Preview
DENNIS LEE
WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival
Friday, October 17
Uptown Stage
Saturday, October 18
Margaret Greenham Theatre (The Banff Centre)
According to Dennis Lee, some readers of his new poetry collection find the subject matter so grim that they ask, "Why does this man not just cut his wrists?"
Whether you ask the same question will depend on two things. The first is your own feeling about what Lee calls "the heart of darkness" – humanity’s continuing destruction of its own planet. The second is how far, for you, the linguistic energy of Lee’s UN balances out your presumably gloomy feelings about the end of the Earth and, with it, human life.
Like Christian Bök’s Eunoia last year, UN may be one of those books that either works for you or doesn’t. The book’s choked and splintered language is both dynamic and despairing. It’s either a wasteland of words or a syllabic Cirque du Soleil – or maybe even both at once.
Speaking by telephone from his Toronto home, the author of Civil Elegies and Alligator Pie describes how he surprised even himself with the voice he discovered while writing his first book of poems for grown-ups since 1996.
Normally it takes between six and eight years for Lee to feel he "has a book right." UN took a mere two-and-a-half years from start to finish. After not publishing any new adult poetry since his Night Watch poems, Lee began to feel that "a well was filling up again." During a trip to Barcelona, he began to work, with initially promising results.
"But then, after a little bit, I remember sitting and looking at the stuff – I had a few pages of trial runs – and saying, ‘You know, this sucks. I don’t really believe this.’"
So he backed up and came at the subject of planetary destruction again. Lee found inspiration from certain lines in the poetry of Paul Celan – "where language just starts to go into meltdown" – and Gerard Manley Hopkins, where he felt "this energy sort of erupting up from below and reconfiguring language."
Whatever Lee had tapped into, it changed the form of his poetry. Known for what he calls "the long, sprawling, meditative line" in books like The Death of Harold Ladoo, Lee now found himself writing in short, explosive blurts. Words fractured into syllables.
Although Lee was used to finding his syntax rearranged by poetic energies, it was a new experience when that energy seemed to "shoulder its way up into individual words themselves."
"That was something I had not been really attuned to before – not just hearing the music across sentences, but up through the centre of words. At first, all I knew was that that was happening – and I was hanging on for dear life."
By discovering this new turn in his own work, Lee also found a way to deal with his inescapably gloomy subject. "The stuff that the sequence is trying to fix right into is really bleak," he says. "There’s no way around that." While he refused to start tacking on happy endings, neither did he want to "take a kind of schadenfreude relish in declaring everything is going to hell in a handbasket."
Lee found a source of hope in the emergence of "this craggy linguistic life that had an unfamiliar face to it," right in the midst of his own effort to "imagine the worst and survive at the other end of imagining it."
Lee not only survived, he found himself exhilarated. At first, his long experience as a writer would not let him entirely trust this excitement – after all, it’s been more than 30 years since he won the Governor General’s Award for Civil Elegies and Other Poems in 1972. Although he still says he can’t understand the energy he drew upon in crafting UN, he has accepted that understanding it is not as important as somehow being able to work with it. An unexpected affirmation has come from younger poets, says Lee, who have startled him by cornering him in rooms for impromptu discussions.
Perhaps they’re responding to what Lee finds most hopeful about his personal confrontation with darkness. "As I wrote, the most immediate source of hope, so far as we have a source of hope, was in the language itself," he says. "A sort of harsh renewal is possible there.
"As a poet, that’s the place where I have some capacity to effect something."
Dennis Lee brings his poetry to the Poetry Bash on October 17 in Calgary and to the Banff Poetry Cabaret on October 18. Both events are at 9:30 p.m. |
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