"Naturally, poetry can't defeat ongoing ignorance, repetitive wrong-doing, physical deterioration nor personal extinction. But to say a few meaningful words about being in the world in the face of infinity and eternity - well, that's something." - Fraser Sutherland, Northern Poetry Review (2007)
Under "Lifer" in THE DICTIONARY OF PO/ETERNITY, you will discover widely travelled Fraser Sutherland's name flanked by W. H. Auden, Earle Birney, Elizabeth Bishop, John Robert Colombo, E. E. Cummings, Mary Dalton, Stan Dragland, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes on the left while Philip Larkin, Irving Layton, John Newlove, Alden Nowlan, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Al Purdy, Theodore Roethke, Goran Simic and W. B. Yeats quite naturally fall to the right.
Born and raised in Pictou County, NS, the critically lauded povert poet, lexicographer, editor and literary journalist who now calls Toronto home put away childish things in order to pursue adolescent lusts before attempting to follow in Ernest Hemingway's foot-stomps by assuming the very adult position of a small-town newspaper reporter in order to gain experience in the ways of this world after earning his journalism degree from Ottawa's Carleton University in 1969. A frequent contributor to this newspaper, Sutherland's body of work includes 14 volumes of poetry, short fiction, criticism and non-fiction published across the continent (as well as appearances in either English or myriad translations in 100-plus prestigious anthologies and periodicals around the globe).
This evening, commencing at 6, the self-described counterpuncher will take his latest work, The Philosophy of As If, from the page to the stage launching what may well become one of the few collections of poetry destined to flourish long after its creator ceases to exist, no small feat in this (or any other) age.
The poem is tired of being abused. In the old days it was an oscilloscope registering the curve of moods. After a while it wearied of rehashing childhood illnesses adolescent lusts, adult idiocies. . . .
Last evening, browser parked at one of the University of Toronto Libraries' incredibly comprehensive and admirably ambitious writesites, Canadian Poetry Online (edited by terrific poet Sophia Kaszuba), it dawned on yours truly that another of the CPO's principle participants, Dr. Ian Lancashire, shared a love of language and literature with Sutherland (since both men belong to the same dictionary society). On the off-chance I might find the good professor at cyberhome, I rat-a-tap tippy-tapped on his e-door with a "por favor" request: Would the Winnipegger mind providing yours truly with an assessment, an opinion, an idea of what he finds valuable in Sutherland's work? (Dare I disturb the universe, I thought to meself. Shamelessly, I shot thought back, yessiree; after all, nothing ventured, nothing maimed when it comes to going the cyber-distance in the name of poetry).
To my astonished delight, a couple of hours later, the good doctor graciously responded: "An admitted 'extreme free-speech libertarian,' Fraser Sutherland possesses the courage of a pride of lions. Who hasn't relished his unflinching reviews of CanLit? A lexicographer of Canadian English, Fraser expects our poets to purify their tribal dialect; and if, thus tasked, they neither toil nor spin, he says so. Fraser is a majestically talented writer, but he is also a most necessary reader."
This evening, this most necessary reader will no doubt relish dishing up the goods from one great work, a work it took its author several years to complete through thin and thinner; but, a work so vital and vibrantly alive in all its aspects, listeners can expect to hear a veritable banquet of robust ear-cheer because, as anyone who's heard Sutherland extemporizingly hold forth, the experience both transforms and transcends each and all versions of so-called reality on its way to express transport.
As if. As If? The Philosophy of As If? Aside from the gorgeosity to the Nth degree of your title, can you explain or describe its genesis to me?
For a brief period during my early 30s, I compulsively copied out maxims of psychology into a big ruled hardbound notebook. One of my sources was a book on the psychology of Alfred Adler, in which appeared quotations from a German neo-Kantian philosopher named Hans Vaihinger whose 1911 work, Philosophie des Als Ob, was translated by C. K. Ogden and published in 1925 as The Philosophy of "As If": A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind.
Some of Vaihinger's zingers just intuitively struck me as being true: "The world of the 'unreal' is just as important as the world of the so-called real or actual (in the ordinary sense of the word); indeed, it is far more important for ethics and aesthetics." A scientific hypothesis is "directed toward reality," and demands verification. Fiction, however, is "a more conscious, more practical and more fruitful error." Truth "is merely the most expedient error."
. . . The poem is out of its mind trying to be a tree, a tragedy, a true confession. It wishes the poet had more legitimate means to relieve his mind, less wasteful ways of exacting revenge. . . .
Many years later I was going through my poems, seeking a pattern that could form the core of a new book. The long-incubated Vaihinger suddenly made a comeback. Coincidentally, I'd become impatient with the near-universal notion that the poet, especially of lyric poems, is a direct and transparently sincere truth-teller. I'd certainly written lots of poems taking that stance (and library collections even classified poetry as "non-fiction"). I'd also written poems in the voice of a persona, but this now seemed to me to evade the issue. Why shouldn't the poet have the freedom of the novelist, both in terms of documenting and inventing?
At the same time, I had reached the point where one looks back at one's life and imagines how it could have been otherwise. That's behind my book's rueful epigraph: "I would like a different mind, a different body, a different life. Is that too much to ask?"
Nope, not in my opinion (unless you deny moi the op to join you in that re/quest, please and thank you in advance).
Well, you know, in one sense, one's life could only have been what it was: Everything that happens or has happened is or was inevitable. The advantage of this view is that if you don't believe in free will, you don't have to blame yourself for the bad choices you've made. On the other hand, a mechanistic belief in determinism makes you a passive pawn of nature, nurture, fate or predestination. But the glory of art is that alternatives can be conceived as possible, a life can be any number of lives. Art also allows wishes and desires to yield fulfillments and vindications which is why, playing with the proverb, I titled two of the three sections "Beggars Would Ride" and "If Wishes Were Horses." Of course, the ultimate fiction is the afterlife (which is the matter of the final section, "And All Shall Be Redeemed"). In sum, I was probing the fictive universe of "as if."
As If's seamlessly wonderful (especially when its propitiatorily calm surfaces, its subtle depths, enter the question) . . . I believe this is number eight, no? How long did it take to create; and why, given the range of your gift, did you elect to go with the particular organization of it you indicate?
Putting the book together took a few months; writing the poems took a few decades. The book's structure was dictated by those poems I found which seemed connected to ideas about fictiveness. Having to cope with personal problems supplied the emotional impetus.
. . . The poem in point of fact cannot stomach any longer being used, used as a crutch, a wailing wall, a sounding board, hollow vessel into which the poet pours hopes and tears and fears. . . .
Correlatively, you constantly and chimerically shift focus, from short lyric to book-length sequence. Is that the process or can you even explain it?
I'm easily bored, especially if I seem to be repeating myself.
Fair enough. Tough question, I know (but, when did that stop me?). Speaking from experience, I know that I am insane, that I put Charlie Manson to shame, that I have a personal agenda, that I am bi-polar with the integrity of a piece of VD and yadda-yadda-yawn because I do not love every goddamned book of poetry I've ever read. You have an advantage over yours truly, however, at least in terms of gender. Let me ask you: Are you a curmudgeon, a contrarian or a realist? That's the rep one gets when one puts poetry before its creators, right? In this medium, I'm just the messenger . . .
I'm all three - curmudgeon, contrarian, realist - by turns; but, basically? I'm a counterpuncher.
Ah . . . Natch, I immediately think of another brilliant counterpuncher. As early as the 1930s, McLuhan warned we would lose ourselves in what he termed extensions of ourselves. You suggest we jumped over that moon; and now, lost, represent naught but our avatar, our electronic discarnate substitution, a simulacrum. McLuhan did say, periphrastically, We shape our tools and they, in turn, shape us . . . You have said nature still sustains you; but, what does that mean? How can poetry staunch that onslaught in this, the twenty-worst century?
I don't know if it can. But we can keep asking the question, "What is it to live?" I don't know . . . I use its tools; maybe its tools use me? I do know in "Lucretius versus the Lake Poets," Frost contrasts two ideas of Nature: There's "pretty scenery" or "the Whole Goddamn Machinery." I'm interested in the machinery.
. . . The poem is just so extremely vexed at being twinned to the poet, irritated with his heavy smoking, his gluttony, envy, and self-disgust and suspects that in these very lines he's trying to sneak himself in again. . . .
Elsewhere, Fraser, you've lamented a lack of judicious editors in this country (for starters because I believe it's a pan-universal problem, really). Do you think this problem may partially explain the po-pap proliferating across the country (and, by extension, across the galaxy)?
Yes, the lack of hands-on editing is an ongoing problem. Additionally, Canadian poetry also faces big structural problems. An unending series of arts-council subsidized first books drop off the production line into a void. Few receive reviews; and, those that do receive them are usually superficial or sycophantic. Even more regrettably, no one attempts an overview of the poet's working past, much less our collective literary past. The same is true of publishing; hence, the scarcity of Selected or Collected works. That an updated or revised Oxford or Penguin Book of Canadian Verse hasn't appeared in nearly 30 years says less about the economics of book publishing than it does about our obsession with the blink-and-you'll-miss-it present. Publicity replaces criticism while big cash prizes become Potemkin-Village substitutes for a healthily engaged culture.
What gives? I read works nominated for them prizes, works granted and gifted with mega-bucks, I wanna up-chuck. How did this happen to us? When we began, we knew something so atomically true: If you lacked world-class chops, get outta the ring. Yes? No? Are we hood-blinked? Who are our heroes, poetically speaking? Who considers The Tradition in the workshop of spatialization? Can we say we earmark The Book of Eternity if we close off most - if not all - of its genuine contributors because they threaten the status quota? John MacLachlan Gray once consoled me by reminding me I ought to remember the thicker the wallet, the thinner the skin. But the consolations of philosophy make for gruel fuel when a critic puts art before its artists. I used to say "they" wanted a critic with teeth; and, the punch-line? That was so "they" could kick 'em outta the mouth of anyone who called a POS a POS. Why the punishment for telling one's truth? Can we possibly hope to thrive, let alone survive? I don't get it . . .
Well, you're quite right, Judith. We're appallingly parochial. Poetry readings are one symptom. Here in Toronto, the country's largest city and English-culture capital, local poets get to wag their tails in front of microphones. Fewer poets from other parts of Ontario appear, fewer still from other parts of the country. Almost never do we hear great poets from other parts of the world.
Why write at all? Whenever I say a country's literature is only as great as its critics, I am laughed all the way to the brink and forced over the edge far below the poverty line; but, I thrive because I believe I would perish instantly without poetry holding me in her ch/arms. A vocation. I did not choose her; but, I am ecstatic Poetry chose me. Conscripted for life, literally.
I think you've answered our own question.
Do you believe our so-called "professional" / "careerist" poets slag others for a specific reason? Are these literary stars earning their stripes at the expense of our literature real or disposable; and, if so, does that not speak to our cultural desuetude? Before I gave up entirely applying for grants, I would read the winner lists and so many of them had fulltime tenured jobs. That slayed me. How can this be? How do such greedmeisters live with themselves . . . Never mind :).
I'm not sure we have "stars." I think that in the past few decades the English-speaking world - Britain, the United States, Canada - has seen the decline of the poet as cultural hero. Ergo, I haven't noticed that they do slag others, at least in public. I wish they would. Maybe they do it in private?
Maybe you need to get out and about Cyberistically a bit more (while I need to do the opposite :)). You know, I still have that pic of you taking that crispy golden bird out of the oven when you were writing in residence in Edinburgh? Yep. You cook good! But, allow me to conclude with a Paul Anka / Frank Sinatra coda: Regrets?
That I haven't travelled more.
You mean physically, I bet; because, in my measured opinion, you've travelled from point A to Infinity in The Book of Eternity with a sensibility and sensitivity that seldom fail to break the speed limit.
. . . The poem finds life as the poet leads it inexpressibly tedious. The poem wants out. The poem would like to live alone, take light lunches, watch what the wind does to grasses. - "The Poem," The Philosophy of As If
(Hat tips, Robert Morgan and Dr. Ian Lancashire.)
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MUSE NEWS YOU CAN USE: Speaking of poetry and editors, you may find Kimiko Hahn's piece entitled "A Poet and Her Editor" worthy of a cyber-peek-see . . . BTW, later this same day @ 7:30? Diaspora Dialogues launches the fifth book in its anthology series, TOK: Writing the New Toronto @ the Bram and Bluma Appel Salon, Toronto Reference Library (789 Yonge Street) featuring readings and lively conversation with contributors Shyam Selvadurai, Emma Donoghue, Marjorie Chan, Mayank Bhatt, Marni Van Dyk, Michael Fraser and Chang Liu (N/C) . . . An exquisitely conceived and brilliantly executed piece on the letters of T. S. Eliot by Eric Griffiths in the TLS will leave you breathless with delight . . . The always entertaining and musie-newsy Alison Flood @ The Guardian reports on the way in which Hull plans to honour the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death with a toady-type tribute come July 17th . . . Poetry's smokin' hot in Hamburg, Germany :) . . . Nobel Laureate and Essex Poetry Professor Derek Walcott's no-bulloney approach to the nuts and bolts (or art and craft) of making a beautiful thing, paradoxically, earns him an immense amount of clearly deserved respect (especially after he tells one of his students that he should take them outside and execute them as well as opining the "best songs are poems - by people like Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen") . . . Revered Rane Arroyo's finest obituary includes a lovely comment left for readers by his clearly grief-shattered brother in The Toledo Freep . . . Hrm . . . ARE pop lyrics literature? . . . Stephen Burt wonders if "there's more to life than poetry" in one of the current articles featured @ The Poetry Foundation's always sublime online repository, this one entitled "Art versus Laundry." (Personally? I covet that washing machine; bet it would keep my durty prose rally rally clean! :))
Photograph of Fraser Sutherland © Danielle Schaub. All Rights Reserved.