Next Year Critical Country

Among the 33 essays, aesthetic statements, interviews and diversions included in Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing, is “The Poetics of Tension and Encounter”, a genial manifesto by Saskatoon poet, Anne Szumigalski. If Robert Kroetsch is the Onan on prairie writing, scattering his literary seed on the fecund topography of the prairie landscape, then Anne Szumigalski is the region’s unofficial den mother, protecting within her inclusive arms a clutch of younger poets and fiction writers. Her essay is as clear and stimulating as Western Canadian air. At one point she characterizes prairie writers as “first of all riders who have ridden their ponies on and off the pages of our history”. I’ll bet dollars to arrowheads that she is consciously invoking the opening line of one of the finest poems ever written about the prairies. “Ride off any horizon”, intones John Newlove, “and let the measure fall where it may.” The exciting thing about Trace is that it demonstrates conclusively that we are taking our cue from Newlove’s lean masterpiece, and letting the critical measure fall in our own back yard, if not our own quarter section.

Poet and critic Birk Sproxton, who ably edited the collection, wanted to gather in a single book “essays essential for an understanding of what has happened in the last 20 years in prairie writing”. He’s done just that. What has happened—or better yet, is happening—is that prairie writing is growing up and cutting out. Not only do we have senior writers like Anne Szumigalski providing echoes from an accepted tradition in prairie writing, but we have a new generation making noises of its own.

Monty Reid, who lives in Drumheller, has a fine essay called “Small Town, Small World” which plays against inherited notions about the prairie sensibility. He concludes that “we’re not looking for paradise”, a denial that ought to cause nervous twitches in the face of Mick Burr, since his first collection of poetry was called The Blue Pools of Paradise. But this altercation is a mere flare-up between brothers; it’s when Reid says that the prairie is not a state of mind that the literary son grows prodigal. His declaration is wheatland heresy, because it contradicts Henry Kreisel’s durable essay, called “The Prairie: A State of Mind”, first published in 1968 and included in Trace as well. Reid’s disagreeing with Kreisel is a little like a young bible scholar going after the Book of Genesis. The advantage in having both essays in the same collection is that by comparing them readers can let their own critical fingers do the measuring. As the editor says in his preface, the book has “gaps for you to fill in”; gaps that come out of the collection’s “competing voices”.

The competition, I’m relieved to say, is fierce. “All art is honouring the past”, says Margaret Laurence in a conversation with Robert Kroetsch, who himself is quoted later on, via this succinct irreverency: “Fuck the past.” The conclusion one seems able to draw from this brace of observations about our current relationship with tradition, is that young writers ought to honour thy poet father and thy novel mother (although the word father in Kroetsch’s version of the commandment would undergo a particularly graphic transformation.) These disagreements, apostasies and friendly rivalries are the stuff out of which a responsible literary culture is made.

It used to be easy to gain entry into the pure prairie league; all you had to do was include the following in your poem, story or novel: a reference to “place”, which was almost always rural; a catalogue of local flora or fauna (preferably with Indian names, although anything ethnic sounding would do); an Indian legend, especially one with a Trickster figure in it; and finally, characters whose ability to articulate their feelings was about equal to the ability of a McCormick reaper to do the same. There were, of course, pioneers who did this sort of thing first and, as it turns out, did it best as well. I’m thinking of writers like Sinclair Ross, Margaret Laurence, Robert Kroetsch and Andrew Suknaski: As For Me and My House, The Stone Angel, Seed Catalogue and Wood Mountain Poems are classic expressions of the best prairie writing. But a good deal of monkey-seeing, monkey-doing has taken place since these books were written and it’s a healthy sign that prairie writers are now questioning the formula that bestowed on Western Canadian writing the Dishonourable Order of the Obligatory Buffalo. “I was sidetracked by the ‘local colour’ movement of the Prairies” writes Kristjana Gunnars; “Ambivalence about place”, offers Monty Reid, “is widespread in recent prairie writing”; and David Arnason further puts tradition in its place when he says, “I think any writer has a duty to explore his past. But for the sake of the reader he has a duty not to pummel it forever.”

It’s attitudes like these that are breathing new life into the stuffed buffalo of prairie literature. On the evidence of the writing in Trace, our writers are omnivorous readers, with a special fondness for South American literature: Marquez, Fuentes, Llosa and Neruda turn up as often as home-grown writers when the influence question is raised. (For anyone interested in who reads what, the collection ends with author’s notes, which section also includes suggestions for further reading. You’ll discover a number of surprises and no small degree of pretension there as well. Some writers, I’m inclined to say, should read less and write more.)

Lest we forget, Trace has some flaws as well: the historical section with which the book opens allows some important writers two kicks at the cat of recent literary history. The editor tells us in his preface that he is pleased with these looks “both ways in time”. I’m less so. I have no idea why Miriam Waddington continues to be considered a prairie poet, but I certainly would have a better idea if either of her two essays dealt with the poetry she wrote about the prairies. Similarly, Dorothy Livesay’s inaugural editorial from CVII (1975) isn’t about prairie writing at all and her overview of Canadian poetry today, I’m sorry to say, is fuzzy and politically naive. In the midst of Kreisel’s seminal essay, Laurence’s manifesto, Wiebe’s witty self-interview and Mandel’s generous and provocative ganging up on his two selves, these earlier double-takes seem especially ill-considered and unfocussed.

In Part Two of Trace Sproxton abandons the idea of orchestrating connections and collisions among the essays; here he simply lists the essays alphabetically by author. The choice is lazy and, in the case of Christopher Wiseman’s “Ideology, Obscurity and the Health of Poetry”, damaging to the collection as a whole. Because of this arrangement, Ms. Wiseman’s rather silly and reactionary piece is allowed to seem summary, and, unfortunately, he concludes his essay with numbered conclusions. All I can say about them—and his essay—is that it’s a pity he isn’t David Arnason. The editor should have upended the alphabet; he should have paid attention to the story of the wedding feast at Cana. He could have done both by calling on the Sad Phoenician.

Still, there are so many pieces in Trace that are intelligent, coherent and, above all, provocative, that I’m obligated to overlook Mr. Sproxton’s dubious choices. In no particular order and with no inclination to be exhaustive, the writings of Patrick Friesen, Aritha van Herk, George Amabile, Pamela Banting, David Williams, Sandra Birdsell, Wayne Tefs, Caroline Heath and Dennis Cooley are worth reading once … and then once again and then again.

You get my point. Trace informs us in no uncertain terms that criticism is alive and testy in the prairies. It’s kicking against the tricks. It’s also allusive and, happily, elusive to boot. As Andrew Suknaski writes in “Essay Parcels”, one of the collection’s most intriguing missives,

“… what I like abt my critics is whenever they discover another version of me, i’m always somewhere else.”

The future, then, when measured by the wood mountain tracks, by the paw prints of Suknaski’s imaginative step, is necessarily hopeful and continuing. Sproxton could have called his tracings and trackings next year critical country. “I still feel”, writes Sandra Birdsell in the ‘Bottom of the Lake’, “that you just can’t tell the whole story in one story.” As it goes with stories, so it goes with critical anthologies. ■

Robert Enright is the arts reporter for CBC’s 24 Hours and the editor of Border Crossings.