Unlocking Avison's Lexicon

David Kent, ed., "Lighting Up the Terrain": The Poetry of Margaret Avison. Toronto: ECW Press, 1987. x + 217 pp. Index and Bibliography.

January 4, 1963 was a day of special significance for Margaret Avison; on that day, while reading the fourteenth chapter of John's Gospel, she was moved to a profound reorganization of her spiritual and social life. Avison's conversion to Christianity — recommitment might be more accurate —would have many repercussions in her own poetic practice, and among her readers and critics, many of whom began to feel distinctly uneasy with the explicitly devotional nature of much of her subsequent work. The commen­tators assembled in David Kent's "Lighting Up the Terrain": The Poetry of Margaret Avison betray no such embarrassment; as Kent points out in his Introduction, "they begin by accepting it" (vii), not just as another event in the poet's life but as she herself has viewed it, as the most signal event in her life. The result is a first-rate volume of criticism and appreciation and, I hope, a harbinger of the quality of Kent's forthcoming critical biography of Margaret Avison.

Interspersed with the five analytical essays in "Lighting Up the Ter­rain" are short reminiscences, poems, and letters to and about Avison from Canadians such as George Bowering, by nichol, and Gwendolyn MacEwen, and from Americans such as Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov. Avison's essay "The Muse of Danger" is also included. Par­ticularly appropriate, I think, is the inclusion of Levertov's poem, "Caedmon," which serves to remind us that Avison belongs to a tradition of religious verse extending back through Eliot and Hopkins to Donne, Her­bert (Avison's favourite) and Caedmon, the first English Christian poet. Although the testimonials tend to be honorific, they also yield interesting bits of information about an unusually reticent poet. From Cid Corman's letters, for example, readers will discover that Avison had read and was enthusiastic about Olson's "Projective Verse" in 1953, almost two decades before the TISH group drew so much Canadian attention to the essay by adopting it as their labarum. Concluding the volume is Frances Mansbridge's "A Bibliography of Margaret Avison." Readers accustomed to thinking of Avison as the author of three slim volumes of poetry may be surprised to discover just how much of the Avison cannon is not included in them.

The real substance of "Lighting Up The Terrain" is to be found in the essays, which have been arranged by Kent in what seems to me to be a logical, developmental order, beginning with those that survey the whole of the published canon and concluding with essays that are more narrowly focused. In "Margaret Avison and The Place of Meaning," John Kertzer places on view the tempting notion of Avison as a poet whose career began in alienation, proceeded to religious doubt, and won through finally to "a radiant vision of God and His redemption" (7). Whatever the merits of this approach as regards Avison's spiritual growth, it does not, according to Kertzer, accurately reflect her development as a poet. The commanding and assured voice intoning "poetic lectures in history, philosophy, and percep­tion" (8) in Winter Sun (1960) becomes, in The Dumbfounding (1966) and sunblue (1978), the voice of the supplicant praying for guidance, asking for rather than giving instruction (9). Where Avison's early poems "seemed to encourage a religion of the imagination in which the epiphany is purely aesthetic," the post-conversion poems eschew "the proud, creative self­sufficiency of the artist" (8) and "although faith is assured and often joyously proclaimed, the style is less confident" (9). Quoting from letters, essays, and interviews, Kertzer reveals that from 1963 onward, Avison had begun to feel increasingly anxious about her early tendencies to luscious­ness and aestheticism. Her pseudonymous essay, "I Wish I Had Known. . .," indicates the religious dimension of this anxiety: "I see how grievously I cut off His way by honoring the artist: the sovereignty of God was the real issue for a long time, for me" (9).

This acknowledgement of His sovereignty raises interesting questions for the critic who, like Kertzer, asks the "geometaphysical" question: "where do words locate or find their meaning" (10). For the Christian poet like Avison, the reply is, of course, that God, as Logos, is both "sanction and sanctification for human speech" (15); for the secular reader, however, such a reply may appear to beg the question. Kertzer approaches the problem by examining, in turn, the less transcendental postulates of Owen Barfield, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. For Barfield, meaning is intrinsic to words and is recreated by the poet who uncovers the original, figurative roots of individual terms and "by magic of new combinations" manifests the poetic "as fresh meaning" (12). Although some of Avison's poetry may appear to be predicated on this model, other poems — "Sliverlick," or "About a New Anthology Again," for instance — employ nonsense terms, words without a history, implicitly exposing the inadequacy of Barfield's account. So, too, with Derrida and Foucault; "the perpetual detour of indeterminacy" (17) as put forth in their writings also comes close, at some points, to Avison's practice but still misses the mark. These theorists "examine what happens to language, meaning, and the comprehending subject when their metaphysical sanction is lost" (17); Avison, on the other hand, is aware of the playful deviousness of language but believes "in the divinity of the Word" and the accessibility of truth to those receptive listeners who "Let Love's word speak plain" (D, 142).

Although Kertzer shows the insufficiency of the paradigms drawn from Barfield, Derrida, and Foucault, he has not set them up as straw men. Rather, he skillfully shows the need to find a model of language that navigates between the pseudo-certainties of Barfield's philological model and the uncertainties of the French theorists' relativism. Grounded in the "intricate duality of the ordinary and the visionary, the human word and the Divine word, the devious indeterminacy of speech and the plenitude of meaning," Avison's aesthetic expresses itself in patterns of "evasive metaphors [which] express her divided condition" (20). Avison frequently employs the image of light to express the mystery of meaning; as Kertzer notes, "Light illuminates and makes vision possible, but is not itself visible" (23). Because of the blinding source of her faith, Avison's poetry, like the metaphoric process itself, proceeds by "displacement, indirection, and impertinence" (16), detouring "through hope to truth" (19).

If Kertzer's conclusions about Avison's use of metaphor suggest that she is, in some way, still holding to Romantic conceptions of the role of the secondary imagination, both Lawrence Mathews and David Lyle Jeffrey dispel the illusion. This is not to say that Avison has given up on the imagination but, as Mathews shows in "Stevens, Wordsworth, Jesus: Avison and the Romantic Imagination," her conception of its significance has changed. Ever since Ernest Redekop's ground-breaking monograph on Avison, particularly his chapter on the optic heart, critics have tended to treat "Snow" as the most concise, and perhaps most central, statement of Avison's poetic. That poem's octave, in particular, seems to celebrate the "triumphant jailbreaking and re-creating" of the Romantic imagination; however, the sestet, calling to mind Coleridge's notion of Fancy with its image of "desolate/Toys," and concluding with the image of the "sad listener," points not to the "old-time religion of Wordsworth and Coleridge" (37), but to Wallace Stevens' idea of poetry as a supreme fiction.

Mathews begins by noting that the octave of "Snow" is not typical of Avison's poetry, not even of Winter Sun, although this volume often exhibits "a nostalgia for the traditional Romantic epiphany that Wordsworth celebrates" (37), a pseudo-religious experience in which man and nature are reconciled. Even in this early volume, Mathews contends, Avison seems more drawn to Stevens' position, that the reconciliation of man and nature takes place in poetry, the supreme fiction, but not in experience or, only rarely and fleetingly. "The unqualified triumph of the optic heart" (40), Mathews shows, is confined to poems like "Meeting Together of Poles and Latitudes (In Prospect)," "Birth Day," or "Intra­political," poems whose settings are (with few exceptions) symbolic. Poems with quotidian settings, "New Year's Poem," "All Fool's Eve," and the like "record [the optic heart's] failure or very limited success" (40). The possibility of transformation is glimpsed, but that is all: "the imagination holds its own against the forces that are inimicable to it, and that is the most the poet can say" (42).

In The Dumbfounding and sunblue matters are different; their world "is pre-eminently the world redeemed and made new by the action of Jesus Christ" (43). The nostalgia of the Romantically affirmative "Wordsworthian" poems is gone; even the influence of Stevens remains, if at all, only as something to be exorcised. The ahistorical Adam of "Dispersed Titles" — Adam as Romantic-Modernist namer and shaper —now gives primacy of place to an ahistorical Jesus. As Mathews notes, quoting Avison's "In Truth," "To `listen / To Him' is to acknowledge that quotidian reality has been transformed, that reconciliation in experience has replaced reconciliation in poetry" (44). If this sounds suspiciously close to Wordsworth's position, we must be careful to note the vital difference: "The divine imagination, not the human, is responsible for the new crea­tion" (45) [italics mine]. Furthermore, Jesus "does not lead us `From joy to joy' as Wordsworth asserts that nature does, but leads instead to places of desolation, into deeper knowledge of sorrow rather than multiplication of happiness" (46). Where the Wordsworth of "Lines composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" seeks refuge in Nature from "the heavy and weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world," the Avison of "Searching and Sounding" acknowledges that "it is only with you / I can find the fields of brilliance / to burn out the sockets of the eyes that want no / weeping" (D, 154-56). Avison's Jesus is not to be found "in Gethsemane's grass, perfumed with prayer / but here," wherever "here" happens to be, whether in the fetidity of rooming houses or in "the place / of jackals, the sparrow's skull" ("Searching and Sounding"). The consequence of this is that Avison can, in effect, repudiate the traditional Romantic view of experience — "the poet has no need to exalt certain kinds of experience, nor to hope that certain kinds of experience will keep happening (while fearing that they will not)" (49) — and, more specifically, to reject the self-serving subjectivity of the Romantic artist. For Avison, Mathews writes, "Jesus is the perfect Roman­tic artist whose poem is the world — coherent, intense, beautiful-redeemed from meaningless by his heroic suffering and creativity" (50). The Chris­tian poet's role, Mathews continues, is to effect a jailbreak that lets Jesus in; thus, "the true recreation is to see with your own eyes what he has made" (50).

One further obstacle to an appreciation of Avison's poetic is the danger of assuming that, having exposed the limitations and irrelevancies of Romantic subjectivity, her post-conversion stance can be equated with a form of Romantic objectivity, namely, Keats' doctrine of negative capability. This view, espoused in relation to Avison's earlier poetry by George Bowering in "Avison's Imitation of Christ the Artist," is flawed, according to Mathews, because Bowering "cannot take Avison's Christology seriously, except as a premise for poetry" (51). The accuracy of this assertion is open to challenge, but I can accept it for argument's sake. More problematical, for me, is Mathews' contention that, as a Christian artist, "Avison does not have the indifference towards the spiritual or moral value of her material that a poet of negative capability must have" (52). There is an obvious confusion here between aesthetic distance, the objectivity or impersonality of the poet of negative capability, and aestheticism, the desire to divorce art from moral considerations. Shakespeare, Keats' exemplar of negative capability, may well have experienced "aesthetic joy in the process of writing a play about an evil person who does not change" (52), but it is improper to conclude, as Mathews does, that "the sense of beauty [obliterated] all consideration" (52) of the moral value of his material. In spite of her own reservations about aestheticist tendencies in her early work, neither Avison nor Shakespeare could be justly accused of aestheticism. This is not to say that they are incapable of negative capability, "of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irrita­ble reaching after fact & reason. . ." (Keats, Letters). Quite the contrary; it is Mathews' own argument that, as a follower of Christ, Avison is "now free to confront evil without anxiety" (49). Mathews may be correct in suggest­ing that the doctrine of negative capability "does not provide a viable framework for understanding Avison's post-conversion poetic practice" (51), but not for the reasons he advances.

In "Light, Stillness, and the Shaping Word: Conversion and the Poetic of Margaret Avison," David Lyle Jeffery makes many of the same points as Kertzer and Mathews to show that Avison has repudiated Romantic subjec­tivity in favour of a more self-abandoned stance. Starting with the premise that "Avison's poetry from the beginning is implicitly religious in charac­ter" (60), Jeffery traces Avison's evolving use of images of light as an indicator of her transformed conception of the poet's role. He quotes liberally from 1 Wish 1 Had Known to emphasize the dramatic turn that took place in Avison's poetic in 1963 and concludes that her reading of John's Gospel "suddenly and decisively moved [her] to a self-abandoned reordering of priorities for her whole life" (67). While there is "no sudden shift in basic human concerns or ostensible subject matter" (60), the pro­found change is clearly in evidence if one considers, for example, her altered perspective on Light. Light and poetry are "nearly synonymous" in her early work; after her conversion, "Light does not at all disappear as a value, but rather is clarified. Light is now the Apex; poetry is reflexive under­standing" (66). The problem of Avison's early intellectual and spiritual life, according to Jeffery, was its "subversive lack of any transpersonal reference for ultimate meaning" (66). Having transcended the Romantic tendency to solipsism, Avison wins through to the understanding that "the poet does not invent the world, nor reinvent. She sees it now as a given: Light makes her listen" (72). This new attentiveness, Jeffery argues, makes Avison "less a mystic than a sage, and her poetry less lyric than gnomic" (52).

In contrast to the essays which attempt to locate Avison in relation to other canonical poets and critics are the intensive readings of her work by Robert James Merrett and Ernest Redekop. Merrett's "Faithful Unpredic­tability: Syntax and Theology in Margaret Avison's Poetry" examines in painstaking detail how Avison's syntactic unpredictability "obliges us to explore the spiritual nature of reality" (83). Focused primarily on past and present participles in The Dumbfounding and sunblue, Merrett's study also demonstrates how subtle shifts in tense, voice, and person, ambiguity with respect to coordinate and subordinate relationships, unbalanced coordinate clauses, and other forms of syntactic subterfuge disrupt the "conventional relations between concept and referent" (83). As a consequence, we are compelled "to reconceive the boundaries between natural and mental reality" (100). This, in Merrett's view, is a deliberate theological strategy, reflecting "Avison's faith in the closeness of the subjective and the objec­tive, her wish to break down their duality" (91). For example, the mixing of past and present participles in "The Earth that Falls Away" manifests "the paradoxes of anthropocentric thought, showing it to be creative as well as naive" (90). What may appear at first to be simple instances of personifica­tion are, in fact, "reciprocal images [which] reflect a theological desire to connect man to the cosmos" (90).

Merrett's essay does not lend itself to casual perusal; readers without a solid grounding in grammar may find it difficult to follow, and even grammarians may find parts of it tedious. Nevertheless, I think this essay makes a valuable contribution to the collection, and stands as an example of the kind of linguistic analysis that so much of Avison's poetry demands. Of an entirely different order is Redekop's study of Avison's use of Biblical sources and strategies. In "The Word/word in Avison's Poetry," Redekop examines three poems, "Not the Sweet Cicely of Gerardes Herball," "Jael's Part," and "The Bible to be Believed," in terms of the distinction between metaphor and kerygma as outlined in Frye's The Great Code. According to Redekop, "the three poems express three levels of her use of the Bible: the use of allusion in the first; the use of a specific biblical text in the second; and in the third, commentary on the typological relation between Old and New Testaments and on the mystical relation between word as language and Word as Person" (117). What follows is, somewhat like Merrett's, an explication of the poems so densely textured as to defy easy paraphrase. The value of Redekop's analysis lies not simply in its location of recondite allusion, an exercise too often stupidly dismissed as source hunting; more important, Redekop knows his sources thoroughly and can point the signifi­cance of what Avison does not use or uses in dramatically altered form. As much as her borrowings, Avison's omissions, rearrangements, and repeti­tions, become the sites of metaphorical signification. A clear sense of this emerges from Redekop's comparison of "On Believing the Bible" (version one) with "The Bible to Be Believed" (version two). The emphasis of the first version is on "the `sealing-up' (not merely `sealing') of the `living word,"' whereas the second version gives "a radically different and more vital sense of rebirth" (133). While the first version is metaphorical, the second is kerygmatic or proclamative: "its final purpose is a revelation towards which metaphor serves as an instrument" (133).

From the beginning, Avison's poetry has had the intertextual density usually associated, in the modern era, with prose works like Under the Volcano or, more fittingly, The Double Hook. In The Dumbfounding and sunblue, this allusional richness has been matched by a grammatical and syntactical ambiguity more in keeping with the self-reflexive uses of language that Barthes has labelled "writing degree zero" than with the language of a poet as clearly committed as Avison to a metaphysics of Presence. These tendencies have contributed to her reputation as one of Canada's most outstanding poets but, as much as her conversion to Christianity, they have conspired to restrict the size of her readership. I have no illusions about the ability of criticism to enlarge appreciably a poet's audience, but I believe these essays could do much to dispel the illusion that there has been no artistically memorable Christian poet since Hopkins. While critical commentary is no substitute for a passionate and thoughtful engagement with the poems themselves, "Lighting up the Terrain" will be invaluable to readers who, like me, need occasionally to peek at the solutions to cryptic crosswords to get themselves started.

J.M. Zezulka