Jacket 34 - October 2007 - Jeff Derksen: John Newlove

Jacket 34 — October 2007

Jacket 34 Contents page

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Jeff Derksen

“These Things Form Poems When I Allow It”:

After John Newlove

A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove covers the forty years of John Newlove’s publishing life, beginning with Grave Sirs in 1961, punctuated in 1972 with his Governor General’s award winning Lies, shifting register with the long poem The Green Plain in 1979, and culminating with The Tasmanian Devil & Other Poems (1999) and the broadside edition of “The Death of the Hired Man” from 2001, his last published work before he passed away in Ottawa due to a brain hemorrhage. Given this timeframe, these carefully structured poems that make up A Long Continual Argument are nested within two parallel continual arguments — one literary and one social — that shape our readings of the poems and with which the poems are in direct dialogue.

John Newlove as a young man

The first continual argument I have in mind is the project of contemporary Canadian literature imagined as a formation integral to historically grounded, and contested, national identities and a larger national sense of self, a sort of national structure of feelings (to rescale Raymond Williams’ term up to the national) correlated through literature. This continual process of defining a national literature has been uneven both in its development and its inclusions and exclusions, but the period that Newlove’s publishing life covers is a particularly intense phase of development, contestation, and plasticity. Set alongside our present moment, it is not a time when literature or poetry mattered more, the “golden age” of CanLit, but a moment when texts were asked and imagined to do something very different than they can do now. Perhaps this is marked by a shift from a Canadian culture industry as a national project devised to shape a historical narrative that would define a place for Canada in the world system of nation states in the post-colonial moment to a Canadian cultural market that has more effectively collapsed the cultural into the economic, the national into the logic of the global, and the citizen into the logic of neoliberalism.

Secondly, over the last four decades there has been a gradual yet dramatic reshaping of Canadian society, within a globalized context, that has seen bedrock cultural and economic assumptions altered by both internal debates, and by external pressures and global harmonizations. While any author’s selected works is a gathering of historical gestures and contexts, both textual and social, a collected works that spans four of the most slyly transformational decades of the long twentieth century is necessarily nested in and intertwined with the historical conditions. These conditions are not blunt nor even graspable in their totality, but are rippling with friction and conflict, as well as, in the case of A Long Continual Argument, moments of clarity, joy, disappointment, and resignation. Further, these moments cohere on a ground where individual identity and subjectivity are in an unstable relationship to the community and group (whether ethnic or racial community or the national imagined community) and the other (dramatically, comradely, and at times problematically in Newlove’s work, First Nations and women).

It’s useful, then, to acknowledge or even confront the fact that a selected or collected works, particularly a posthumous one, periodizes an author’s work — and I think it is necessary and rich to read the poetry while keeping in mind the cultural, social and aesthetic relationships it was produced within, in dialogue and reaction with.

Two strains that I think arises throughout A Long Continual Argument are a dialogue with the cultural discourse of Canadian Literature and an address to, a disgust with, and a resignation to the shape of society and the fleeting joys and false openings an individual imagination conjures and hopes for. By reading this selected works as a periodizing of Newlove’s poetry within these frames, I borrow from Fredric Jameson’s notion of the “period” as “not some omnipresent and uniform shared style or way of thinking and acting, but rather as the sharing of a common objective situation, to which a whole range of varied responses and creative solutions is then possible, but always within the situation’s structural limits” (178). The long continual argument of the title, is in fact a dialogue between these very “structural limits” that Newlove identifies, defines, and writes of and the “creative solutions” that are experienced, imagined, or shut down at various levels and places.

Or, as the lines that Newlove ends the poem “Remembering Christopher Smart” with remark: “I see that we all make the world what we want. / Our disappointment lies in the world as it is.” Here is the powerful intersection of limitations and expectations that generates the continued friction and precision of Newlove’s work.

Given the frame of these two parallel arguments, the poems in A Long Continual Argument are simultaneously social registers of one person’s life over forty-plus years — a register that shows a social imprint on consciousness and the body in sculpted, hard-edged lyrical poems that open to expressiveness through their precision — and poems that are part of the project of a national literature even as they are reflexive about that project. Specifically, the poems carry a reaction to and sometimes a resignation to — at a very subjective level — rural and small town life in Canada, the promise of cities and an urban life, the movement for jobs and love and kicks, the joys and difficulties of family life, as well as relations that we understand at a more abstracted level even though we experience them in very material and everyday ways — gender relations, class relations, and the relationship of history to how we locate ourselves, both collectively and individually, in the present.

Poetically, and socially, there is also the tension of the imperative to find and speak your own “voice” (even if that voice is understood as part of a “national voice” of poetry or marked by a particular identity) within the relationship of the self to the other and within a bounded or even static space. This relationship of place, and of figure and ground, in Newlove’s work is spatially complex with the various scales of space nested in one another, but with an event-filled liminal zone in between. For instance, country and city are joined or articulated in Newlove’s poetry, but the liminal space between them is where a lot of the laconic action happens.

Likewise, the relationship of self and other is, in Newlove’s work, dialogic, based on the recognition that one’s own voice exists only in relationship to other voices. And, as is driven home in the poems in this selection, Newlove foregrounds the imbalance of power in this dialogic relationship: the voices of First Nations, of the historically repressed (and of repressed histories), of women, of the working class, of rural lives are all in tension and relation throughout this book. What is striking is that this tension is both personal (or intrapersonal, between people) and forged from pressures of the period and social relations. All of the people, places, things, bodies, and voices in these poems are under the heavy weight of the social and its reification, its alienation combined with minor moments when that alienation is punctured.

At times, this imbalance of power is brought sharply into focus and at other times these relations are reflected in the poems themselves. But, if we take the sixties as Jameson defines it, as the decade that ends around 1972–1974 (and I think this works for Canada, even if we consider the state crisis of the FLQ and the invocation of the War Measures Act as the end of a sixties), then the themes that Newlove continues to ruminate on and develop are all cued up by the time of his 1972 Governor General’s winner, Lies. And the philosophical and social framework to examine these themes is also in place, and in alignment, I think, with “a significant and social symptom” of the long sixties, that Jameson marks as “in the mid-60s, people felt it necessary to express their sense of the situation and their projected praxis in a reified political language of power, domination, authority and antiauthoritarianism...” (184).

But in the case of Newlove and of many of Canadian poets, this language was torqued or irritated to try to shatter the reification of language and experience, its ossification of the everyday, and the poetry aimed at recording the impact of the times on the subject, on the body, on voice, on identity, and more generally on place and history. In more avant-gardist positions, the fight is against the reification of language itself (understood materially or as a homology of the social). But Newlove strikes a balance between materiality and reification in his strongest poetry — thematically reflecting reification in everyday life and the relations between people (for reification is relational) while materially crafting poems which strain at reification by a tension of proximity and distance. The spatiality of the poems — the relationship of landscape to self, of the urban to the rural, and the event-horizon of the liminal spaces — plays out in this dialectic of proximity and distance at a subjective level.

This incomplete cataloguing of the concerns and conflicts that Newlove’s poems grapple with can easily be organized — and given a thematic clarity — through the metaphors that Canadian Literature etched out to define its contours. But these categories, drafted to bring the nation into historical presence and spatial legibility — metaphors of survival, of a relationship to the landscape and to national space, to the necessity of national identity, and to a mytho-spatial poetics of a land with contested histories and malingering colonial relations — do not sit easily either with the jarring and unsettling aspects of the poems in A Long Continual Argument nor with the reflexive dialogue the poems have with the discourse of Canadian Literature.

Even when I first read Newlove’s “Ride Off Any Horizon” in 15 Canadian Poets (before its expansion), and before I had the sense of Canadian poetry as a field itself, the poem seemed both bigger than the themes it was laying out, even as it was precise in its particularity: how could “any horizon” be a specific Canadian prairie horizon, was the horizon spatial or temporal, conceptual or material? This counter flow — of universalizing the particular, but not losing its particularity — somehow went against the current with the other poems in that anthology and created an irritating eddy.

As a result, even though there is a general sense that the important, constitutional so to speak, work of Canadian Literature was done in this period, Newlove’s poems resist such a clear-cut designation as, for instance “prairie poems” or categorization as engaged in the thematics of survival that was not a socially charged understanding of survival embedded into everyday practices. These poems are difficult to mollify into such reductions for three specific reasons: the poems are reflexive of — or one could say self-aware — of these literary categories and therefore alter the categories themselves rather than merely fitting in: the poems hammer away at a bleakness (reification played out as proximity and distance) that is driven home at the subjective not national scale; and, as I’ve suggested, the poems tell us more about the social relations (and class relations specifically) of an extended period and how they effect a view of the world than Canadian literature correlated as a thematic catalogue allows.

So, it is not possible to casually, yet accurately, write in an afterword for this collection that Newlove was a poet whose work helped define Canadian Literature during a time when it was taking a contingent yet dominant shape. To do so pushes aside the other scales that these poems work at — for the national scale is not the predominant one — and it also pushes aside the kind of affect registered in the poems, and tripped off by them in the reader. Newlove’s place in the cultural field of Canadian literature is already established — and no doubt it will be enhanced and rethought with this volume — and poems such as “Ride off Any Horizon”, “Samuel Hearne in Wintertime” “Crazy Riel”, “The Pride” and “Veregin, Moving in Alone” take a position alongside the key poems of Canadian literature in which the representation of identity, place and history and the possibilities of poetic form and voice intersect to create insight and poetic possibilities. And in reading this collection now, it is the intersection of affect within historical conditions that equally drives the poems.

Poetic theories of affect can be seen as a means to resist an imagined reduction of literary texts to socio-political markers and return the poem to corporeal and aesthetic events that record or produce emotions. Yet to imagine affective emotions as separate from the truly affective social relations severs the poem from the two things — the imperatives of a literary history in the making and the material social and historical conditions of a period — that I have proposed as parallel arguments to A Long Continual Argument.

It is tempting to look at this compilation of Newlove’s poems as an affective gathering where Canadian landscapes give way to the blackness of night and the noir shadows of cities that fail to fulfill their promises (as in “The Cities We Longed For”) — promises viewed from afar from small towns, farms, roadsides, or from liminal spaces such as street corners, rented apartments, and temporary domestic spaces. This tone is of a hard life broken by moments of brief happiness and surprising admissions of love that then turn to an ironic pulling away from love itself. Yet this tone of the poems is built both from Newlove’s poetics — the careful syllabics, the precision of his line breaks (consider how the line break works in “Ride Off Any Horizon”), and what Robert Duncan memorably called the tone leading of vowels — and from the subject matter of the poems. [1]

Usefully, here is how Sianne Ngai, in her book Ugly Feelings, describes tone: “By ‘tone’ I mean a literary or cultural artifact’s feeling tone: its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation towards its audience and the world” (28). Ngai, is careful however, not to have tone rest at this emotive formal level, but she moves it to create a link between the poem and what I called above “the imperatives of a literary history in the making and the material social and historical conditions of a period”. Ngai explains further: “Instead, I mean the formal aspect of a literary work that makes it possible for critics to describe a text as, say ‘euphoric, or ‘melancholic’, and, what is much more important, the category that makes these affective values meaningful with regard to how one understands the text as a totality with an equally holisitic matrix of social relations” (28).

A related way to look at this is to see tone as the aesthetic software that creates the interface between the literary text and the “holistic matrix of social relations”, or how the poems, in their long continual argument engage intellectually and affectively with the continual arguments they are embedded within.

Ngai focuses brilliantly and exclusively on “negative affects that read the predicaments posed by a general state of obstructed agency” (3) — ranging from envy to disgust — and I’ve already suggested that disgust is one of the reactions that the reader is drawn into in the works in this selected poems. But disgust here is a socially situated disgust, not a melancholy for possibilities, but a powerful intersection of limitations and expectations experienced across the Canadian social landscape — that is, the affects, the powerful emotional performance of these poems, come from “obstructed agency”. And, as I’m suggesting, obstructed agency is often spatial in the poems — the sense of containment of small towns, the modernist trope of the isolated individual in the city, the nation as unknowable, even the isolation of lovers and the distance of one from ones own body (as in “An Examination”).

Coincidentally, E.D. Blodget has proposed “the search for agency” as one of the periods that Canadian literary criticism moved through: here we can grasp the self-reflexive tension in Newlove’s poems with this national literary criticism, for agency in his poetry is obstructed socially — or the potential of agency, the possibilities of agency, are continually moving from proximity to distance, hoped for but not graspable. Yet, the negative possibilities of agency, when it can be achieved, are also part of the landscape of these poems — this is shown as of the subjugation of another. So Newlove’s poetry also reads about the constitution of agency and power across the Canadian social landscape.

Perhaps Newlove is a modernist poet of a belated Canadian modernism whose writing carefully catches the effects of modernization through the tropes of isolation, alienation, and social fragmentation. Certainly in the representations of the city, and of the administration of society (moving from a more tightened-down determined view to a deadly dry humorous take as in “It’s Winter in Ottawa”) this modernist view takes hold, but in Newlove’s work it is not a general cultural condition, but the conditions of capitalism and the effects of wage labour (and its flip side, unemployment). This is how the long continuous argument with the social is felt throughout this selected works. That Newlove’s last published poem is the devastating and ironic “The Death of the Hired Man” holds this up, but I don’t want to argue that his work is universal in this way — catching a generalized structure of feeling of a period — because a reader is struck by the particularities in the poems (both imagistically and in tone).

But I think we can also read Newlove’s work as being caught on the cusp of what Jameson sees as the “waning of affect” and yet working through of what Ngai describes as “capitalism’s classic affects of disaffection” (4). This complicated knot finds its way into a key poem, The Green Plain (a work that defies my categorizations in many ways), of Newlove’s work and this stanza carries the oscillation of proximity and distance and the reverberation of tone that has made his work endure:

always ignorant,
always amazed, always capable of delight,
and giving it, though ending in hatred, but
an image only. Of disaster. But there is no disaster.

It is just that we lose joy and die.

Notes

1. I’m relegating a personal anecdote to an endnote (poetics reference: bpNichol “Friends as Footnotes”). In the early 1980s, I studied with John Newlove at the David Thompson University Centre in Nelson B.C. DTUC was, in a way, a Canadian version of Black Mountain College, and later, after it was shut down in one of the early examples of the neoliberalisation of Canadian post-secondary education, DTUC gave a difficult birth to the Kootenay School of Writing which continues today in Vancouver. DTUC was a dynamic place to study and to learn how to be a writer, and one afternoon I recall Newlove asking me into his house as I dropped him off so he could show me the careful syllabics of an Irish writer (who I can’t recall now), literally counting the syllables per line, noting their stress patterns (and the breaks and shifts in patterns).

Works Cited

E.D Blodgett Five Part Inventory: A History of Literary History in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003.

Jameson, Fredric. “Periodizing the 60s”. Social Text 9/1 (Spring Summer 1984): 178-209.

———. Postmodernism , or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Jeff Derksen is the author of numerous books of poetry including Transnational Muscle Cars, Dwell, and Down Time. He works in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University. His critical writings on globalization and culture, urbanism, and art have been published extensively in North America and Europe. He recently edited the “Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment” issue of West Coast Line (51 / 2007).

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