I am having a crisis of faith.
I am lucky enough this semester to be taking a course with Prof. Karis Shearer at UBCO on the rise of poetry in Western Canada, and more specifically the Vancouver Poets of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference. This was a huge time in Canada for poetry. The people at the conference were like rock stars. Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg. It feels so strange to be a poet in Western Canada and to be learning about this now, in the terminal semester of my degree. This time last year I would have been able to recognize the name Charles Olson as being a poet, but I certainly would not have been able to tell you what he did or how he changed poetry. This time last year the only poet of this noble poetic peerage I would have been able to tell you anything about would have been Allen Ginsberg. The progeny of these American poets, post-coference--George Bowering, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Frank Davey-- have done so much, and certainly should be a bigger deal than they are.
I feel like I need to say this right now: I am so proud to be a Canadian poet. I love Canadian poetry and other Canadian poets. We are so lucky in Canada to be in a community of poets that are so diverse, and with so much tension over form and the avant garde (because controversy means that people care). I am struck with rampant poetic nationalism. Leaving the university at the end of this semester, at the end of my degree seems like a terrifying prospect because where are the poets outside the annals of the academy?
THESE PEOPLE ARE CANADA'S POETIC CANNON! Why is education so fixated on old poetry? Why is education so fixated on on the English cannon? How many times does a person have to study Robert Frost's "Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood" before we can get to that? (The answer to that last question in my experience has been between 3 and 6.)
I guess part of this blog post is about how I am afraid, the way that most people are afraid, to graduate. I'm not afraid about work, because the real work as a poet is living. I'm not afraid about where I will go because where ever I go I will build a world. The thing I am most afraid of is how I will be able to know poets when I go. Canada is a big country after all.
