I have seven random points to make. There are five of them. But I can only remember three. When my book What the Pig Said was published, several very good readers insisted that I had failed to make my meaning clear. I’m a postmodernist, I replied, I’m not supposed to make sense. So it is with Mrs. Buchanan, who—much like Sinclair Ross, Susanna Moodie, Adam Kidd, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Frank Davey, Roch Voisine, Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster, and Thomas Chandler Haliburton—is a postmodernist poet without knowing it herself. In fact, without any-one but me knowing it. Her poem is the unstable subject speaking its exquisite and erotic becoming against the kangaroo courts of the poetic desire machine. Mary, thou art.

How do you stretch out a slight concept for a critical article in a new country?

Begin just once more.
Mr. Buchanan’s invisibility sponsors an erotics of absence in the poem, to which Mrs. Buchanan has clearly responded with an erotics of presence. In particular, the presence appears to have been that of young Sven Grunwald, who had been hired on to help with the pigs on the Buchanan farm on February 17, 1907. He remained until late April, 1908, when he disappeared from the area entirely. (The appended poem “Duckies” [“soon, alas, comes ‘Thanksgiving,’ / Off goes duckies heads”] appears to have been composed after his exit; still, Mrs. Buchanan’s bitterness cannot conceal her warm feelings: “Succulent and sweet; / Duck is to me the very best / Of fowl there is to eat.”) Sven’s goings and comings are documented in the ledger of the Buchanan farm, which was recently uncovered and which, surprisingly, demanded of me a poem. And so then I wrote The Pig Ledger:

How do you make love to a pig in a new country, especially with your husband sleeping in the house right next to the barn?

Begin one last time.
Mary rhapsodizes over Sven’s own little pink pig, “be he little or big.” His “snowy lard” is similarly “sometimes soft, sometimes hard.” The sexual intent of these lines is inescapable (did I mention I grew up on a farm?), and there is a long tradition in Canadian literature linking pigs and sex. (Also milking machines and sex, as I show in What the Pig Said). In my own first novel When Sick with Trichinosis (as yet unpublished), there is a lengthy scene yoking a pig-dressing with sexual tension. And, of course, in my later novel The Stud-Boar Man there is a similar scene. And. . . well, those are the only examples I can call to mind at the moment, but they tell the tale, I think. The sensual delight Mrs. Walter (Walled/her?) Buchanan takes in her forbidden passion for Sven is figured in many ways. “there’s meat—juicy meat.” “he’s no beauty [but] he always keeps doing his duty.” “The pig is a gent, on mischief often bent.” He is the “Brute” who will “thrive if we give him attention / If his trough we but fill with plenty of swill / And other good food I might mention.” I might mention. I might mention. Once more, the absence speaks above the presence, the dialogic stress points of the hidden threatening to become the unhidden. Canadian writing is, from its inception, a shadowed writing in its deliberate employment of concealment as a strategy. Mary Buchanan is bravely effing the ineffable, tracking the intractable, violating the inviolable, speaking the unspeakable, thinking the unthinkable, eating the inedible, questioning the unquestionable, employing the unemployable, flexing the inflexible, visiting the invisible, honking the bobo, fatiguing the indefatigable, believing the unbelievable, buttoning the unbuttonable, corking the uncorkable, spanking the monkey, electing the ineligible, spouting the endless and unendurable blather and nonsense and. . . un, sorry—I was thinking of someone else.
No wonder, then, that Canadians long so eagerly to read what they so fervently believe cannot be written, that Mary longs to experience what cannot be lived. The namelessness is the name, but must be written even to be nameless—but cannot remain nameless if written.

How do you grow a poet in a new country—Mary, Mary, what does your garden grow?

Begin one last time. (I really mean it this time.)
In matters of poetic form, Mrs. Buchanan is ever more the postmodernist. With her 32 lines, she comes tantalizingly close to 28 lines, which would, of course, be exactly twice what one would expect of a sonnet. The rhyme scheme, too, suggests a doubled sonnet, lacking only a final, concluding couplet. The permanent deferral of this eternally absent closure represents most clearly Mary’s ludic response to the demands of the patriarchal poetic tradition, just as her visceral response to Sven figures her rejection of her (absent) h(o)us(e)/ band’s patriarchal control over her sexuality. That swine.

How do you end an essay that has no real structure in a new country?

Begin (I swear—this is really true now!) for the last time.
Mary writes, “we will repent and lose many a cent / If we ever go back on the porker.” The delicious ambiguity of “go back on”—to turn one’s back on / to mount again—is epistemologically, hermeneutically, even ontologically, appropriate. She is—as a woman, as a Canadian, as a pig farmer—necessarily beset by ambiguity and ambivalence. For how could it be otherwise? I certainly don’t know.

How do you finish this up so that we can all go home in a new country?

Begin (okay, okay: I was lying last time—but I’m not now!) just this one last time.
Mary writes, “the pig is a friend that will last to the end / Altho’ as I’ve said he’s no beauty.” Canada, too, is no beauty, no prettified Miss America. Rather, it is a pig—one has to come to love it for its inelegance, its uncomeliness (did I mention I grew up on a farm?). Canada, like the pig, refuses to speak, refuses letting itself be known.
The trick is to hear a pub. One day, or maybe for several days in a row, sit in a pub from noon til closing. Listen to the tales of the pig farmers. Buy them beers. Let them buy you beers. Then let them buy you some more beers. Drinking beer is a ritual act, a sharing with each other of values, of aspirations, of suffering. There is a profound truth in the old saying, “You don’t buy beer, you rent it.” It is, nonetheless, a beginning. In the talk of pig farmers, of Mrs. Buchanan, we talk our way towards Voice: the ex-centric conversation of a couple of hard-ass A-1 Northern bullshitters sitting around the cracker-barrel chewing the fat, so to speak. Two would-be lovers. They meet in the tongue. It is the voice of the body, of the poet, of the new country, of Mary Buchanan.

Just don’t tell Walter.

Works Cited

Krouch, Robert. “The Exploding Porcine: Violence Against Pigs in the English-Canadian Novel.” The Tricky Lechery of Words 108-116.

———. “The Fear of Prairie in Women’s Fiction: An Erotics of Dirt.” The Tricky Lechery of Words 73-83.

———. Field Pokes: The Collected Poetry of Robert Krouch. Toronto: Beporkt Books, 1981.

———. “Heidegger, Bakhtin, and Barthes: Where They Went Wrong.” Implausible Stretches. Ed. Smaro Neuman, et al. Vancouver: Boar’s Head Press, 1992. 194-242.

———. The Pig Ledger. Field Pokes 40-46.

———. “On Being an Alberta Hog-Farmer (Did I Mention I Grew Up on a Farm?).” The Tricky Lechery of Words. 117-134.

———. Pig Catalogue. Field Pokes 13-26.

———. “The Pork Roast Poem.” Field Pokes 5-12.

———. “The Sad Pig-malian.” Field Pokes 27-39.

———. “Sketches of a Porker.” Field Pokes 47-52.

———. The Stud-Boar Man. New York: Wayne and Schuster, 1970.

———. The Tricky Lechery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Hoggsford UP, 1989.

———. What the Pig Said. Don Swills: General Publishing, 1978.

———. When Sick with Trichinosis. Diss. University of Iowa, 1961.

———. The Words of My Snorting. London: MacSwillan, 1966.