22/3/85
Nothing pleases a
perfect wife, nothing. I told that to the blizzard.
The blizzard shrieked
with laughter. Since then I’ve travelled often
to strange places,
rain forests and tropical islands. I’m planning a
collection of turtle
eggs.
Robert Kroetsch, Excerpts from
the Real World
A writer friend responds in an email,
recommending I step back from wedding plans, and admit that the day is about
her, and not us. He was much happier when he finally realized the same, and let
his beloved proceed as she wished. Perhaps this is cynical, perhaps this is
simply the difference between his wife and my soon-to-be, not in the least bit
worried about either of us pulling too far in either direction, or tear at the
other. How does one proceed? As Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once famously
asked, How do you write, how do you make love in a new country? If, as
Saskatchewan poet John Newlove wrote, the past is a foreign country,
then the future as well, a fresh space in which to spread out, take root.
Kroetsch says much about desire, but little
about marriage. What is this, I wonder. In the title sequence of Advice to
My Friends (Stoddart, 1985), he slips two in the middle, poems composed
around and about a wedding reception. “At the wedding reception, such as it is,
/ How Morenz is asked to say a few words.” A wedding poem, wedding song,
interrupted enough by the narrator and the subsequent action that a second poem
is required. An epithalamium interrupted by a (Greek) chorus of mischievous
ghazals. Just how much might Kroetsch have known about the Greeks? Quite a lot,
I’d suspect. Never lonesome, in detail.
8. Wedding
Dance, Country-Style
This will not be, Mr.
Ondaatje explains,
your standard epithalamium.
He is taking
pictures, both in
colour and black and white.
The bride and the
bridegroom are dancing.
Actually, everyone is
dancing. George
(which George?) is
dancing, with Gertrude Stein.
All of Victoria,
later, expresses embarrassment,
but the dance, the
dance is full of marvels.
Roy Kiyooka arrives
by balloon. He drops in
for a polka. He is
the only person who brings
an escape plan as a
gift. It is a collage
of 1,243 pages, in
code, with maps and diagrams,
all of which Mr.
Ondaatje photographs
as part of the
epithalamium, and the ecstatic
document, in arrest,
has about it the air
of a painting of a
forest exploding into light,
or of a hockey game,
under the lights, exploding.
But the dance, the
dance is the first decoding.
Consider his volume of poem/journal entries, Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), written ostensibly as letter-poems
to his then-wife, Smaro Kamboureli, during the period she was in Greece
composing her own journal, in the second person (Longspoon, 1985).
Kamboureli wrote a book about returning to Greece, and Kroetsch wrote a book
about Smaro, returning to Greece. Hers less a journal of longing than a book of
exploration, retracing her steps and working out what she’d learned. “December
5, 1983. Winnipeg is my home. I am writing my dissertation on the Canadian long
poem. I am married to a Canadian. I dream in English. I write in English. And
I’ve become a landed immigrant today. A status that legalizes my feelings about
this city, about Canada, that allows me to live permanently where I already
feel at home. But this permanence is provisional. I inhabit a plain that has
many edges.” Hers is a book that edges, as his does, toward their own wedding,
his second. Compare what Kroetsch writes in his, “When you get to Sifnos, take
another look at the house / you mentioned. The one by the chapel. The one that
you / said we might be able to rent a year from now.” to a section near the end
of Kamboureli’s poem-journal:
June 6, 1982
Our plans for our
Greek trip get more and more complicated. Now we’ve added to them the
complications of a wedding between a Greek and a Canadian. We’re all frantic,
but the wedding, of course, may never occur since none of the local authorities
can provide us with the papers that the Greek church demands before it issues
the wedding license. In the meantime, father has sent me the banns already
printed in Macedonia. And mother has included in his letter the design
of the wedding dress that my godmother has offered to make for me.
I phoned them: hold
your horses.
I wonder, whose horses were whom? If these the
same horses Kroetsch wrote about crossing the High Level Bridge in TheStudhorse Man (Simon and Schuster, 1969)? Most likely, not. In one of his
later collections, The Hornbooks of Rita K (University of Alberta Press,
2001), he wrote his male narrator in love with a disappeared poet, the
unpublished Rita Kleinhart. Unfulfilled, a desire that could never achieve, be
disrupted, interrupted, or even deflected. It remains what it is, the perfect image
of desire. It remains a love held in amber.
It is so much easier to love someone who is
gone, and can never change. How immature, archivist. Perhaps I read too much
into? Perhaps this is unfair, on my part. He writes:
We write as a way of
inviting love. Each text is a request that says, please, love me a little.
Rita Kleinhart was an
admirer of snow. Snow, she remarks, is the caress of impossible meanings. Snow
is closure without ending. Snow is the veil that lets us see the shape of the
dream.
Forever returning to the beginning, begin
again, was Kroetsch less confident once he approached those inevitable ends? In
the collection that follows, The Snowbird Poems (University of Alberta
Press, 2004), another male narrator, Snowbird, writes out conversation to and
with a woman, but this time a travel companion, Henrietta. They write out their
names on the beach, in the sand. Writing footprints. They move as a marriage
does, would.
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