The Essential James Reaney

by Bartlett, Brian

• ISBN13: 9780889843196
• ISBN10: 0889843198
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-01
• Publisher: Porcupines Quill

Summary

Despite his amply deserved reputation as the father of Southwestern Ontario Gothic, James Reaney was one of the most playful and buoyant Canadian poets publishing in the 1940s and ’50s. The Essential James Reaneypresents an affordable, pocket-sized selection of the poet’s very best work.

Excerpts

One evening in the late 1940s, the poet Earle Birney went to a party and met an undergraduate over twenty years younger than himself. Much later he would recall that stranger: ' ... a small packet of firecrackers set alight, he went sizzling and leaping mischievously from one guest to another, an excited child popping adult questions, bounding into the kitchen and back to the hall, and continually exploding with ideas, images and emotions. I thought him a marvellously inventive Ariel, and still do.'' That young stranger, James Reaney, would soon win the Governor General''s Award in 1949 when he was only twenty-three years old, for his first collection of poems, The Red Heart.Much of the subsequent commentary on that book referred to its darkness, its glimpses of stunted childhoods and embittering communities, but Birney''s image of Reaney as Ariel is valuable, since the book is leavened with tonal lightness, delight in metaphor and odd detail, and spirited inventiveness. Despite his deserved reputation as the father of Southwestern Ontario Gothic, Reaney was one of the most playful and buoyant of Canadian poets publishing in the 1940s and ''50s. The mixture of disturbing grotesquery and entertaining whimsy in his poems is, I hope, amply embodied in the following selection. The flexibility of Reaney''s poetry is shown in its range of voices. He has poems that address a dog, the Avon River, God, the Muse of Satire, downstairs furniture, and the to-be-resurrected dead; poems in the voices of Lake Superior, a lonely child on a farm, Death, a nasty ghost, and geese named Branwell and Lobo. His omnivorous imagination is also evident in its range of allusions and references, from Isaiah, Shakespeare, and Emily Bront#xE9; to the Katzenjammer Kids and Rin Tin Tin, from Egyptian hieroglyphics and Penelope''s fingers to the Orange Lodge, zeppelins, and Ernie''s Barber Salon. Reaney''s language itself often pushes back against the restraints and oppressions of a culture the poems satirize. His poems inhabit what a late work of his referred to as 'a tavern called the Noun. / And a gymnasium called the Verb''. His diction is often built upon familiar and common words, but also dips into the likes of 'sardonyx'', 'chalcedony'', and 'idlurious'', or comes up with coinings like 'Godwanaland'', 'heartsmith'', and 'tricklerain''. Against the spectres of solitude and death, Reaney pits his lively rhythms and seductive sounds. 'The Plum Tree'' evokes the plight of a farm boy trapped in loneliness and profound silence, where plums 'are like blue pendulums / That thrum the gold-wired winds of summer. / In the opium-still noon they hang or fall, / The plump, ripe plums.'' Not only the plums'' Keatsian sensuousness but also the 'um''s of those lines -- plum, pendulum, thrum, summer, opium, plump-- suggest a mantric life force beneath the grimness of the environment. A tension between the threat of morbidity and an expressive freedom is often felt in Reaney''s earlier poems. In the first fifteen years or so of Reaney''s poem-making, death and childhood are pervasive -- not that these themes vanished after 1960: his sequence The Dance of Death at London, Ontariowas published in 1963. Whether Reaney writes of a carrion bird called 'Devouring Years'', or -- in 'Dark Lagoon'', a masterly poem of prenatal fatedness -- of death prophesied for every infant, his poetry is shaded with the implacable course of mortality. Yet the poems are rarely lugubrious in tone; a madcap intelligence is never far away. Children appear often in the poems, nowhere more freshly or unusually than in 'Antichrist as a Child'' (an early, less successful version of that poem was in the first person, spoken by the Antichrist himself); there the child seems perplexed and passive, a victim of compulsions he doesn''t understand rather than a manipulator or strategist. In other poems we find a 'low IQ farmboy'' whose head is full of 'Vast God and the interiors of tree trunks'', a baby who was 'an old man one hour old'', and an adolescent cycling to school 'murmuring irregular verbs''. Reaney''s attraction to childhood as a field for poetry is rooted in his youth as an only child in rural Ontario, the first breeding ground for his sense of both suffering and joy, providing what his later friend the musician John Beckwith called 'a whole world of wonderful images coming out of that grain of sand that is the farm'' (spoken in Mark McCurdy''s documentary film James Reaney: Listening to the Wind). If Reaney''s poems depict the stultifying effects of environment, they find in metaphor, symbolism and audacious imagination not only ways of expressing threats and terrors to human sanity and health but also the pleasures of poetry and other kinds of creativity. In the McCurdy film, Reaney says that his favourite course-evaluation comment among those he received for his teaching was 'Dr Reaney exaggerates'' ('I''m going to have that put on my tombstone''). In the film he also speaks of his homeland''s attitude to the mind-expanding exaggerations of myth: 'The immediate response on the part of Southwestern Ontario is that ''I don''t want to believe in anything before breakfast -- especially if it''s impossible.'''' '' But 'the impossible'' often serves as Reaney''s bread and butter. To him a record-player can be a 'beastly bird'' on a bank by 'the lake / At Gramophone''; Death tells a poet, 'All your tropes and iambics / Become my leaden fiddlesticks''; and a huge fan appears in the sky, tremendous enough to 'blow giants & battlefields like dead leaves away''. However, if fancifulness were all, Reaney''s inventions might wear on us and show the strains of too much cleverness. Instead, they co-exist with sharp social observations and views of community. 'Klaxon'' is a comical poem about a town''s obsession with cars, which become personified in the poet''s imagination; and 'Shakespearean Gardens'' is a multi-part prose-poem that finds Shakespearean parallels in Stratford, Ontario, in a thunderstorm, a lumber-yard accident, a school and a boarding house. Reaney''s A Suit of Nettles,a form-switching, book-length satire inspired by Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser''s Shepherd''s Calendar,takes on several targets (education, religion, literary criticism) within the fantasy of competing, loving, speaking geese. Some of this book''s earlier readers found it a disappointing retreat into bookishness and pastiche after The Red Heart,but in retrospect it emerges as Reaney''s finest extended achievement in poetry, including passages of his sweetest lyricism and of his most piercing, perennially apt satire. A more comprehensive study at Reaney than I can give here would look at the intersections between his poetry and his plays. For the most part, the latter dominated his writing for the last several decades of his life. For here, all I''ll point out is that two of the poems in this Porcupine''s Quill selection reappeared, after their first publications, as passages in Reaney''s One-Man Masque(1960), which he performed on stage several times, and which impressed and astonished a young student named Margaret Atwood. Readers of The Essential James Reaneymight enjoy knowing that stage directions in One-Man Masqueindicate that 'The Ghost'' is spoken with the actor 'wearing brown furry motoring gloves'', and that in its theatrical context 'Doomsday, or The Red Headed Woodpecker'' -- Reaney at his most delightfully exclamatory and gusto-driven -- is to be yelled through a megaphone. Reaney''s influence on Canadian poetry has not yet been recognized adequately. His humour is surely echoed at times in the poetry of another long-time resident of Southwestern Ontario, Don McKay, not so coincidentally once a student of Reaney''s. Its dictionary-ransacking wordplay in a poem like 'The Alphabet'' caught the attention of bpNichol, who once wro