Hide and Seek: Looking For the Real MacEwen

The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen

Gwendolyn MacEwen

(ed. Meaghan Strimas)

Exile Editions, 2007

356 pages, $32.95

Gwendolyn MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941 to a mother who spent much of her life in and out of mental health institutions and a father who died young from alcoholism. She dropped out of high school – to study on her own terms – and eventually taught herself Arabic, Hebrew and Greek. (It’s worth noting, if only to appreciate the symmetry, that she later wound up with corresponding lovers for each language.) As a young woman in the early sixties, she earned a reputation as a precocious regular at Toronto’s legendary Bohemian Café, where she wowed Margaret Atwood and other early CanLit luminaries with her powerful readings – and where she also met Milton Acorn. Their brief marriage, lived out mainly in a rough little cottage on Ward’s Island in Toronto Harbour, was seen by many as a “beauty and the beast” match. MacEwen visited Israel and Egypt in a time when a woman journeying alone in the Middle East was rare and when neither country was particularly tourist friendly. Throughout her life, she moved from apartment to apartment, travelled the city by bicycle, and survived on little money. Like her father before her, she struggled with alcoholism, an addiction that led to her premature death at forty-six.

Due in part to Rosemary Sullivan’s 1995 biography, Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, these facts are widely known. It is difficult to read, or revisit, MacEwen’s work without having the experience coloured by them, a truth that becomes immediately apparent upon picking up The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen, edited by Meaghan Strimas. This edition updates Guernica’s selected from the early nineties, two pocket-sized books that I carried about with me for months when I first discovered MacEwen’s poetry. These thorough volumes plainly confronted her difficult life, both by direct reference to its details in their introductions and by what their cover portraits revealed. On Volume One the young MacEwen looks out from the half-light, bold and promising; on Volume Two her face, in profile, is puffy. She appears older than her years. The new Selected is far too fat and tall to fit in a pocket, and avoids any mention of the challenges that beset MacEwen in her personal life. Nonetheless, it, too, must contend with the Plathesque aura that shadows her career.

Here is a hint of what I mean. In a review of the new Selected in the Globe and Mail, Judith Fitzgerald (identified in her bio as a close friend of the poet’s in her final decade) introduces MacEwen’s literary accomplishments as follows: “Unimaginably wounded by grief (dolor), passion (furor), and hardship (labor), heart-broken beyond belief, inexplicably abandoned by those who called her friend, MacEwen still somehow managed to stay the writerly course… always mindful of her place in the holy acts of destruction and creation…” Indeed, we are told, she “sears” pages, “miraculously reshapes them after the fashion of the phoenix,” and remains true to “the long charred night of the ashen soul.”

Reading Fitzgerald’s review brings to mind Brent Wood’s essay, “From the Rising Fire to Afterworlds: The Visionary Circle in the Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen,” published in Canadian Poetry in 2000. Woods, like Fitzgerald, unabashedly reads the painful circumstances of MacEwen’s life between the lines of her poetry, so much so that he even describes one particular poem as her “plea to be freed of the intensity of life, a plea that probably led her to alcohol.” He equates her with “psychedelic experimentalists,” mystics and shamans. He calls her a “visionary-healer” who “transcends the limitations of time’s arrow.”

Had I read Wood’s analysis before ever encountering MacEwen’s poetry, I might never have picked it up. I wonder whether other potential readers have been similarly turned off. Her current status suggests as much. MacEwen, people will tell you, was never a great poet. She was “mystical” and overwrought. Recently a friend and colleague whose judgment I respect declared that MacEwen wrote a few memorable lyrics, but that our sustained interest in her has more to do with her dramatic life story than with anything of value in her work.

Such indictments lead to a fundamental question about Strimas’s edition. Not merely: do we need another MacEwen selected to improve upon those we had? But: do we need one at all? What was there that is worth bringing back into the light?

To a point, current doubts about MacEwen – and the kind of cloudy, indulgent reading that trigger them – begin in the aura she herself projected, and in the symbols and tropes upon which she chose to hang her exotic scarves. She performed her poetry (by heart) wearing long, velvety dresses, her eyes outlined in black kohl. As a youth, she avidly studied the Hebrew and Gnostic mystics, and incorporated ideas from these belief systems into her writing. She had a thing for mysterious beings such as magicians and escape artists, who turn up frequently in her poems, as do prophetic children, “cosmic” objects, alchemy, princes, gods and kings. Her lines often unearth “terrible” and “unspeakable” things. In her earlier work especially, but even in some of her very last poems, a high-minded pretentiousness, tinged with an otherworldly air, rears. Some of her stuff was just plain bad. A good portion of her travel poetry following her trip to Jerusalem, which appeared in her GG award-winning collection The Shadow Maker, reads like the worst sort of banal, earnest, “I was here, look what I saw” reportage. The solemnity and grandeur in the voice she adopts, its descent from on high, can (especially in high doses) come across as precious and even naive.

In my early twenties I ate this stuff up; now it grates. But I would say the same about a certain amount of Leonard Cohen (her contemporary) and Irving Layton (who served as a mentor in some fashion to them both). MacEwen and Layton carried on a correspondence that is quoted generously in Sullivan’s biography. York University scholar Branko Gorjup, in the introduction to The Last Hieroglyph, his bilingual Italian-English MacEwen selected published in 1997, places her squarely in the wake of Layton’s neo-romantic modernist camp (where also sat Klein and Avison), among the poets coming up behind them, notably Cohen and Ondaatje. Her use of myth, he writes, aligns her with the older set; and her obsessive gaze into the past, along with what Tom Marshall has called an “alchemical search for the divine in the mundane,” with the younger.

I would link them another way too. MacEwen’s “motorcycle Icarus” in her “Poem Improvised Around a First Line” is a guy who might still seduce you post-high school, but not much beyond. He’s “black and leathery and lean” and “cannot distinguish between sex and nicotine.” His parting (pick-up) lines are: “O Baby, what hell to be Greek in this country/ without wings, but burning anyway.” There’s a bravado here that reminds me of Layton’s poem that begins, “The day you came naked to Paris” – a poem that also contains “a blaze of pubic hair” and “my Love, my Darling” and people who “became the atmosphere around them” (a cheap line above which he was well capable of rising). And then there’s Cohen. Take “Celebration,” in response to which a friend of mine once grimaced and exclaimed – not at all in the way the guy in the poem would have hoped – “Oh, Leonard.” Shall I quote? “When you kneel below me/ and in both your hands/ hold my manhood like a sceptre.” In the next stanza we encounter the sceptre’s “amber jewels.” Then dancing Roman girls. Before you know it, Samson is falling from the roof.

They set off the cringe-o-meter now, but these poems were all written and published in a time when they would have felt daring to write, and to read. We’re talking mid-century, very Catholic Quebec for the guys; and, in MacEwen’s case, the stiffly Protestant, early-sixties Toronto, where for her to write “each cloth is slander to your skin and/ nakedness itself is silk across your rising sex” (“Poem,” Breakfast for Barbarians), was to tear away the loin cloth well ahead of the northern migration of women’s lib. In his introduction to the 1962 anthology Love Where the Nights are Long – which includes both his and Cohen’s poems quoted here, and which came out the year before Barbarians – Layton seemed to call MacEwen’s “Poem” into being: “I have sought mainly for those extreme statements of surrender – for that is, after all, what love is all about: when the ego forgets its strategies of protection or retreat and men and women stand naked, revealed in all their clotheless glory.”

The parallels between MacEwen and Cohen especially, once you start to notice them, pop up suddenly all over, like tulips in spring. The voices are equally brash and often confrontational. They both regularly employ repetition, an incantatory rhythm, and a colloquial diction laid over a formal syntax and deliberate lineation. They plead and command, and call toward some presence or reality beyond the “I.” MacEwen, in “You Cannot Do This,” (also from Barbarians): “You cannot do this to them, these are my people;/ I am not speaking of poetry, I am not speaking of art./ You cannot do this to them, these are my people./ You cannot hack away the horizon in front of their eyes.” Now Cohen, in what seems almost an uncanny prequel: “The poems don’t love us anymore/ they don’t want to love us/ they don’t want to be poems/ Do not summon us, they say/ we cannot help you any longer.”

And consider these two side-by-side. First, from MacEwen’s “The Children are Laughing,” one of her most hypnotic compositions, later to be dubbed a “fugue” in the anthology In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry (Polestar, 2005):

It is Monday and the children are laughing

The children are laughing; they believe they are princes

They wear no shoes; they believe they are princes

And their filthy kingdom heaves up behind them

Place that against the opening of Cohen’s “Sky”:

The great ones pass

they pass without touching

they pass without looking

each in his joy

each in his fire

Of one another

they have no need

they have the deepest need

The great ones pass

Recorded in some multiple sky

Inlaid in some endless laughter

they pass

We could do this all night. And it wouldn’t be just a fun party game. It becomes tough, after awhile, not to see them as yin and yang. Is it the old sexist double-standard that has us dismissing MacEwen as way too celestial and melodramatic, while lauding Cohen as deep and daring and lusty? Or just luck – in that he lived long enough to grow up? (Or should I say “old?”) They shared not only tone and technique but a sort of “macro” sensibility. Kingdoms and gods and ancients populate their respective collections, as well as the close-up history that shadowed their own youths. Allow me one more comparison. In MacEwen’s “The Left Hand and Hiroshima,” the narrator appears “four-fingered and garbed/ in a broken gardener’s glove” and declares: “only because my poems are lies do they earn the right/ to be true, like the lie of that left hand at night/ in the cockpit of a sad plane trailing God in its wake.” In Flowers for Hitler, Cohen’s alter ego similarly spreads, and accepts, the blame. The poem “What I’m Doing Here” begins: “I do not know if the world has lied/ I have lied” and continues apace with conspiracy and torture and hate before closing with “I wait/ for each one of you to confess.”

Against the grain of the rising Canadian (even North American) “confessional” lyric, these two Canucks were instead building new myths, both of them: baldly and boldly (and sometimes badly). It’s MacEwen who sets this down, still in her twenties, in her introduction to Barbarians:

These poems arise out of a willful hunger, a deep involvement with self and world, a belief that to live consciously is holy, while merely to exist is sacrilege. The barbarian, living close to his original appetites, has not lost the capacity for joy…. I should like to think these poems have a certain value for what I term their essential ‘optimism,’ as opposed to much of the terribly cynical and ‘cool’ poetry written today. I write to communicate joy, mystery, passion… not the joy that naively exists without knowledge of pain, but that joy which arises out of and conquers pain. I want to construct a myth.

It is hubristic and youthful but in some way wonderful that MacEwen gave us this manifesto. Its resistance to the rise of the cool ironic stance is at one with the sentiments in Latyon’s Love intro, quoted above, and absolutely particular to her time. I am inclined to forgive her its excess – and those I have found when revisiting her poems – in the same way we have all tended to forgive Cohen: because, like him, she meant it. She delivered. Gorjup paraphrases critic Frank Davey in the introduction to his MacEwen selected, asserting that she has, “more than any other writer, restored the value of mythology to Canadian poetry by demonstrating that it is not merely a system by which one escapes worldly events, but instead a way to better comprehend our sensual and Heraclitean world.” Put more plainly, when she got it, she got it. She broke through walls. She left rubble in her wake.

Some of the most realized, most memorable, and most read-aloud-worthy poems I know remain McEwen’s. At the top of the list: “Breakfast for Barbarians” (“my friends, my sweet barbarians/ there is that hunger which is not for food –/ but an eye at the navel turns the appetite/ round”); “Dark Pines Under Water” (“You dream in the green of your time,/ Your memory is a row of sinking pines.”); and “The Discovery” (“I tell you her uncovering takes years,/ takes centuries, and when you find her naked/ look again”). These might well be the three lyrics my friend was referring to when he mentioned a “handful” of fine MacEwens. They’re stand-outs, no question. But there are many he missed. I bring forward, as one example, “The Breakfast,” from The Rising Fire, an early foray into what would become, for her, a fundamental instrument and metaphor: the first meal of the day. Here is its second stanza:

a breakfast hysteria; perhaps you have felt it,

the weight of the food you eat, the end of the meal coming

before you lift the spoon; or eat only apples

to improvise an eden. or forget the end takes place

in each step of your function.

This poem, moving as it does from “hysteria” through the breakfast room to Eden to the blessing of forgetting – then that sinister nothingness taking form in the solid, heavy rhythm of “each step of your function” – frightened me at twenty-two, when I first read it (incidentally the same age MacEwen was when it was published). It also brought an inexpressible relief. Note the three intangibles (hysteria, Eden, forgetting) interspersed with the spoon and the apples and the steps. Myth in reality. Weight in air. The inevitable known (the daily meal) containing the inevitable unknown (our end). By embedding the scary ungraspables within the particulars of this basic morning ritual, MacEwen cuts down their power: we can touch them after all. They’re simply cutlery and fruit, our own selves moving. But this sleight of hand, which she mastered young and never stopped employing, simultaneously renders our ultimate fate more sinister and insidious. It’s not somewhere vaguely off in the future. It’s here – and here and here. It might pounce into consciousness while we’re reaching for a spoon.

The enigmatic boy (or man) – or, as Atwood has termed it, the “male muse” – is another vehicle MacEwen repeatedly employs for her vigorous and unsettling explorations. In “Generation Cometh” he “grows beneath your heels/ and the city for him is easy he/ knows it from below.” He later becomes “The Magician,” “Manzini: Escape Artist,” “The Winemaker,” even “Archie Belaney” – but most memorably Lawrence of Arabia, in what has been described by some as MacEwen’s most powerful sequence, The T.E. Lawrence Poems. Published as a complete volume in 1982, this collection shows MacEwen moving past her early manifesto to “construct” a myth, into a project far more interesting and complex: now she’s engaged in mythmaking over top deconstruction of a myth. She brings us a fictional Lawrence engaged in confronting his own fabrication and re-fabrication of himself. In the opening poem, “Water,” we are immediately given a taste of the slipperiness of identity, which will prove Lawrence’s bugaboo:

… In France it tasted

Of Crusaders’ breastplates, swords and tunnels of rings

On ladies’ fingers.

In the springs of Lebanon water had

No colour, and was therefore all colours,

outside of Damascus

It disguised itself as snow and let itself be chopped

And spooned onto the stunned red grapes of summer.

For years I have defended water, even though I am told there are other drinks.

Water will never lie to you, even when it insinuates itself

Into someone else’s territory. Water has style.

Water has no conscience and no shame; water

thrives on water, is self-quenching.

The particulars of Lawrence’s reality are informed not just by MacEwen’s reading of his memoir and her trips to the Middle East, but by a lifetime of autodidactic studies in history, philosophy, poetry, religion and language, including her mastery of Arabic – all of which permeates the writing rather than bogs it down. Combined with the poems’ physicality, her immersion in Lawrence’s world grounds the mythological aura in which the voice is cloaked, just as, all those years before in “The Breakfast,” she set death down atop a spoon.

When MacEwen published the T.E. Lawrence Poems with Mosaic Press in 1982, we were well into the era of the primarily personal, formless Canadian lyric – the light domestic, the mildly nationalistic kitchen and garden poems so many of us grew up reading (and replicating). Meanwhile, MacEwen was forging a borderless, timeless poetics. She was global before “globalism.” She treated the portage or the northern lake with exactly the same attention and reverence (and raised eyebrow) as she did the Middle East, or people and places from ancient times, or, say, the Loch Ness Monster. She stood alone in other ways, too. She lived through the rise of feminism, and saw her contemporaries (Atwood especially, with that wicked irony) employ the pen to critique the status quo. But MacEwen had never felt compelled to meet the societal expectations placed on women, and so didn’t rail against them. Instead, she operated under a precociously post-feminist disregard for the battle of the sexes that remains refreshing.

Lawrence’s fraught journey, though well worth taking, isn’t on offer in Exile’s new Selected. Strimas truncates her selection from the Lawrence poems to just a handful, a selection as slim as those that appear in anthologies, giving us no sense of the ambition and accomplishment of the undertaking. Strimas either missed the value in the Lawrence poems, or sacrificed them to make room for the scrapbook of photos, news clippings and letters at the back. (Or the “Questions for Discussion and Essays,” which, sadly, reminded me why most people leave high school fearing poetry.) But without any word from Strimas, neither forward nor introduction – nor even a tiny bio that might provide some clue to her perspective – we are left to speculate.

This lack of context is maddening. The new MacEwen seems designed as a compendium for teachers, a sampler, and it is not without its merits. The book touts itself as the first chronological selection of MacEwen’s work in every genre. We get her best-known lyrics; her mesmerizing “Nine Arcana of the King;” and the long, fabulous “Helen,” MacEwen’s translation with her second husband Nikos Tsingos of Yannos Ritsos’ famous piece, in which Helen of Troy speaks out before she dies. (This poem bears revisiting now not just for its force but as an interesting contrast to Atwood’s recent re-imagining of Homer’s Odyssey in The Penelopiad.) The book also contains many poems from MacEwen’s last collection, Afterworlds, which read as a farewell and a reckoning. In addition are intriguing excerpts of fiction and memoir (the latter, in particular, setting down useful context for some of her poetry); and her excellent verse play Terror and Erebus (about the Franklin expedition). But compiling all this stuff in the order in which it was written doesn’t on its own make the publication of this collection a “signal event in North America’s cultural efflorescence,” as Fitzgerald effused in her Globe review. The book’s sections are grouped in such a way that it is not always clear which selection belongs to which original text (where previous knowledge couldn’t help me I was forced to refer to other collections). I was dismayed to find frequent typos. Works of art and photographs, many of them depicting MacEwen, function as intriguing dividers, but none of them appears with any attribution or credit line, an omission that had me flipping pages up and down, convinced I’d missed some hidden footnotes. Regarding the fiction, it is possible that we have been mistaken in accrediting more importance to MacEwen’s poetry, but the brief excerpts here are not enough to make the case. After reading the entire volume, I’m left puzzling over how exactly Strimas reads MacEwen’s trajectory, and what she was attempting to redress, if anything.

All of this undermines any sense of the “definitive” for which this collection might have aimed, and makes for a book that is far less meticulously made than each of the pieces of writing contained within. A reissue of those old Guernicas would have served as well, or better. What we could have used was a strong critical essay casting a contemporary eye on MacEwen, an effort to properly place her in the Canadian canon once and for all. Instead, we’re treated to a brief intro by Rosemary Sullivan that is essentially a severely truncated reprise of what she’s written in the past, though without any mention this time of MacEwen’s alcoholism or family tragedies. This leads me to suspect Strimas was tackling one of the problems I’ve mentioned – the overshadowing of MacEwen’s work by her life – but since these facts are so well known, it seems like a head-in-the-sand approach to reality. It’s too late to pretend this stuff away.
It’s possible some of these choices were made with the context of the classroom in mind, clearly one hoped-for home for this book. Such prudence might make sense; and MacEwen, reportedly fiercely private, might even have appreciated it. But her artistic methods – myth-building and all – indeed her entire poetic philosophy, has always seemed to me less an attempt to escape reality than to bring it on, full-force. In 1986, the year before she died, she took the post of writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. She reportedly used to tell students that they were better off failing than treading carefully. She encouraged swagger. As Sullivan reports, MacEwen’s complaint about contemporary poetry was that it “tended to be an exploration of pain, a kind of dwelling on one’s wounds and scars.” She also once complained in a letter to Layton: “The art of directly experiencing one’s poems is unknown in this city – the art of verifying what one has had the gall to write. Introspection itself should be a passionate thing, being sponsored from the outside.” She put this another way in her poem “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear”:

You suspect this is a posture or an act.

I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.

You actually think I care if this

Poem gets off the ground or not. Well

I don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not

And neither should you.

All I have ever cared about

And all you should ever care about

Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.

MacEwen never apologized for wielding the pen; she never belittled its importance. She wasn’t afraid of words like “beautiful” and “bloody,” and she generally got away with using them. She was bold enough to risk being misunderstood. Since her death in 1987, our little literary-nation-that-could has birthed truckloads of competent lyricists, some of them fine, really fine. But revisiting MacEwen leaves me wondering whether a flatness now reigns, a middling ambition. I see all these meticulous, thoughtful, accomplished writers neatly pressing words into the page as though decorating a cake. I think of the ubiquity of that peculiar, heavily comma-spliced “poetic” syntax. Do we have more careful literary personae being composed in this age than ambitious works? Where, I ask myself, are our new MacEwens? Is any one of us prepared to trip over our own hubris and fall down hard? When MacEwen writes, “All you should ever care about/ Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page,” it is pure irony (as opposed to that safe, cool stance we’ve come to love). It is the voice from within the poem telling us to look up – and we do.

Tags: Issue 77

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