The Interconnected Writing Lives of Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and

303 Pages·2017·1.19 MB·English

Western University
“RADIANT IMPERFECTION”:
THE INTERCONNECTED WRITING LIVES OF ROBERT BRINGHURST,
DENNIS LEE, TIM LILBURN, DON MCKAY, AND JAN ZWICKY

by

Kostantina Northrup

Graduate Program in English

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada

© Kostantina Northrup 2013
Abstract
In 2002, Cormorant Books of Toronto published an essay collection entitled Thinking and
Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. Edited and introduced by Tim Lilburn,
the book gathers a series of meditations by five writers whom this dissertation considers
as a group: Lilburn himself, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Don McKay, and Jan
Zwicky. Over the course of the past two decades, the five poets have come to be known
as a coterie of ecological writers and ethicists, and this dissertation examines their
interconnected writing lives in light of their significant influence in the establishment of
ecocritical cultures in Canada. All five poets have inhabited the Canadian university at
various points throughout their careers, and by discussing their ecopoetics as they relate
to their commentary on academic epistemologies and contemporary education in the
humanities, these readings observe how the poets’ respective approaches to aesthetics,
philosophy, and pedagogy are intimately intertwined.
Throughout their writing lives, the Thinking and Singing poets have been vocal
opponents of postmodernism – a term they use broadly, but generally mean to
comprehend the theoretical spectrum associated with the late twentieth-century
“linguistic turn” in the humanities. By contextualizing the group’s ecopoetics in light of
their academic interventions, I argue that the poets’ public reputations as ecological artists
and educators have been established as they have worked to define the borders of their
own poetry and poetics within and against the territories of the broader academic and
literary traditions they inhabit. In this regard, I explore two of the major epistemological
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traditions that the poets set in contrast to the reading practices of postmodernism –
phenomenology, and the via negativa (negative way) – and argue that engaging with the
Thinking and Singing poets’ works means continuously renegotiating the age-old
question concerning poetry’s capacity to teach as well as delight.

Keywords
Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, ecology, poetics,
ethics, criticism, university, humanities, phenomenology, apophasis, lyric, polyphony

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Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks go to many who helped me see this through. My supervisor, David
Bentley, whose unflagging encouragement and confidence gave me the enthusiasm to
keep going. My piecemeal drafts and half-baked ideas seemed not to faze him, and for
that I am grateful. My second reader, Manina Jones, for her wisdom, encouragement, and
canny advice. Alison Conway, mentor and paragon, for always telling me the truth.
Pauline Wakeham, Matthew Rowlinson, Kim Solga, and Steven Bruhm, for the warmth
and collegiality they radiate, and Kathleen McConnell, at St. Thomas University, for first
introducing me to the poems of Don McKay. Thanks too to the administrative staff who
facilitated my life (who facilitate all life) in the English Department – Anne McFarland,
Beth McIntosh, Teresa MacDonald, Leanne Trask, and Vivian Foglton.
This project could not have been completed without financial assistance from the
Department of English, the Province of Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, and the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would also like to thank
Sean Kane for permission to quote from archival materials, and the editors of Studies in
Canadian Literature for permission to reframe portions of my essay “Lyric Scholarship
in Controversy: Jan Zwicky and Anne Carson.”
Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky
granted me access to archival and otherwise unpublished materials, and gave generously
of their time in response to my queries and letters. Their correspondence helped me to
understand their ideas and poetry more deeply, and for their dialogue, guidance, and
interest, I thank them heartily. To Mark Dickinson, my friendly interlocutor, I extend my
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warmest appreciation.
More gratitude goes to Lindsey Bannister, Nina Budabin McQuown, Nadine
Fladd, Patricia Graham, David Hickey, Rebecca Murie Wenstrom, Tara Murphy, Alicia
Robinet, and Michael Sloane, for years of book-lending, conversation, and support.
To Rebecca Campbell, Jenna Hunnef, Rajan Kapila, Stephanie Oliver, Phil
Glennie, Stephanie Rade, and Amelia Lubowitz — my love and thanks, for all the fish.
For keeping me tethered and bringing me light, greatest gramercy to Emily Nicol
and Anna Burkhart. And finally, for being my first and best teacher — Maria Northrup.

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Table of Contents

Page

Abstract ii
Acknowledgments iv
Table of Contents vi

Introduction: The Interconnected Writing Lives of the Thinking and Singing Poets 1
Writing Home / Singing in the Dark 14
Considering “Coterie,” and Further Notes on Method 31
Notes 39

1 Thinking and Singing Education, Ecology, and Pedagogy 47
The “Programmatic Polemics” of Dennis Lee and Robert Bringhurst 49
Reading Thinking and Singing Poetics with Pedagogy in Mind 66
Notes 82

2 Phenomenologies of the Thinking and Singing Poets 91
Dennis Lee’s “Consciousness Knowing the World” 106
Don McKay’s Apparatus and the Phenomenology of the Unfamiliar 114
Jan Zwicky and the “Ethics” of Reading Phenomenologically 120
Returning to the “Community of Things”: Phenomenology and
Apokatastasis in Tim Lilburn’s Poetics 129
Notes 151

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3 Thinking and Singing Aesthetics of the Sublime 161
Dreadful Sublimity in Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies 168
Don McKay’s Strike/Slip and Paradoxides: The Sublimity of Deep Time 184
Notes 208

4 Musical Form and Ekphrasis: Thinking and Singing the World 217
Bakhtin and Canadian Literary Polyphonies in the Late Twentieth Century 218
Robert Bringhurst’s Poetics of Polyphony 226
Poetry and the Resonant World: Polyphony and Harmony
in Jan Zwicky’s “Lyric” 243
Coda 267
Notes 269

Works Cited 275

Vita 295
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1

Introduction
The Interconnected Writing Lives of the Thinking and Singing Poets

Watch it: it thinks but, no, you cannot quite watch it
thinking. Listen to it singing: no, you can’t quite
hear it singing. Smell it: linseed and lampblack: no,
no you can’t quite smell it, touch it, taste it. Take it

intravenously and see if it does not have
some effect.
1
— Robert Bringhurst, “Notes to the Reader”

Well, to hell with it, only – as I sd before – the poet is the
only pedagogue left, to be trusted.
2
— Charles Olson, “The Gate and the Center”

In 2002, Cormorant Books of Toronto published an essay collection entitled Thinking and
Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. Edited and introduced by Tim Lilburn,
the book gathers a series of meditations by five writers whom this dissertation considers
as a group: Lilburn himself, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Don McKay, and Jan
Zwicky. Together, the five form a quincunx of variously occupied autodidacts,
contemplatives, critics, essayists, professors, poets, students, scholars, translators, one
2

children’s author (Lee), one professional philosopher (Zwicky), and one typographer
(Bringhurst). They constitute a collective, having dedicated individual poems and full
poetry collections to one another, listed one another’s names in their acknowledgments
pages, assisted one another’s book launches and performance pieces, and written essays
on the topic of one another’s writing. Working across the thresholds of academic and
literary cultures in Canada, in the past twenty years, they have come to be known above
all as a coterie of ecopoets. Having been linked by camaraderie and long-term personal
and professional relationships, they have enjoyed bonds of intellectual kinship that have
inspired them to praise and honour one another, as Bringhurst has honoured Lee by
calling him both “senior colleague and elder brother” (“At Home” 57). In their
admiration for one another, moreover, the five poets have also revealed their own
aesthetic and philosophical investments. The scholar Mark Dickinson, whose
forthcoming study “Canadian Primal” will be the first monograph published on their
collective works, has initiated an appellation for the five. He calls them the Thinking and
Singing group (“Canadian Primal” n. pag.).
Emphasizing the gerunds “thinking” and “singing” in relation to the poetics of
Bringhurst, Lee, Lilburn, McKay, and Zwicky suggests much about the aesthetic and
philosophical perspectives underlying their work. The word “thought” may call to mind
concepts such as “wisdom,” “reason,” “rationality,” “logic,” or “theory”; “song,” on the
other hand, may suggest the adjectives “orphic,” “lyric,” or “ecstatic,” and perhaps even
notions of poetic “praxis,” “participation,” and “process.” It is tempting to associate the
Thinking and Singing poets’ “thinking” with the artistic mode that Nietzsche called the