The Canadian Canon

I've been thinking a bit about the Canadian poetry canon lately, given that I have been trying to read quite widely and cover a number of "important" poets I've skipped over before.  Like Canadian literature in general, the early figures leaned heavily on British poets (though writing as if they had been dropped into a kind of unpeopled wilderness) and then much of the 20th Century poetry is more directly inspired by American poets: the Beats, the Black Mountain poets (esp. Robert Creeley), "nature" poets (esp. Gary Snyder), the Objectivists (Charles Olson and Charles Reznikoff), the New York school and William Carlos Williams.

One reasonably good starting point are the lists of poets from Gary Geddes's various anthologies, though I do wonder if 15 Canadian Poets x 2 is more truly canonical than the 4th edition, which I believe includes a full 45 poets, many of whom I have never heard of, even in passing.

• E.J. Pratt 
• F.R. Scott
• Earle Birney
• Ralph Gustafson
• A.M. Klein
• Dorothy Livesay
• Irving Layton
• P.K. Page
• Miriam Waddington
• Margaret Avison
• Al Purdy
• Raymond Souster
• Eli Mandel
• Anne Szumigalski
• Robert Kroetsch
• Phyllis Webb
• D.G. Jones
• Alden Nowlan
• Leonard Cohen
• George Bowering
• Pat Lowther
• John Newlove
• Margaret Atwood
• Patrick Lane
• Gwendolyn MacEwen
• Michael Ondaatje
• Bronwen Wallace
• Robert Bringhurst
• Robyn Sarah

There are a few here that are completely new to me, but generally I've read at least a few poems by these figures.  I would agree with adding a handful from the 4th edition, including bp Nichol, Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Don McCay and Fred Wah.  

Before my recent dive back into Canadian poetry, I would say I was most drawn to Atwood, Bowering, Kroetsch and Ondaatje.  I had read a fair bit of Birney, Purdy and Webb's work, with Purdy being the most interesting to me of the three.

I have a long way to go in exploring these other poets, but I will say that Irving Layton's poetics don't interest me that much, and it's not that surprising that I am not warming up to his work.  I'm also not that interested in explicitly religious/spiritual poetry, which covers an awful lot of Avison's work and Szumigalski's oeuvre from what I've skimmed.

I've read quite a lot of Souster's work over the past month and will review at least some of it.  He strikes me as the Canadian version of Charles Reznikoff, which is generally a good thing but he didn't have an off-switch.  A really good selected volume would do a lot more for his reputation than the 10 volume set of his Collected Poems, which still leaves out a few of his final books!

One fairly interesting discovery to me was Ralph Gustafson.  I'll be reviewing at least one or two of his collections and perhaps a few more in the next challenge, assuming I do sign up again.

Now there are any number of established poets that could be added, such as W.H. New, George Stanley, Barry Dempster, Jan Zwicky, Sue Sinclair, Elise Partridge, George Elliott Clarke, bill bissett, Robin Blaser, David McFadden, Barry McKinnon, Michael Dennis, etc., and many of these are more directly central to my interests than the poets in this so-called canon, but I don't want to expand this list indefinitely.  The only poets that I feel are clearly missing are Dennis Lee and Louis Dudek, and if I add them that rounds it out to 36 poets, which seems like a good number, at least as a starting point.  I could see myself paring down the list, removing poets that seem to have sunk out of the public's eye.  Given my current preoccupations, I probably will see if I can identify a poem about travel from each of the poets on the list, but I can see this might take a while.