Phyllis Webb is a poet I have known of for a long time, but whose poems I have never spent much time with. I am not sure why this is. Maybe it has more to do with the how -- not the when -- I get around to reading certain writers.
A few years ago I was in Pulp Fiction Books when Chris showed me a copy of Webb's Wilson's Bowl (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980). The book had just come into the store and I noted right away how lovingly it was put together. Nice paper, nice printing, nice endorsements from Northrop Frye, bpNichol, D.G. Jones and Margaret Atwood.
Wilson's Bowl begins with a "Foreword" by Webb that begins with a quote from Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse (1977) (published in English in 1979, a year before Wilson's Bowl). Rather than set off as an epigraph, the quote is imbedded in the body of the text, a decision (the poet's, I'm sure) that had bearing on my reading of the "Foreword". Something else that had bearing was John Bentley May's essay on Webb's work in a 1973 issue of Open Letter, an essay I had never read (until yesterday) but was aware of -- and reminded of when, in accounting for why Wilson's Bowl was "a long time coming," Webb referred to "critical wounds."
No, I thought to myself, I can't read Wilson's Bowl just yet -- I have to start at the beginning. Which I did the day after I picked up her collected at the People's Co-op Bookstore last Saturday, beginning with her first book, Trio (1954), followed by Even Your Right Eye (1956), The Sea Is Also a Garden (1962) and her last book before Wilson's Bowl, one of the most remarkable book-length poems I have ever read: Naked Poems (1965).
Naked Poems has its own entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia. Written by Douglas Barbour, it contains a quote from Robert Kroetsch that Barbour believes is "perhaps the finest and most concise statement about this innovative and concise work."
Kroetsch writes:
"On nakedness and lyric and yet on a way out, perhaps a way out of the lyric too, with its ferocious principles of closure, a being compelled out of lyric by lyric."
I agree, particularly the poems in "Suite I" and "Suite II". Reading them I was reminded of how I felt when, as first year undergrad, I read X. J. Kennedy's ekphrastic ode to Marcel Duchamp's 1912 painting in my Norton, his "Nude Descending a Staircase" (1961) -- the woman who "wears/ Her slow descent like a long cape/ And pausing on the final stair/ Collects her motions into shape."
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