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Last Updated: Jun 23rd, 2009 - 21:47:11 |
Poems
Poems of Louis Dudek
Louis Dudek personally selected and arranged these poems for this project shortly before he died in 2001.
Jun 24, 2009, 12:01
Essay
The Role of Little Magazines in Canada
The little magazine is a recognizable and peculiar phenomenon associated with the growth of the modern poetry movement in this century. In Canada, this type of magazine can be said to have appeared only after 1940, although a number of forerunners having some claim to be ranked as little magazines appeared earlier. It is with the period after 1940 that the kind of literary activity and movement‑poetry that had arisen in England just before World War I and in America during the 1920s began to flourish in Canada.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:31
Essay
Academic Literature
This arty literature—or, if you like, true culture—is finding the going hard, under the economic pressure of modern life. The artist therefore running into the modern cloister, uncloistered as it is, the university, where he can find partial shelter. But neither blue-blood artist nor the cloistered type of university seems to be destined to survive for long; in a last desperate effort, they are clinging together for comfort.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Review
The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English
Unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, Atwood cannot really follow in Smith’s footsteps. She is not a modernist, and she is not an aesthetic critic. In defining the modern shift in poetry represented by Smith and Scott, she describes it somewhat pejoratively as “noun‑and‑adjective description, formal elegance and verbal felicity” and so forth, while she adds that an entirely different strain interests her more deeply:
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Article
Appreciation of Louis Dudek
In addition to being one of Canada’s major poets and literary critics, Louis Dudek, who died Thursday, [March 22, 2001] was that rare thing in Canadian life: a public intellectual.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Lecture
The Ego in History
The Egyptians in their mythology had a visual organ, an Eye, moving about the universe: so that the Eye of God, however you spell it, comes before the “I” of man. In fact, it is some time before the individual poet and artist learns to say “I”.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Commentary
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Editorial
Editorial 101
By having a lively scene, we are more likely to get some great ones (poems and poets) rising to the top. After all, much compost is needed to grow a single flower. Also, in a multicultural society (which Quebec is, whether the pure laines of language and culture want to admit it or not) variety can only add to the health and vitality of the organism. Inbreeding only results in anemic and incestuous pale imitations of the real thing.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Article
Functional Poetry
Tell em to open their mouths, you want to see their back teeth, their tonsils. Tell em to say AHHHH. Most Canadian poetry is written with the mouth closed. Ask them to write again when they think they’ve said something straight from the shoulder, no monkey business. Goddamm decoration. All icing and no cake. All cake and no meat. We want something to chew into in a poem, not just words.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Essay
What Do You Have Against Myth?
In the beginning, children, youths and women died on the altar. According to Arnold Toynbee, “child sacrifice was a custom that several kings of Israel and Judah practiced in common with other peoples in Canaan.”[1] You can read in Leviticus 18:21: “You shall not surrender any of your children to Molech….”
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Essay
The Idea of Art
We’ve all heard of “the death of God,” as announced by Nietzsche—the death of the idea of God. What I want to consider here is the prospect of “the death of art,” the death of the idea of art which is being proclaimed today.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Article
Louis Dudek: Critical Overview and Context
There have been only three major articles published—all in Canadian Literature. Even the reviews are slim. His early books received the same two or three notices one would expect for a new poet, but his later works have seldom done much better.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Article
The Sculpture of Poetry
Now that the feuds have died down it would no longer be appropriate for A. J. M. Smith to cry: “Layton shall tingle in Canadian air / And echo answer Dudek everywhere.” Omitting those polemics and parodies, salutary as they have been in stirring up the potage canadien…
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Article
The First Person in Literature
After I completed my B.A. in literature at Sir George Williams University, I went to McGill to do my M.A. I chose McGill because I wanted to study with Louis Dudek. I remember that first day, finding Dudek's office. It was a large spacious room with a window facing Sherbrooke Street…
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Biography
Autobiography: Louis Dudek 1918-2001
My mother died, at the mere age of thirty-one, when I was eight years old. My third vivid memory has to do with the time of her death. I am standing in the corridor of my grandmother’s house, before the closed door at the end of it, when an overwhelming realization comes over me that I will never again see my mother. Upon this thought I dissolve in tears. And then, on a sudden I realize, with a kind of thrill, that I am now completely and inescapably free I block out this thought, but I cannot deny it had passed my mind. In fact I remember it now.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Essay
Patterns of Recent Canadian Poetry
In a recent count of book‑publishing poets writing in Canada in English I was able to put down no less than fifty names. In making up this list, simply in the act of writing down names in their geographical, chronological, or various literary orders, a series of patterns seemed to emerge, a map of the current literary scene. Looking at these patterns and groups, one could easily see relations between them; our poetry is more self‑contained and unified at present than either English or American poetry can be…
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
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