The Small November: Six anti-ghazals for Phyllis Webb

(1927-2021)

 

1.

The distance                     houses. Ninety-four years,
deliberating Ideas, backstage with Leonard,

or crafting failure, enough
until it, too, could sing.                Hermetic sounds.

Artifacts of blessings, common good.

The echo reflects    across the imprint

of such ancient curve. A bowl, perhaps. This stone
upon the question.

To revise on paper and endlessly           think.

 

2.

No writer                an island. A stone’s throw
seeking tether,         shorelines. On Salt Spring,

where she lay                    books aside.

A correspondence             : the small hand
of an outpost. Fierce, and fiery. A copy of her essays,

signed. A wedding present. The closing pages 

held, and scattered. Fell     , against this
floating detour.

  

3.

The argument of moments                              , memorials.
Monuments. John Newlove, also. Cross-legged

in a room. The memo                           of an artifact. Naked.
To highlight care, and gentleness. Two ladybirds, spin.

This texture of blossoms. Sundeck. A space of intimacy,
to land on spitting dust. Ascribe the mainland. Long shadow, gulf.

The paintbrush                                      or the shutter.

Capacity                            of the single page.
Where you have left                               your mark.

  

4.

My mentors are dying. Friends. Douglas Barbour, Joe Blades,
David Donnell. Incomparable speech.

Michael Dennis. Bless your cotton socks.

Cold             , this curse of weather. Green island grass.
A footpath, there, approaching Royal Canadian Legion Branch 92.

Illumination, illumination. More than I have. More
than I might comprehend.

A cobweb, across              the field of the sayable,
towards the white frame.

  

5.

Gerald Manley Hopkins: “I am happy, so happy.” Last words,
set against a silence. Certified, crafted. Coiled.           As careful

as a phrase. Iambic pleasure. Brief candle, pen. Lone typescript.
Salt Spring Garbage Services                 : what saturated air

; this modest shed of mildewed paperbacks.

Her hand-scrawled autograph                decorating discards.
Island restoration, salvage                     , refreshed

and undiminished. Books, perpetual                          ; released
into the undercurrent.

  

6.

Heidegger, Heidegger. The wood          still split.
Her brother’s gift of scotch. The ferry, lace

and thread. An ebb. An alphabet

of broken skin. Meniscus. This daylight spread
like plush. We watch this morning passenger, port

into the unfamiliar. Alongside.    We watch
it occupy both absence,

space. This              peacock blue.
This crest and curl. We chase the furrows.

Stephen Collis, Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten

            I come to Phyllis for the possibilities of despair, for endurance, for the potentiality that remains in determined resignation (I can’t go on / I will go on). And for her poems on Lenin and Kropotkin and the persistent and potent failures of our revolutionary dreams – which to me always seem less failures than they do as-yet-unrealized potentialities, inviting, waiting just out of reach, lost and wandering somewhere in the labyrinth of the No. If the poem of the revolution remains unwritten, a failure, is it because the revolution itself remains unwritten, unfulfilled, an incomplete series of failed attempts?

Going through Vancouver poet, editor, critic and troublemaker Stephen Collis’ new Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018), I’m struck at how remarkable it is that such a book like this exists: a critical memoir on writing, thinking and, as the title suggests, the unwritten – the almost and not written, and the never written. As Collis writes early on in the book, citing his attraction to Phyllis Webb, her work and her silence: “A certain terror attracts me too: that, as Phyllis Webb says, ‘words abandoned’ her – and I have so thoroughly constructed my identity as ‘poet’ that I know no greater fear than that abandonment – even though I have barely eve for a moment been able to stem the flood of words rushing through me for decades now, hypergraphically putting pen to paper each and every day, filling journal after journal. Even though she herself is the embodiment of the ability to survive the loss of words – and still be a poet, almost three decades after this silence descended – still a poet in the very fabric of her nonagenarian being.”

Given this is the second book by Collis on Webb’s work – after the 2007 title Phyllis Webb and the Common Good: Poetry /Anarchy / Abstraction (Talonbooks) – he might be coming dangerously close to producing as many pages on her and her work as she herself has published (see the 514 pages of her 2014 title, Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems, also from Talon). Her silence, as when the poems left her some three decades ago, is infamous, with each new collection of poems emerging after a longer period of silence than the one prior. While some readers still hold out a hope for new poems, most of us most likely know that the idea of that might be completely impossible (I had held out similar hopes for John Newlove, Artie Gold, David Phillips and D.G. Jones). Either way, one can take solace in the fact that Peacock Blue even exists, given her reluctance a decade earlier to publish a selected poems through Salt Publishing, a project Douglas Barbour had tried for some time to instigate.

            One can, perhaps, become a poet simply because one stumbles upon the right poem – even simply the right line of poetry – at the right time and place. Miss that particular arrangement of words on paper, at that particular moment, and perhaps the turn toward poetry would never have happened. For me, the turn was simply the strangeness and utter inexplicability of an oddly shaped book jutting off a used-bookstore shelf – discovered by chance, so it seems – filled with words I barely understood (some of them in ancient Greek in fact) arbitrarily splayed across its broad pages, its often isolate words surrounded by blank paper. It was the complete objecthood of the book, its unreadable thingness, that led me. I made a choice, or was chosen, and wrote back to that unreadability.

Through describing visits out to see Webb on Salt Spring Island, Collis opens with explorations of Webb’s most recent work and slowly moves backwards, almost unraveling a series of threads from failure to becoming, writing her history in reverse. While seeking out answers, Collis appears instead to seek to understand the connections Webb’s writing (and not-writing) make to the larger outside world, from her influences and references, the geographies of her islands and the Indigenous populations there, to anarchism and the anthropocene.

Almost Islands is a thoroughly-researched and considered book, and feels at times that he is so aware of his subject that the connections that might not have been otherwise made are simply, and casually, at Collis’ fingertips. Ideas, images and details click together, perfectly focused and purely described. Moving through Webb’s writing, research, interests and even her biography, Collis’ memoir is slightly deceptive: inasmuch as he writes a book about Phyllis Webb, exploring her work, her politics and her silence, it is also a deeply personal memoir about Collis’ own concerns of, and anxieties around, mortality, ecology, politics, anarchism and his own writing and potential silences. In that way, Almost Islands exists as a remarkably personal and most wonderful blend of essay and memoir, comparable to the best of works by writers such as Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, Elisa Gabbert, Brian Fawcett, Myrna Kostash, Elizabeth Hay (her first three books remain my favourite) and so many others that have worked their own blend of essay/memoir into something that transcends the form itself.

I don’t know that it’s appropriate to say that I have a “thesis.” It’s more a curiosity. In the 1960s Phyllis Webb sets out to write a book of long-lined poems with epic reach on Kropotkin. She makes little headway. In the silence following this stalled effort, through the 1970s living alone on Salt Spring Island, she becomes interested in Indigenous petroglyphs. She befriends local resident Beth Hill, author of Guide to Indian Rock Carvings of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Hancock House, 1975). And she comes into the orbit of two other people obsessed with Indigenous art – University of British Columbia anthropologist Wilson Duff and retired librarian and Salt Spring resident Lilo Berliner. Duff and Berliner both commit suicide within months of each other, the latter leaving her correspondence with Duff – including their discussions of a key Haida Raven story – on Webb’s doorstep before she walked off into the sea. The impact on the poet of Berliner’s suicide is profound. In 1980 Webb at last publishes a new book, Wilson’s Bowl, which shows the shattered trajectory of her thought and writing over the past fifteen years: fragmentary “Poems of Failure” on Kropotkin, and poems revealing in increasing fascination with Indigenous art and culture, as well as the physical and psychic fact of her residence in a Pacific archipelago, awash in Coast Salish history. To Russia, Suicide, and France we might now add Salt Spring Island, the place of abeyance – the choice of not-choosing.

There is something curious about how Collis writes on Webb, still considered a poet despite her years of inactivity. He writes on the slippery balance of making work and not making work, succumbing so often to the pressures of constant production and publishing set against Webb’s decidedly lack of production over the past three decdaes, and how she is able to maintain such, seemingly without guilt, or regret. What is also fascinating about this book is how thoughtfully it is as much a book on Webb as it is on Collis’ work and anxiety around writing, and the ways in which he could or should continue writing (if he can continue at all). As he writes:

            To read Webb, as I am trying to do, as a bellwether of the complexities of writing poetry on this far-flung and deeply entangled West Coast, is to confront a deeper problematic: How to write as a settler in the wake of colonialism – how to write, in this place, under the signs of liberty and justice, in ways that do not entirely erase the history of erasures? How to locate ourselves in the midst of an unsettling – in the table – and try to follow those threads that can be woven anew into lifetimes of mutuality? But, as poet Christine Stewart once said to me, maybe the question is not, what does it mean to write from here, but rather, what would it mean to stop writing from here? To cede the floor, step back, and truly open what has been closed.

The conversation is absolutely fascinating, and incredibly relevant, especially to my own thinking over the past few years, struggling with my own considerations on what and how to continue in such a climate (I’ve been much of the year attempting to figure out the best way to begin what comes next, after last year’s “the book of smaller” poems). How does one best continue through these conversations in a productive way? Or should one simply step aside, and spend more time reading and listening? In this way, one might consider Almost Islands a culmination of everything Collis had written, published, presented, explored and thought up to this particular point (having authored numerous trade works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including a book-length study of the work of American poet Susan Howe), and a book that not only leads directly to what might come next, but suggests the possibility of his next project, as he writes near the end:

Maybe you don’t always have to write the poem you feel approaching your door. But maybe, sometimes, the poem you write is the unwriting of the poem you don’t.

            I thought, conceive of something so vast and complex, the writing of which would be so time-consuming – an impossible book perpetually knocking at my door – writing it would be like not being able to write at all. A simulation. An indefinite deferral. A sketch of a poem I will not have written. Which I will write, refusing even refusal. That’s the project. Next. I am putting on a brave face.

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair, spring 2013 (part two)

[jwcurry and Michael e. Casteels] See my previous post on this past spring’s ottawa small press book fair, here.

Kingston ON: Kingston poet and publisher Michael e. Casteels participated in the fair this year, bringing a number of publications through his Puddles of Sky Press, including his own work, and Jason Heroux’s recent chapbook In Defense of the Attacked Center Pawn (2013). Reading as part of the pre-fair event the night before the fair itself, he opened with pieces from his chapbook of prose poems, The Robot Dreams (Puddles of Sky Press, 2013):

A Brief History of the Ice Age

The primates spot-checked their harpsichords, spoon-fed the plesiosaur, and garrisoned the tax collectors. It was ravenous, living inside a sarcophagus where steam engines glaciated into place, where imperial moths televised the impasse: the rickety mammoth confronting the equatorial scarecrow. The sabre-toothed polarity of the breeze exempted each Neanderthal. The price war syncopated, the stellular vistas fallowed. Symphonies climaxed, entire marching bands faced extinction. Then, the great scraping—all the numbness of an ice cube, erasing the pyramids and the harpoonists, the lily pads, the approaching storm.

The poems in are tight, surreal pieces that show an obvious influence from Stuart Ross and Gary Barwin (both of whom are thanked at the back of the collection), and I’m very taken with what Casteels is doing with the sentence and the shape of the prose poem; there are some amazing things at play through these small pieces, from “Trimming the King’s Beard” to “Just Like Grandma Used to Bake” and “The Incredible Hulk Goes Bowling.” One can see the influences of Barwin and Ross through the titles themselves, from the humour and odd-surrealism, but there is something about how the surreal aspects in Casteel’s work is more subdued and subtle, not allowing it to overtake or distract, but as a soft, through-line. His other recent work from the same press is cemantics: minimalist & concrete poetry (Puddles of Sky Press, November 2012), a chapbook that is exactly what it describes, including explorations of the short poem, some of which are entirely Nelson Ball-like in their brevity, including one titled “Rain.” Is this another Stuart Ross influence at play?

Rain

There is only one sky

in the sky above our heads

and it is full of holes.

Ottawa ON: Always worth paying attention to is the In/Words Magazine and Press table [see my recent piece on In/Words at Open Book: Ontario here], from recent issues of their journal, recent broadsheets they hand out (which echo the above/ground press “poem” broadsides) and their chapbook series. Of their broadsides, they produced a small handful of new publications for the fair, including new poems by Maria Demare (#5, “Catullus 101”), Amanda Earl (#6, “Trieste”), Jeff Blackman (#7, “Song for David Currie”), JM Francheteau (#8, “The Gelding”), Michelle Duquette (#9, “Hello, Nice to Meet You”) and Selina Boan (#10, “Litany”).

Litany

You gather slips of laughter on a breakfast tray. Pestle jars of

seed. Under doorways, balanced atop kettles, stuffing hand

to mouth. Abrade your fingers. Busy yourself with home.

You make scarves, a hat, puffy sweaters. Gathered by years,

set to inaccurate frame after frame you bind hair to wool.

Weave them into one another. A reinvention. Ready Mercy.

We find our baby teeth. Look inside a black film canister.

Listen to it rattle: Remember tooth fairies. Remember when

the house filled with lemon zing, you cooking summer heat,

cherry marmalade and rambling chutney.

One after the other we find your missing parts: Dug up or

stuck under a pot, inside an old rice bag, stitched to a mint

green scarf. Absorbed by puffy garments while we try and fit

you. Maneuver limbs, lift soft arms to the sway of prayer as

you imagine glass elephants and elegant ladies lining

windowsills, tell stories about the queen, tuck self to penny

jars.

You crumble chutney, remove citrus, dissolve to laughter.

From In/Words poet Chris Johnson also came the chapbook Phyllis, I have never spoke your name (In/Words, March 2013), self-described as “one man’s interaction and internalization of months of reading Phyllis Webb and opening his eyes to the inequalities in the world.” This small chapbook, composed and produced for “Feminists and Feminism in Canada / CDNS 3400/WGST 3812 / Sophie Tomas” is an intriguing response, albeit a highly uneven work. I very much like that Johnson is reading the work of Phyllis Webb generally, and that he is responding to Webb’s work through the space of an extended sequence of poems, as a mix of response, homage and exploration:

Phyllis, I have never spoke your name, but

what kind of night am I to wish for?

When her white skin is locked

behind a door, unbloused yet

untouchable; what kind of night

am I to wish for?

View the Premiere Screening of Robert McTavish's "The Line Has Shattered" on March 21 at SFU Woodward's, Vancouver

The Line Has Shattered, a documentary film by Robert McTavish on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, is being premiered on Thursday, March 21st at 7:30pm at the Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, SFU Woodward's, 149 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver. Admission is by donation: $3.00 for students, and $5.00 for others.

The event is being introduced by Canadian Poet Laureate (and '63 conference participant) Fred Wah.

Narrated by poet Phyllis Webb, who chronicled the event at the time, The Line Has Shattered is a sixty-minute documentary film that revisits the '63 Conference and hears from a number of its participants half a century later.

The Vancouver Poetry Conference, hosted by the University of British Columbia in the summer of 1963, is seen by many as a landmark event in the history and development of West Coast Canadian and North American innovative poetry - and indeed a major early manifestation of the Sixties West Coast zeitgeist.

Organized by UBC English professor Warren Tallman and American poet Robert Creeley, the conference was an intense, freewheeling three-week program of discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings at which a rising generation of Canadian and American poets, including George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Jamie Reid, Michael Palmer, and Clark Coolidge, was exposed to and, in many cases, profoundly influenced by the personalities and 'New American' open-form poetics of the visiting poet-instructors Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Margaret Avison.  For many of the student participants the conference played a key role in providing them faith that the pursuit and practice of poetry could constitute a meaningful calling and life's work.

Robert McTavish is a Canadian documentary film-maker whose works include Ghosts on the Land (2001), Fiddler's Map (2003) and What To Make of It All?: The Life and Poetry of John Newlove (2006).  He also edited A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (Chaudiere Books, 2007, afterword by Jeff Derksen) which was hailed by the Globe and Mail as "a fitting monument to the poet's consummate craftsmanship, and a cause for national celebration."

This event is being co-sponsored by SFU Library and English Department, with thanks to the Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

View or print the poster. Contact the library to reserve a seat. For more information, contact Tony Power in Special Collections, 778.782.6676.

Phyllis Webb documentary by Robert McTavish on CBC Radio's IDEAS, May 12, 2011;

A profile of Canada's great poet and the co-creator of the program IDEAS!
Phyllis Webb: The Art of Ideas on IDEAS on CBC Radio, 9pm Thursday, May 12th.

She has spent a lifetime asking questions. Her body of work was never satisfied with the answers. Poet, anarchist, intellectual, former radio producer, and co-creator of the program IDEAS, we honour Phyllis Webb in this documentary by Robert McTavish.

Robert McTavish has done a number of radio and film documentaries, including What to Make of it All? The life and poetry of John Newlove (2006). He later edited the collection A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (Chaudiere Books 2007 with an afterword by Jeff Derksen) which critic Steve Noyes described as "probably the best summation of John Newlove's inimitable poems that we are likely to get" and is currently producing and directing his fourth film, The Line Has Shattered, on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference.

A question of questions: watching the “12 or 20 (small press) questions” series

In “’You Devise. We Devise.’ A Festchrift for Phyllis Webb, guest edited by Pauline Butling, in West Coast Line (Number Six (25/3), Winter 1991-92), Lorna Knight wrote about Phyllis Webb’squestionnaire to Canadian poets. As Knight’s “’With all best wishes, high hopes and thanks”: Phyllis Webb, Canadian Poetry, and Publishing in the Early 1950s” begins:

Between 1951 and 1955, the young poet Phyllis Webb was preoccupied with the lot of the poet and the state of Canadian publishing. In 1951, at the suggestion of Earle Birney, then professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Webb designed a questionnaire to gather information and mailed it to “almost every poet of any merit in this country” (“P&P” 1955, 499). During a difficult and transitional period for Canadian poets and publishers of poetry, Webb’s questionnaire served as a focus for concern and catalyst for solutions. Its significance was most directly felt by Phyllis Webb herself; the questionnaire brought her into contact with other poets and with publishers, made her cognizant of the Canadian literary climate and pointed her in a number of directions which she would pursue in the following years.

I’ve gone through this essay, and this issue, again recently, while co-crafting the new selection of “12 or 20 questions” for small and micro-press publishers and editors. Most literary writers and writing aren’t written of nearly enough, if at all, in this current climate, and publishing ventures, even less so. For a period in the mid-1980s, Grain magazine out of Saskatoon was producing pieces on the history of literary presses, short histories of presses such as Thistledown and Turnstone. Shouldn’t all presses have such opportunities to tell their stories? How the hell did Hagios Press get started, for example, or BookThug, or even CUE Books? How can even the writers published by such presses know so very little?

To know that Vancouver’s New Star Books came out of The Georgia Straight Writing Supplement which came out of The Georgia Straight which came out of the fourth editorial period of the poetry newsletter TISH, giving the press a history that goes back to 1961. Or what of Fredericton’s Goose Lane Editions, which came out of Fiddlehead Poetry Books, thusly out of The Fiddlehead, or bill bissett’s blewointment press that was sold to become Nightwood Editions (over the past few years, editor/publisher Silas White has established a blewointment imprint to, in part, acknowledge this lineage).

Most small press books and chapbooks don’t even seem to get reviewed, so any larger or longer conversation of press activities can’t help but get overlooked. Why are so few of these stories ever asked for, ever told?

Phyllis Webb and the Common Good: Poetry / Anarchy / Abstraction by Stephen Collis

Who is this I infesting my poems? Is it I hiding behind the Trump type on the page of the book you are reading? Is it a photograph of me on the cover of Wilson's Bowl? Is it I? I said, I say, I am saying—
— Phyllis Webb

What is the syntax of absence? What is the substance of between?
— Stephen Collis

Despite the fact that she stopped writing a number of years ago, Saltspring Island resident Phyllis Webb remains an important poet for a number of writers across Canada, newly highlighted by the publication of Vancouver poet and editor Stephen Collis' study of her work, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good: Poetry / Anarchy / Abstraction (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2007). A book in the works for a number of years (excerpts have appeared as "A Duncan Etude: Dante and Responsibility" in Jacket #26, and "Another Duncan Edude: Empire and Anarchy" in W 10), Collis certainly isn’t a slouch himself, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University and author of the poetry collections Mine (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2001) and Anarchive (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2005) [see my review of such here], as well as editor of the anniversary collection companions & horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry (Burnaby BC: LINEbooks, 2005) [see my review of such here]. The author of numerous publications of her own over four decades, Webb's poetry output is as formidable as it is (nearly) small, including Even Your Right Eye (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1956), The Sea Is Also a Garden (Toronto ON: Ryerson Press, 1962), Naked Poems (Vancouver BC: Periwinkle Press, 1965; also found in The New Long Poem Anthology, Second Edition), Wilson's Bowl (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1980), Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti-ghazals (Lantzville BC: Island Writing Series, 1982), The Vision Tree: Selected Poems (ed. Sharon Thesen, Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1982), Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984) and Hanging Fire (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1990), the last of which, as well as her selected poems, are still available through Vancouver publisher Talonbooks; she also published two collections of critical prose, including Talking (Dunvegan ON: Quadrant Editions, 1982) and Nothing But Brush Strokes: Selected Prose (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press / writer as critic, 1995).

'Ambrosia'

Bee-sweet, the honey now/how trails a star
of far/near hawthorn and roseate late leap year

Gerald Manley, your black cossock
rushing through cosmic and microcosmic

inscaped latitudes, I look, see you
passing away/through Jesuitical

raced time-future. All your musculature
stretched, taut, reaching out/off

from black clouds, momentary passage,
there to here, tears of your Christ

mix/mingle 'I am so happy, so happy',
your last wet watering words,

June the 8th's hawthorn-hoped, pied beauties,
beatitudes, 1889, heard

here, February, leapings of '88,
10.15 a.m. The 24th. (Hanging Fire)

In his book length study of Phyllis Webb (one would say long overdue), Collis works through the public and the private spheres of the poet and now former poet (and current painter) Phyllis Webb through the lens of her poetry, working through how her poetry worked, and works, and continues to work so well. As he writes in the first paragraph of his introduction to the book:

Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster. The reclusive artist. The distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. The lonely Canadian in the wilderness, cabined in the cold—shacked up alone Tom Thompson style. There is of course some truth to these mystic associations, but, of course, they do not come close to telling the whole story. This cartoon biographical version of Webb must be bracketed aside here at the beginning—if not cast out entirely—so that we may focus instead on a more public and engaged Webb, a poet who forms a key part of, and who, as it turns out, has been so concerned with, our "common good." I will be polemical: if we are writing now on the West Coast of Canada we are all of us writing in some sense "after Webb"—both chronologically (though still very much alive, Webb has given up writing) and in terms of our debt (what she has given to poetry which we should not forget).

One of the interesting ways that Collis moves through Webb's poetic, and one of the things that makes Webb's poetic rare, is in the overt way she showed her influences, responding openly to other writers and their writings, as Collis writes:

Webb's response poems to her female contemporaries—Atwood, MacEwen, Bronwen Wallace—tend to take the form of poetic correspondences addressing more the poet than the poetry. The exception, perhaps, is "Letters to Margaret Atwood," which, while addressing Atwood directly as a friend, does engage critically with some of Atwood's writing and ideas. Even more importantly, the response to Atwood prompts some thoughts on Webb's own poetics:

After survival, what? The sedition in my own hand, will it be written down legibly, will I sign it and hand it over for someone else to fulfill? Or will I open like a Venus fly-trap to catch fat spies from the enemy lines and feed myself forever on them on them on them? They really aren’t worth my exotic trouble but I can't eat money and I want for once to be useful.

For years various editors and publishers (including British publisher Salt) have been suggesting a new edition of Webb's poems, ranging from a selected of sorts to a collected, with little success (from what I've heard, she wants us to wait until after she dies). Until then, some of the books are still in print, at least, to be able to access the poems of one of the most quietly influential and important Canadian poets of the past few decades. What makes a poet so precise write so very little, and eventually stop altogether (a question that could easily have been asked of John Newlove, as well, a friend and contemporary of Webb's)? How does one move to not simply slow down and/or stop (such as the now-late Artie Gold, or David Phillips), but actually renounce? What makes a poet move beyond the words, as Webb has moved through the other side and into abstraction and visual art? In "You Devise. We Devise." A Festchrift for Phyllis Webb (an issue I would recommend highly), guest edited by Pauline Butling, in West Coast Line (Number Six (25/3), Winter 1991-92), she speaks in an interview conducted by poet and critic Smaro Kamboureli, that includes:

SK: I'd like to go back to a phrase in the passive mode you just used—the insistence on the words having "been given to" you. This implies a passive process for the poet, the poet's ear being a receptacle. It reminds me of the poetics of dictation that Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser talk about. Being dictated, in the verbal sense of the word, as to what to listen to, what to pursue, what to record. I remember George Bowering's opening of Allophanes where he begins by reciting a sentence he heard in his mind—in his ear to be exact—in the voice of Spicer—the poet of dictation dictating. What are your thoughts about being initially on the receiver's side, something we might define as passive, before you move into the active mode, the act of construction, of writing?

PW: I think that the writer has often felt and feels like a receiver, a receiving station, and so there's nothing extraordinary really about this process, except that I made it conscious and I pursued it and I tried to understand what was going on. I do feel that these givens are totally out of my control, and therefore I am the receptor. But what I do with them is what turns them into the poems. I'm not claiming anything extraordinary about the process.

Part of what makes Collis' study interesting, too, is that he includes some of Webb's visuals, whether as a cover image, or as full colour reproductions inside, showing how one clearly relates to the other, the writing that became the visual art, painting and collaging her way past the language. As he begins the final chapter, "After Webb," writing:

Near the close of her last book of poetry, Webb's poetic, lyric I "commits suicide," plunges off into the "watery commune" that is the very source of language, leaving Phyllis Webb herself to continue, to be reborn as a painter—to abstract a painter from the tangled self-examination of her verse. Or—is it a movement from the unavoidable subjective impulses of the (lyric) poem into the more (plausibly) objectifiable exteriority of the abstract painting? This is the tricky part. I don't want to veer into psychobiography, don’t want to suggest painting as therapy, as the salvation of a tormented poet. In Webb's suicide poems the lyric I is already gone: either it is part of the "commune"—"we, my friends, / who have considered suicide"—or it is wholly outside, an eye (I) watching—"I go as far as I can / collaborating in the fame"—staring into (or out of) the face of the other of its language: silence.