Post-Puddicombe

I think some post-Puddicombe reflections are in order now that a particularly gifted set of poets, surrounded by escarpment, orchards and a rebuilt 1915 CN passenger car, have participated in the first ever poetry reading at this stately farm and winery in Winona, Ontario. I offered my Puddicombe poetry event as a tribute to a uniquely Canadian rural poetics from which (as I believe) all Canadian poetry comes.

Reading my tribute to "Eaarth"

Poets nicely transferred their own contemporary sensibilities & verse rhythms to my ad Naturam canadensis call, as I knew they would. In fact, it's what I was eagerly waiting for. The rural itself was never interpreted in just some traditional Wordsworthian sense as ode to fields, rivers & contented rustics, a view that's both silly and caricatural. Our very earliest pioneer writers, like Susanna Moodie, instinctively knew that. Everyone gave a poetry that was attuned to a real person and a uniquely celebratory vision of life in Canada. How wonderfully diverse Nature turned out to be in their verses!

Poetry of an anguished human species shared spaces gracefully with animal friendship & grief, Sufi and "interstellar" prayers. A season was associated with cosmic rather than calendar time, & anything from my own "Eaarth" piece, which tries to delight the environmentalist heart, to hymns to neighbourhoods or Egyptian crypts, which bemoan the dark transitoriness of life itself (and even frustrated friendships in a Calgary winter!) created both physical grounds and the spirit of poetry fellowship. Poets & poetries homaged not just a suggested theme but a vital nexus that tied tradition to a postmodernist present.

Andreas Gripp

Ever since I announced that a distinctively rural poetics was to be the Puddicombe theme, I knew the attitude towards it would most likely be creative instead of restrictive. And as creators we've already become used to that: we adopt an idea and it begins immediately to morph into marvelous windings & variations. And it certainly did. Our experience of the Word does affect, and indeed creates the very conditions of, the World, and poets tend to see their work as a journal of hopes, frustrations & imaginative rebirths bound by the strictures of their craft. Haiku, free verse, rhymes & at times the most exquisitely cadenced sequence of imagery became the language of those marvelous variations on a prescribed theme.

Jeff Seffinga

Again, writing on a single theme was taken as a call to respectfully differ, and they did. Poets didn't intentionally favour one type of poem over any other. It was a case of playful teasing perhaps and an opportunity for the master-poets there (distinguished founders of People's Poetry movements and literary journals, Guernica publishers & activists) to show how the sublime appears as much in a dying cat as austere woodlands. I think I'd have had a similar effect if I'd given poets an absolutely free rein but it'd be foolish to have expected nearly the same playfulness & adaptations of subject matter to form. It was wonderful to see this cutting of the reins.

James Deahl

 To be part of an assembly of poetic voices, each uniquely expressive as the poem itself, & still preserve a sense of tradition didn't seem too unrealistic a goal, after all. Insights into human time, love, aging parents & various tributes to literary influences (sometimes en bilingue) couldn't have been more beautifully conceived & delivered, as if they were submissions for a future anthology of verse. None of the offerings sounded unfamiliar to us and yet not a single line of verse could have been exactly duplicated: authors and work were so marvelously integrated.

Puddicombe was a celebration of language, history and a distinctively landscape poetics that seemed to bridge physical distances (some poets having had to travel hundreds of miles to get there) & the alienation they can cause, an acknowledgement, if ever there was one, of nearness rather than otherness. Yes, nearness & not the more fashionable (mostly academic) ideals of a work's ambiguity & polysemy. And so perhaps the reading may be a protest against the postmodernist monopoly in the areas of writing & criticism. Or a return to a more interestingly integrative Modernist era, such as we find in the writings of P.K. Page, Layton, Purdy, et al., sadly superseded by the new (Tish-inspired) experimental poetries.

Karen Shenfeld

Ah, but if we keep following this, we'll lose sight of what the Puddicombe reading was for. It wasn't a manifesto but poetry community building inspired by place & tradition: perhaps the place of tradition itself. But whatever inspires must arrive through its own uniquely diverse channels: or else the thing's a sham.Thirteen poets understood this very well, knowing everything already about both the physicality & symbolism of the event—even if I'd said nothing at all—, eager, above all, to free the spirit from whatever threatens to take the poet from his/her rightful place among lovers, Manitoulin life and the stars. Actually, I'm rather glad they hadn't taken up the idea of a rural poetics too seriously: if it'd meant only the content of a prescribed speech it would have become a cold abstraction, and not the richness of a living contemporary experience it did actually turn into.