Genuine Primitive

Jeffery Donaldson admits his early ambivalence about John Thompson's poetry:

I’ve been slow, lazy even, in coming to Thompson’s work. I felt I understood his place in the big picture. He was gathering up the energies of the Poundian Imagist and Vorticist movements from the teens and twenties, shaping a hybrid sixties expression of them in familiar nature poems that were complicated by cryptic psychological interventions. The quintessential Canadian themes were there: bone, wood, axe, hammer, chopping, digging, the underground root, the buried specimen. It is the work of a genuine primitive looking to build simple sustaining structures out of the materials of nature. I felt I understood the experiment: the poems were an exploration of the spare style (“laconic, controlled, percussive,” is Sanger’s excellent formula) leaning in the direction of the private, enigmatic, and recondite. I was stuck between feeling that his poems were either too hard or too easy, that I didn’t have the patience for either, and didn’t in any case know how to decide.

He seems to have come around—a little:

It may be that Thompson left us the best key to his poems in the title of his first book, At the Edge of the Chopping There are No Secrets. Thompson tried to work at the edge of the chopping, to find a way of getting words to say something that they weren’t already going to say. To chop away at their own underbrush, make new clearings. Poems that cut and split and pile: breakings-off, severances; out of it, a whole assembling. What is rightness but that feeling of astonishment when the axe falls keenly, just so?

(Photograph by Thaddeus Holownia of the Jolicure woods, site of John Thompson's former home)

Alcoholic Logic

Michael Lista argues that John Thompson's breakthrough collection Stilt Jack gives us the "sound of a mind in its cups."

Published posthumously, Stilt Jack is a collection of 38 ghazals, a poem for every year of Thompson’s life. He includes a brief primer on the form as an introduction, where he explains the ghazal’s origin in ninth century Persia, and its formal conventions. The ghazal, he writes, “proceeds by couplets which (and here, perhaps, is the great interest in the form for Western writers) have no necessary logical, progressive, narrative, thematic (or whatever) connection.” That’s not quite right though, as the poems in Stilt Jack do have a kind of logic—alcoholic logic. Thompson ends his introduction by writing: “The ghazal has been called ‘drunken and amatory’ and I think it is.” Thompson’s interest in drinking, in other words, wasn’t strictly recreational. In 1962 he published a translation of Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat.” In 1966, he edited and helped translate a book on Paul Claudel and his “l’ivresse poetique,” which Thompson himself rendered as “poetic drunkenness.” And in Stilt Jack, he managed, more than any poet since Baudelaire, to distill the feeling—and the meaning—of being intoxicated.

Circling a Big Idea

Josh Prescott describes his first encounter with John Thompson's poetry:

As an undergrad in Sackville, a professor of mine, unabashedly eager to evangelize about the greatness of Canadian poetry, was outwardly offended by my confession that I’d not read Thompson, at which point I was casually told that something monumental was missing from my literary tool belt. Thompson was a giant, I was told, and not to be overlooked.

And so I did read Thompson. But I did not encounter the giant as I was expecting. Instead I found a writer whose interest in language, whose precise use of subtlety and nuance, was at the forefront of each line. To me Thompson’s work seemed small and somewhat broken, circling a big idea but desperate to remain contained, limited perhaps. Critics often remark on the trials of Thompson’s personal life—the alcoholism, battles with university bureaucrats, failed marriage, illness. Undoubtedly, these experiences resonate in his poems. But my first readings of his work were innocent and unaware. Both eager and apprehensive, at the time of this first encounter with Thompson I was deeply engaged with a flurry of prose works categorized by their existential reach—Kundera, Camus, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and others. Thompson’s poetry echoed the sense of reaching I found in these writers. Each time I return to Stilt Jack, I recall that first encounter and the sense of grasping in his work.