“The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English” by Margaret Atwood

How many times have you picked up an anthology to read, just to read for pleasure? Anthologies are like conservative old aunts, safe-keepers of the family’s treasures, visited out of a sense of duty rather than pleasure. Why, for heaven’s sake, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English has such an auntie on the dust-jacket, in a wicker-chair. There she sits, reassuring, a figure of conservation, with the entire past (English, at any rate) of Canadian poetry in her lap. She’s ready to gather dust.

Well, don’t you believe it. This old lady’s been given a radical shift in point of view. It comes with the contents. The editor, Margaret Atwood, explains that she took on the job of the anthology out of a duty, a kind of pious, filial service. Back in 1960 when Atwood was a young poet looking for precedents, the previously titled, Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, edited by A.J.M. Smith, provided them, supplying her with evidence of “a Canadian tradition” in poetry, she says. And Atwood felt grateful. Twenty years later, she found herself knee-deep in the same relics, working her way through the long narrative poems endemic to this country, retravelling Smith’s road. But the outcome was hardly imagined. Of the 120 poets represented in Atwood’s edition, 88 are living and 65 have been added since 1960. With that kind of ratio predominating, “a Canadian tradition” in poetry belongs to the present and the future, and the best may be yet to come. The Oxford anthology now carries its own built-in obsolescence.

I think that’s as it should be in a country like Canada, only beginning to shake free from its colonial experience. Real poetry is a recent thing. What went before is frequently derivative, flat and uninteresting. So Smith merely accepted the obvious: 52 of his chosen 98 poets were born in the twentieth century, and Atwood was following his example. Like him she paid due respect to ancestors, presenting an elegant, concise survey of them in her preface (from the seventeenth-century through Confederation to the modernists and beyond), explaining why, unlike him, she omitted poetry in French from her text—she doesn’t know enough about it. She didn’t intend to be radical. It’s simply that in her time, under her eye, poets began to multiply like rabbits, and many of them were good, very good, too. It was inevitable that in her hands, the anthology would grow “top-heavy” as she puts it; I’m simply interested in the implications of that.

You can’t compare Isabella Valancy Crawford—though she was game and isn’t it nice she was there rhyming in the nineteenth-century?—with Gwendolyn MacEwen, for example. It makes you a little defensive about the past, and I think Margaret Atwood is a little in her preface. Really, what do these poets have in common beyond provenance and sex? Surely not excellence. Pace Crawford, most of our nineteenth-century poets appear to have had psyches as smooth and imperturbable as pine-nuts; their technical skills were not memorable. As the twentieth-century continues its take-over, I suspect that it will become increasingly difficult to argue a continuity in tradition except in the simplest terms. It used to be we were told that a Canadian poem dealt with the land, the weather; you know, man against nature and the odds. But recent Canadian poetry has shown itself to be more and more urban; preoccupied with chauvinism, slums, revolution; with an international as well as a national focus, more and more sure of itself, less and less out in the cold, and literary. It may be one day that Canadian literary criticism will have to consider the influence of Jorge Luis Borges, say, along with E.J. Pratt. One thing is certain: with the bulk of its poets (Eli Mandel, Pat Lane, Michael Ondaatje, Susan Musgrave and Roo Borson among others) alive and well and still writing, who knows what they will write? The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English will have to be updated and revised in another twenty years or sooner. And there will be more new poets, young poets, who will further alter the look of the past by infiltrating its pages.

Already poets and critics alike are disagreeing about the new talents on the scene, who were and were not included. And I’ll bet the editor’s phone was ringing off the hook about work that was selected and how representative contributors felt it to be. Energies change and life is reflected in different lights according to the generations—and of course an editor is fallible. Just think. In 1960, A.J.M. Smith didn’t include the twenty-four year old Margaret Atwood, though she was writing well enough for another newcomer, poet John Newlove, to lament her omission.

No such risk this turn around. The splendid Atwood in this edition has been chosen impartially by William Toye, Oxford’s inhouse editor. Significantly, he’s included “Notes Towards A Poem That Can Never Be Written,” dedicated to American poet, Carolyn Forché. Forché’s poetry about El Salvador seems to have spurred Atwood on to a larger, more anguished understanding of human oppression than the power-politics of lovers can provide. If you look at Margaret Atwood’s development alone, how her poetry has taken heart from other soil as well as its own, how it has escaped the national inferiority complex as well as other stereotypes—you have to believe that Canadian literature is entering the world at long last. As for The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, the editor would disagree, I know, with much of what I’ve said about it here. Her reverence for the past in Canadian poetry is more substantial than mine and probably wiser. Nevertheless, the fact remains that she had copious and better material to choose from than her predecessor, and she speaks to a much wider, more appreciative, more critical audience. You see if I’m not right. This venerable old anthology grows younger with the years, and more vital. ■

Marilyn Powell is a producer with CBC’s Stereo Morning.