Peacock Blue: the Collected Poems (2014)

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."

"Some Final Questions" (1965)

Stopped by the People's Co-op Bookstore yesterday to revel in its ever-expanding poetry section. I don't think there is a Vancouver bookstore with a bigger new-and-used poetry section than the one at the PCB.

Years ago I had a copy of Phyllis Webb's Wilson's Bowl (1980) but lost it or gave it away. In looking for it at PCB I noticed a selected that Webb did with Talon in 1982 called The Vision Tree that includes a thoughtful introduction by Sharon Thesen who, with Erin Mouré, are launching books at the store tonight, 7pm.

Webb's Naked Poems (1965) is well-represented in The Vision Tree. Included is her poem "Some Final Questions". In this piece, which moves from questions concerning sadness, melancholy, pain and desire, Webb finally asks (herself?) "But why don't you do something?" To which she replies (after five carriage returns) "I am trying to write a poem". Following that:

Why?

Listen. I have known beauty

let's say I came to it

asking

And following that, on the final page:

Oh?

"Wayward, natural and unnatural silences"

 A fragment of Phyllis Webb's "Foreword" to Wilson's Bowl (1980):

My poems are born out of great struggles of silence. This book has been long in coming. Wayward, natural and unnatural silences, my desire for privacy, my critical hesitations, my critical wounds, my dissatisfaction with myself and the work have all contributed to a strange gestation.