As a reader, whose habits of perception and
evaluation have been conditioned by conventional forms and techniques of
poetry, I have been shocked on encountering the new frontiers of
frontierlessness of the poetics of the post modern Canadian poet Robcrt
Kroetsch, who seems to be struggling to capture in words the ineffable, the
indeterminable and the unidentifiable. I deem it a creative shock, as it has
thawed the indolence of complacency and pushed me out of the world of
conditioned assents, hypothesis and contingency into a world of unsettling
quest. I do not intend to indulge in superstitious veneration or envious
malignity, but wish to hold a mirror upto the reactions generated in me on my
critically self-conscious encounter with the post modernist poems of Robert
Kroetsch, whose literary personality seems to elude final definition.
“Like the resourceful Coyote of Plains Indian
Mythology, a figure central to his imagination, Robert Kroetsch is difficult to
trap” 1. He throws away the tight-lipped traditions of social
realism and defies the restrictions of conventional forms, as he endeavours in
his poetry to discover the ‘I’, the real being beneath the mirrored images of
perception and a form through the metamorphosis of the formless.
In Robert Kroetsch we find a “historical
transition…..from a literature which assumed that it was imitating an order to
a literature which assumes that it has to create an order, unique and
self-dependent, and possibly attainable only after a critical process called
‘decreation’” 2. He throws away the static ordered mythopoeic world
view, which finds its expression in ritualised forms, which has been given
literary application in conventional forms. He tries to capture the chaotic
dynamism of the complex realities of the world, employing thematic and
technical devices like self-reflexivity, sub-version or de-idealisation,
de-centering, irony, parody, indeterminacy, generic paradoxes and mock-seriousness.
These thematic and technical devices testify beyond doubt and dispute that
Robert Kroetsch is a post-modernist poet.
Robert Kroetsch has shown evident interest in
the naked and primary problems of the poetic form. This is conspicuously
perceptible in ‘The Ledger’ and ‘Seed Catalogue’. His poems seem
to be an epiphany of the problematic relations between language and selfhood.
He has fed his and his people’s experiences
into the smithy of his alchemising genius. There they have been transmuted. The
apparently unfinished products reveal his self and the corporate self of his
people. In the introduction to ‘Seed Catalogue’ Kroetsch says that it is
an ‘ongoing poem’, whereby he artfully implies the suggestive parallel between self and poem. Each individual poem is the suggestive analogy of an individual
self. Each anthology becomes an implicit parallel to the corporate self of his
people. He becomes acclaimed as a post-modernist, when we find multiplicity of
implications in the same parallels. Each individual poem can be interpreted as
the parallel to individual life. The anthology, which he epithetises as an
‘ongoing poem’ becomes the suggestive symbol of the ongoing phenomenon of life.
He seems to be struggling to capture the protean forms of life, reality and
self in the protean forms of language.
In ‘The Ledger’ and ‘Seed Catalogue’
thc ‘I’ figures prominently. But the ‘I’ in these poems conforms to Kroetsch
only superficially, because we find here only a hooded self. But what leaps off
the pages and grapples our attention is the search for an adequate language and
the quest for an authentic self. This elusive theme is central to both ‘The
Ledger’ and ‘Seed Catalogue’. They contain a veiled examination of
the poet’s own family’s past and his seeking after the personal source. The
search for the past and self become incidentally the search for form and
language. It is important in this context to note what he declares in ‘How I
joined the Seal Herd’, the final poem of ‘Seed Catalogue’: “I am /
writing this poem with my life”. He wants us to understand the absurdity in any
notion of that life “as the book of final entry / in which a record is kept” 3.
The double entry, the double column printing
of much of the poetry in ‘The Ledger’ implies the paradox in the attempt
to find a balanced account of oneself. We find Kroetsch involved in the
double-sided tale of construction and deconstruction as he enters ‘The
Ledger’. He gives us the shocking realisation that the entries seldom
balance. Wherever he looks, he finds holes. He finds “some pages torn out / by
accident”4. He tries to fill up by imagining absences. He declares
that everything he writes is a search, “a search for the dead”, “for some pages
remaining”. ‘The Ledger’ becomes the record of his inward journey to his
past. He doesn’t find his past. He finds only the act of finding. This finding
is disquieting, thematically and technically, which transforms ‘The Ledger’
into a symbol of the metamorphic nature of language and the elusive protean
forms of realty. Each entry becomes an ambiguity, Kroetsch, who seeks adequate
voice and utterance is caught in a disputed territory, a slippery ground
between affirmation and negation -
“Yes: no / no: yes” 5. He tosses us between
the columns in ‘The Ledger’, knocks away notions, causes confusions and them
compels us to emerge with new thoughts and to fill the gaps in his text
intelligently.
‘The Ledger’ evokes ancestral voices,
which Kroetsch tries to record. In trying to record the ancestral voice, he
attempts to speak. His attempt to speak becomes the unstable dialogue between
the reality and the rendering, between the fact and the interpretation. In ‘The
Ledger’ we find memory interacting with a document of the past. Memory
engages itself in seeking the source. Kroetsch calls this a ‘dream of origins’.
It is the seedbed of song which he describes in his ‘Seed Catalogue’:
“His muse is
His muse/if
memory is
and you have
no memory then
no meditation.” 6
The interaction between memory and the
document of the past is a baffling transformation of ambiguities. Yet
ambiguities remain unresolved. This interaction which is essential to the inner
journey, is recorded in ‘The Ledger’. Kroetsch acknowledges its effect
upon the Orphic passion of eloquence and loss. The alchemising effect of the Orphic
passion is seen when it
transforms the very silence of death
into magniloquence:
“everything you write
my wife, my daughters, said
is a search for the dead” 7
Conspicuously there is indeterminacy in the
search, in the finding and in the form in which these two are recorded, and
there emerges the elusive literary identity of Kroetsch as a post-modernist.
Robert Kroetsch who attempts to deconstruct
the images of the records in the ‘The Ledger’ is a pure post-modernist.
We find him trying to put back logs, which used for building the cabins of the
early settlers, into “the original forests.” His insistence on relieving the
experience of “the confusion again/the chaos”, on “marrying the terror” is
quite evident. It is reflected in the language he uses. This descent into the
destructuring element is recurrent in Kroetsch’s works. “How I joined the
Seal Herd” in ‘Seed Catalogue’ gives evidence of this. His flight
back to the sea, which he honestly records in this poem, carries rich echoes
and associations of this destructuring trend, which is characteristically post
modern.
The pre occupation with the inability of
language in capturing and containing reality is a characteristic of
post-modernism. The disquieting paradox of the defeat of language occurs in
Kroetsch’s writings. In ‘Seed Catalogue’ we get his stunning assertion:
“We silence words/by writing them down.”
In ‘Seed Catalogue’ we get Kroetsch’s
dominant question: “How do you grow a poet?” The answer is implied in the seed
time described in the poem. The seed time extends from his childhood to the
present. If we want evidence of the post-modern technique of a meditation
through memory upon the making of an imagination, the ten related sections of ‘Seed
Catalogue’ offer it. The ‘Seed Catalogue’ is a metaphoric field.
Here Kroetsch assembles the myths of seeding, decay and renewal. The poet seems
to be preoccupied with a large conflict. The conflict is between the closed
structures of the agrarian myths and the shamanistic role of the poet. For the shamanistic
role he seems to prepare by adopting the techniques of innovation, elaboration
and boundlessness. What is laudably remarkable is that his poetry is open in
form. In ‘Seed Catalogue’ and ‘The Ledger’ there are no defined
boundaries of genres. Prose fades into poetry gracefully and poetry weds prose
in harmonious transfusion.
In ‘Seed Catalogue’ slightly varying
questions are repeated: “But how do you grow a lover?” “How do you grow a
prairie town?”, “How do you grow a past….?, “But how do you grow a poet”,
“How/do you grow a garden?”. These variants are like the different coloured
strands, which appear, disappear and reappear in the loom, finally emerging as
a pattern. Here the pattern moves from the gardener to the garden. The flights
of the lover and the poet complicate it. In this movement from the gardener to
the garden, the mother’s request: “Bring me the radish seeds” is repeated but
evaded. It is noteworthy that her garden is the particular “locus” which stands
in repudiation of the boundlessness
of the hyperbolic story in ‘Seed
Catalogue’. Normally the description of a garden assumes a halo of romance.
Here it is divested of that. This we find even in the lack-lustre presentation
of the image of a home place, which occurs in the first and last sections of ‘Seed
Catalogue’:
“No
trees
around the house.
Only the wind.
Only the January snow.
Only the summer sun.
The home place:
a terrible symmetry.”
The mention of the double realm of winter and
summer is in the postmodemist vein. It offers an enigma of identity. The post
modernist poet seeks a ‘terrible beauty’ through a ‘terrible symmetry’ of
language.
“No. 176 - Copenhagen Cabbage:” This new
introduction, strictly speaking, is in every respect a thoroughbred, a cabbage
of highest pedigree, and is
creating considerable flurry among professional gardeners all over the world. 8
Peter Thomas, who has done a deep study on
the imaginative process of Kroetsch, which is as deceptive as Hemingway’s
allusive simplicity, tells us that in the lines given above we can find “the
language of flight, expressing the wishful, hyperbolic dreams of winter
kitchens”. 9 The dreams of winter kitchens may be
characteristically Canadian. But who else other than a post-modernist poet like
Robert Kroetsch can present the hyperbolic dreams in the lustreless language of
a piece of advertisement and yet make the description assume an unidentifiable
grandeur? Normally we find poetry wrapped in the mist of metaphysical
mystification. But here Robert Kroetsch divests poetry of that and he makes the
muse embrace even the language of the advertiser and the accountant. “A tension
between the language of acceptance and familiar meaning and that of storied
enlargement is at work throuuhout ‘Seed Catalogue’ and remains intrinsic
to Kroetsch’s narrative methods elsewhere” 10. In the second
poem in ‘Seed Catalogue’ the language of the storied enlargement of the
vegetable assumes a moral grandeur. The dry advertisement is spiced with a
piece of preaching: “Virtue is its own reward.” This provokes a sardonic
laughter. In the characteristic post-modernist mode the poet makes us think as
he provokes a laughter without mirth. An anti-song is characteristically
post-modernist. In section 4 of “Seed Catalogue” Kroetsch gives an anti
song, as he defines the town as a series of absences. There are no features of
the personal or collective past in this town. Here through the post modernist
technique of negation Kroetsch effects paradoxically an affirmation. If we look
for a deflationary story unravelled in unlyrical, sardonic, dislocated
language, the following passage is sample enough:
“The Gopher was the model
Stand up straight:
telephone poles
grain elevators
church steeples
vanish, suddenly: the
gopher was the model.” 11
In the seventh section of ‘Seed Catalogue’
we get a confessional note. Kroetsch describes a night out with A1 purdy. Here
we get the male/female imaginative tension. We find the demythifying hammer of
the deconstructivist heavily banging at the hallowed myths of propriety and
decorum. The concluding part of the section depicts the parable of male grain
eloquence being punctured by a woman. The poetic genius of Kroetsch is found
here involved in construction through deconstruction.
In the final two sections of ‘Seed Catalogue’
we find the consciousness of past and present appearing as an intricately woven
pattern of recurrence. Kroetsch uses a startling metaphor from his family
history. There are a ‘terrible symmetry’ and a stirring irony in his veiled
allusion to the death of his cousin who died on a bombing mission over Cologne
in 1943. He employs metaphors of planting and recurrence. The phrasal
repetition enhances the effect:
‘The danger of merely living.
a shell/exploding
in the black sky: a
strange planting
a bomb/exploding
in the earth: a
strange
man/falling
on the city
killed him dead.”
Conventional norms of poetic rhythm and
symmetry of poetic language are exploded here. But the force of the images
emerges through the unconventional lines.
Even conventional norms and concepts of
propriety are shattered when the ‘She’ becomes “the holy shit mother”
described in ‘Meditation on Tom Thomson’. The myths of Demeter
and Aphrodite are deconstructed and then synthesized in the post-modernist
deconstructivist-mode. A new myth, ironically, emerges as Kroetsch describes
the “holy shit mother”. The elements of legendary awe around this myth as we
find the “holy shit mother” sending forth her sons on lcarian fligts of
‘forgetfulness’ and she herself remaining to guard memory and time.
In ‘Seed Catalogue’ we have the
documentation of pieces of advertisement. But quite in the post-modernist mode,
it assumes an aura of fancy: it moves into phantasy: it touches reality at poignant Junctures.
In the ‘The Ledger’ there is imaginative
descent through time. Re-invited family past becomes the means for the
imaginative descent. From the bounds of time and space, the descent is into a
shamanistic dream song. Our acclamation of Robert Kroetsch as a post-modernist poet is justified as we
critically analyse the
characteristic concerns of Robert Kroetsch as a poet. We can recapitulate his
characteristic concerns as : (I ) the obsessive search for source, which he
unravels in the “dream of origins”; (2) the duality of perception which
he discloses in the double kingdom of winter/summer and in the male/ female
hegemonies of underworld and vegetation; (3) the Orphic motif of descent, which
he divulges in the motion of entry into chaos; (4) the structures of language
of shaministic dream. These thematic devices and technical peculiarities help
us to ascertain the poetic identity of Robert Kroetsch as a post-modernist.
NOTES:
1 Peter Thomas.
Rohel1 Kroetsch. (Vancouver : Douglas & Mcintyre, 1980) p. 1.
2 Frank Kermode. The sense or an Ending (New
York. Oxford University Press. 1967) p. 167
3 Robert Kroetsch.
The Ledger. (London. Ontario: Applegarth Follies. 1975) (a)
4 Ibid
5 Ibid (b)
6 Robert Kroetsch. Seed
Catalogue. (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press. 1977) p. 29
7 Robert Kroetsch.
The Ledger (London. Ontario, Applegarth Follies. 1975) (a)
8 Robert Kroetsch. Seed
Catalogue (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press. 1977) p.1
9 Peter Thomas.
Robert Kroetsch. (Vancouver: Douglas & Mcintyre. 1980) p.1
10 Ibid - p. 25
11 Robert Kroetsch. Seed
Catalogue (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press. 1977) p. 11