Flunked

Using the Finkbeiner Test—created to suss out gender bias in profiles of female scientists—Melissa Dalgleish discovers that Canadian poets don't fare any better:

The title of Sandra Martin's piece was the first red flag: "The nurturing nature of Jay Macpherson." No mention of her brilliant poetic mind, her many awards, or Martin's own newspaper's statement, back in 1957, that Macpherson was Canada's "finest young poet." Indeed, no mention of the fact that Macpherson was a poet at all. Despite Macpherson's choice to remain unmarried and childless, Martin still manages to construct an image of her as maternal which trumps her professional identity, suggesting that her poetic output was small because "she was a ministering angel to waifs and strays, often to the detriment of her own work and health."

True Cosmopolitan

James Pollock, who recently edited The Essential Daryl Hines, describes the moment when his enthusiasm for Hines' poetry began to take hold:

Once I had tracked down all his books of poems, and read them all from cover to cover, I realized I had found the strongest Canadian poet of his generation, and one of the strongest Canadian poets of the twentieth century. Having just read, and been thoroughly persuaded by, Timothy Steele’s argument for the power of metrical verse in contemporary poetry—in his 1990 book Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter—I was excited to find a compatriot who was so much more sophisticated and skilled in his prosody than any other Canadian poet I knew, even Jay Macpherson. And his knowledge of and engagement with such a wide range of poetic traditions—ancient Greek and Latin, Spanish baroque, Elizabethan, French, American—revealed him as a true cosmopolitan, a perfect antidote to the literary provincialism I’d winced at in so much Canadian poetry.

Acts of Recuperation

For Melissa Dalgleish, the fight to keep alive the reputations of Canada's key female modernist poets (like Dorothy Livesay, above) is one of the essential battles of our literature:

Livesay died in 1996. [Anne] Wilkinson died long before, in 1961. Jay Macpherson, a contemporary of both and the subject of my doctoral research, died in 2012. All three were among the foremost writers of their generations, but for all three (and for most of the female poets of Canadian modernism, with the possible exception of P.K. Page) reading the body of criticism about their work reveals something strange and important. Like [Joan] Coldwell, very many critics view their critical work on these women and their writing as an act of recuperation. The fundamental impulse behind much of it is not to reveal something noteworthy about style, or relationship to historical context, or use of language, or community formation in the modernist period, although that happens along the way and often as justification for recuperation. The core message—implicit or explicit—is that the work of these women is on the verge of disappearing from the world, from our critical consciousness, and has been on that verge for a very long time. This criticism, written by those like Kaarina [Mikalson] and I who care deeply about this work and advocate strongly for its importance, fights to keep the work of these writers from disappearing from the world, from our understanding of what it was like to to be a woman writer in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, from the matrilineage of writing by and about women that forms a chain that leads right to the present.

Daryl Hine 1936-2012

Here is the email I received from Evan Jones last night.

Daryl Hine passed away yesterday [April 20] in Evanston around 9:30pm. His health wasn't great, but he was stable. We spoke two weeks ago. He was at work on his own version of the Argonautica—from the ship's point of view. He had just bought a new MacBook. Daryl, Jay Macpherson and Virgil Burnett in one year. That's the end of something.

Some excellent essays on Hines' work and career are available online. Here's one by Eric Ormsby, and another by Bill Coyle. Arc serves up only a morsel of James Pollock's piece (but you can dine on the whole thing in Pollock's upcoming collection of essays, out in November).