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Wilfrid Laurier University Press - Don Mckay

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70 pages

English

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This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay’s best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Méira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay’s afterword written especially for this volume in which McKay reflects on his own writing process—its relationship to the earth and to metamorphosis.

Don McKay has published eight books of poetry. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1991 (for Night Field) and in 2000 (for Another Gravity), a National Magazine Award (1991), and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 1984 (for Birding, Or Desire). Don McKay was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize for Camber and was the Canadian winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip. Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, McKay has been active as an editor, creative writing teacher, and university instructor, as well as a poet. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of New Brunswick, The Banff Centre, The Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the BC Festival of the Arts. He has served as editor and publisher of Brick Books since 1975 and from 1991 to 1996 as editor of The Fiddlehead. He resides in British Columbia.

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Poetry

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Publié par	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Date de parution	02 août 2009
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781554586585
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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Field Marks
The Poetry of Don McKay
Field Marks
The Poetry of Don McKay
Selected
with an
introduction by
M ira Cook
and an
afterword by
Don McKay
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McKay, Don, 1942-
Field marks: the poetry of Don McKay / selected, with an introduction by M ira Cook; and an afterword by Don McKay.
(Laurier poetry series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN -13: 978-0-88920-494-2
ISBN- 10: 0-88920-494-2
i.Cook, M ira, 1964- ii. Title. iii. Series.
ps8575.k28f518 2006 c811 .54 c2006-901198-2
2006 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada n2l 3c5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover image: Brian Henderson. Quail , 1999. Colour photo.
Cover and text design by P.J. Woodland.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.

This book is printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper.
Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Table of Contents
Foreword, Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction: Song for the Song of the Dogged Birdwatcher, M ira Cook
Down River, Into the Camp
At the Long Sault Parkway
The Great Blue Heron
The Eye Meets Tom Thomson s A Rapid
The Trout
August
Lependu nearly materialized by his blackbirds
Field Marks:
Leaving
The Boy s Own Guide to Dream Birds
I Scream You Scream
Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow
Field Marks (2):
Identification
VIA, Eastbound
Buckling
Some Functions of a Leaf
How to Imagine an Albatross
from Black Spruce
Another Theory of Dusk
Meditation on a Geode
Choosing the Bow
Meditation on Shovels
Poplar
Early Instruments
Twinflower
Alibi
Materiel: (i) The Man from Nod
(ii) Fates Worse Than Death
Setting the Table: (i) Knife
(ii) Fork
(iii) Spoon
Sometimes a Voice (1)
Load
Luna Moth Meditation
Hush Factor
Sometimes a Voice (2)
Astonished-
Afterword: The Shell of the Tortoise, by Don McKay
Acknowledgements
Foreword
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada-writing and publishing it, reading and thinking about it-finds itself in a strangely conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don t need to be rehearsed.
But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues-in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media-and there needs to be more, and more different kinds of publications, that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available.
The hope that animates this new series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is that these volumes will help to create and sustain the larger reader-ship that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly be better known at home.
Our idea has been to ask a critic (sometimes herself a poet) to select thirty-five poems from across a poet s career; write an engaging, accessible introduction; and have the poet write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology will be much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet s work. Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope, the connections among, as well as the distances between, the life and the work.
It was the ending of an Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the epigraph for The Diviners : but they had their being once / and left a place to stand on. Our poets still do, and they are leaving many places to stand on. We hope that this series will help, variously, to show how and why this is so.
-Neil Besner General Editor
Biographical Note
Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, in 1942, Don McKay was educated at the universities of Western Ontario and Wales, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1971. He taught English and Creative Writing at Western and the University of New Brunswick for twenty-seven years before retiring to write poetry full time. McKay has long enjoyed a celebrated reputation as a mentor to other writers; he has worked at the Sage Hill Writing Experience in Saskatchewan and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has also been prominent as an editor and a publisher: with Stan Dragland, he was the founding publisher and editor in 1975 of the small Ontario press Brick Books, one of Canada s leading poetry presses, and he edited the well-known literary journal The Fiddlehead at the University of New Brunswick from 1991-96. After his teaching career, McKay settled in Victoria with his partner, the poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky.
McKay s poetry has won many honours and prizes, including two Governor General s awards, for Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000). He was nominated for the prestigious Griffin Prize in 2004. His first book of poems, Air Occupies Space , appeared in 1973; other volumes include Long Sault (1975), Lependu (1978), Lightning Ball Bait (1980), Birding, or Desire (1983), Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night (1987), Night Field (1991), Apparatus (1997), Another Gravity (2000), and the chapbook, Varves (2003). His most recent book is the collection Camber: Selected Poems 1983 - 2000 (2004).
Introduction
Song for the Song of the Dogged Birdwatcher
Award-winning poet, essayist, critic, beloved teacher and professor, Don McKay taught English and creative writing at The University of Western Ontario and the University of New Brunswick before moving to Victoria with his partner, acclaimed poet Jan Zwicky. McKay has worked as poetry editor for The Fiddlehead magazine, manuscript reader for Brick Books, and poetry facilitator at The Banff Centre; he has twice won the Governor General s Award, for Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000). Readers, students, browsers, and loiterers between the pages of McKay s poems are fortunate in their access to a fine poet who is lyrical, wise, and winsome in his writings on nature, birdwatching, wilderness poetics, and the homing instinct in, amongst other things, his eccentrically philosophical field guide Vis- -Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness (2001). Although bonded by nothing so categorical as a school, McKay s environmental poetics, his peculiarly gentle, un-grasping, disowning brand of nature poetry has often been grouped with that of poets such as Tim Lilburn, Dennis Lee, Roo Borson, Robert Bringhurst, and Jan Zwicky-ecologically centred poets inspired by the conflict between inspiration and gnosis, instinct and knowledge.
On Birding
Sparrows burning
bright bright bright against the wind
- Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow
( Birding, or Desire )
McKay is an avid birdwatcher, and his poetry is alive, bright , with the presence of birds- imagined, metaphoric, in flight, grounded, winging it across southern Ontario skies or pressed, wildflower-like, between the stern pages of the hobbyist s field guide: The Birds of Canada . Indeed, this reference guide becomes something of a quirky leitmotif entangled in the pages of Birding as its earnest, binocular-gazing protagonist lopes across fields and streams, peering into thickets and over hillocks. The point, as many critics have remarked (Bondar, Elmslie, Oughton), is that McKay s self-effacing poetic persona is never far from this slightly stumbling, stooped and wandering, peripatetic birdwatcher. Birding- implying the act of watching birds and the act of being a bird- hints at a presumptive metamorphosis from which McKay s persona swiftly dissociates himself. For this humble watcher, birding (like reading, like writing poetry) is an act of attentiveness, a working poetic in which the attendee discovers but never appropriates the wilderness world. Gingerly, tactfully, reverently, McKay s watcher never becomes bird.
Who, then, is the birdwatcher? Or, rather, who is the poetic persona in his guise of birdwatcher preoccupied in translating the free-fall and thrall, the lift of bird into language, that allows us to imagine the feathered imperative of draft and drift, that locates our readerly flight path, our freedom to fly or fall? Oblique, evasive, learned, witty, wry, whimsical, McKay s birder is viewer rather than voyeur, his place in language, in landscape, a subtly achieved, precariously wrestled subject position in which poetic flight constitutes the sum of knowing where and how to land within language (Bondar 20). The characteristic sideways lope of such poetry depends upon an eccentric point of view, serviced by a compassionate yet utterly cu