Powerful Polarities

After editing a new selection of Anne Wilkinson's poetry, Ingrid Ruthig reflects on the hurdles—both societal and psychological—the mid-century poet had to overcome in order to pursue a literary career:

The powerful polarities affecting her life are not only evident in her poems, but also in her private journal writings. In these she could be extremely critical, and entries often reveal her frustrations: ‘Started work on several poems simultaneously about two weeks ago. The pattern is irritatingly familiar. The first heaven flowing rush—this is it! A week later the desolation of knowing that this not only is not ‘‘it," but is atrocious, has no relation, except for the odd line, to poetry. Then the slow laborious reworking.’ She also notes , ‘Have a sudden sense of impatience with the great bulk of contemporary writing of the so-called ‘‘serious’’ type. It (the moderns) is already academic and o so solemn. Those who attempt the simple are thin to the vanishing point. But the greater number, in poetry, are obscure, tortuous and torturing. They give the impression of poets flaying themselves into feeling; paraplegic poets cutting off their legs and begging the pain to come. I’m sick of all these harrowed little fellows dropping their guts on paper!’ Self-deprecating, she adds, ‘I’ve been a prime offender but fortunately am little read,’ then goes on to log recent news of her children and social visits with family and friends. Later she writes, ‘Continual contact with people exhausts my energies and leaves no power or patience for anything else.’

As a female poet publishing in the 1940s and 1950s, Wilkinson's frustration went deep:

It is clear that her preoccupations and the tensions they imposed took a toll on her psyche. She doubted, second-guessed, demanded and criticized while fully acknowledging the double-edged sword of her ‘desire to publish and the sense of horror at s elf exposure.’ She grappled with her sense of isolation and of failure as a writer, as well as wife and mother. As she strove to interrelate the bonds of family and home with those of the universal, of memory, life, death and Nature, she often despaired . The realities of womanhood could not easily be reconciled with the demands of the poetic self.

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.

What Falls Between the Cracks

Using our own reissue as a starting point, Evan Jones tries to get to the bottom of why Anne Wilkinson's wonderful poems keep getting overlooked:

She had chops and finesse, style, substance and a verse that was steadily and uniquely her own. She fit into her age and responded to it with verve. But sometime after she had departed, her tradition turned just enough in her native country that what she was doing was deemed unattractive. That’s a shame, as what falls between the cracks in these kinds of poetical shifts is often worth as much if not more than what comes to the surface.

Get a PDF of Jones' essay here.