Archive for the ‘Louis Dudek’ Tag
A nod to Louis Dudek
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Canadian poetry, Louis Dudek, St Jax Cathedral
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One striking difference between, say, France or Germany and Canada is how the respective countries honour their cultural traditions. I remember seeing in Tübingen a plaque on a bookstore commemorating the one night Goethe slept upstairs, and, on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, the house where André Bréton resided during World War Two is indicated by a memorial from the French government, while the struggle to preserve poet Al Purdy’s A-frame is still fresh in my memory. Happily, we do have a counterexample to such willed amnesia, the Writers’ Chapel in Saint Jax Cathedral in Montreal, that features plaques for such canonical figures as F. R. Scott and Mavis Gallant and where, this evening, poet, critic, and scholar Louis Dudek will be honoured with a plaque of his own.
Bruce Whiteman provides a gracious portrait of Dudek on the occasion of Dudek’s death in 2001. I, too, had a chance to hear him read one snowy, weekend afternoon, and he was gracious enough to seek me out for a meeting when I published a polemical article on the reigning poetic aesthetics in Canadian anglophone poetry the year of his death. As it’s unlikely I’ll be able to attend the ceremony in his honour as I hoped and planned, at least I can post this notice here, now, and direct interested readers to a poem of mine that engages Dudek’s late poetry, “Reading Dudek’s The Caged Tiger“.
In Good Company
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Ezra Pound, Jerome Rothenberg, Louis Dudek, poems, poetry, Romanticism
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Jerome Rothenberg posted today some poems from his “Pound Project”, a set of sixteen-line poems that riff off lines of Pound’s. Rothenberg writes Pound is “a strong poetry influence for many of us ([him]self [& myself] included)”. And the poetic at work in his series echoes that at work in a sequence of poems I wrote in response to (Ezraversity graduate) Louis Dudek’s penultimate book of poems.
Rothenberg has been an important influence and/or poeticultural coworker for me, too: his Technicians of the Sacred strongly orients my own understanding of what poetry has and can be, and his Poems for the Millenium assemblages, especially Volume III, Romantic and Postromantic poetry, resonate with my own present concerns. It’s good to be in such spiritual, poetic company, however physically distant.
For the Record: “Reading Dudek’s The Caged Tiger”
Filed under: poems | Tags: innovative poetry, intertextuality, Louis Dudek, poetic form, poetry
Comments (2) One of the ironic aspects of the digitization of cultural artefacts and the blissfully ignorant acceptance if not celebration of this process is, apart from those documents excluded from the process in the first place, the inevitable decay of links and websites and the consequent disappearance of the works they hosted. Such was the case with the poem below.
When Louis Dudek’s penultimate volume of poetry The Caged Tiger was published, I read 
it with some irritation and sought a way to express it other than in a review. The compositional answer was to write poems that intervened in the original, engaging in a kind of dialogue; the relation of the new poem to the original is underlined in [28], below. The words in bold are Dudek’s; the numbers in [] are the page numbers of his original book.
The novelty or singularity of this formal maneuver to contemporaneous and subsequent compositional practice I leave to the determination of the learning of the reader; the poem was written the year of the publication of Dudek’s volume, 1997.
Reading Dudek’s The Caged Tiger
[10]
The transcendental then is merely the unknown
—No: how what’s known is—
inside out: no silhouette
no eidos no idea:
The transcendental’s how you know
you’re facing the mirror
…
Aside from yourself
the world
things
How it all happened
to come
together
‘s beyond you
…
Neither this nor any mystery’s gnawed
The mystic’s “the tight-lipped”
Tongue’s quiver locked up
[3]
Art is a dead god’s tongue
whose words
we still like the sound of
“the music of the spheres”
night’s white noise
the whole spectrum
of electromagnetic radiation
visible and audible
only to the radio-telescopes’
timpani tipped to listen
idle humming
“I-am-I”’s sound poem
[8]
Time’s transcendental
A watch
[15]
As one of those
in downy feathers
mouth open
happened on
spring mornings
[39]
in the cage too tight to lie in
a small pot nobody empties
wire mesh hardly a reach up
nights icy rain
days the sun throbs
the face in the cool mud
[28]
The bass beat faster than a raver’s heart at daybreak
shudders the whole body in the spot and strobelit dark
College boys and girls in their personal fashion statements
each writhe alone in cigarette smoke fog and pheremones
[99]
The old are removed
to their graves
and the young come up
to fill their places
i.e., as a “[f]ine bod”y
closed in a dipping casket
Old Heracleitus
renewed every sun
Poeta Doctus 