The knock on modern poetry is that at best it's willfully obscure, at worst a con job – insulting, vaporific nonsense for intellectual poseurs who should just face facts: There never will be a poem as lovely as a tree.
A.F. Moritz addresses this perception in the title poem of his latest collection, The Sentinel, short-listed last year for the Governor-General's Award and now one of three Canadian finalists for the $50,000 Griffin Prize, to be awarded in Toronto Wednesday evening.
Moritz, who's 62 and, depending on who's counting, has 14, 15 or 16 books of (mostly) free verse to his credit, is an acknowledged master of metaphor – a mastery displayed to brilliant effect in The Sentinel, about the anxieties of a watchman on the perimeter of an armed camp that's bedded down for the night.
It's the watchman's job to report to his commanders, of course. But what if his report is deemed inaccurate or trivial or phrased in a way they can't readily comprehend? In The Sentinel, the commanders turn condemnatory: “You made it up to humiliate us, you are a foreign agent … this report records your evil dreams … [it is a] libel on your comrades.”
It's also, as Moritz acknowledged in a phone interview, “an allegory of the poet and poetry,” the poet functioning as at once far-seeing scout, ethical bellwether and troublemaker, his words, to some at least, without rhyme and reason.
Intriguingly, however, Moritz didn't realize The Sentinel 's allegorical content as he was writing it. “Unbeknownst to myself in that very poem,” he said, “I am looking at poetry as a kind of affliction that separates you from the rest of people, yet one of those proud afflictions where you pin the insult to your flag and raise it high.”
In short, it appears the gap (and the link) between expression and comprehension – what T.S. Eliot called “communication before understanding” – can apply as much to the poet as to his reader. Moritz admitted as much in discussing another poem in The Sentinel called In a Prosperous Country. A tiny thing, just 16 short lines in length, it “has a lot of meanings to my mind,” he remarked. “I think it makes sense but it almost escapes me because it has so many things barging around in it.”
Moritz – the “A.F.” stands for Albert Frank – lives in Toronto with his wife of many years, Theresa, and teaches at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. But he was born in Niles, Ohio, educated at Marquette University in Wisconsin and only arrived in Ontario in 1974 when his wife was admitted to the Centre for Medieval Studies at the university's St. Michael's College.
Moritz has been a Canadian citizen for many years and pretty much his entire literary output has originated in this country
Moritz had a PhD in English at that time but he wasn't keen to teach. In fact, while in graduate school, he'd worked as a reporter for the then-Milwaukee Sentinel daily and hoped to continue in journalism here. However, since the Toronto Telegram had folded less than three years earlier, “there were still ex-Telegram people wandering around Toronto looking for jobs.” Eventually, he got a job at an advertising agency, managing to publish his first three books of poetry during the six years he worked there.
Canada wasn't entirely anathema to him. As a teen, he – and Theresa, too – had developed a fondness for the stories of humorist Stephen Leacock. Indeed, a few years after arriving in Canada, they began to research a biography of the creator of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, publishing it in 1985. Another Canadian, Northrop Frye, and especially his Anatomy of Criticism, “had been a profound experience,” Moritz noted. Living in Toronto meant he'd occasionally see the great literary theorist and critic, who died in 1991, on a bus or “walking along St. Clair Avenue lost in a dream, carrying two bags full of milk or bread home to Mrs. Frye.” Now “in a strange tying-up of Jungian synchronicity,” Moritz's office at the U of T is in Northrop Frye Hall.
