Lanterns
the blizzard came
after the first frost —
the hired man left the house
with a lantern
to see how the cattle
were taking the storm
in the north pasture
my father found him
three days later
near the fence on the east side
of the pasture
the faithful dog froze
beside him — curled up
like a lover in the man's arms
(the broken lantern
lay near a stone
the glass shattered)
men freeze this way everywhere
when lanterns fall
a p a r t
(even within one's arms
inside the city's rim)
Prairie poet Andrew Suknaski, known as “the poet of Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan,” died
of natural causes in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, on Wednesday, May 3, 2012. Of
Ukrainian and Polish decent, he was born on his parent’s homestead near Wood
Mountain, Saskatchewan in 1942, left home at sixteen, returned, left home
again, and repeated over the next twenty years before making it to Regina, and
finally to a group home in Moose Jaw in the 1980s. In the years that followed
his first departure, he worked as a migrant worker, travelled through Europe
and Australia, and attended Simon Fraser University and the University of
British Columbia in Vancouver, eventually falling under the wing of Vancouver
poet Earle Birney. He also studied at the Kootenay School of Art in the British
Columbia interior, as well as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art
and Design. Through heavy amounts of publishing in small press publications and
elsewhere starting in the late 1960s, as well as his own Elfin Plot Press, he
caught the eye of Ontario poet and editor Al Purdy, who included Suknaski's
poems in his first Storm Warning
Anthology (1970), before editing what would become Suknaski's first trade
and most famous poetry collection, Wood Mountain Poems (1976). He was the subject of a documentary film by Harvey
Spak for the National Film Board, and was writer-in-residence at the University
of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1978. Anyone in the prairies older than their
mid-40s not only knows of the work of Andrew Suknaski, but might even consider
him an influence, through years of his work being taught from out-of-date
anthologies. Until his first trade collection Wood Mountain Poems, edited by Al Purdy for MacMillan, was reissued
by Regina's Hagios Press as a thirtieth anniversary edition in 2006, almost
everything of Suknaski's had long been out of print. Working through Andrew
Suknaski's poems, the collection Wood
Mountain Poems wasn’t a beginning, as many readers have come to see it, but
almost a mid-point in his writing career, moving into text and away from the
visual poems that made up a large part of his first decade. Still, despite his
years of producing visuals and chapbooks and publishing and distributing across
the country, the first few lines of his long poem "Homestead, 1914 (Sec.
32, TP4, RG2, W3RD, Sask.)," the first poem in Wood Mountain Poems, and reprinted innumerable times in anthologies
(much the way George Bowering's poem "grandfather" had been, from a
decade earlier), was the first, and sometimes only reflection that any reader saw of the work of Andrew Suknaski.
for the third spring in
a row now
i return to visit father in his yorkton shack
the first time i returned to see him
he was a bit spooked
seeing me after eleven years –
a bindertwine held up his pants then
that year he was still a fairly tough little beggar
and we shouted to the storm fighting
to see who would carry my flightbag across the cn tracks
me crying: for
chrissake father
lemme carry the damn thing
the
train’s already too close!
For
years starting in the late 1960s and further into the 1980s, Andrew Suknaski
was one of the most prolific, energetic and influential poets in the prairies,
travelling and writing, making poems out of drawings and words and cigar tubes
and kites, and producing chapbooks and magazines as he went. Suknaski, more
than anyone else, became the face of prairie poetry to a multitude of writers,
readers and other admirers. What happened, you might ask? He was a combination
of friend and contemporary, student and mentor to more than one generation of
writer across the country, including Eli Mandel, Barry McKinnon, Gary Hyland,
John Newlove, Patrick Lane, Al Purdy, Kristjana Gunnars, Dennis Cooley, Robert
Kroetsch, Mick Burrs, Dennis Lee, Tim Lander, Mike Olito, Robert Currie,
Catherine Hunter, Jars Balan, bill bissett, bpNichol, George Morrissette,
Stephen Scobie, Smaro Kamboureli, Linda Rogers and so many others. As an
author, he produced eight trade poetry collections and dozens of chapbooks; as a
publisher, dozens more. Suknaski's poems were written as stories about the land
and the people that lived there, working their way toward myth, and the myth of
the place, even as he told the "real story" of various residents of
the village of Wood Mountain. Like his friend John Newlove, Suknaski was one of
the first too write any stories about the Native peoples in that part of the
country, well before it would have been considered "voice
appropriation," and helped more than a few other writers open up to tell
their own stories down the road. There is a particular kind of deceptively
simple prairie plainspeak that Suknaski seemed to perfect in his poems, and one
that is repeated by many of the writers that came after him, but often without
the kind of nuance that Suknaski was known for, through his series of seemingly
endless departures and returns. As Scobie wrote in the introduction to
Suknaski's previous selected poems, The
Land They Gave Away (1982):
Suknaski has had an immense influence upon the development
of Prairie poetry over the last ten years. This "anecdotal" style has
become an orthodoxy, and, in the hands of less skillful writers, a cliché.
Suknaski's best work retains the energy and vitality of the speech he is
quoting ― but the danger of the style is that the poetic rhythms will go flat
and dull, producing only some mildly interesting short stories which might just
as well be told in prose.
Suknaski's
poems continually return to that edge to acknowledge the stories around him
that might otherwise have been lost, writing of his own family histories and
those of friends and neighbours, to various of the other nations and
nationalities around him, including the immediate Sioux (ever aware of his
immigrant guilt), the Chinese, Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, and various
others of the native peoples. It is important to note that the word
"honour" is repeated throughout his poems, as is the word
"remember." Suknaski does
remember, including stories of Big Bear, Sitting Bull and Crowfoot, Gabriel
Dumont and the Teton Sioux, much in the way other writers, such as his friend,
the poet John Newlove also did, another Saskatchewan poet who left the land,
but, unfortunately, was unable to return (he considered himself a Saskatchewan
poet for the rest of his life). For Suknaski, perpetually leaving and
returning, the land itself is important to him, from his father and mother as
well as the physicality of his home base of Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan
(elevation 1,013 metres), close to the Cypress Hills (the highest point between
Labrador and the Rocky Mountains), site of the infamous Cypress Hills massacre.
It was April when the parcels started arriving. The snow
was melting. Yellow grass could be seen by the fence. I went home after work
one evening. Opened the screen door. Two large thin parcels fell to my feet.
The postman hid them between doors.
I did not open the parcels. They went into the basement. Next
day four cards in the mailbox. Four more parcels at the St. Norbert post
office. I picked them up. Not because I wanted them, but because of the
Francophone clerk. He was so excited.
Those parcels went into the car trunk. There they stayed,
unopened. When the warm weather came a great perfumed smell arose from one of
the packages. When I got into the car it made me think of a field of tulips in
Amsterdam.
Andrew Suknaski once said that he got the same amount for his papers that his father
got for the homestead (where Suknaski's sister is still buried), a total of
five thousand dollars for each. according to the University of Manitoba
website, “in 1987, having wearied of transporting his personal papers during
his frequent moves, Suknaski burned twenty years of records in a bonfire in his
backyard. What remains of his papers encompasses the years 1977-1972. The
collection comprises 15 linear feet. There are drafts of many of his published
works as well as correspondence with literary fugures like Eli Mandel, John
Newlove, Robert Kroetsch and Kristjana Gunnars.[…] Perhaps the most valuable
portion of the collection are the unpublished manuscripts that Suknaski worked
on during the 1980s, including “Divining the West,” “Ussuri Line” and “In
Search of Parinti/History of the Roumanians in Western Canada.” When he began
having difficulties in the 1980s, he joined a select group of Canadian writers,
poets considered the best at their craft, who, for whatever reason, had stopped
writing (or at least, stopped publishing), including Montreal poets Peter van
Toorn and the late Artie Gold, the late Toronto poet Ed Lacey, British Columbia
poet David Phillips, and Ottawa poet William Hawkins. Over the last twenty-five
years of his life, Suknaski lived in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, not far from his
original home of Wood Mountain, and not far from his close friend Gary Hyland,
who long looked after his affairs until he died a few short years ago.
My
biggest regret is that the book I’ve spent twelve years working on, There Is No Mountain: Selected Poems of Andrew Suknaski, hadn’t yet appeared in time
for him to see it. After many complications and hurdles, an individual came forward yesterday to help fund the production, but now waits for the appointment of a literary excecuter before proceeding.
An Ottawa memorial is currently being organized for Friday, June 1 at The Carleton Tavern, as is a Montreal memorial, hosted by Brian Sentes.
I would love to see his unpublished works see the light of day! The canadian prairies needs more culture of its own.
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