Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn (Laurier Poetry)

65 Pages·2006·0.27 MB·English

by  Tim Lilburn

Desire Never Leaves
ThePoetryofTim Lilburn
Selected
with an
introduction by
Alison Calder
and an
afterword by
Tim Lilburn
Weacknowledge the support ofthe Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing pro-
gram.We acknowledge the financial support ofthe Government ofCanada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lilburn,Tim,1950–
Desire never leaves :the poetry ofTim Lilburn / selected,with an introduction,by
Alison Calder ;and an afterword by Tim Lilburn.
(Laurier poetry series)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn-13:978-0-88920-514-7
isbn-10:0-88920-514-0
i.Calder,Alison C.(Alison Claire),1969– ii.Title. iii.Series.
ps8573.i427a6 2007 c811'.54 c2006-906448-2
©2007Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo,Ontario,Canada n2l 3c5
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover image:Pamela Woodland,Untitled,© 2004.Colour photograph.
Cover and text design by P.J.Woodland.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material
used in this text,and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately.Any errors and
omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
(cid:39)
This book is printed on 100%post-consumer recycled paper.
Printed in Canada
Nopart ofthis publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system or trans-
mitted,in any form or by any means,without the prior written consent ofthe publisher
or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).For an
Access Copyright licence,visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-
5777.
Table of Contents
Foreword,Neil Besner / v
Biographical Note / vi
Introduction,Alison Calder / vii
Names OfGod / 1
1 Love At The Center OfObjects / 1
2 Allah OfThe Green Circuitry / 1
3 Light’s Gobbling Eye / 2
Theophany And Argument / 3
Pumpkins / 5
Fervourino To A Barn OfMilking Doe Goats
Early Easter Morning / 7
Call To Worship In A Mass For The Life OfThe World / 9
Elohim Mocks His Images For The Life OfThe World / 11
I Bow To It / 13
Spirit OfAgriculture,1986 / 14
In The Hills,Watching / 18
Contemplation Is Mourning / 19
How To Be Here? / 20
Restoration / 23
Pitch / 24
There Is No Presence / 25
A Book OfExhaustion / 29
Kill-Site / 32
There / 39
Afterword:Walking Out ofSilence,Tim Lilburn / 41
Acknowledgements / 49
iii
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Foreword
At the beginning ofthe twenty-first century,poetry in Canada—writing and
publishing it,reading and thinking about it—finds itselfin a strangely con-
flicted place.We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new
work,and there is still a small audience for poetry;but increasingly,poetry
is becoming a vulnerable art,for reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed.
But there are things to be done:we need more real engagement with our
poets.There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in class-
rooms,in the public arena,in the media—and there needs to be more,and
more different kinds ofpublications,that make the wide range ofour con-
temporary poetry more widely available.
The hope that animates this new series from Wilfrid Laurier University
Press is that these volumes will help to create and sustain the larger reader-
ship that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves.Like our fiction
writers,our poets are much celebrated abroad;they should just as properly
be better known at home.
Our idea has been to ask a critic (sometimes herselfa poet) to select thirty-
five pages ofpoetry from across a poet’s career;write an engaging,accessible
introduction;and have the poet write an afterword.In this way,we think that
the usual practice ofteaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an
anthology will be much improved upon;and readers in and out ofclassrooms
will have more useful,engaging,and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s
work.Readers might also come to see more readily,we hope,the connections
among,as well as the distances between,the life and the work.
It was the ending ofan Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the
epigraph for The Diviners:“but they had their being once/and left a place
to stand on.”Our poets still do,and they are leaving many places to stand on.
We hope that this series will help,variously,to show how and why this is so.
—Neil Besner
General Editor
v
Biographical Note
Tim Lilburn was born in Regina,Saskatchewan,on June 27,1950.He was
trained as a Jesuit and spent many years teaching philosophy and creative
writing at the University ofSaskatchewan in Saskatoon and St.Peter’s College
in Muenster,Saskatchewan.He has taught in West Africa and herded goats in
Ontario.He currently lives in Victoria,BC,where he teaches Creative Writing
at the University ofVictoria.
Lilburn has written six poetry collections,among them Tourist to Ecstasy
(1989),which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry,
andMoosewood Sandhills(1994),which won the Canadian Authors Associa-
tion Award.From the Great Above She Opened Her Ear to the Great Below
(1988) is a collaboration with visual artist Susan Shantz.In 1999,he won two
Saskatchewan Book Awards:the Nonfiction Award for his collection ofessays,
Living in the World As IfIt Were Home,and the Book ofthe Year Award for
the poetry book To the River.He has also edited,and contributed to,two
anthologies ofessays about poetry and philosophy:Thinking and Singing:
Poetry and the Practice ofPhilosophyandPoetry and Knowing.His latest poetry
collection,Kill-Site,won the Governor General’s Award in 2003.His work is
widely anthologized.
vi
Introduction
Tim Lilburn’s poetry should come with two instructions to the reader:have
courage,and relax.Have courage because the poetry,on first glance,can
appear daunting;relax because,well,it’s beautiful words on a page.So you
don’t know all about these characters “Nicholas ofCusa”or “Paul Celan”?
Relax and listen to the music.An expert on classical music will have a different
experience ofa Beethoven symphony than a non-expert will,but they’ll both
enjoy the concert.Lilburn’s poetry is no different.His well-crafted lyrics,both
thoughtful and artful,treat the basic objects ofthe world around us at the
same time as they gesture towards something that words themselves cannot
express.The resulting verse mixes the profane and the sacred,ultimately
insisting on the necessary coexistence ofboth.
Lilburn writes about place very intensively,but his poetry may not provide
what readers of“prairie poetry”expect.One strand ofprairie poetry,heavily
influenced by the writings ofRobert Kroetsch,Dennis Cooley,and Andy
Suknaski,uses vernacular speech to provide a record ofprairie experience.
This kind ofpoetry is narrative,conversational,and often,though not always,
accessible.It may also rely on the convention ofthe lyric narrator,a voice
confessing its thoughts.Another strand ofprairie poetry,to which I think
Lilburn is much more closely aligned,comes down through writers like Anne
Szumigalski and shows up in poetry like that ofJan Zwicky,whose lyrics
draw on a wide range ofsubject matter and philosophical and literary influ-
ences to produce an eclectic mix ofvoices.The distinction between these two
strands—John Deere vs.John Donne,let us say—is in some ways artificial,as
vernacular poetry also draws on a wide range ofinfluences,and more formal
poetry often speaks directly to immediate prairie experience.Nonetheless,
Lilburn’s poetry uses different conventions than those usually called “prairie,”
and thus requires a different kind ofreaderly approach.He doesn’t give us a
solid narrator for us to ground our readings in.He mixes the wordplay of
Gerard Manley Hopkins with the whimsy ofDylan Thomas,pinning it all to
philosophical questions raised by early Christian mystics and Classical Greek
thinkers.His work starts with the prairie,but it does not end there;the place
with which he is concerned is the larger world viewed through close attention
to environmental detail.Lilburn is a thinking poet;he’s working through
vii
various tough questions about the relation ofthe human to the environment
and the artist to the Divine,and none ofthese elements can be separated
from the others.He’s working hard,and it behooves readers to put a little
effort into their readings too.He’s not running counter to “prairie writing”;
he’s expanding the category.
Though Lilburn’s poetry draws on religious and philosophical languages
born far from the prairie,his poems continually insist on their here-ness.They
are about somewhere in particular,and where they are located needs to be
looked at carefully.Living in the World As IfIt Were Home,the title ofhis essay
collection,points to this connection with the immediate environment.But
what does it really mean to live in the world? And what is lying in wait in that
tricky phrase “as if,”waiting to trip us up?
Central to Lilburn’s poetics are the concepts oferos and sorrow.Eros,or
erotic love,is the desire that one has for the beloved.For Lilburn it is also the
desire that one has to connect with the divine presence immanent in the
natural world,the desire to get at the essence ofthe world,its soul.Sorrow
results from the recognition that this connection is impossible—how can we
possibly know the essential natures ofother things? What makes the deer a
deer will always surpass our understanding.This desire to express the inex-
pressible is part ofa long poetic tradition;in fact,one might argue that it is
from this desire that poetry sprang in the first place.Think ofmetaphor and
simile.Ifa poet writes “my luve’s like a red,red rose,”as Robbie Burns does,
that saying is not strictly true,yet we know what the poet means.The words
have pointed to something beyond themselves,while at the same time keeping
a measure ofthemselves hidden:neither the love nor the rose is captured
fully on the page.Lilburn’s metaphors are often erotic and sensual,perhaps
unexpected in writing about landscape.But in his use oferotic language,he
follows a well-established tradition ofChristian mysticism,taking his cue
from eleventh-and twelfth-century writers like Bernard ofClairvaux and
Margery Kemp (see Barratt and Dalrymple).Like these early writers,Lilburn’s
yearning for connection with the divine is expressed in solidly physical terms.
His poems bounce with physical and sensual imagery—sights,sounds,smells,
sometimes blending into an ecstatic synaesthetic experience.
What does Lilburn’s poetry desire? Nothing less than the recovery ofa lost
unity with the world and with the divine forces immanent in it.Another
prairie artist,Joni Mitchell,suggested that we’ve got to get back to the garden,
and Lilburn’s complex and intricate poetry tries to work through a way of
doing that.But in Lilburn’s thinking,we will never come to know the world
as we want to.The resulting sorrow is what motivates us to keep trying to
connect with the world.Ifwe don’t feel sorrow,ifwe think that this time
viii / Introduction
we’ve made the connection,then we’ve gone wrong.Lilburn’s poetry is like
tossing stones towards a target you know you’re never going to hit.It may
seem silly to keep throwing,but gradually,ifyou look at where the stones fall,
you may discern a pattern,a vague shape outlining your target.You’re never
going to be able to strike it;but in your different throws you may discover
different ways ofapproaching it,maybe even getting a little closer.
To think that one can encompass the world with language is inherently
conceited.The key to overcoming this conceit,according to Lilburn,is to
know that writing a poem is like carrying water in a sieve.Because language is
so faulty,you’re never going to be able to say what you mean,just as you can
never see the true essence ofthings.“The grass is a mirror that clouds as the
bright look goes in,”he writes in the poem “In The Hills,Watching.”You can
look,but your vision will always be obscured.Seeing the true face ofthe
natural world is like seeing the true face ofGod—impossible.To believe that
you can do either,and that you can then express this vision in language,is an
act ofarrogance that leads to the attempt to “command”the natural world
(Living60).Instead,argues Lilburn,“everything exceeds its name….The
mysterium ofthe world is a theophany ofwhat is not there”(Living61).The
word deer,the human idea ofthe deer,is not the deer itself.As one Buddhist
precept goes,the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.Confusing
the artist’s words with the world is the arrogant act.To avoid arrogance,know
your limits.The world itselfwill always exceed them.This excessive nature
ofthe world is one reason,I think,for the deluge ofmetaphors present in
Lilburn’s poetry.A deer’s body is “a border crossing,a wall,and a perfume”in
“Contemplation Is Mourning,”pumpkins are “earth hogs,”“blimpish Prussian
generals,”“garden sausages,”and “golden zeppelins”in “Pumpkins.”Over and
over he tosses the stone,the metaphor,and each time comes up a little short.
Sorrow:but then he tries again.
In Living in the World As IfIt Were Home,Lilburn argues against the pro-
jection ofthe human ego into the world,against an anthropocentric world-
view that sees the world only as the background to human activity.Instead,he
calls for a kind of“poetic attention”that seeks not to appropriate the world,
but to stand alongside it.So,how to do this? Lilburn turns to ascetic and
contemplative practices.Stripping away the external trappings ofthe world,
the poet separates himselffrom distractions and tries to empty himselfout so
that he can receive what the world has to give him.For Lilburn,contemplating
the prairie landscape is crucial.The prairie has been described as a minimalist
landscape,already scraped down to the bare essentials.In a sense,it serves as a
model for the contemplative poet:without the overblown greenness ofthe
West Coast or the busy highways ofSouthern Ontario,the prairie shows its
Introduction / ix