The Essential Kenneth Leslie

by Wells, Zachariah

• ISBN13: 9780889843288
• ISBN10: 0889843287
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-03-01
• Publisher: Utp Distribution

Summary

Though barely remembered today, Kenneth Leslie was one of the most remarkable Canadians of the 20th century. An award-winning poet and an influential political activist in the U.S. during the 1930s and 40s, he lived with a rare, furious passion that found expression in everything from his writings to his turbulent personal life.

Table of Contents

Open Lading

New Song

By Stubborn Stars

Success

The Preacher

Halibut Cove Harvest

The Hill Heart

The Word Had Need of Flesh

Cobweb College

Tea With the Professor

Harlem Preacher

The Candy Maker

Windward Rock

It Cannot Be Easy

Sorrow Must Sing

To My Father Drowned at Sea

Lowlands Low

Beauty Is Something You Can Weigh In Scales

Cape Breton Lullaby

Rory's Praise of Elspeth

Jesus Thought Long

Guide

The Old Man

Tasseled Thought

Early Summer Storm

Requiescam

Lir's Daughter

The Computer

Last Sleep

No Poem Is Ever Ended

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

I first encountered a Kenneth Leslie poem in the anthology In Fine Form, published in 2005. Modestly titled 'Sonnet'' there, I later learned that it was the untitled fifth poem from the title sequence of By Stubborn Stars, Leslie''s Governor General''s Award-winning 1938 collection. Further trawls through anthologies suggested to me that Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve, the editors of In Fine Form, must have found this poem in Margaret Atwood''s Oxford University Press anthology of Canadian poetry. While hunting for content for my own forthcoming compilation of Canadian sonnets, I found the poem again in, of all places, John Fuller''s Oxford Book of Sonnets. For all its formal perfection and emotional resonance, the stubborn endurance of this poem also signals a significant loss. The poem stands alone beautifully, but what the most recent anthologizations of it fail to announce is that it is only 1/28th of one of the best long poems ever published in Canada. I don''t dispute that this is the finest sonnet in 'By Stubborn Stars,'' nor indeed that it is the best short poem ever published by Leslie -- but there are several pieces in the series nearly as good, as A J M Smith maintained in the introduction to one of his anthologies, and the suite itself cannot be excerpted without doing damage to it, and to our sense of Leslie''s most important poetic accomplishment. One explanation for Leslie''s all-but-disappearance is his old-fashionedness. Leslie, whom Milton Acorn called 'the loveliest of our orthodox sonneteers,'' was keenly aware that the verse he wrote was out of step with Modernism and the dictum of Pound -- seven years Leslie''s senior -- to 'make it new'': 'I cannot sing a new song, / I fear to sing the ol'' '' is how he begins a poem that ends with Pound''s very phrase. If the chart for Leslie''s poetic course was doubtful -- to modify the opening line of the title sonnet of 'By Stubborn Stars'' -- it didn''t keep him from proceeding headlong: 'I sail by stubborn stars, let rocks take heed, / and should I sink ... then sinking be my creed!'' That closing couplet tosses a mooring line of sense and rhyme to a poet who had died by drowning over a century earlier. Shelley, born almost exactly a hundred years before Leslie, wrote in his own sonnet sequence, 'I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!'' There are striking parallels, biographical and poetic, between Leslie and Shelley. Both were resolutely unconventional iconoclasts, idealists, radicals; both founded anti-establishment magazines (Shelly, The Liberal; Leslie, The Protestant) -- though Leslie lived to see his through several years'' worth of issues before it foundered -- both believed in, and worked for, changes to the legislation of the world, and both ran afoul of political authorities for their trouble. Leslie hated dichotomies, hated the world''s insistence that we make a choice. If faced with Frost''s fork in the road, he would opt to travel both ways at once. Although he cleaved to inherited British, Romantic modes of poetic speech -- perhaps because he did so, stubbornly discarding the fashions of modernism and later of Olsonian Projective Verse -- Leslie believed in a Whitmanesque embrace of contradiction, the fusion of apparent antinomies. So many things in Leslie cut both ways; in the sixth sonnet of 'By Stubborn Stars,'' 'Green ebbs away'' signifies the recession of life and vitality while in the ninth, it is death itself that is green. As Burris Devanney says, 'the ambiguity of Leslie''s political message persists and seems to allow for no final synthesis. He is indeed, throughout his poetry, remarkably consistent in this one inconsistency.'' This can and should be extended to all aspects of his life and works, not just to his politics. Easier to gather up an armload of live herring than to fix Leslie in any synthetic scheme. Leslie hated everything that engenders dullness and conformity. In 'Tea with the Professor,'' a satirical sonnet with a carpe diem theme, the speaker urges the Professor to 'Hang history and its seven thousand years,'' to let himself be engulfed by 'this ''now,'''' that, narrowed to a name/for what is not, was never, nor can be,'' and ends 'Your ifs and ands, your wisdom, heavy and old,/walk on my heart ... your tea is getting cold!'' He develops this theme at greater length in 'Cobweb College.'' The freshman class at the College 'are ghosts of boys, cracked wide with knowledge,/their dreams dried out and left the dreamers dead,'' already bereft of 'illusion'' and 'romance,'' no vital force left in them for the College''s Spider to suck out, he having 'drawn their blood too many generations/and spoiled the breed''. In a memorable simile, Doctor Spider describes their wills as being 'like the blown pigskin that drools/November muck around a soggy field.'' All they want are the Professor''s 'ifs, ...ands, ...buts.'' It''s not hard to imagine what Leslie would think of today''s Creative Writing industry, snugly ensconced in the folds of academe, star pupils destined to become tomorrow''s teachers, poets acting more as bureaucrats than as legislators, safe in a hermetic world of their own. In such a climate of diminished expectations for poets and poetry, it makes sense that Leslie''s peculiar brand of ambitious but non-careerist poetic excellence, his fusion of the radical and the traditional, of the personal and the public, of the wild and the sophisticated, of musical grace and raw emotion, should have sunk almost out of sight. Although Leslie loved romance and illusion, he anticipated his future obscurity with clairvoyant sangfroid in 'Street Cry,'' the coda to 'By Stubborn Stars.'' But he also prophesied those readers in 'uncut page[s] of time'' who have kept, and who will continue to keep, his words alive.