Culture Wars In The Colony. British Columbia And The Invaders - 'Making Waves'.

Culture Wars in the Colony.  British Columbia and the Invaders -  ‘Making Waves’.

 Making Waves (UFV Press/Anvil Press, 2010)  is – in one important strain of its thematics – a colonial undertaking by willing colonials declaring in warm and co-operative language their perfect happiness as colonials. 

The book presents a series of essays – some highly interesting – that attempts to show something about the shaping and development of literary culture (especially it’s poetic expression and the views of practitioners of poetry) in British Columbia and what might be called the Pacific Northwest since about the late 1950s.

Editor Trevor Carolan embraces the colonial.  He wants us to know that some B.C. people – some – delighted in contacts with, and/or the embrace of, U.S. culture-bearers existing above, below – and, alas, even in British Columbia.  He, himself, does not call the U.S culture-bearers – in any way – into question.

For those readers wanting to inhabit some of the literary spaces created in the last fifty years, the book will be an interesting and rewarding experience.  The placing of what I choose to call “mere propaganda articles”, however, presents what may strongly be argued is a false subtext to everything that appears in the book.

That subtext may be called “the war to erase Canadian traditions, and the attack on Earle Birney”.

[Apart from knowing Birney’s work, I attended courses he gave at UBC.  I heard him read often in those years.  I bought – with a friend – a copy of Trial of a City or The Damnation of Vancouver when it was published and we had him autograph our copies. I was examined by him (and others) for the Honours English degree.  And over later years I ran into him, usually on his reading tours.]

He didn’t like me much, and I didn’t like him much.  But I had no doubt about his excellence as a poet.

The false subtext of the book Making Waves is that, somehow, a stodgy and decaying poetic tradition in Canada was destroying the possibility of poetic work in British Columbia.

Fortunately, U.S rescuers (the invaders) arrived:  Warren and Ellen Tallman, Jerry Zaslov, Stan Persky, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, George Stanley, J. Michael Yates, Doug Fetherling, Jane Rule, Helen Zontoff, Abe Ragatnick, Alvin Balkind, 50% of the members of SFU Department of English, and a large number of the members of UBC English Department … and more.

They came, pulling behind them allies – for influential visits – the Black Mountain and San Francisco poets brandishing their works like flame throwers.

Around them in various postures of adoration gathered the young colonials who propagandized against Canadian poetic traditions - young Canadian poets and pamphleteers recruited into the imperial program. [Such is the case … and such has been the case since Empires began.]  The Tish Group and their many supporters and adherents and fellow travellers made up that army: George Bowering, Jamie Reid, Frank Davey, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Robert Hogg, and many … many … many others.

Those allied forces formed an Exclusive Group, a political wedge, an articulate anti-Canadian force.  Writers in Making Waves point out how, in 1963, at the UBC Poetry Conference organized by the Exclusive Group, the only Canadian poet headlined was Margaret Avison of Toronto.  No accident.

In Joseph Blake’s interview with P.K. Page, “That’s the Way It Began” (pp. 67-77), Ms. Page confirms the extraordinary opacity of the foreign hegemony in B.C.  A major writer, she reports being almost completely excluded when she went to live on Vancouver Island with her husband Arthur Irwin in the early 1960s.

She reports that she fought with immigrant editor Robin Skelton (who with John Peters founded the Malahat Review).  She fought with him because the Review didn’t publish any Canadians. 

I suggest P.K. Page wasn’t ‘kept out’ by accident. Not only was she a major poet (and painter); but her husband, Arthur Irwin, was a trail-blazing editor who – in his time as editor of Maclean’s Magazine – consciously raised it to be a major, Canadian-centred, national publication. To welcome them would have been to contradict the whole argument by ‘the invaders’ in B.C. that it belonged to no tradition of excellence and vitality.

Robin Skelton was an English immigrant – which introduces a slight anomaly to my argument … easily managed.  In the work many of us did beginning in 1968, which arose out of distinct discrimination against qualified Canadians for employment in universities, colleges, and other cultural institutions, a tendency became clear. (The work was conducted to have Canadians fairly hired and to introduce reasonable Canadian curriculum across the spectrum of studies.)

The strongest opposition to Canadian curriculum (in my experience travelling across the country) was often made by recent U.S. immigrants.  On the matter of hiring – opposition to the hiring of qualified Canadians came from immigrants from many lands.  The largest source of hirings was the U.S. and then Britain, and the resistance of immigrants from their countries was the greatest.  They didn’t want a pleasant system ended that allowed them to hire from their own countries instead of from Canada…to hire, they believed, the superior people.

Overall, Canadian university administrators joined, often, in resisting both the hiring of Canadians and the building of respectable Canadian offerings in the curriculum.  The people who forced changes to the colonial structures were the Canadian students and members of the larger Canadian population. 

British immigrant –  Robin Skelton – was content to publish a British Columbia review (supported by a Canadian institution) that carried no Canadians.

By the same token, when in the 1970’s a Learned Society was created to focus academic attention on the literatures of Canada – called the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (with a parallel name in French), George Woodcock – who often spoke or wrote of himself as an English immigrant - was editor of the quarterly journal out of UBC called Canadian Literature.  W.H. New was its Associate Editor.

For the first time an academic organization was constructed to focus on the literatures produced in Canada.  A victory.

Canadian Literature did not report the founding of the new organization – though W.H. New was present at its beginnings, did not ever refer to it in the publication, and did nothing to assist in its survival and growth.  The leading journal dealing with Canadian literature – published out of Vancouver – ‘shut out’ The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures.  That organization was created to acknowledge the deep and long history of the creation of prose and poetry in Canada – and ‘the invaders’ in British Columbia worked from a presumption that no such history exists.

Dorothy Livesay tried to be-friend the invading hordes, and even told a fellow poet that she had learned from them.  But in her later  years when she went to live for a time on Galiano Island, she told me that she was ‘shut out’ by the U.S. expatriates there.  Clearly another national icon, like P.K. Page, Dorothy Livesay fought for Canadian culture and Canadian literature, on a tour, as early as the 1920s. She embodied the Canadian tradition over at least 50 years of writing.

At a point in the 1960s I was handling literary guests at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.  Helen Zontoff was handling them for UBC.  I wrote to Helen (who I knew casually) a long, careful letter in which I suggested that I take a few of the poets she was bringing from the U.S. each year and she take a few of the Canadian writers I was bringing from East of B.C.  That would allow variety … and save both budgets money.

Ms. Zontoff didn’t bother to answer my letter.  A little later, poet Phyllis Webb came as a guest to read at the U. of A.  I told her I was surprised not to hear back from Helen Zontoff.  Phyllis Webb spoke firmly that Helen Zontoff wouldn’t want on UBC campus any of the Canadians I would bring to the U. of A. Ms. Webb may have been misreporting Helen Zontoff … from whom I never received any answer…ever.

I can underscore the reality of my claim that the vital Canadian tradition was actively repressed by the U.S. invaders and their (mostly) young Canadian supporters.  In 1986-87 I planned to undertake a year’s exchange with a Canadian SFU English Department member who wanted to teach for a year at Carleton University in Ottawa.  The matter became a public sensation.

Led by Jerry Zaslov, U.S. head of the English Department at SFU, the invaders fought to keep me out.  Zaslov’s letter to me reported that many in his Department objected to my views on literary and cultural nationalism and did not want to provide a place in British Columbia for me to utter them.  [The colony was in U.S. hands; it wanted no resistance from … anyone.]

A part of the tenacity and intensity of the invaders and their (mostly) young Canadian supporters was that they were fighting – in many ways – a false literary war.  In fact, what the invaders said about poetry, poets have been saying … forever.  The poem speaks through the poet.  The poet is a member of a timeless family.  All poetry is contemporary poetry.  The poet learns from his/her teachers anywhere in time and space.  And so on….

The invaders added – as poetic groups often do – a few technical ideas.  In this case the invaders wrote about breathing, the value of seriality, line length – matters of technique.

What was important in their ‘message’ was its dynamic, imperialistic ideology.

Canada didn’t exist.  Canada is not a cultural community (despite national poets like P.K. Page, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, Milton Acorn, Al Purdy, etc. etc.)  British Columbia didn’t exist (in the mind) until the arrival of the invaders.  It was “no place”.  It couldn’t speak until it learned language from the invaders. George Bowering wrote in an essay in his book Craft Slices that the invaders helped the Tish poets buy a mimeograph machine and a few other things … so poetry could get started ….

Stan Persky and Robin Skelton preached ‘the Pacific Nation’ – from Alaska to California.  Notice: they erased British Columbia, Canada – and they replaced it with a huge amorphous territory in which U.S. values and beliefs would predominate.  We call that imperialism.

It may not be coincidental that in his essay on the UBC Creative Writing Department, George McWhirter (pp. 161-173) records something unusual.  Without intending to do so – as I read him – he makes clear the provenance of its teachers.  With the exception of Robert Harlow, head, not one of the five other major teachers in the Department (till the end of the 1960s) had grown to adulthood in Canada. 

The invaders and their supporters worked hard to minimize anything about the existence of a Canadian community, preaching the smallest communities as relevant.  Those dessicated, fragmented, separated “communities”, of course, would look for leadership – and the U.S. invaders would happily supply it.  Even the (often admirable) concentration on native literature in British Columbia may be seen to have had a covert intention. What was important to many of its proponents was that it denied the present British Columbia and supported “the Pacific Nation” concept (dominated by U.S. presence and power).

At the famous (?) 1963 UBC Poetry Conference no British Columbia poets were headlined. But, even so, what could the organizers do about Early Birney, probably a better poet than any poet included in the much talked about New American Poetry anthology of 1960 – which included Robin Blaser, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, and Jack Spicer, among others?

Earle Birney had, somehow, to be destroyed, erased. He was a living, breathing, working poet in British Columbia who embodied a lively and interesting Canadian tradition. The vestiges of the program to destroy Earle Birney are present in Making Waves.  In Michael Barnholdern’s essay, “The Production of Meaning…” (pp. 103-117), he writes, “according to Earle Birney, poetry in Vancouver in the 1950s was pretty much a one-man show and he was it”.

Trevor Carolan, in “Ecosystems, Mandalas – and Watersheds: The Dharma Citizenship of Gary Snyder”, (pp. 231-255) repeats the mantras of the 1960s: 

“It was precisely this Pacific Northwest referencing of the local, the naming of the particular, that offered a generation of B.C. writers with interests beyond Earle Birney and the poetic traditions of Montreal and Toronto authorization to write in this mode.” (p. 239)

Birney wrote Trial of a City or The Damnation of Vancouver, “David”, and many, many, many other poems of the local, the precisely ‘here’, the naming of the particular (before the arrival of the invaders).  Indeed, in the family of poets, he grew through Old English poetry, through the Chaucerians, through Newfoundland poet E.J. Pratt, was kin to the Confederation Poets and those after, and he lived into British Columbia where he made the B.C. location completely his own, and present in his work.  Completely contemporary. Completely here.

So incontrovertible were those facts that he had to be destroyed, removed, erased, expunged.  Or how could the invaders and their (mostly) young Canadian supporters claim they were here to teach place, the local, the particular … were here to start a tradition recognizing the centrality of this place and its being as “community” - since one didn’t already exist?

P.K.Page was dealt with.  Shut out.  Dorothy Livesay was brushed aside, as were Anne Marriott, Maria Fiamengo Hardman, and any others of substance who were ‘native’. Birney was harder to avoid. 

The destroying knife was wielded by Frank Davey who wrote such a vicious, unfair, and destructive book about Earle Birney that I was amazed!  I was no friend of Birney, but I wrote to him to ask how the book could have come into being.  Earle Birney wrote me he had recorded that whole story and lodged it in the University of Toronto library with the rest of his collection.

Birney told me that Frank Davey had posed as a friend, had visited him, had taped and taped and taped for hours and hours.  Then,  Birney alleged, Davey took every self-deprecating remark Birney had recorded, every negative statement – however irrelevant, and had put them together to make his book.  Earle Birney clearly felt that he had been used … and massively mis-used.

Readers must decide for themselves by reading the book. 

Maybe Trevor Carolan can make a new book – a sequel to Making Waves.  And maybe he can sponsor an article on the Davey/Birney relation.  The title of the article might be:  “Doing the Work of the U.S. Empire – Frank Davey Writes About Earle Birney”.