Several years ago, sitting around his kitchen table on Quadra Island after supper one night, I asked Robert Bringhurst how he found his voice as a poet. It was something of a trick question because he rarely writes in the first person – a quick perusal of his Selected Poems (2009) yields less than half a dozen appearances of the lyric ego, and most of these appear in a sequence of love poems written after he and Jan Zwicky were married two years earlier. Voice, he said, his own as low as a whisper, has never come easy to him. He got there through hard work – by surrounding himself with sacred texts; by leaning on, and apprenticing himself to, the voices of other human beings from different times and places. A random sampling from his Selected Poems sees him assume the persona or mask of sages, poets, and thinkers from cultural backgrounds as diverse as Presocratic Greece, the Levant of the Pentateuch, Taoist and Buddhist Asia, and Indigenous North America. These intellectual and poetic ancestors, from Anaximander to Zuangzi, share in what Bringhurst once called “an archaic sense of integrity” – an awareness of the radiant interconnectedness of all life, an animistic ecology in which “the stones still sing and the light is still alive” (Pieces of Map 103, 109). His “elective grandparents” constitute nothing less than his own homemade oral tradition, a colloquium of voices and personalities that are always at his elbow and in his mind. They help him find his way through the dominant patterns of modern consciousness and into new angles of looking at and engaging with his surroundings; they help him, as he told me on Quadra, “figure out what all this is.” Over the decades they have been his closest friends, and it is fair to say that Bringhurst is more at home in conversation with his imaginative elders than he is with most of his contemporaries. In exchange for their wisdom and friendship, he has built them a refuge on the east side of Quadra Island as invaluable as any nature preserve, consisting of a spectacular library and writing studio surrounded by forest. It is his guarded hope, and the focus of all his literary efforts, that “the old in their knowing” should somehow be kept alive for another generation or two so that they might be of use to our elective grandchildren, and anyone else who survives our current age of ecological disintegration.
Robert Bringhurst was born on 16 October 1946 in Los Angeles, “a city of migrants where everyone was from somewhere else, and trying to get someplace else.” Rootlessness dominated his family’s background on both sides. His maternal grandfather had been abandoned as an infant in a field in Oklahoma, making him “the perfect ancestor,” Bringhurst says, because he wasn’t from anywhere, had no inherited traditions to keep alive, and could start from scratch. In 1933 at the age of sixteen, his mother, Marion Large, fled Idaho for Los Angeles with her sister, and found work as a typist. His father’s side of the family took their name from a small village in the English Midlands; they emigrated to America sometime in the eighteenth century and at one point were involved with the Quakers in Philadelphia. His father, George, was a mechanical genius, able to turn one machine into another, and worked as an inventor, amateur electrician, and carpenter. After his only child was born – an event, Bringhurst says, that “ruined” his father’s life because he then had to find full-time work – George uprooted the family for Salt Lake City, where he had been hired as a junior salesman with Lennox. Between 1948 and 1952 the family moved four times around the state of Montana. Their fifth move in that same time span saw them cross the border, where George was given the job of regional general manager for the company’s western Canadian division, based out of Calgary.
What Bringhurst remembers about the quick succession of towns and cities he moved through as a child was how phony they seemed. The North American West was like an enormous construction site, perpetually building itself up and tearing itself down in a grotesque, hyperaccelerated parody of growth and decay. In this false-front culture – he likens it to a stage set from a western – nothing looked as though it had been there for very long, and couldn’t be brushed aside in short order (Garland, the small town in Wyoming where George was born, became a ghost town in his own lifetime). People did not seem aware of or responsive to the enormous, elemental presences that sculpted the land around them, as they were too busy trying to get someplace else. “There was no sense of being surrounded by something outside of your control, nothing to wonder at,” he said.
Bringhurst’s individualism asserted itself early. In a house without books he learned to write before he could read, learning individual letters of the alphabet and then writing pages and pages of them, his mother circling the words that formed accidentally in the stream of letters. When he was seven, he spent the summer in ’Ooléé’jtó, a Navajo community in southern Utah, living with a family that had converted to Mormonism, the religion of his parents. One side effect of this early exposure to indigenous life in the Southwest, he says, is that he doesn’t feel like “an alien in a native household.” In Calgary Bringhurst moved between schools, eventually landing at King Edward School where he was introduced to sports he had never seen before (soccer and hockey), skipped grade four, and learned French from a one-armed Irish teacher who had an imaginary dog named Hypothesis. His first friend was Polish; he fell in love with a girl who was Estonian and whose best friend was Latvian; and in time his circle widened to include Blackfoot and Cree children. “I had the feeling that Canada too was a kind of imaginary dog,” he said later (“Air, Water, Land, Light, and Language” 5).
In 1959, when Bringhurst was thirteen, his father was transferred back to the Salt Lake Valley, and, with that, the family’s Canadian experiment was over. He entered the ninth grade already having been put ahead yet another year, making him the youngest person in the class. There was, however, nothing young about him. According to Michael Peglau, who lived a couple of doors down the street in the suburb of Cottonwood, Bringhurst showed up with his personality already fully formed, his inner direction set. He was physically striking and vaguely Celtic in complexion, his reddish-brown hair offsetting him from the Scandinavian background of most of his peers. He was mysterious and mannerly to the point of being courtly in disposition; he dressed himself “like a building” in sturdy clothes; he had no interest in the hectic juggernaut that was 1960s popular music, instead teaching himself how to play classical guitar. He also distinguished himself in the classroom with his precision of insight – he wasn’t a frequent talker, but proved to be a trenchant voice when he chose to speak up. High school academics, though, bored him utterly, and he was negligent in his course work.
Bringhurst fell in with a group of friends who were both academically and athletically gifted. He was fearless, but not talented, at sports. That inner compass was already pointing somewhere else, away from the playing fields to the sheer vertical rise of the mountains beyond. While in Calgary, his parents had sent him to a camp in the Rockies where climbing was taught, and, since that time, he had been reading books on the subject and going on solo expeditions to put into practice what he’d learned. One weekend, he decided to climb Mount Olympus, a bone-dry peak that towered some five thousand feet over the valley floor. There wasn’t any trail; he just found his way up there, and made little noise of having done so on his return. Bringhurst would often disappear with his car – a used Triumph TR 3 – and set out exploring the slick rock canyons of southern Utah, seeking out indigenous pictographs that were like tiny windows into some other reality he felt drawn to but could not yet understand. Another opening that both intrigued and baffled him, and was as alien as those pictographs, was a beautiful hardcover edition of the Cantos by Ezra Pound that he carried everywhere. He had been tipped off by a reference to Pound in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, and likened the Cantos to “a great sprawling landscape of quotations and sentences as if a bomb had gone off in a polylingual library.” When he showed Peglau his find, he admitted that he could only read a few lines at a time “before I have to go and chew nails.” Such interests left friends like Peglau puzzled. “None of us in a way really know him,” he said. “The inner Robert Bringhurst is as mysterious as the face of a cliff. I’ve never met anyone more like a landscape than him.”
In the fall of 1962, aged sixteen, Bringhurst began attending philosophy courses at the University of Utah in the afternoon while still attending Olympus High in the morning. The following spring, he published his first poems in the school magazine; graduated from high school; and spent much of the summer climbing in Wyoming’s Teton Mountains, making a solo ascent of Grand Teton, the second largest mountain in the state at just over thirteen thousand feet. He also began reading Daisetsu Suzuki, who beginning in the 1920s had almost single-handedly introduced Zen Buddhism to North American audiences hungry for a different way of thinking and being. For Bringhurst, this was the beginning of a lifelong engagement with the sages and teachers of Buddhist and Taoist Asia, an engagement carried out in a gleefully unorthodox manner – the likes of which Suzuki, a pioneer and reformer himself, might have approved. For Bringhurst would forever remain at the door of the sangha, not seated within, able to grasp the central truths of Zen Buddhism without being swallowed up by a rigid adherence to its ritual gestures.
In the fall of 1963, Bringhurst arrived in Boston to begin his undergraduate career at MIT on a scholarship to study architecture and physics. He used an exemption from freshman math to take a course in Milton, a decision that did not go over well at home. By his second semester, Bringhurst was already gravitating away from his chosen fields, filling his schedule with almost nothing but humanities courses. He was compelled to study literary works from an unusual perspective – linguistics – a discipline that traditionally did not concern itself with anything beyond the morphology of the individual sentence. He wanted to know what language was; how it knew what it did; and the ways in which it reached back into the earth. His inchoate interest in linguistics brought him into conversation with Noam Chomsky, already a major figure in the field, who gave him the all-important advice that one cannot know anything about language if all the languages you know are from the same family. For the necessary perspective, Chomsky suggested, Bringhurst had to get outside Indo-European languages altogether. Bringhurst left MIT after a year, returned to Utah, and in the summer of 1964 attended an intensive course in Arabic at the University of Utah. “Arabic was hard,” he said, “the first thing I had ever done that was hard.” He also became intensely interested in T.E. Lawrence, the larger-than-life British soldier and archaeologist whose activities in the Arab Revolt in the Sinai were described in his book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922). That fall, Bringhurst officially transferred to Utah, and spent the year studying philosophy and Arabic.
After working on a rail dock in Salt Lake City to raise the necessary funds, Bringhurst took Chomsky’s advice, and in the spring of 1965 caught a freighter for Casablanca. Upon landing, he used his Arabic to startle a tout who approached him in French. He passed through Italy, Greece, and Egypt en route to Beirut, where he lived from May to September, and then made his way to a small village near Bcharré in the mountains of Lebanon, where he set about his linguistic errand with characteristic single-minded purpose. He imbibed the culture and the language, yet was more concerned with finding his way to the brine out of which these things sprang. Letters to friends at the time, tersely worded, beautifully crafted, testified to his ability to internalize a landscape and find a few right phrases with which to evoke it.
In December of that year, as the war in Vietnam began taking its disturbing form, the draft board came looking for Bringhurst. George relayed the message to his son, who pondered his options: he could declare himself a stateless person, re-enroll at MIT, or move to Canada or France as a draft dodger. “What bothered me most about it,” he said, “was the wholesale submission to authority.” While he wasn’t a pacifist, Bringhurst thought it was pointless for the United States to be fighting a peasant culture, and ludicrous to be doing so with heavy industrial weapons, burning up forests, harassing villages, and counting bodies to keep score. He decided on an unlikely course of action. He learned that if he joined up instead of being drafted, he would have some say in where he went and what he did, though he would have to serve for a longer term. He returned to the States, and on 25 January 1966 enlisted with the army as a military linguist to escape the draft.
Much to the worry of his friends, Bringhurst did not enter the army reluctantly, but enthusiastically. He saw it as another domain of experience he wanted to plumb. After basic training, he bounced from one military base to another, working at one point as an assistant to instructors of Arabic in the Presidio of Monterey. His schedule was generous, with weekends off, and he devoted much of his free time to rock climbing. Having already tackled the Tetons, he was not intimidated by four-hundred-foot vertical cliff faces. Michael Peglau recalls getting stuck with Bringhurst on a rocky ledge several hundred feet up, their way blocked by a large overhang. While Peglau wondered nervously how they were going to either get past the overhang or climb back down to the ground, Bringhurst just took out his notebook and started a journal entry, “casual, cool and composed,” as though nothing was amiss.
Another weekend leave with Peglau was seriously derailed by an even more formidable obstacle when the two of them got into their ride south to Big Sur and realized their driver was none other than Neal Cassady. Trickster of the Beat movement, juggler of sledgehammers, Cassady by that point was only two years removed from his stint as the main driver of “Further,” Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus immortalized in the “non fiction novel” The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. On their way down the coast, Cassady made a detour to an isolated farmhouse in search of a cocaine stash he had heard tell of, and, after not only finding it but burying himself in it, piloted Bringhurst and three others back to the highway. He drove over a hundred miles an hour, often on the wrong side of the road, and took a number of corners on two wheels. The party of five headed to yet another isolated farmhouse near Big Sur, where Cassady believed the Merry Pranksters would be arriving later that night. Bringhurst and Peglau, fearing what lay in wait, headed into the mountains. Five miles in, and well up the mountainside with a stunning view of the Pacific, they stopped and talked for some time before noticing the heavy fog rolling in off the ocean. They decided they’d be fools to get caught on the mountainside in such conditions. When they returned just before nightfall, the Merry Pranksters had indeed arrived en masse from Kesey’s farm in Oregon. When a Prankster got his hands on an axe, convinced that one of the women there was a witch, Bringhurst and Peglau slipped back to the Chevrolet they came in and waited out the night with the doors locked. Bringhurst, whose life’s work would consist of climbing into the mythworlds of other cultures, was utterly bored by 1960s counterculture, and the sight of young WASPs on acid was of no interest.
Early in the summer of 1967, Bringhurst was on leave visiting his parents, now living in Portland, when the Six Day War broke out in the Middle East. He was immediately transferred from Monterey to the Army Security Agency detachment at National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where he did “elint” work, or electronic intelligence, intercepting, decrypting, and translating radio traffic worldwide. Not long after his arrival, he was asked if he wanted to go and work for the Israelis. Bringhurst soon found himself based in Netanya, Israel, making short forays into the Sinai Peninsula. A broad expanse of land nominally claimed and colonized by Egypt, the Sinai had been seized by Israel in the war, even though it was home to just a few towns of settlers and otherwise inhabited by Bedouin nomads. Unlike the munitions experts, or the specialists in weapons design and electronics, no one quite knew what to do with the linguists on these forays, meaning that Bringhurst had no orders to follow other than to watch and observe. This suited him fine, for he considered himself temperamentally an anthropologist, not a participant in the conflict.
As the Vietnam War continued to intensify, Bringhurst asked to be transferred there as a combat photographer. Ever the anthropologist, he wanted a way of seeing what was going on “without having to kill anyone to do it.” To his considerable disappointment, he was sent to Panama for a year and a half instead. In October 1969, three months before his four-year hitch was up, Bringhurst was discharged from active military service. He put his car on a ship and put himself on a plane, and moved into a cabin not far from his parents’ new home. Ten months after that, he moved to Boston, re-enrolled at MIT to study linguistics with the GI Bill picking up his tuition and living allowance, and started to look for work as a part-time journalist. It was there he began putting together his first book of poems: The Shipwright’s Log.
As befitting a young writer, Bringhurst kept up a diverse slate of activities in order to survive. In Boston, alongside his studies in linguistics and his ongoing attempts at writing poetry, he worked as a low-level stringer for Time magazine, contributing “files” converted into stories by staff writers in New York. When he moved to Bloomington, Indiana the following year, accompanied by his wife-to-be, Miki Sheffield, whom he had known since high school, he found work with the city’s daily newspaper as a theatre, dance, and music critic. Indiana University had an experimental program called “Independent Learning” that allowed students to design their own plan of studies and find professors willing to tutor them. Their education was to be conducted in the library, not in the classroom, an approach that suited Bringhurst the autodidact just fine. He invented for himself a degree in comparative literature – not a subject the university claimed to teach – though it is perhaps more accurate to say that his plan of study was that of the literary anthropologist. Drawn intuitively to the borderlands between poetry, translation, and linguistics, he tracked down three capable tutors to help him find his way. Willis Barnstone, the most celebrated of the three, was a poet and translator who produced a steady stream of award-winning books, and offered a living example of how the two vocations could merge in the same person. Although he had been contributing poems to student magazines as early as 1963 (under “Bob Bringhurst”), it wasn’t until 1972 that Bringhurst published his first translations of French and Arabic poets, including works by Villon and Badr Shakir el-Sayyab. He elaborated on these efforts, and began articulating his own emergent philosophy of translation, in a handful of academic journal articles.
Later that year, he and Sheffield set up Kanchenjunga Press (named after the third highest mountain in the world), and his first two books of poetry soon appeared under its imprint. In The Shipwright’s Log, Bringhurst tried out a number of different genres, triggering the avalanche of gaffes and misfires often found in an apprentice book. Most of the poems are written from his personal perspective, in the voice of the lyric ego; this is noteworthy because “I the writer” is all but expunged from his later work. He riffs off of modernist masters Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, and, in the following excerpt from “Sinai,” the T.S. Eliot of Four Quartets: “And there is time if not tomorrow / in the stillness, and tomorrow if not time / above the flutter in the hull” (Shipwright’s 12). Alongside such experimentation, stilted as it may be, we might recognize in his early writings a number of hallmarks that anticipate his later work – his eye for the anatomy, physiology, and the elements underlying the human social sphere; the strident, uncompromising voice; the mythic landscapes in which so many of his mature poems are set.
In 1973, his bachelor’s degree behind him, Bringhurst decided to return to Canada to begin an MFA in writing at the University of British Columbia. While he believed that creative writing could not be taught, no less institutionalized, he went to UBC anyway because the university was willing to foot the bill. For his three areas of concentration, he chose poetry, translation, and screenwriting. As was the case at his other academic stops, Bringhurst kept a low profile, rarely attended class, and used the resources of the university as he pleased. He and Sheffield were living in Mission, BC at the time, up the Fraser Valley, and he would commute in every week to drop off writing assignments for his courses. One of his projects was a screenplay adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a hopelessly sprawling affair that was “twenty times the size of a documentary.” His thesis, “Carmina propria et opuscula translata,” was a combination of his own poems and some translations from Arabic and other languages, completed in the spring of 1975. While he did not aspire to become an academic, misfortune intervened to keep him at the university after finishing his degree. When Pat Lowther, a gifted poet who had just started teaching in the department, was murdered by her husband in September of 1975, Bringhurst was asked to step in, and, with only twenty-four-hour’s notice, take over her course load. He inherited a group of students – not all of whom stuck it out over that difficult semester – that included Erin Mouré, Daniel David Moses, Roo Borson, and Kim Maltman.
The title of Bringhurst’s next collection, Bergschrund (1975), refers to a crevasse found at the head of a glacier. This alpinist’s metaphor suggests the poet has arrived at a creative summit of his own, and is willing to plant a flag against his modernist forebears:
The difference is nothing you can see – only
the dressed edge of the air
over those stones, and the air goes
deeper into the lung, like a long fang,
clean as magnesium. (Beauty 20)
“I the writer,” so present in his apprentice books, has been left behind at base camp. Writing in 15 Canadian Poets x 3, Gary Geddes locates the absence of the lyric ego in Bringhurst’s poetry securely within a modernist trajectory: “Bringhurst belongs to the older tradition of objectivity in art, expressed in Flaubert’s statement that the novelist should be ‘everywhere felt, but nowhere seen’ in his work and in Yeats’ comment that, in art, ‘all that is personal soon rots’” (Geddes 388). Bringhurst can still be seen measuring himself against his forebears, sometimes at the level of the individual line. His “Gods immersed in the masked / North American air” from “The Greenland Stone,” for example, is a re-imagining of Pound’s “Gods float in the azure air” from the Cantos, while one of the most elusive sequences in the collection, “Hachadura,” is in its first six sections an image-by-image, stanza-by-stanza response to “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” by Wallace Stevens.
Bringhurst’s most important borrowing from the early modernists – and the device that allowed for his poetic ascent – is his adoption of the dramatic monologue. Like T.S. Eliot and his concept of “impersonality,” or Ezra Pound and his use of “personae” or masks, Bringhurst after Bergschrund disappears behind the mask of one particular historical or mythological figure after another. “Deuteronomy” re-enacts a transformative moment from the Pentateuch, Moses’ solo ascent up Mount Sinai and his encounter there with some presence that defies mental categories. He inhabits Petrarch, one of the chief architects of the Italian Renaissance, in “The Stonecutter’s Horses”; he opens a window on the thought-world of the poet-philosophers of Presocratic Greece through the long-running suite of poems “The Old in Their Knowing”; he looks in on Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty through one of its writers and government ministers in “The Song of Ptahhotep.” As he told Kristjana Gunnars in a 1987 interview, “It’s a great gift . . . to have characters to speak on one’s behalf, to share the half-truths and the risks. That’s one of the great and ancient pleasures of writing and reading. It is possible in literature not only to hear something else, but to be it” (“Making Draft Horses” 6). These adventures into the imagination of pre-industrial humanity found their way into a scattering of little-seen chapbooks, broadsides, and various periodicals and anthologies. Bringhurst canvassed these efforts into a single volume, The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972–1982 (1982), the first of three books chosen by Dennis Lee for inclusion in the Modern Canadian Poets series he was putting together for McClelland & Stewart.
In his efforts to inhabit the voices and minds of other human beings, Bringhurst’s inheritance from Pound, the American expatriate and iconoclast, is profound. He shares in Pound’s frontier-like zeal that literature might serve as “the guide and lamp of civilization” that could rejuvenate Western culture (Reck 36). The modern experience had moved forward so rapidly that teachings from earlier generations – the hard lessons of other ages – had been forgotten or ignored, leaving lacunae in the consciousness of the time. A central task of the writer is to fill these gaps by auditing the works of the past, sifting for insights that extended the reach of human understanding and might eventually be incorporated as accepted truths that govern knowledge “as the switchboard the electric circuit” (Pound 24). Yet locating “luminous details” was only the first part of Pound’s literary project. The writer, wherever necessary, had to “make it new,” and return to past works their literary potency so that they might sing again in the ears of another generation. For Pound, translation as the central task of the literary guardian involved less a literal rendering from one language to another and more the revitalization of the spirit of the original in a new form. The aim, he wrote in a defence of his translations of Cavalcanti, was to drive “the reader’s perception further into the original than it would without them have penetrated” (Reck 171). Bringhurst inherits this impulse from Pound: “Re-working the gifts and givens of other thinkers feels to me like an essential part of the task. That is a use of poetry: to sing thought back into being, to personify it, state it, locate it, clear the haze” (Pieces of Map 113). The oracular writing of an ancient poet-thinker like Herakleitos is not simply to be translated, word for word; it is his mindset – and by extension the world of sixth-century BCE Greece – that one attempts to bring back to life. “If I found myself translating from Arabic,” wrote Bringhurst, “I tried, as a rule, not to make it seem that the original had been written in English, but to make the English function like Arabic: to enlarge the language, to open it up to that very un-English, un-North American mind” (114).
Pound is best thought of as something of a can-opener for Bringhurst, who learned from his elder that “the world, especially the literary world, was a great deal larger than anyone had suggested to me in school.” Through Pound he learned that it was possible to combine his pursuits as a poet and translator into a single project, one with a decidedly humanist orientation, and, as he notes self-deprecatingly, learned “how to write prose with a baseball bat.” Pound, then, was his teacher by negative as well as positive example, and it wasn’t long before Bringhurst ran up against the limitations of Pound’s literary horizons. Pound never got past Longfellow’s Hiawatha in terms of showing any interest in Native North American literatures, and was criticized by friends like William Carlos Williams for his failure to confront the problems of being a writer in America by living most of his life overseas. While in the later Cantos he came to the realization that a deeper unity links all things, Pound’s engagement with foundational questions concerning ontology and ecology – of vital importance to Bringhurst – did not go beyond a fascination with Neo-Confucianism and nineteenth-century organicism. Pound was given to slovenly generalization in his sweeping attempt to marshal the wisdom of the ages; Bringhurst, by contrast, is relentlessly punctilious and precise, digesting literary languages from the inside out and pouring himself into archival work. When Bringhurst was travelling around the Mediterranean in the mid-1960s, he made an attempt to seek out Pound, going as far as his elder’s compound at Rapallo where he had been holed up since the end of the Second World War. Pound, at this point, wasn’t talking to many people, and, at the critical moment, Bringhurst walked past his gate, realizing that he had nothing particularly important to ask his elder either.
Bringhurst’s term as a visiting lecturer at the University of British Columbia came to an end in 1977. He spent the next year running a Vancouver typesetting firm owned by George Payerle, and, after that, began making his living as a freelance typographer and editor. In 1980, he began dividing his time between a garret in Vancouver and a cabin in Garibaldi, a township in the Coastal Mountains that was abandoned because of the threat of rockslides. He was thirty-four years old, had an infant daughter and a strained marriage back in the city, and was nevertheless determined to make a go of it as a full-time writer. He used the cabin as a studio as well as base camp, setting out from there into the Garibaldi and Mamquam Mountains on solo hikes that lasted for weeks at a time. The Coastal Mountains became an obsession. These extended trips were an attempt to imbue the poetic vision he had inaugurated in Bergschrund with a certain cultural, historical, and bioregional sensibility. He was acutely aware of the fact that he didn’t know most of the names, let alone the deeper qualities, of most of the non-human residents he met in the mountains. Ecological illiteracy, one of the conditions of life in a colonial society, had shaped him as much as anyone else. The land was the text he needed to learn how to read and think with.
On 24 July 1982, Bringhurst was sworn in as a Canadian citizen, yet still felt far removed from the country’s Indigenous realities. He was well aware of the fact of Native North America – that the city of his birth, for example, had originally been a village called Yangna in Kumivit territory, inhabited by a people with their own architectural, artistic, and spiritual traditions – yet he had not begun to respond in any noticeable way to the challenge such submerged history posed. He was also aware that such a thing as Indigenous oral literature existed, having found his way in the late 1970s to Haida Texts and Myths: Skidegate Dialect (1905), a collection of oral works dictated by a number of elders to John Swanton, a linguist and career employee of the Bureau of American Ethnography, during the fall and winter of 1900–01. Bringhurst was not the first poet whose imagination was sparked by Swanton’s compilation. While a student at Reed College, his future colleague Gary Snyder had stumbled over the book, and built an entire thesis around it. Haida Myths and Texts includes work by Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, a commoner honoured for his mastery with the myths; his younger colleague Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, blinded from one of the three major waves of smallpox that decimated the islands’ population; the historian Kilxhawgins; the headman of Skaay’s family, Xhyuu, a significant author in his own right; and several others who left faint trails through Swanton’s notebooks. What sets Haida Myths and Texts apart from so many other ethnographic works of its time is that Swanton recognized and honoured the literary genius of these artists by painstakingly transcribing everything they had to say, word for word, instead of collapsing their stories and accounts into convenient paraphrase. Here was the Haida mythtelling tradition as it existed within a single individual’s mind.
Bringhurst was initially baffled by the stories Swanton diligently collected. Characters would appear and disappear illogically, without warning, as if popping in and out of different levels of reality, sometimes occupying more than one at the same time. Multiple plotlines would wrap themselves around one another and take turns surfacing in the narrative according to some pattern he couldn’t yet fathom. Strange slips in the time-space continuum would go on repeating themselves until the story’s protagonist stumbled upon some trick for resolving them. All the while, deeper energies simmered around the edges of these stories, suggesting that their spoken content was outweighed by something the two oral poets decided was best left unsaid.
In Bill Reid (1920–1998) Bringhurst found a guide and mentor to walk him deeper into the many-sided Haida imagination. Reid first appeared on his horizon in 1976, when Bringhurst was teaching as a sessional instructor at UBC. He used to bring his students over to the newly constructed Museum of Anthropology, where he was running a practical workshop on how to give a poetry reading, and, from time to time, Bringhurst would see Reid, Jim Hart, and others working on the iconic Raven and the First Men sculpture. Publisher Scott McIntyre introduced the two in the early 1980s when he asked Bringhurst to assist Reid on The Raven Steals the Light (1984), a collection of ten traditional stories accompanied by Reid’s spectral graphite drawings. In his sixties, and slowed by the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Reid was nonetheless at his most artistically mature at the time of their meeting. He grew up at a distance from the landscape of his mother’s people, learning of the artistic traditions of classical Haida Gwaii by studying exemplary works of the past. As a young man, he had been introduced to some of the old-timers who had listened in on Swanton’s work with Skaay and Ghandl a half century earlier. In Toronto, while apprenticing as a jeweler, he spent long hours with the Haida mortuary poles jutting up through the stairwells of the Royal Ontario Museum. Working from these fragments, Reid not only helped revive Haida monumental art; in the words of his colleague Claude Lévi-Strauss “he tended and revived a flame that was so close to dying,” giving it a place “upon the great stage of the world” (Lévi-Strauss 1974). Reid became a father figure to Bringhurst, introducing him to a circle of friends and colleagues who became something of an adopted family, and before long the poet was a regular fixture at Reid’s studio. It was a stroke of good fortune for both men. In Reid, Bringhurst had the opportunity to speak with a cultural authority who seemed to have internalized everything he was fascinated with; in Bringhurst, the tradition met someone who could preserve its greatest literary accomplishments.
In the spring of 1984, Bringhurst accompanied Reid on one of his annual pilgrimages to Haida Gwaii on board the Norsal, an old wooden boat he frequently chartered. Bringhurst had his collapsible kayak with him – “a French boat that makes up as either a double or a big, cavernous single” – which the poet and the sculptor put to good use exploring the coastline and its creatures. They also spent time talking about the spirit beings in Skaay and Ghandl’s stories, unseen inhabitants of the larger landscape through which the Norsal was travelling. Bringhurst was to some degree stuck. He still didn’t have the capacity to read the stories in their original language and therefore couldn’t think his way through their strange musculature by making translations of his own. Reid, as much as he proclaimed himself to be “out of touch with the impulse and social pattern” behind Haida art, already knew his way around that mythworld (Solitary 48). The best of his sculptures radiate an intensity of presence that only comes when the artist has gone beyond convention and sensed a tradition’s animating spirit. Reid suggested to Bringhurst that he might get inside the stories by approaching them from an unexpected direction: European classical music. One night in the Norsal’s lounge, Reid played Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites for his colleague, saying: “Those solo cello pieces are like those myths you were talking about. It’s hard to follow the pattern, but they make a kind of sense.”
1.1An apprenticeship of spirit: Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst on Denman Island, BC, August 1984.
For Reid, the analogy between classical music and Haida sculpture was vital and sustaining. Bach and Mozart were important influences in his studio, not simply background music; the two composers, working in an entirely different medium, revealed tricks about how to carve overlapping forms. The pattern that Reid sensed in Bach’s cello pieces, as well as in the stories of Skaay and Ghandl, had a certain sculptural quality to it, a shape and moreover a multiplicity that he knew firsthand through formline art. The visual language practiced up and down the Northwest Coast, “formline” refers to a grammar of shapes and images and blank spaces held together by a black, near-continuous line. The formline constricts and expands according to the shape of the entity it attempts to trace; it is a way, said Reid, of “writing animals.” One of the principles of this art form is that more than one creature can occupy the same space at the same time. Beings pass through one another easily here, sometimes taking up residence inside one another. When depicted in formline the seawolf, for example, a mythcreature of particular importance to Skaay, contains within it a number of other, smaller beings, making it a kind of compound intelligence that roams around the ocean. This play of overlapping forms is part of how reality held together within classical Haida metaphysics. Polyphony makes visible “what we know to be there but cannot see, and to capture for long inspection and contemplation what we would otherwise only know through fleeting glimpses” (Black Canoe 26).
Bringhurst’s sense of himself as a poet shifted dramatically after meeting Reid. Multiplicity seemed to be a fact of how things are – “perhaps the fact of life.” By the mid-1980s, following the completion of a suite of translations of Buddhist and Taoist poet-philosophers called “The Book of Silences,” he began to fall away from the dramatic monologue, opening up space in which he might arrive at a way of enacting multiplicity in his own creative idiom. That breakthrough finally came in 1985, a year that saw Bringhurst moving between several continents and thought-worlds, one after the other, until they began blurring inside him. He spent most of February and March in Australia and New Zealand, a trip that, among other things, gave him his first substantial contact with aboriginal Australians, their rock art, and their music. After a few days at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji he returned to Vancouver, then bounced across the country to northern Ontario, where he taught a workshop for aspiring Cree and Anishinaabe writers at the end of March. A week later he was on an airplane from Vancouver to Santiago, Chile, then made his way into Peru for a month. He intended to stay longer, but he had to cut his trip back when the Writer’s Union of Canada invited him to do a reading tour in Japan with novelist Audrey Thomas. All of these voyages collapsed together in his mind, creating a kind of paradigm of his mental life. “A man with more than one idea, more than one imagination, must somehow be in more than one location,” he wrote in his journal at the time. Thus he found himself in Quetico, Ontario, reading about Peru and thinking about the rock paintings in Kakadu National Park in northern Australia; studying Fujiwara architecture in Cuzco and Inca stonework in Tokyo; and soaking everything in memories from Navajo country and the BC coast and dreams of ancient China and Greece.
In May of that year, Bringhurst was travelling by train through Honshu – the most populated of the Japanese islands – with Thomas and Eleanor Wachtel, who went on to host the popular CBC Radio program Writers and Company. At one point, Thomas made a comment about the blue-tiled roofs dotting the countryside, one that, heard above the chatter of the crowded passenger car, lodged itself in Bringhurst’s mind as the opening line of a new poem. Later, when he set out to write the poem, the voice seemed to split in two. This second voice seemed to tease the first, echoing, sometimes reversing its words, acting as both trickster and conscience. “I wanted to take full advantage of this problem,” he writes, “so I made no attempt to shut out either of these voices. They would alternate, I thought. But they refused. They kept trying to talk at the same time – and kept succeeding” (Everywhere 201).
Composing a poem for more than one voice meant that he had to re-think the logic of the medium of print to fit what he heard. Was it possible to imagine a different way to read a book, a different way to encounter voices on the page? Bringhurst’s early efforts were rudimentary. He began by copying each of the speakers’ parts onto separate acetate transparencies, and then layered the sheets on top of one another with a sheet of translucent blue paper behind them. This allowed him to experiment with how the two voices might fit together visually. For insight he looked to other artists working with overlapping voices or melodies, just as Reid relied on Bach and Mozart in his studio. He listened with new-found alacrity to Bill Evans’s Conversations with Myself, to African and Afro-Cuban polyphonic percussion, and to Bach – in particular to those of his works that had been transcribed for solo lute.
The Blue Roofs of Japan, described by Bringhurst as a “jazz duet” or “a score for interpenetrating voices,” features a male and a female speaker whose words thread through one another at the same time. In the version printed in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, he makes use of both sides of every page opening. As discussed in detail by Katherine McLeod in this volume, the male voice dominates the left-hand page, his lines printed in black and superimposed over the female voice’s lines, which are printed in a ghostly blue showing out from underneath. On the right-hand page, the female voice predominates, printed in black with the male this time in blue. By overprinting the two texts, Bringhurst’s intention was to provide both speakers with a visual point of reference whereby they could continually place themselves in relation to one another as the poem progresses.
A number of Bringhurst’s modernist forebears – Pound, Joyce, Bunting – were taken with the idea that a piece of writing could somehow mimic the structure of the fugue. Yet he realized that the roots of polyphonic poetry run much deeper than the twentieth century. There is a “prehistoric potency” at work in polyphony, Bringhurst writes, something that goes “back to the shamans, back to the oldest whistles and horns and percussion” (Pieces of Map 116). The polyphonic experience, is, among other things, an opening unto presence. Blue Roofs is undeniably eerie in performance in the way the female voice seems to come out of nowhere to ghost around and through the male speaking part. As the voices of a polyphonic poem intertwine, swerving around and through one another, it feels as though through their movements they create a third, larger space that expands and contracts in a manner of the formline that thickens or thins depending on what it attempts to trace. Skaay and Ghandl built similar acoustic structures, openings in the air through which meaning could pass, or, as they understood it, through which the Haida mythworld might resound. All of this leads to an intriguing possibility: that Bringhurst in his polyphonic work of the mid-1980s was creating a similar opening in the air.
At this time, Bringhurst had committed himself to learning the Haida language. Reid was only of limited help, as he wasn’t a fluent speaker. While Bringhurst did not have any institutional support for his project, he acknowledges that he could have moved to Haida Gwaii and found himself a teacher among the dwindling number of native speakers. “I took the path I preferred, working with pieces of paper,” he said. He would teach himself the rudiments of an extraordinarily difficult indigenous language – one that owed its vibrancy to complex agglutinative verbs that could explode into hundreds, if not thousands of conjugations – by taking it in through the ear of the mind.
In his prose writings of the mid-1980s, Bringhurst was already conceiving of his project as a humanist endeavour. Mere months after his trip to Haida Gwaii with Reid, he was rooting around the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia when he came across unpublished manuscripts, in Haida, of performances by Ghandl. It was a thrilling discovery: “I felt then an excitement such as I think Gian Francisco Poggio Bracciolini felt in 1417, when poking through manuscripts at a monastery in Italy, he uncovered the lost text of Lucretius’ De rerum natura” (Pieces of Map 104). The deeper into the archives and rare book collections he went, the more evidence he found of two to three hundred oral mythtellers, poets, singers, and historians of note from across the continent whose words and songs had been painstakingly recorded word for word by a small number of linguists and anthropologists, many of whom had been taught by John Swanton’s teacher, Franz Boas. Generations of scholars and bureaucrats that came after them were completely unaware of the literary quality of what had been collected, and so these texts languished. In a lecture he gave in Vienna in 1988, Bringhurst stressed the value of these texts in humanist terms, and raised the hopeful, heady possibility that they might nourish a revival, or more appropriately a renaissance, of North American culture itself. Perhaps they offered a horizon of meaning the likes of which might transform how moderns thought about and experienced their own surroundings. Could such texts gently steer modern civilization to a more sustainable path?
Bringhurst was not averse to working with the present-day inheritors of those traditions either. That spring he participated in a series of workshops organized by Simon Frogg from Wawakapewin (Long Dog Lake) and Valerie Frith, then with the Ontario Arts Council, the first of which took place at Eva Lake, near Quetico Provincial Park. There he met Tomson Highway, worked with a small group of Cree and Anishinaabe writers, and found himself talking about Aboriginal Australian writers, Maori writers, Sophocles, and Jose Maria Arguedas (“a deeply torn bicultural and bilingual Peruvian I had started reading late the previous year”). He also spent time with a number of elders, including Louis Bird, Henry Frogg (“a first-rate storyteller”), and Jemima Morris, who spoke no English and gave Bringhurst his Anishinaabe name, Kijianabit, or “Big Robert,” a name that had originally belonged to one of Morris’s relations – a young man, recently deceased, who, as it happened, had been able to move effortlessly across cultural boundaries.
Meanwhile, Bringhurst’s polyphonic experiments continued to evolve symbiotically alongside his immersion in Haida art and literature. “Conversations with a Toad” was first published as a single-voiced poem in 1987, yet not long after it began to splinter. Later versions include a long middle section composed for one voice, book-ended by two short sections for two voices. To expand the range of possibilities of literary polyphony, he began something of a crash course in musical history. He traced polyphony back to its European origins in organum and Gregorian chant, followed it through to what he considers its purest expression in the Renaissance in the motets of Josquin Desprez, Nicholas Gombert, and Thomas Tallis. He went through a phase where he listened to Renaissance polyphony for hours every day, working his way through hundreds of polyphonic masses. From there he studied the fugues and string quartets of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. He found polyphony in musical traditions as diverse as Inuit katajjait throat singing and John Lewis’s work with the Modern Jazz Quartet.
In 1986, the year he turned forty, Bringhurst traveled to Indonesia with his second wife, an Englishwoman named Charlotte Bagshawe, who introduced him to traditional ikat weaving. In addition to travelling across the archipelago as far as Kupang, the remote capital of West Timor, they spent two memorable months immersed in the rich artisan culture of the interior of Bali. There Bringhurst attended nightly gamelan performances in the local temple. Involving anywhere from a dozen to forty or more performers, the gamelan orchestra consists of drums and gongs elaborating on a central theme, often accompanied by flutes, fiddles, and singers. Bringhurst was so taken with gamelan that once back in Vancouver he joined an orchestra at Simon Fraser University for six months. On Dennis Lee’s recommendation, he also began listening to Glenn Gould’s largely forgotten contrapuntal radio documentaries known collectively as The Solitude Trilogy, a singular achievement that marks the emergence of a late-twentieth-century sensitivity to a multiplicity of voice that now bubbles up across Canadian cultural expression.
Around the same time that Bringhurst’s understanding of polyphony was gathering momentum, Reid was starting to work on what would become one of his most enduring and recognizable masterworks, The Spirit of Haida Gwaii. A massive bronze sculpture commissioned by the Canadian Embassy in Washington, the “Black Canoe,” as Bringhurst started to call it, took Reid and a team of assistants four years to complete. It depicts a boatload of refugees from the Haida mythworld – including Mouse Woman, Wolf, and Raven – who have been displaced and scattered in the chaotic press of colonization, set adrift into an uncertain future. Duplicates can be found in the Canadian Museum of History in Hull and the Vancouver International Airport, and until recently the Canadian twenty-dollar bill also carried its image. Throughout the process, Bringhurst watched, asked questions, and later accompanied his mentor to New York to visit the foundry that was casting the sculpture. He wrote the text accompanying a collection of photographs by Ulli Steltzer that detailed both the evolution of Spirit and the mythworld it emerged from (published as The Black Canoe in 1991), and, from a mountain of raw footage, put together a screenplay for a one-hour documentary film about the sculpture, also called The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, broadcast on the CBC. Bringhurst can be glimpsed – fleetingly – in the background of one shot as the camera pans from Reid to the sculpture.
Like The Black Canoe, Bringhurst’s polyphonic poem for three voices, New World Suite No. 3, tells the story of the retreat of the civilizations of North American antiquity and the dispersal of their resident mythcreatures before the deluge of European explorers and settlers. Newcomers saw the land as the staging ground for the victory of the Western spirit, turning it into a continent-wide construction site of pit mines, logging slash, urban sprawl, and the “acres of radioactive glass” at the Almogordo nuclear-test site. In this new reality, one speaker asks, “what is there to listen for, or to sing of?” (I, line 11; Selected 204). The deluge of modernity is slowed to some degree in the poem’s later movements, when spirit beings like Coyote and Kokopelli are overheard lingering around its edges, and by fragments of Eastern thought carried like driftwood on the tide. In the poem’s last movement, as technological civilization exhausts itself, mythic time begins to re-assert itself. The calendar of wars and catastrophes gives way once again to the one measured in terms of seasonal renewal and celestial movements. “The sun burns to the ground. / It is kindled again. There is one lesson / deeper than hunger” (IV, lines 2–3; 228). It is the descendants of colonists who, in the poem’s final unsettling line, are the ones now set adrift, orphans searching the land for forms of meaning they never learned to listen for: “We who have traded our voices for words circle back to the pool of alkaline silence to listen” (IV, lines 23–6; 230–1). The “pool of alkaline silence” suggests a curious reversal of the sacred springs, streams, and underground kivas, home to the gods of the earth that archaic humanity sought out and listened to through the words of their oracles. Bringhurst has modern human beings attempting to restore a dialogue with the earth by looking in the wrong place. “Alkaline pools are silent because the water is not what it seems. Nothing much comes there, and nothing much grows there,” Bringhurst explained. “Which I guess means the folks who have traded their voices for words are misdirected; they habitually go (if we can believe what they say) to the wrong waterhole.”
It took Bringhurst five years to translate New World Suite No. 3 to the page after its first performance at the Vancouver Literary Festival in 1990, mostly because he had slipped wholly into typographical terra incognita. There are few precedents for a poem composed for three voices speaking together at the same time. The first version, published in The Calling in 1995, manages the problem by recourse to musical notation. The voices are organized on staves, stacked in successive bars, and printed in bold, italic, and roman fonts. For the special 2005 Centre for Book Arts version, Bringhurst moved to a different form of notation, one that resembles conventional European musical-publication practice. Each performer has a printed part, uniquely his or her own, with the other two voices printed as context, in blue and ochre, and offset up or down. On a number of occasions, voices converge and pass through one another on a shared rhyme or half rhyme. One of the most sonorous moments in the Suite, in the middle of the first movement, involves such a convergence. The first speaker says: “History here is a clock ticking, a blade / sliding between the earth and our shoes” (I, line 40; 207). The second speaker says: “Therefore the deer remain dead, / and the pronghorn are spooked by the fences.” The two speakers walk side-by-side during the first clause before their voices jump clean through each other on that shared half-rhyme in the second clause, the words “shoes” and “spooked” passing through one another on the whistle-like sound of the “s” and the long “oo.” It’s out of convergences like these that the poem takes its unique acoustic shape.
In a lengthy article called “Singing with the Frogs: The Theory and Practice of Literary Polyphony” published in Canadian Literature in 1997, Bringhurst argued that one source of inspiration for literary polyphony is to be found in non-human nature. “What city dwellers frequently call ‘silence’ is the ebb and flow of birdsong and the calls of hawks and ravens, marmots, pikas, deer mice, singing voles, the drone of gnats and bees and bee flies, and the sounds of wind and rain and running water. The world is a polyphonic place,” he writes. “The polyphonic music and the polyphonic poetry and fiction humans make is an answer to that world” (Everywhere 37). Three years later, in another Canadian Literature article called “The Origin of Mind,” he broadened the range of possibility further by making recourse to Saayaacchapis, a Nuuchahnulth elder who shared with linguist Edward Sapir an account of polyphonic consciousness in December of 1913 in the village of Ttsuuma’as (present day Port Alberni). Saayaacchapis, expressing his ideas through narrative interaction, described the mind as made up of a plurality of ten smaller beings nested inside of every human head. Kapkimyis, “the maker of things,” tells his daughter, Breaking Daylight, that a human can only get somewhere when all ten of those tiny figures inside the mind are in agreement with one another. “When the ten of them consent, / all ten of them, to go there, / then he’s going to go” (Everywhere 273). The story doesn’t end there, though. Kapkimyis turns away from his work, pauses as though something is still not right with his human creation, and then goes back and adds another figure, an eleventh being, to complete human consciousness. “This one is called Staying Alive,” he tells the girl (275). Bringhurst suggests that the task of this eleventh being is to ensure that conformity of consciousness never comes about – “that those ten people aren’t too often of one mind, or that the horses (to switch metaphors and cultures) aren’t pulling all the time in one direction” (282–3). The permeability of the artistic structure must be maintained so that it doesn’t shut life out; the shape of human consciousness remains open and purposefully incomplete.
The notion of polyphonic mind may well be the basis for a higher-level understanding expansive enough to include all the various alternatives for polyphony that have been exchanged between Bringhurst and other colleagues like Dennis Lee, Jan Zwicky, and Sean Kane. Against the isolationism of the Cartesian concept, polyphonic mind is an intermingling of the human intellect with its larger non-human surroundings. There are thoughts that are generated inside the thinker alone, and those that germinate in the interplay between inner and outer and are as elemental as wind and rain. The Zen thinker Dōgen, one of the intellectual ancestors that Bringhurst draws upon in “The Book of Silences,” once wrote: “I came to realize clearly that mind is not other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun and moon and stars” (Loy 25). Individual human mind is nested within, and can reflect, and can dialogue with, larger eco-mental processes that are indivisible from the existents of the earth. Gregory Bateson, the brilliant anthropologist and cyberneticist to whose thought Bringhurst came late in his career, likewise proposed that mental activity is not simply analogous to but interrelated to and indivisible from natural processes. An ecosystem is really a higher form of intelligence. It thinks through the interactions of its component parts, which may or may not include human beings. If one has been alienated from this ecology of consciousness, as all moderns are, the task is to figure out how to rejoin it.
Such polyphonic consciousness is everywhere in Bringhurst’s Haida translations. In 1999, he published A Story as Sharp as a Knife, the introduction to his twenty-year project. Two volumes followed on its heels: Nine Visits to the Mythworld (2000), nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize a year later, and Being in Being (2001). The centrepiece of Skaay’s work, and perhaps of Bringhurst’s Haida project in its entirety, is the Qquuna Cycle, which deserves recognition as one of the great literary works not just of classical Haida culture, but of humankind. The Qquuna Cycle is five thousand lines long, roughly half the length of the Odyssey, amounting to about ten hours of spoken work. Its narrative architecture is rich and complex, consisting of five parts made up, with one exception, of smaller trilogies of stories. The first of these locates the Haida between an animate and volatile matrix of sea, forest, and sky. The second explores the covenants between human beings and bear beings, creator and creation. The third set of stories takes as its subject the role of the shaman in mediating relationships between the human community and non-human world. Skaay asks of his listeners that they acquaint themselves with the signature images and events from these first three trilogies; such close reading is a prerequisite for “Spirit Being Going Naked,” the stand-alone fourth story, which is composed of significant allusions to a number of stories from the first three parts of the cycle. Here is evidence of a different kind of polyphonic intelligence as whole moments are carried intact between the stories, sometimes passing through one another, or meeting and then diverging in different directions. The hapless protagonist of this story, a would-be shaman whose weakness of character leads to a vivid and very literal downfall at the hands of a mysterious figure named Voicehandler, ends up wandering through bits and pieces of these other stories, in effect walking around inside of the Qquuna Cycle itself.
The artistry of Skaay, Ghandl, and others, as well as Bringhurst’s genius in translating that artistry for the contemporary world, remains mostly overshadowed by a roiling controversy that erupted shortly after the publication of A Story as Sharp as a Knife, the chronology of which is discussed by Nicholas Bradley in this book. Arguments marshalled against Bringhurst were consistent with those made during the cultural appropriation debate of the early 1990s – beginning with Lenore Keeshig-Tobias’s article in the Globe and Mail, “Stop Stealing Native Stories” – and were thus constrained by the limitations of that critical moment, including the racial purity associated with the Indigenous/Settler binary (itself a carry-over of Victorian morality) and the complete exclusion of the possibility of hybridity, both at a racial and cultural level. An emphasis on Bringhurst-as-cultural-interloper has obscured the unique geometry of the Haida mythtellers’ thinking, as well as the merit of Bringhurst’s translations in relation to previous compilations. A number of potentially more promising directions in which the discussion might move remain unexplored.
Although Bringhurst did address the issue of cultural appropriation head-on in a published interview with Thérèse Rigaud, we might consider Ursa Major (2003, 2009), his fourth and most recent polyphonic composition, as his definitive response to the controversy, one in which earth-centred teachings are allowed to intermingle. Ursa Major brings into uneasy alliance two texts that approach the motif of the Great Bear: Ovid’s version of the story of Callisto and Arcturus, and “Bear Woman,” a work of oral literature dictated by Sweet Grass Cree mythteller Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw. Ursa Major builds on one of the structural conceits of New World Suite No. 3 – that whole ontologies can pass through one another, occasionally overlapping, exchanging motifs. Yet the Cree and Greek mythworlds do not interact directly. Rather, it is as though they are obliquely aware of one another, and dance around each other’s presence without openly flirting. It is through the temporary overlapping of Cree and Greek mythworlds that Arcturus becomes aware of the relativity of his parent culture and, by the end of Bringhurst’s composition, is no longer willing to accept the primacy of its worldview. He is able to translate his own life within this larger context, and, in so doing, embodies a line from Claude Lévi-Strauss that Bringhurst quotes elsewhere: “no fragment of humanity can hope to comprehend itself except through reference to all others” (Everywhere 86). The stories of Arcturus and the Cree hunter suggest that other kinds of relationships between different peoples, and between human beings and the land, are possible, beyond theft and appropriation. As Bringhurst asked Rigaud: “How are English, French and Spanish American literatures going to learn to think inside the land if they cut themselves off from all the voices and the thinking that preceded them?” (6). Texts like Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s “The Bear Woman,” and numerous other overlooked and forgotten works, may represent the best literary ideal for the ecological revival of North American culture.
Following the first edition of Ursa Major, which coincided with his move to Quadra Island, Bringhurst has continued to produce books at a breakneck pace. These include two volumes of prose, The Tree of Meaning (2006) and Everywhere Being Is Dancing (2007), which, he said, “have found a lot more readers than the poems have.” His Selected Poems was published in Canada in 2009, followed by British and American editions in 2010 and 2011. Two major revisions of The Elements of Typographic Style appeared in 2005 and 2008. Looking ahead, a book of translations of the poems of Michelangelo is set to appear in late 2015. A nine-part poem about waterfalls, Going Down Singing, will follow in 2016. Another collection of poems, now a couple of hundred pages in length and still growing, is also on the horizon. He continues to direct some of his resources to salvaging half-finished manuscripts on subjects dear to him – like Athapaskan oral narrative (This Is What They Say) and Renaissance French typography (The Scythe and the Rabbit) – after their original authors, Ron Scollon and Kay Amert respectively, passed away. He has also written a lengthy book – complete with hundreds of high-grade illustrations – on the work of the renowned typographer Hermann Zapf, who passed away in June 2015.
While Bringhurst may not have another masterpiece of translation in him, there is still one enormous, discipline-defining project on his working horizons to look forward to, one last gift to celebrate the continent’s pre-colonial literary traditions. Voices in the Land is intended as an encyclopedia of the oral literatures and major authors of Native North America, a mammoth effort that he has been compiling, in bits and pieces, ever since he began sleuthing around in archives and rare book collections. Right now the book, at eight hundred pages, is still only “skeletal”; he hopes to write small essays on some two hundred or more major authors and significant minor ones. Ideally, in order to complete this project to his satisfaction, he would go to all the places these people lived; he would see for himself what they saw when they looked up in the morning; he would drink from the same rivers they did. Voices in the Land remains, “a lifetime’s work.”
If there is an overlooked literary genius in this country, a singular talent deserving of some form of sponsorship to free up time so that he might be able to put pen to paper and continue to open new horizons of meaning, it is Bringhurst. Academics of a post-colonial bent have not yet realized that in both his polyphonic compositions and translations, Bringhurst shows what decolonization of consciousness might actually look and sound like. What matters most to Bringhurst is the survival of the words and stories of the old ones, and his mission continues to be to help their wisdom endure for the benefit of the entire human family, in hopes they will be present, in one form or another, to show their beleaguered descendants not to drink from the wrong watering hole.
Information and direct quotations in this essay were derived from extensive correspondence, personal conversations, and interviews with Robert Bringhurst over a period of fifteen years.
Bringhurst, Robert. “Air, Water, Land, Light, and Language.” Public Lecture. Trans-Canada Institute, University of Guelph, 21 October 2011.
– The Beauty of the Weapons. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1985.
– “Breathing through the Feet.” Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1987.
– The Calling. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995.
– “Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue.” Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2007.
– “Origin of Mind.” Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking.
– The Shipwright’s Log. Bloomington, Indiana: Kanchenjunga Press, 1972.
– “What Is Found in Translation.” Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking.
– and Kristjana Gunnars. “Making Draft Horses out of the Gods: An Interview with Robert Bringhurst.” Prairie Fire 8:1 (Spring 1987): 4–15.
– and Thérèse Rigaud. Translating Haida Poetry: An Interview with Robert Bringhurst. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2002.
Geddes, Gary. Fifteen Canadian Poets x 3. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Keeshig-Tobias, Lenore. “Stop Stealing Native Stories.” The Globe and Mail, 26 Jan. 1990, A7.
Loy, David. Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1998.
Pound, Ezra. Selected Prose: 1909–1965. New York: New Directions, 1975.
Reck, Michael. Ezra Pound: A Close-Up. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
Reid, Bill. Solitary Raven: The Selected Writings of Bill Reid. Robert Bringhurst, ed. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2000.
