The Problem of Place

Normally I don’t agree whole-heartedly with the literary declarations of Carmine Starnino. But I have to make an exception for his recent comments in the March 2006 issue of Quill & Quire where he sums up the career of Irving Layton. And I especially support what he says about Layton's relationship with this country:

"I was amused to learn from the CBC that Layton fought for a 'Canadian' voice in our poetry. Layton didn’t have a Canadian bone in his body…He was the first poet from this country to disown his assigned historical self, that boondock checklist of 'Canadian' behaviours."

Admittedly, maybe because Layton wasn’t Canadian-born the roots were just never there. Maybe it takes a certain amount of time for a person to become Canadian or a child has to breathe Canadian air and swim in Canadian water before a certain age or else it’s all for nothing.

But Starnino has nevertheless hit on one of the main things that attracted me as a beginning poet to Layton – that dismissiveness towards the place where he lived. Granted, Layton wasn’t just dismissive, he was contemptuous, as in his poem, “Centennial Ode”:

Like an old, nervous and eager cow
my country
is being led up to the bull
of history

The bull has something else
on his mind
and ignores her

The truth is that the cow did the best it could to enlist the poets at the time of the centennial, including the likes of Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood, whose body of work hasn’t exactly been one long ode to their country of origin. Cow-nada in this is like every other country in assuming that the artist is a citizen first – someone Adrian Clarkson (even before she was Governor General) can parade around like national literary trophies.

Layton’s work puts the lie to this, though; partly because his poems mostly ignored the country he lived in even while embracing Greece and Italy, and partly because most of the poets of this place never welcomed him as one of their own. Sure, there’s the sexism, the strident pro-Israeli statements, and the occasional annoying gnat of poem that many poets saw as a lower art form. But how many poets and publishers who have survived only because of a beneficent state can say they weren’t at least a little bothered by his contempt for this place? Why make such a fuss, especially when there is apparently so much here to be celebrated?

My collision with Layton’s poetry came not long after I had been reading Hermann Hesse, a German writer who abandoned his country between the World Wars because he didn’t like the direction it was heading in – a finely tuned apprehension as it turned out. One of the books I read was a collection of letters entitled If The War Goes On… In it, Hesse and Romain Rolland exchange thoughts on the nature of war and doubts about the validity of the whole national enterprise. Great stuff for a kid in Grade 11 whose English teacher has just said that even though he doesn’t want to teach poetry, he will put the class through two weeks of Canadian poetry “because it’s Canadian.” So the tinder was there and Layton was just the right spark.

But Layton did write about Montreal. He did write about places where he travelled. And there he and I part company. And while the blurbs on the backs of most poetry books published in this country usually end with the writer’s bio and a final sentence saying, “She lives in...” (possibly because where you are from as a poet is more important to most readers than what you actually have to say), I blithely ignore the places I have lived. And they’ve all been decent places – Montreal; Red Islands, Sydney and Antigonish in Nova Scotia; Windsor, Kingston and Toronto in Ontario; and Edmonton. These places stubbornly refuse to inspire me even as they have been good homes for me. It is mainly in my dreams that they appear in any creative way. A high school hallway leads to a university classroom whose door opens onto Alexandra Road in Sydney which intersects Santa Monica Boulevard (must have something to do with the similarities I saw between part of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and George Street in Sydney – a lot of empty retail buildings on a wide, desolate street), which brings me to a poetry reading on Whyte Ave. in Edmonton. If dreams reveal anything about the innermost desires and intentions, then I must not see much difference between the places I’ve been. Or I see them as essentially interconnected, if only by my having been to each of them.

Let’s face it, though – how many of us in North America are born, grow up and live in the same place all our lives? Does place mean the same thing to us as it once did when we couldn’t easily pick and move our lives? Are we as a species gradually moving towards a revelation about the nature of our places – something akin to what the 12th century monk, Hugo of St. Victor wrote? "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land."

I’d like to believe we are moving in that direction – not because it’s some pseudo-religious rejection of the world we live in, but because it’s a more realistic assessment of what land and sea mean to us as a changing species. Yes, species. Most poets like a more folksy approach – a more locally rooted way of being in the world. Who, after all, would dare speak for ‘the species’? But if modern man can reject the possibility of God as a superstition, then why cling to the near mystical belief that a place has a special hold on us? Why choose to reject one superstition and then live inside another one?

The truth is, maybe I just suffer from ‘place envy’ – a baffled fascination with people who write in such loving detail of the places that are close to them. I don’t begrudge anyone their attachments – so long as they don’t look askance at my poems. My poems with no sense of home that wander the page like descendants of Cain, knowing they’ve done something wrong to become so unmoored from the earth, but determined to see what’s out here beyond the ‘Here Be Dragons’ signs.