Desiring_the_Prairies_(an_Antholoogy_of_Women_Prairie_Poets

desiring the prairies (An Anthology of women prairie poets) Table of Contents Poems 6 Mythinterpretations 6 Seventh Day-Crozier 6 Gender Relations-Catherine Hunter 6 If I were You- P.K. Page 6 The Elect- Anne Szumigalski 6 Eve- Dorothy Livesay 6 Blood Mother-Su Croll 6 The Walls Are Too High-Deborah Schnitzer 6 Alienation-Dorothy Livesay 6 EnKroetsching on the Property Lines 6 Sexing the Prairies-Alison Calder 6 Prairis/cite Maintenance-Adeena Karasick 6 South-West, or Altadore- Erin Mouré 6 Aprons-Leona Gom 6 Staying Awake-Karen Solie 6 Male Thrust-Lorna Crozier 6 Transplant-Elizabeth Allen 6 LOST. CHILDREN HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO-Jill Hartman 6 Calgary, This Growing Graveyard- Aritha van Herk 6 Squaw Poems- Marilyn Dumont 6 Waiting-Leona Gom 6 Rising, Batoche-Kim Morrissey 6 Unmixed Good-Su Croll 6 Meadowing-Barbara Klar 6 Tongue Graft Variations-Sylvia Legris 6 mythinterpretations 7 enKROETSCHing on my territory 9 (de)Construction Season 13 Works Cited 20 This anthology contains a selection of female poets whom I would consider “prairie poets”. How does one become a prairie poet' Is it because a poet lives on the prairies' Maybe because she was raised on the prairies and spent her formative years surrounded by all that would define her adulthood' Mandel suggested that his image for a prairie writer was not, necessarily the one who stayed in the west, but the one who returned, moved or pointed in that direction. Perhaps these criteria are the standard, but I think that Erin Mouré says it best: “It is very specifically saying that the west won't go away just because you move. Some images stay as a pride and way of seeing. In the east people think if you're from the west you are a certain kind of person and if you stay east long enough it'll go away and you'll be all right. "West" says the place you come from is in you anyway. Perhaps the key point of being a prairie poet-it will not go away..it seeps into all that you do”. (Waves 1986) The west remains inside the poet, no matter where she chooses to eventually call home. She does not let the prairies define who she is and she does not let the prairie contain her. Rather, it is more a process of acceptance and understanding. The acceptance that everything is part of something greater, and the understanding that this acknowledgement does not diminish anything or anyone, is at the core being of a female prairie poet. This is adamantly not to be confused with submissiveness. The ability to embrace the mythological vision in order to revision; the power to hear the unspoken, read the unwritten in order to deconstruct and expand; this is not submission-it is an understanding. If, as Mandel suggests, “prairie” is nothing more than a mental construct- a myth; then it is not difficult to envision the poets birthed, fully formed, from the head of such a powerful construct. The male poets, struggling to define and dominate, who thrust and bluster their way to ownership of the indefinable prairie. This is in stark contrast to the female poets, who instinctively understand the landscape and fertility of the prairie land. They know there is no ownership. There is only the illusion of domination, they know that to give the language power, there must be a duality present. Aritha van Herk stated that the things that are written are meant to be unread and uninscribed (van Herk, 1993). To be able to untell a story implies that the reader unravels the threads back to the place where the poem/story/myth began and create it again. It is important to understand the processes through which these poets create and recreate their vision. The following poems are divided into three sections, the theme of each section self-explanatory. Yet one must remember that the poets and poems within belong to the prairies. On the prairies fields, there is no new life without a little cross-fertilization. Crozier’s poems, in their revisionist glory, can be found deconstructing old myths , muttering to themselves like God’s Wife, saying things like, “Why be upset' Who’s going to believe it'” (Crozier,The Blue Hour of the Day, 66). Van Herk’s work can be found mapping it’s way across territory previously uncharted. It does like to relax at the end of a hard day, though, and can often be found trying to start an argument with Pete, the cowboy, at the bar. Pete is thinking that maybe he should have taken that nice Miz Calder up on her offer of coffee and a lemon square, or two. It will be interesting to see what grows. Poems Mythinterpretations Seventh Day-Crozier Gender Relations-Catherine Hunter If I were You- P.K. Page The Elect- Anne Szumigalski Eve- Dorothy Livesay Blood Mother-Su Croll The Walls Are Too High-Deborah Schnitzer Alienation-Dorothy Livesay EnKroetsching on the Property Lines Sexing the Prairies-Alison Calder Prairis/cite Maintenance-Adeena Karasick South-West, or Altadore- Erin Mouré Aprons-Leona Gom Staying Awake-Karen Solie Male Thrust-Lorna Crozier Transplant-Elizabeth Allen LOST. CHILDREN HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO-Jill Hartman (de) Construction season Calgary, This Growing Graveyard- Aritha van Herk Squaw Poems- Marilyn Dumont Waiting-Leona Gom Rising, Batoche-Kim Morrissey Unmixed Good-Su Croll Meadowing-Barbara Klar Tongue Graft Variations-Sylvia Legris mythinterpretations In Gingell’s essay "Let Us Revise Mythologies: the Poetry of Lorna Crozier” Crozier quotes the female narrative voice in "Inside," as choosing not to do battle with nature, but rather to submit to the "flat-palmed" wind, preferring to "breathe" with it, to "tremble with the earth" (71), and to hide therein from the "heavy boots" of those others (men) whose attitude to nature is combative and exploitive. She does not have to create a new myth; she embraces the mythology inherent in the Canadian prairies and plants herself firmly in the Garden. From the Garden, the seeds of creation are carried on the wind. Whether it is a few feet or a few thousand kilometers, the ideas take root. To understand the mythology that empowers the female prairie poet, one must start at the beginning. Not so much chronological, but the mythological and ,more specifically, the creation of the world. The use of the garden as metanarrative is prevalent in much of prairie poetry. The female poets, however, take this archetypal myth and claim it for their own. In Livesay’s poem “Alienation” There is no God, male or otherwise, in the "golden garden" of Eden. The only deity present is that of a stalking wind and a sinister "magic" which transfers all knowledge to Adam, and Eve is more like the tree, stripped of its fruit of knowledge, rather than the seductress responsible for the end of innocence. This "Alienation" of Eve from Adam expresses the conflict between woman and man. Robbed of power and denied Adam's privilege, woman is excluded fully from the "garden,” Livesay is asking for an expansion of male consciousness to permit the inclusion rather than the "Alienation" of Eve and women in general. Susan Gingell writes i that Crozier is a mythological poet, one who creates a type of feministic re-visioning of the patriarchal mythologies (53), especially in the Old Testament. Lorna Crozier’s poem “The Seventh Day” publishe in “Inventing the Hawk” is a “re-Creation” story, where Ms Crozier uses a well-known biblical tale to satirize the male creationist-her counterparts in the arts. In this poem, God’s wife is the one who creates everything else after “Let there be light”. God, apparently, is so taken with the fact that he can create light by and on command that he neglects to do much else. Crozier’s vision is of a man who is quite pleased with himself- for this wonderous thing he has created. She draws a parallel with the ordinary prairie and the extraordinary creation of the world. After God creates nothing but sky for three days, his wife demands, “Quick, make something to stand on!”(Crozier 62) The ensuing image is that of the prairie, where the sky seems immense and the land rests as a line on the horizon. The image also makes the reader think that Crozier has entrusted the solidity of humanity to women. It is God’s wife who creates the reality. A person “comes back to earth” and back to reality, after daydreaming or engaging in flights of fancy. It is this earth that is created at the behest of God’s wife. God’s wife is the ultimate creator in this story. In Crozier’s version, the Garden of Eden is, perhaps, located somewhere in Saskatchewan where the prairie sky is huge and dominating. However, under this sky, this grandiose obsession, “Everything he’d forgotten, she had to create.”(62) Therefore, she creates life “paw by paw” and “leaf by leaf.” Notice that although God’s wife creates, she understands that nothing is forever. There is; “too little room for life without end, forever and ever, on that thin spit of earth under that huge prairie sky.”_ (Crozier 62) Within Crozier’s rejection of the patriarchal myths of the Bible, she is also rejecting western patriarchal myth by drawing a close parallel between the creation of Earth and the prairie itself. Crozier rejects the patriarchal mythology of the West, by introducing death as an afterthought rather than the punishment meted out to Adam and Eve. Death is not a threat or form of dominance at the hands of God’s wife. Rather, it is just something else that needs to be done before the end of the homemaker’s day. The homemaker is the time-honoured and universal role in culture. By shifting the traditional female role out of the narrow confines of the domestic and into a wider broader spectrum, it is easy to cast her into the role of mediator. No longer transforming only the homestead and the children, she transforms language and culture. enKROETSCHing on my territory Kroetsch’s prairie is a place where men are men, and the home-makers' Well, according to Kroetsch: The basic grammatical pair in the story-line [the energy line] of prairie fiction is house: horse. To be on a horse is to move: motion into distance. To be in a house is to be fixed: a centring unto stasis. Horse is masculine. House is feminine. Horse: house. Masculine: feminine. On: in. Motion: stasis. A woman ain't supposed to move. (Kroetsch, `Erotics of Space' 49) In his “lifelong” poem “Seed Catalogue”, Kroetsch asks, “how do you grow a prairie town'”(Kroetsch 35) His result is full of phallic symbolism; gophers and steeples, telephone poles and grain elevators; always going up always rising. This is the male version of the prairie in which one must always dominate. Even Wiebe is not immune from Kroetsch, as he “lays great black steel lines….of fiction”.(Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch 1989) There were those who believed that the railway would conquer the prairie. It is no coincidence that one “lays” track, and in Kroetsch’s opinion, laying down the written word to conquer land, and perhaps to conquer the distance between it’s people. I mention Kroetsch in an anthology of women poets, because “Seed Catalogue” provided the fuel that ignited a conscious response from at least two of this anthology’s authors. Cross-boundary writing asserts some strong and powerful constructions and reconstructions. By estranging itself from the safety zone of genre, and by refusing an “authentic” voice the poem permits us to question the those preconceived notions of locations of race, gender and language. I also believe that he was influenced by some of the prairie’s early female voices. For instance, in an interview with Bernice Lever in 1975, Livesay had this to say: “The tree is central because it has roots; underground roots to the basic elements of life and death. Everything that dies goes to the earth and the tree is reaching to new universes, in a sense, and towards the sun with its branches, and the tree doesn't flourish by itself very often. The tree needs company, other trees. A tree is the symbol for man. .. . [It is also] The tree of life. And, of course, it's the Garden of Eden symbol — it's absolutely fundamental” (Lever 49) Kroetsch, in his own interview, writes that “Seed Catalogue” was his effort to locate the poem in a specific place so he could expand outward to other models, like the Garden of Eden. His ultimate goal was to get all those echoes of gardens working together in order to give what grew there a shape (MacKinnon 15). Both Kroetsch and Livesay trace those echoes back, unraveling the myth and recreate it according to their own experiences. According to Kroetsch, History, as he knew it, did not account for the world he lived in (Kroetsch 1983). So he created his own versions of history, like his female colleagues have been always doing. A poet destabilizes the boundaries each time s/he crosses them, until there are so blurred and trampled, no one can recall that they really existed in the first place. In “The Seed Catalogue”, Kroetsch’s prairie garden is vast. The echo of God’s obsession in Crozier’s poem is found in the bewilderment of Kroetsch’s father. He cannot understand the tiny little garden his wife creates and nurtures. What purpose does it yield' There is no conquering of the land, no upright fence posts to claim ownership by. This tiny garden is the true echo of Eden. Created by the woman, it is a bridge between the stillness of the house (woman) and the motion of the land. Alison Calder answers Kroetsch with her own poem “sexing the prairie”.(Wolf Tree 2007) For if there is patriarchy in the prairies then surely there is matriarchy as well. For in Calder’s prairie, the square, not the grain elevator is the model. The squares in the kitchen, traditionally the domain of women, the dishcloths, lemon squares, the table. This image is also carried on outside, on the prairie. Land is based on grids, or squares. There is an interesting dichotomy between the outside, where all the boys are, and the inside, traditionally the domain of women. Calder presents the image of a group of boys, suddenly shy and unsure, at the threshold of the kitchen door. However, the trivialization of women’s work proved too much for the boys and they won’t come in for “a real good talk.” The boys would “ rather “be shootin' and hollerin' and having pissing contests over in the barn. They'd rather have a chaw and beat each other up, manly-like”(Calder,Sexing the Prairie 65). Who dictated that the “field of battle” was more significant than the “field of nurturing”' The field of battle in Calder’s poem is the prairie itself. In her last stanza the boys decide, “We got to cover that prairie”(Calder 65). Why' Perhaps the sight of her uncovered more than they could possibly endure. She can’t just be lying there in all her glory for everyone to see. The covering of the prairie symbolizes the covering of a naked woman, implying ownership and dominance by making the choice for her. Tornadoes, dust storms and floods kick off the covers on Calder’s prairie and she takes control once more. Calder writes that the “prairie, she’s a boy,” (Calder 66) and she instinctively understands the duality present in life on the prairies. In order to have a reaction, there must be an action. The reaction of the prairie to the action of the boys is just part of the ongoing reciprocation that occurs. (de)Construction Season Nothing can be deconstructed without the initial construct. These women poets could not reconstruct the vision of the prairies without the initial construct of the men. The original male construct of the female’s role on the prairies is therefore necessary in order for women poets to reconstruct the mythologies through the deconstruction of the language used to create the male version. Roland Barthes, in his book “Mythologies” said that myth robs language of something, so why not rob myth' (Barthes 1972) He goes on to explain that myth needs special conditions and one of these conditions is language. A myth can be anything at all and just needs the language to make it so. Language takes the prairies from their closed, silent state and opens it to society. There is no law that forbids the poet to talk or write about the prairies; to create the myth of the western frontier. There is no law that forbids the female poet to create or recreate her myths out of the prairies she sees. Aritha van Herk creates her own myth in the poem “Calgary, This Growing Graveyard.”(a/long prairie lines, Lenoski). On the surface, the poem may look like a commentary on the decay of society and the constant death and rebirth of a prairie city, but underneath, it is a revisionist metanarrative in which van Herk uses all the mythologies (fertility, birth, death) and weaves a story of the present day prairie. In “The Secret Cemetery”, Doris Francis, Leonie Kellaher, and Georgina Neophytou note “Through the creation of the cemetery in the form of a landscape garden, a harmony with nature was sought in death – a return to the lost Garden of Eden.”(6) The Corinthians call it “God’s seed-field” in which the bodies of the departed are sown. In the “growing graveyard” called Calgary, Aritha Van Herk neatly turns the Garden of Eden into a place of death, not desire. In a sense, the immortality, lost in Crozier’s poem “The Seventh Day”, is regained. Biblical references continue as the speaker in the poem further describes the city with its stone and concrete as Jericho. Just like Jericho, though, these city walls are ready to collapse. Through these biblical allusions, van Herk gives Calgary an archetypical status; it appears as a sacred city. However, as with any human project, Calgary is flawed and impermanent. Calgary in its boom and bust phases is constantly being rebuilt. Van Herk builds her poem through the use of quadrants, and, the narrator considers “Calgary as quadrant, the sweep of a long-armed compass quartering the city nw/ne/se/sw, segmented”. She consults maps to locate places in the city and hopes that they will also help her to find herself. . However, Calgary, with all its maps, does not fulfill these hopes. To express her feelings of entrapment, the narrator compares the city to Jericho, the ancient city whose massive walls are brought down by seven trumpet blowing priests and that is taken over by the Israelites. Does Calgary have to be destroyed in a similar fashion for the narrator to be able to free herself' The materialist nature of the twentieth century seems overwhelming in Calgary, its “iconography of money” overpowering. The narrator is left confused, caught in “labyrinths” of buildings, light and stone. In this state of confusion and distress, her desire to belong becomes apparent. The narrator reminds us that we are driving on graveyards as urban sprawl pushes the cemeteries “souther and souther.” (323). Although the poem is speaking of the relocation of graveyards, underneath the language is the idea that one is also driving on the dead Calgarys as well. The constant death and resurrection is biblical in its mythology. The themes of birth, death and renewal that seem to be so common in prairie poetry, are made into something new by the deconstruction of the old prairie language and the ultimate recreation in the form of the modern day city. The deconstruction of the old prairie (male version) is not to be confused with destruction. As stated above, there is no recreation without creation and no deconstruction without structure. It is the structure of the language that allows the deconstruction of mythologies and beliefs. My belief is that the female prairie poets, in their reconstruction of firmly held cultural and gender beliefs, do not destroy the foundation on which these beliefs are built. It is just seen from another vantage point.[1] In a criticism of deconstruction, Simon Critchley said that deconstruction involves openness to the “Other”.[2] Just as poets have the duality of vision/revision, construct/deconstruct; the duality of “Self” and “Other also exists. These identities play a key role in continental philosophy. If one can cast the female poets as the “Other” and "if human experience is a contingent creation”, then it (experience) can be recreated in other ways (Critchley, 2001 p. 64). It is interesting that van Herk claims this sense of alterity gives rise to a distinctly Canadian narrative. (Verduyn 21) I would go one step further to say that since many prairie poets have or had parents who were immigrants (if not immigrants themselves), the only way to redefine themselves was with these narratives of alterity or “otherness”. These female poets find ways to recreate the experiences around them. The words themselves take on a different meaning to the girl who is no longer conforming in order to fit in. It is within this “misreading of words” (Kroetsch, Labyrinths of Voice, 149), that the female poet begins. They are taking the structure of the male dominated prairie and are reinterpreting the spaces, silences and those things left unsaid. In van Herk’s Calgary poem, these unsaid things find their way to the surface: “And stones will work their way to the surface, no matter, how buried and buried again…..”(321) Left buried, they will find their way to impede. Only when the unsaid/buried things are dealt with, can progress occur, crops be planted and ideas flourish and grow. Death is often one of those things left unsaid. It is has been mythologized, anthromorphized, suppressed and denied, but rarely ever embraced or discussed. Van Herk’s work often deals with death, graves and coffins and has stated that we are always dying, every minute of everyday and once you realize that then the concept of death could be freeing. One could live because one is dealing with the unsaid things that rise to the surface no matter how many times the thoughts are pushed into the unconscious ground of the mind. This image is carried through also in the description of the coffins: “From within the grave you can only leave into light, burst through dark soil, arrival the admission of belonging: here/there/ within.”(319) Van Herk thinks of coffins as containers: “ If you actually think about it, we only have the coffin for the people who put the body away. The body does not need the coffin to be contained. We put them inside this thing to say they are really dead and so I guess I have this notion that coffins or genres or books or even lives can be escaped or even transformed.” (van Herk) Dumont’s coffin is that of the negative connotations aboriginal people. Native writers, such as Dumont, are struggling to deconstruct these misrepresentations and find a voice within Canada and within the prairies. Historically, Native peoples have been silenced: politically, economically, and culturally. Writing by Aboriginals represents the struggle to tell the truth. Many Native writers find themselves "writing back" and reconstructing the vision held by others. Misrepresentations, such as the Indian Princess or Easy Squaw, are encoded within dominant, white society. Marilyn Dumont takes these “misappropriated” words in “Squaw Poems” and claims them back for her own. These words seem contextually uncontainable when Dumont writes that a “man is a whiteman until he is a squaw…he is a squawman” (Squaw Poems 1996); a squawman being the worse thing a man could be. Yet, the definition of a squawman is, among other things, one who laughs with a squaw. It is the one word “laugh” that deconstructs the preconceived notion. If, squaws are as bad as Dumont writes; if they are everything she desires not to be; if a squaw is a construct of white Euro society, then how could someone laugh with her' This implies that the squaw is worthy of friendship and laughter. The only way Dumont has of rectifying this is to make something worse a squawman. The squawman represents the whiteman who creates the “halfbreeds” (Mètis). Dumont uses this term to reformulate (reconstruct) the idea that native women were the seducers of white men. Of the prairie poet, Dorothy Livesay, had this to say; “We must take the place, the Locus, and dig down into our own place where we’re born.”  (An Interview with Dorothy Livesay, Beardsley and Sullivan) This was in response to the feeling that the prairie poet was getting lost in the expectations of what other poets wanted. They were, in fact, writing for each other instead of writing for themselves. The writers in this anthology have, indeed, gone back to the beginning. Whether it is to the mythological beginnings or personal beginnings, each writer has traced the roots back to her prairie beginnings as well. Whether she had to recreate, revision, or reconstruct the myths, conceptions and structures, the roots of the prairie poet were strong enough to allow her to do so. The landscape of the Canadian prairies allows the minds of the female poets to become a” little open space/ Free for all varying winds to stop and rest.” (Livesay, Collected Poems, 43). With her roots strong and her mind open to all the ideas that blow across the prairies, the female poet, who has desired the land, will want for nothing at all. Works Cited Allen, Elizabeth. "Transplant." 1980. Draft: an Anthology of Prairie Poetry. Ed. Dennis Cooley. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1981. 7. Print. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Print. Beardsley, Doug, and Rosemary Sullivan. "An Interview With Dorothy Livesay." Canadian Poetry. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2010. Billings, Robert, and Mouré Erin. "Erin Mouré with Robert Billings (interview)." Waves 14.No 4 (1986): 36-44. Print. Boyd, Shelley. "A Grave Garden: Aritha Van Herk's "Calgary"" The Brock Review 10 (2008): 21-40. Web. 20 Mar. 2010.