Bewilderment and Wonder

A few years ago, or a little more, Don McKay was everywhere. His final book of the last millennium, Another Gravity (2000), won the Governor General’s Award for poetry; an earlier volume, Night Field (1991), had attained the same recognition at the start of the decade. In 2004 he published Camber, a splendid selection of poems drawn from the period bookended by Birding, or Desire (1983) and Another Gravity: a milestone in an already distinguished career. His subsequent collection of new poems, Strike/Slip (2006), won the Griffin Prize. These books were all issued by McClelland & Stewart, the most prestigious literary publisher in the country. In the small world of Canadian poetry, McKay was a bona fide star.

In the time between Another Gravity and Strike/Slip, McKay published two volumes of essays—essays verging on poems, really—with Gaspereau Press: Vis à Vis (2001) and Deactivated West 100 (2005). In addition to their literary merits, the books helped establish and consolidate the reputation of Gaspereau as the publisher of choice for a lyrical strain of environmentally oriented writing. In a moment of enthusiasm for ecological approaches to Canadian literature, McKay’s works were examined in a spate of scholarly articles and a cluster of dissertations, one of which eventually became what is to date the most sustained and perceptive account of its subject, Travis V. Mason’s Ornithologies of Desire (2013). Perhaps even more so than his poetry, McKay’s genial but penetrating essays on environmental themes were embraced by readers. One passage in particular, in which McKay proposed an extraordinary definition of wilderness, was quoted endlessly by approving critics, among them graduate students eager to breathe life into the hoary, hoarfrosted topic of nature poetry. If I sound facetious, it is only because I was one of them.

But like a bar-tailed godwit or a sooty shearwater, time flies. For various reasons, including the shrivelled academic job market as well as ordinary shifts in scholarly fashion, ecocriticism remained on the periphery of Canadian literary studies as the 2000s turned into the 2010s and 2020s. My sense in those years was that McKay had faded from view. Paradoxides, a volume of new poems, appeared in 2012, and it was followed two years later by Angular Unconformity, a massive edition of his collected poems, the odd title alluding to a geological feature. But neither book attracted much notice. Al Purdy once wrote that a “‘collected poems’ is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival” (596), and although in McKay’s case reports of the death of the author were exaggerated, I was inclined to believe that Angular Unconformity marked the end of a period of interest in his writing rather than the start of a new phase.

Maybe I was just out of touch. In 2020, McKay published another book of essays, All New Animal Acts, while the next year brought a collection of poems, Lurch. The pair of books provides ample evidence that McKay is alive, well, and in much the same form as a decade or so ago. All New Animal Acts contains six short essays, two poems about fossils with commentary, and two stretchers—a term for “tall tale” borrowed from Mark Twain (All New 51). Embedded in the essays or appended to them are additional poems: “Morphogenesis, Etc.,” “Epilogue,” “Suddenly, at Home.” Like McKay’s earlier books of prose (or prose plus), All New Animal Acts is formally neither one thing nor another. Its variety makes me think of his description of lichens, composite organisms that are neither fungi nor plants but made of both, as a metaphor consists of tenor and vehicle: “lichens are naturally occurring koans, puzzles placed in our path to shift our paradigms of thinking and help us into fresh spaces in the contemplation of life forms, natural systems, language, and ultimately the organ we are contemplating them with” (11). “The world is full of wonders,” McKay notes elsewhere; “lichens remind us that it is just as full of bewilderments” (25). (In “The Bushtits’ Nest,” from Vis à Vis, lichens are, in a description adopted from the lichenologist Trevor Goward [105], “fungi that practice agriculture” [106].) His essays, stretchers, and poems are not found in nature, in the manner of lichens, but they are paradigm-shifting puzzles, oscillating with their readers between bewilderment and wonder.

McKay’s usual interests are apparent throughout All New Animal Acts. The essays touch on deep time, Greek mythology, theories of metaphor, the Anthropocene, Taoism, the geology and vernacular English of Newfoundland, fossils, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. (In the poem “Kestrels,” McKay writes of “sprung rhythm and / surprises” [Birding 99].) He tends not to linger on such subjects, instead establishing connections between seemingly unrelated matters, but despite the eccentricity of his fascinations and the occasional nature of certain essays, the book is lent a degree of coherence by his persistent concerns: time scales that stagger the imagination, the function of poetic language, and the state of simultaneous union with and estrangement from the world, which, for McKay, characterizes human existence. “Language is inescapably (wonderfully) anthropoid,” he writes, “the way wings are inescapably (wonderfully) avian. Phrasing the issue like that foregrounds the paradox that lies at the heart of ecological writing, which so often tries to convey, through linguistic means, the extra-linguistic condition” (All New 120). This paradox has perplexed McKay for decades, giving rise to his distinctive style, in which humour, bathos, and oddball metaphors humanize a poetry preoccupied with the non-human realm.

Proof of continued interest in McKay’s works is found, meanwhile, in another recent book, Mark Dickinson’s Canadian Primal (2021), a group biography of five poets: McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, and Jan Zwicky. Dickinson concentrates on the lives of the authors, not on “critical disputations of their work”: “Interrupting a life narrative to critique the artistic and intellectual products of that life strikes me as ungenerous,” he writes (xvi). Those of us professionally mortified by the parasitic aspect of criticism, or too timid to venture beyond the book, can only admire the gumption and exertion at the heart of Dickinson’s study. (I have in mind a remark made by Frank Lentricchia: “while the New Criticism taught us to read, it simultaneously taught us how to subordinate our reading powers and humble ourselves before the ‘creative’ authority of an ontologically superior primary writing. (The bibliographical convention of distinguishing between primary and secondary texts is here politically symptomatic)” [139].) Both despite and because of its biographical inclination, Canadian Primal is the new point of departure for studies of the five writers and their works, and more broadly for contemporary ecological writing in Canada. Dickinson contends that the poets “offer the rarest of gifts: a cure for the sense of rootlessness and the inability to perceive meaning in the world around us that drives so much of our predatory behaviour as a modern civilization” (xiii–xiv). This passage appears in his preface, which concludes with the last words of McKay’s “Song for the Song of the Chipping Sparrow,” a poem from Strike/Slip: “Let’s go. / For we shall be changed” (McKay 25; qtd. in Dickinson xvi). The lines in context refer to bursting into song, but Dickinson assigns them greater and more general significance, and it is hard not to hear in the preface a distant echo of Rilke’s “Du mußt dein Leben ändern”: “You must change your life” (60, 61).

The eye-catching redefinition of wilderness to which I’ve referred above appears in McKay’s “Baler Twine,” an essay from the 1990s reprinted in Vis à Vis (see McKay, “Baler”). The essential statement is brief—“By ‘wilderness’ I want to mean, not just a set of endangered spaces, but the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations”—but the paragraph in question is worth quoting in full in order to elucidate the idea and to illustrate McKay’s style:

By “wilderness” I want to mean, not just a set of endangered spaces, but the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations. That tools retain a vestige of wilderness is especially evident when we think of their existence in time and eventual graduation from utility: breakdown. To what degree do we own our houses, hammers, dogs? Beyond that line lies wilderness. We probably experience its presence most often in the negative as dry rot in the basement, a splintered handle, or shit on the carpet. But there is also the sudden angle of perception, the phenomenal surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments of haiku and imagism. The coat hanger asks a question; the armchair is suddenly crouched: in such defamiliarizations, often arranged by art, we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy—its rawness, its duende, its alien being. (Vis à Vis 21)

In common usage, wilderness and nature are roughly synonymous, both terms referring, if vaguely, to something out there beyond us and our control—a green world of the imagination that encompasses a local park and the Great Bear Rainforest alike. If the terms and concepts are divorced, however, and if wilderness is used in a conceptual rather than a geographical sense, then exposure to wilderness is rendered utterly democratic. That is, if wilderness is created by a misbehaving pet or by fungus in a poorly ventilated room, then the so-called nature writer (or reader) need not have explored every corner of the North Maine Woods or the remotest ranges of the Western Cordillera to have confronted wilderness. There is, in fact, no need to go outside at all. McKay’s essay suggests that a connection between wilderness-as-place and wilderness-as-phenomenon is coincidental rather than necessary. Wilderness may be close at hand, threatening only in a philosophical sense. There are few ravenous beasts or yawning crevasses in McKay’s poetry.

I have read “Baler Twine” two dozen times at least; I teach the essay year in, year out. Still, I find it difficult to reconcile my appreciation of wilderness in a conventional sense with McKay’s “defamiliarizations.” I’ve cleaned up my share of shit, and although I concede that there is “phenomenal surprise” in the undertaking, which might be useful to thinking and perhaps even poetry, I would prefer to watch the waves crashing over Incinerator Rock in Pacific Rim National Park (the setting, by the way, of McKay’s superb “Winter Solstice Moon: An Eclogue,” from Another Gravity). In All New Animal Acts, McKay continues to ponder the idea of wilderness, at times with reference to such commentators as Jane Bennett and William Cronon. He allows that the concept is bound by time and place—wilderness as social construction—but insists on the powerful reality of phenomena beyond language:

Few would care to dispute the fact that cases of socially constructed wilderness are hard to avoid. Just standing in downtown Banff, or reading a brochure advertising a “genuine wilderness experience” (with senior’s discount) in the Arctic or the Galapagos, or taking a course on “The Concept of Wilderness in Western Culture,” we are not only aware of such construction, we’re carpenters in the enterprise. But let us imagine ourselves outside circumstances like those, on a trail attending to birdsong, say, or tending a fire, or—to cite extreme instances outside stock Romantic epiphany—engaged in the process of giving birth or dying. Then wilderness isn’t something you think, but something that thinks you, a process that gathers you up and carries you, whether or not you have, just a few days previously, deconstructed the notion in your critical theory seminar. (All New 124–25)

Here as in “Baler Twine,” wilderness is said to occur everywhere, not least in its “extreme” manifestations: no life is untouched by birth and death (124). Yet as McKay’s own poetry often indicates, natural places permit more immediate and usually more manageable access to “rawness,” “duende,” and “alien being” (Vis à Vis 21). Even if wilderness is not confined to the wild, it may be more easily witnessed on a “coastal trail,” which offers “the prospect of cosmogony / writ suddenly and large” (“First Philosophies,” Strike/Slip 26)—or on a mountaintop, where you might glimpse “the improv / at the heart of things” (“Ravens at Play over Mount Work,” Paradoxides 11). Trails, summits, and beaches place their visitors in contact with natural beauty and, sometimes, provide the experience of a relatively minimal human presence. They are valuable and pleasurable on their own terms; at the same time, they exist, for McKay, on a continuum with the extremities and ordinarinesses of daily human life.

You must change your life. In an essay on the poet Margaret Avison, McKay remembers his time as an undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario and suggests the promise of transformation held out by certain modes of poetry: “We’d studied the Romantics; we knew about imaginative re-creation through Shelley and Blake. But here was an actual, live, Canadian visionary, able to inhabit an urban inferno as banal as Toronto, to characterize its deadening malaise poetically and overcome it with supremely agile acts of attention” (All New 63–64). I admit that the literature about which Dickinson writes in Canadian Primal, McKay’s poetry included, has for me been life-changing, but the notion of a poetic cure, whether for personal or cultural ills, nonetheless gives me pause. Transformation is a lot to ask of any art or artist, in part because of the simple fact that tastes vary. Who hasn’t suffered the small humiliation of pressing a favourite book into the hands of a friend or colleague, only to have it returned days or months later with bemusement or worse?

More serious is a political matter that accompanies all aspects of environmentalism, literary and otherwise, in Canada and the United States. Dickinson understands perfectly well that Canadians “live in a civilization based on the outrageous theft of the land and the persecution of those closest to it” (237), but regardless of the accomplishments of the poets on whom he focuses, the argument can be made that those who desire sustainability and environmental justice should listen to Indigenous writers and political leaders in the first instance—and not, to indulge for a moment in caricature, to white boomers equipped with binoculars and dog-eared translations of Sein und Zeit. Such authors as Jenna Butler, Camille Dungy, and Robin Wall Kimmerer have, moreover, changed the very idea of nature writing (not that it was ever wholly fixed) and expectations of who a nature writer might be. Indeed, one of the epigraphs in All New Animal Acts is taken from Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: “The very facts of the world are a poem” (Kimmerer 345; qtd. in McKay, All New 9). A changing context for the reception of traditional nature writing is further suggested by the Sierra Club’s repudiation in 2020 of John Muir, a founding figure (see Brune); although it has long been understood in scholarly circles that Muir was a man of his time, to use a trite phrase, the failings of the historical eminences of the environmentalist movement are increasingly in public view. It is now widely accepted that in North America ideas of wilderness as unoccupied, pristine space have obscured the displacement of Indigenous peoples from territories that were in actuality carefully managed and often cultivated domains, and that the reification of such ideas in the form of national parks and similarly protected areas was achieved by the expulsion of the original inhabitants of the lands.

In McKay’s body of work there is with rare exception little explicit condemnation of our getting and spending, and scant mention of major episodes in the environmentalist struggle. All New Animal Acts may seem far removed from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016 and 2017, for example, or the blockade at Fairy Creek in the summer of 2021. Fairy Creek belongs to the part of southern Vancouver Island that McKay roams in Deactivated West 100 and Strike/Slip, and it has become impossible for me to teach the books without placing them in the acquired context of police violence and Pacheedaht sovereignty. But in the classroom, I seek to show that McKay’s works are more pertinent and urgent than their seemingly apolitical quality suggests. Their relevance lies in their probing of the assumptions, the habits of mind and culture, that engender such abstractions as wilderness, natural resources, park, and Crown land, or, in the terminology of the poem “Stumpage,” “harvest, regen, working / forest” (Strike/Slip 22)—abstractions that circulate in social and political discourse and acquire material significance. As every weary student knows, poets say one thing but mean another. Yet as McKay writes, that ironic condition has an intrinsically political dimension:

Poetry—any poetry—is always political and subversive because it uses language, our foremost technological tool, against its powers of mastery and control. In poetry, language discovers its eros. In poetry, language is always a singer as well as a thinker, a lover as well as an engineer. Language delights in its own being as though it were an otter or a raven and not just the vice president in charge of making sense. (All New 102)

And in a delicious paradox, the study of literary language and its indirections prepares us to speak clearly and forcefully on matters of public concern. A poem about logging, such as McKay’s “Après Chainsaw,” from Strike/Slip, will in itself have negligible influence on the Government of British Columbia or the Teal-Jones timber and lumber company. Yet to examine that same poem in detail is to be plunged into a consideration of topics, from romantic aesthetics to the ecology of clearcuts, that bear on the question of sustainability. As a poem, it resists being reduced to a message or statement, but no student, I believe, emerges unchanged from a careful reading of it. The same principle applies to All New Animal Acts, which, apart from the sheer delight of its language, both asserts and demonstrates the importance of ecological writing. McKay never really disappeared, but I am glad that he came back.

Works Cited

Brune, Michael. “Pulling Down Our Monuments.” Sierra Club, 22 July 2020, www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club.

Dickinson, Mark. Canadian Primal: Poets, Places, and the Music of Meaning. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2021.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Lentricchia, Frank. “How to Do Things with Wallace Stevens.” Close Reading: The Reader, edited by Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, Duke UP, 2003, 136–55.

Mason, Travis V. Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013.

McKay, Don. All New Animal Acts: Essays, Stretchers, Poems. Gaspereau, 2020.

—. Angular Unconformity: Collected Poems, 1970–2014. icehouse poetry, 2014.

—. Another Gravity. McClelland & Stewart, 2000.

—. “Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home, and Nature Poetry.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, vol. 18, no. 1, 1993, pp. 128–38.

—. Birding, or Desire: Poems. McClelland & Stewart, 1983.

—. Camber: Selected Poems, 1983–2000. McClelland & Stewart, 2004.

—. Deactivated West 100. Gaspereau Press, 2005.

—. Lurch: Poems. McClelland & Stewart, 2021.

—. Night Field: Poems. McClelland & Stewart, 1991.

—. Paradoxides: Poems. McClelland & Stewart, 2012.

—. Strike/Slip. McClelland & Stewart, 2006.

—. Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness. Gaspereau Press, 2001.

Purdy, Al. “To See the Shore.” 1986. Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, edited by Sam Solecki, Harbour Publishing, 2000, 593–97.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, Random House, 1982.

Shepherd, Kelly. Review of Canadian Primal: Poets, Places, and the Music of Meaning, by Mark Dickinson. The Trumpeter, vol. 38, no. 1, 2022, pp. 123–27.