The heart is being aching, being
beating,
being knowing being
that not what not
who not how not why
it is the beating that it is.
“Sutra of the Heart” (Selected 157)
In the mirror of the air
are the hearts that are
faster than yours.
In the mirror of the earth,
the hearts that go
slower and slower.
“At Last” (Selected 256)
Any attempt to do justice to the achievements of Robert Bringhurst in all his dimensions – poet, translator, typographer, cultural historian, essayist, lecturer, and student of languages – must at some point confront the need to consider him also a philosopher, a lover of wisdom and learning with something to say to his contemporaries and to posterity. His broad spectrum of talents suggest equally the epithet “Renaissance man,” as Bringhurst was described when receiving British Columbia’s Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2004. The term is appropriate by way of the customary analogy with European artist-scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, but also insofar as it alludes to Bringhurst’s own fascination with the Florentine Renaissance – with typography, with Titian, with Petrarch. If we have the good fortune to look back at turn-of-the-millennium evolutionary tumult and recognize a North American renaissance in the making through new kinds of radical cultural exchange, we will find Bringhurst doubly worthy of the term.
The wide scope of Bringhurst’s accomplishments and the varied aspects of his career have ironically had the effect not of expanding his audience, but of limiting public understanding and appreciation of his work. Those who may have found Bringhurst’s poems in an anthology likely remained unaware of his typographical expertise. Few studying The Elements of Typographic Style conceive that its author spent ten years delving into Haida oral narrative. Those who associate his name with public controversy over the Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers have probably never encountered his polyphonic performance texts The Blue Roofs of Japan, New World Suite No. 3, or Ursa Major. This volume, Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: The Arts of Robert Bringhurst, aims to reveal Bringhurst’s diverse vocations as facets of a single project. The following essays and commentaries, contributed by literary scholars and by peers, explore the depth and the breadth of the work Bringhurst has produced over a long and wide-ranging career from a multiplicity of angles, illuminating both the craftsmanship and the complex vision it serves. This hybrid of scholarly analysis and professional perspective is the only way a well-rounded view of such a subject could be achieved, and we hope that its mix of personal account and artistic analysis will prove attractive and enlightening to readers within the academy and without.
Despite receiving major awards and having been welcomed to the Order of Canada in 2013, Bringhurst remains a shadowy figure not only among the Canadian public but among literati and academics, and scholarly attention has been as elusive as commercial success. The “lover’s quarrel” that Bringhurst has carried on with the academy is evident in the paucity of critical writing on his massive literary oeuvre. In displaying little of himself to readers, Bringhurst’s poetic style strays far from contemporary fashion, and his experimental work shares virtually nothing with the modes adopted by others in the vanguard. Yet Bringhurst’s concern has seldom been popularity. “Who was it that taught us / the artist’s ambitions,” he asks in The Blue Roofs of Japan: “a house in the country, a house / in the town, an apartment in history?” His own house on Quadra Island off the coast of British Columbia is more workshop than bucolic retreat, and if he does come to inhabit an apartment in history, it will have been paid for with decades of intellectual labour on many fronts. It’s not unfair to liken Bringhurst to Glenn Gould, the reclusive Canadian genius and interpreter of past masters whose little-known polyphonic radio documentaries inspired Bringhurst’s own multi-voice performance poems. The polyphonic imaginations of both Gould and Bringhurst, expressed in their compositions, reflect the plurality of their talents as artisans and contemporary “Renaissance men.”
At the heart of Bringhurst’s mission is the drive to access modes of consciousness not shaped by the industrial world but evolving from cultures outside it, beyond it, and prior to it, in which the essential principle of reciprocity between the human and the rest of the natural world is maintained by myth, philosophy, and literature. Bringhurst has relentlessly sought a poetics of wholeness and a pragmatics of transcendence, reaching for the “archaic sense of integrity” he conceives as belonging to the philosopher-poets of presocratic Greece, Taoist and Buddhist Asia, and pre-colonial North America. Presocratics such as Herakleitos and Empedokles are role models for Bringhurst in their “refusal to be compartmentalized . . . their assumption that poetry, philosophy, physics, biology, ethics and even theology are all one pursuit” (Pieces of Map 109). His is an animist intellectual’s conception of an ecosystem both finite and infinite, alive with spirit, and of a human culture participating actively in it. Such an ecology requires what Bringhurst refers to in the work of Haida mythteller Skaay as a “hunterly manner” – an “extra ration of courtesy” extended from the human to the natural world (Being 22).
The necessary interweaving of the emotional and ethical with the imaginative and intellectual is a common source of his diverse artistry. Like many before, Bringhurst seeks to re-enchant the world, yet his approach is anything but Romantic. More literary engineer than bard, more philosopher than shaman, more craftsman than prophet, this custodian of precious, nearly extinct modes of consciousness and the voices and texts through which we access them may have identified himself best in the “celestial janitor” role he took in the inaugural performance of Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers and Dancers. In A Story as Sharp as a Knife, the introductory volume of the Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers trilogy, Bringhurst’s custodial vocation is most fully synthesized: cultural historian, student of language, poet, essayist, typesetter, and book designer.
A corollary of Bringhurst’s concern with wholeness is that his natural habitat is not the centre but the margin, the transition zone where systems meet, where the interrelationship of the elements is obvious. He is a creature of the North American west, the last frontier between colonial expansion and the cultural and natural worlds which co-evolved over thousands of years. He resides on the edge of the continent with one ear to the voices of the forests, mountains, rivers, and Indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, and the other to the advancing industrial economy in which he plays the necessary role of artisan. The historical moments that fascinate him are those in which the modes and patterns of thought and language originating in oral cultures have met scribal or typographical forces. His ecological niche is the margin between the ephemeral tools of the oral poet-philosopher and the mechanized inspiration of books. Even poetry is conceived as a liminal art – the dance of thought along the margin between speech and music. In every respect, Bringhurst’s artistry is charged by the energy at the fork in the river where poiesis and technē diverge, as Heidegger might have it – or where they converge again. Bringhurst has actively embraced the possibilities afforded by the literary technology of the book to open up pathways to phenomenal worlds more elemental and perhaps more complex than those permitted by industrial or post-industrial psychological frameworks.
Yet the organic technē of the voice itself remains always the focus. A lifetime study of languages and the ecologies of thought for which they are vehicles has left Bringhurst acutely aware of both the relativity of logic and the need to reach beyond words in the search for an intellectually accessible sense of order in the dynamic cultural and biological ecosystem of planet earth. In Bringhurst’s conception, as in that of the archaic Greeks, logos means the voices of the gods. The routes he opens for his readers are through the voices of wise men who have listened intently before speaking: over the course of his career, Bringhurst has poetically inhabited an astounding range of voices, including those of Jacob, Moses, Parmenides, Empedokles, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Ptahhotep, Nagarjuna, Saraha, Han Shan, Dogen, Hakuin, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Rilke, Celan, Skaay, and Ghandl, to name only a select group. Nevertheless, Bringhurst is neither mimic nor ventriloquist, but a poet seeking the heart of his speakers’ messages – which is to say, the heartbeat of Being itself. Developing what we might call a “compound ear” required to listen and to convey this multiplicity of voices constitutes the essential discipline of Bringhurst’s long and varied career.
The Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers may well prove the most enduring of Bringhurst’s accomplishments in this respect. With A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, Bringhurst’s prose may be said to have surpassed his poetry in rhetorical dynamism, consistency of cadence, and emotional expressivity. Bringhurst was scrupulous in avoiding oversimplification in spite of the artistic and cosmological complexity of the mythtales themselves and the historical complexities of the Haida culture from which they spring, its encounter with colonial forces, and the process by which Skaay and Ghandl’s oral art became transmitted into the reader’s hands. He typeset the trilogy himself, surely his largest such project and likely the most demanding. A Story as Sharp as a Knife achieves a high degree of readability as it gracefully solves the problems of rendering on the page a hundred-year-old dialect of Haida, revealing the integral structural features of the poems, and navigating a broad range of textual and discursive modes. Groundwork for the project was laid by Bringhurst’s earlier poetic translations from the Mediterranean and Asia. Inhabiting those other thought-worlds, he developed his faculties for comprehending aspects of the Haida oral narratives that might otherwise remain beyond his ken, as indicated by his linking of the resonant words of the spirit being Nang Kilstlas, or “Voicehandler,” to Raven (“you are me here / You are that there too”) to a comparable passage in the Chandogya Upanishad (Story 255). By providing access in so many respects to what he calls “classical North American literature” on par with the oral epics of other cultures, Bringhurst has bent his skills to an enterprise likely to prove priceless historically and timeless artistically, justifying his provocative application of the term “classical” to oral texts of Indigenous North America.
A Story as Sharp as a Knife was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in the year 2000. It is possible that this notoriety played a part in precipitating the ensuing controversy, as recognition from the state inadvertently brought with it an association with a history of cultural imperialism and appropriation. For Bringhurst, translation is always a gesture of respect, and translation from Native North American languages a necessary step in a process of healing colonial wounds. Bringhurst’s contemporary efforts are predicated on the conscious decisions by Skaay, Ghandl, and Cree storyteller Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw to perform their oral narratives for linguists to write down and translate in the early twentieth century. Yet the politics of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are rarely straightforward, and although Bringhurst has many friends and collaborators within First Nations linguistic communities, the success of A Story as Sharp as a Knife came with criticisms which were not entirely anticipated. Nevertheless, the late Cree elder Christine Wilna Hodgson, a noted builder of bridges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples who herself earned the Order of Canada, in a letter to Books in Canada called The Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers a “gift to First Nation peoples across this land,” and “a masterpiece in the growing genre of spoken texts” (Hodgson). Skepticism from certain quarters of academia was put to rest by the Edward Sapir Book Prize, awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology to recognize works that make “the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society” (SLA website).
Bringhurst’s experimentation with performance poems for multiple simultaneous voices cannot be dissociated from his growing knowledge of and interest in the art and culture of the Haida fostered by his working relationship with Bill Reid, the sculptor of Haida descent who became one of Canada’s best-known artists. Reid and his art helped Bringhurst make sense of the Haida mythtales of Skaay and Ghandl with which he had struggled upon earlier encounters. Multiple plotlines featuring characters who disappear and reappear mysteriously revealed themselves to be part of a polyphonic cosmic order reflected in the structure of the narratives themselves. Reid, having as a young man been introduced to Haida elders present during the performances by Skaay and Ghandl which were recorded by Swanton, was the essential link between Bringhurst and the stories that captivated him. Bringhurst documented Reid’s best known and perhaps greatest sculptural achievement in his book The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii (1991). The most relevant principle of Haida formline art, for Bringhurst’s comprehension of the mythtales and his subsequent polyphonic compositions, is that more than one creature can occupy the same space at the same time. Bringhurst’s insight that polyphony makes visible “what we know to be there but cannot see” and “capture[s] for long inspection and contemplation what we would otherwise only know through fleeting glimpses” (Black Canoe 26) is evidence of a kind of epiphany: the explicit recognition that such multiplicity is the central fact of life. Bringhurst later used the figure of polyphony to characterize Reid’s ability to incorporate both European and Northwest–coast artistic traditions in his work, “much the way two songlines coexist, enriching one another without losing their identity, in polyphonic music” (Solitary 9).
Reid’s friendship evolved into a mentorship, one in which he became, as noted in Solitary Raven: The Writings of Bill Reid, the collection Bringhurst edited after Reid’s death, a “stand-in for the father” whom Bringhurst had “earlier disowned” (5). As his relationship with Reid intensified, Bringhurst unexpectedly found himself composing his first polyphonic poem, The Blue Roofs of Japan: A Score for Interpenetrating Voices. Originally published in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (1986) alongside “The Book of Silences” (a series of short poems centred on Eastern sages) and “The Lyell Island Variations” (a sequence of lyrics interpolating the work of poets in the European tradition, including Paul Celan and Rainer Maria Rilke), The Blue Roofs of Japan occupies a pivotal place among Bringhurst’s network of interests. Lyell Island, part of the archipelago of Haida Gwaii, had become the locus of a power struggle between the Haida and the British Columbia government over logging rights. Bringhurst offered “The Lyell Island Variations” as an album of “mistranslations” of the work of poets “of whom we should think as the trees are falling” (Pieces 53). The juxtaposition of the wisdom of the past poets of the colonial world with the ecological devastation and political strife of the contemporary Pacific Northwest prepares the way both structurally and thematically for The Blue Roofs of Japan and the more ambitious polyphonic works which followed. A moral dimension of Bringhurst’s polyphony is evident in his observation that “when two voices intertwine, the space they occupy gets larger, and the mind gets larger with it” (Everywhere 202).
The challenge of typesetting polyphonic performance pieces as a “score” is one for which Bringhurst’s long apprenticeship in the craft had uniquely prepared him. In the early 1970s he published his first two books, The Shipwright’s Log and Cadastre, through his own Kanchenjunga Press, and frequently worked as a freelance typographer through the subsequent decades. He typeset Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music himself, and the list of working principles he compiled evolved into The Elements of Typographic Style, published in 1992 by Hartley & Marks, a west-coast firm focused on book design. The manual received high praise from many, including prominent type-designer Hermann Zapf, and has steadily grown in popularity over the course of its four editions. It has become an influential text which has helped return a sense of artisanship to the craft of typography. Bringhurst demonstrates his unparalleled eye, broad practical knowledge, and finely honed rhetorical skills in the book, for which he chose two newly designed typefaces, Minion and Poetica, also used a few years later in The Calling.
While honing his typographic skills, Bringhurst wrote reviews for a San Francisco–based journal of book arts called Fine Print which attracted the attention of Berkeley printer Peter Koch. Impressed by his sequence on the ancient Greek philosopher-poets, “The Old in Their Knowing,” Koch invited Bringhurst to collaborate on a new translation of the fragments of Parmenides, which finally came to fruition in 2004 in a bilingual, limited edition framed by Bringhurst’s essay “The Poetry of Philosophy and the Survival of Pagan Thinking.” Bringhurst’s fascination with the Presocratics had been made clear at the very outset of his career through the quotation from the archaic Greek poet Alkaios used as an epigraph to The Shipwright’s Log. The Presocratics lived and worked in a geography similar to the one Bringhurst himself occupies, a coastline “pinned to the sea’s edge by the horned mountains rising close behind” (Beauty 48). Intellectually and artistically, the Presocratics also occupied a particular niche not unlike Bringhurst’s, the edge between an oral culture and a culture dominated by writing which would succeed it. Parmenides, Bringhurst writes, “has his feet in two domains” – among the first Greek thinkers to write his thoughts down, he wrote them in the style of the oral verse typical of the culture in which his mind was formed. Skaay and Ghandl, too, lived through a tumultuous transitional period, yet with the aid of Henry Moody and John Swanton managed to record their oral artistry through the medium of written text. Bringhurst’s gravitation to the British Columbia coast is thus of a piece with the progress of his thinking and his sense of kinship with the Presocratics.
His habitation at edges and boundaries, his early nomadic life, and his historical perspective continue to challenge attempts to identify Bringhurst as a “Canadian writer,” even though he became a Canadian citizen in 1982. He has published major collections with McClelland & Stewart, received nominations for the Governor General’s Award, and is now an officer of the Order of Canada. Nevertheless, one peculiarity of Canadian multiculturalism is that while imports from the British Isles, the Caribbean, and Asia are readily absorbed, those who have migrated from the United States are often suspected of remaining American underneath the Canadian facade, as if they might change their minds and return south of the border at any moment. Moreover, Bringhurst’s own views of North America derive from a historical scope not dissimilar to that of the First Nations, in which “Canada” appears as a fiction of recent invention.
This volume of essays is offered as both an introduction to and a critique of Bringhurst’s poetry and translations from his very first collection, The Shipwright’s Log in 1972, through to Ursa Major in 2003, with abundant references to his essays and lectures as gathered in The Tree of Meaning (2006) and Everywhere Being Is Dancing (2007). The default reference text for his poetry is his Selected Poems (2009). These latter four books are all still in print as of 2014, published by Gaspereau Press, and Bringhurst himself remains as engaged in his project as ever. A history of book design in Canada, The Surface of Meaning was published in 2008, a second edition of A Story as Sharp as a Knife in 2011, and a fourth edition of The Elements of Typographic Style in 2012. He continues his work on Voices in the Land, an encyclopedia of the oral literatures and major authors of Native North America still in progress. We hope that Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: The Arts of Robert Bringhurst will meet the challenge of opening up the multifaceted career of this literary “Renaissance man” to students, scholars, and the wider Canadian public, to whom, in this time of unprecedented cultural change and ecological crisis, he undoubtedly has much to say.
The essays and commentaries that follow each offer a unique perspective on Robert Bringhurst’s many-faceted career. Mark Dickinson’s opening essay provides the most thorough artistic and intellectual biography of Bringhurst yet compiled, tracing his life from his nomadic childhood through his self-directed post-secondary education, his experiences as a translator in the American military, and his mature life on the British Columbia coast. Dickinson details Bringhurst’s apprenticeship with Bill Reid, who suggested he approach the enigmatic mythtales of Skaay and Ghandl through the polyphony of pre-classical European chamber music, opening the door to the latter half of his career as translator and polyphonic poet. Dickinson follows Bringhurst through his simultaneous labours on The Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers trilogy and his ambitious performance pieces New World Suite No. 3 and Ursa Major, showing the links between the projects.
Peter Koch’s article “Renaissance Men and Presocratic Philosophers: The Path to The Fragments of Parmenides” discusses Bringhurst as both craftsman and philosopher. Koch, an artisan printer based in Berkeley, California, recounts his first meeting with Bringhurst and their discovery of common interests, including the Presocratics, the challenges of setting Greek type, and a childhood history in Montana. The primary focus of Koch’s article is their collective creation of a new volume of Parmenides, with translation, typeface, and paper all designed from scratch for the hand-printed, limited-edition book. Bringhurst’s lively translation of Parmenides was subsequently published in Everywhere Being Is Dancing, along with the essay “Raven’s Wine Cup,” a meditation on philosophy and verse which concludes Carving the Elements, the companion volume on the making of The Fragments of Parmenides. A detailed analysis of another of Bringhurst’s translations from Greek is provided by Kevin McNeilly’s essay “Ecologies of Estrangement: Bringhurst’s Antigone,” which examines “Of the Snaring of Birds,” a short poem based on a choral passage from the tragedy by Sophocles. Antigone’s impossible position between the “moralizing absolutism” of Creon and the “ethical demands” on her to bury her dead brother is given an ecological dimension by Bringhurst’s “contrary” or “supplemental” translation, dedicated to Heidegger, in which the chorus speaks to us directly, provoking a recognition of our estrangement from ourselves and the natural world alike. McNeilly contrasts Bringhurst’s translation to one by contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson, and digs into its connections to Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Celan.
Iain Higgins traces the self-conscious evolution of Bringhurst as a poet from his first self-published volume The Shipwright’s Log through his breakthrough work Bergschrund in 1975 in which the Presocratic poems first appeared as a sequence. Higgins’s essay “Salvage Selvage Joinery: Bringhurst’s Early Drafts” examines the poet’s efforts to define and redefine himself as a literary craftsman, including attempts at salvage (finding the living amongst the dead and gone), selvage (self-definition through edge-making) and joinery (literary carpentry and attachment to literary traditions). Higgins shows Bringhurst to have been “his own most exacting reader” over successive volumes collecting his poetry as a “living repertory.” Crispin Elsted, another artisan printer who collaborated with Bringhurst, picks up a thread from Higgins in his essay “Grace in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions,” in which he discusses Bringhurst’s evolution as a typographer and book designer from the early work up through The Elements of Typographic Style and The Surface of Meaning. Brent Wood’s essay “Anatomy of a Voice: Robert Bringhurst’s Rhythms” picks up another thread, revealing the extent to which the success of Bringhurst’s inhabitation of voices depends upon his deft manipulation of metre and other kinds of rhythm. Wood shows how an essential concern with rhythm defines Bringhurst’s entire professional oeuvre, including the principles of his typographical theory, his interweaving of rhetorical patterns through the polyphonic New World Suite No. 3, and his attempts to render the “noetic rhythms” of Skaay’s mythtales on the page. These are put in the context of his published thoughts on the rhythmic nature of reality, in which he reasons that “if what-is is musical, then to do ontology well, it might be necessary to think in a musical way” (Everywhere 178).
Clare Goulet, one of the first people to perform New World Suite No. 3 with Bringhurst, recounts that experience, along with her thoughts on the partially polyphonic poem which opens The Calling, in her essay “‘Conversations with a Toad’: A Prologue to Polyphony.” Goulet consults recent research on the psychology of musical polyphony to help explain the challenges Bringhurst’s multi-voice performance poems pose to audiences and performers. She explores various options for setting “Conversations with a Toad” on the page, and the poem’s “natural ecology of call-and-response.” Famed Canadian poet Dennis Lee, in whose name the symposium on literary polyphony at which Goulet performed New World Suite No. 3 was organized, comments on the degree of creative initiative demonstrated by Bringhurst in making the leap into polyphonic performance poems in his article, “Braided Skeins of Sound: Bringhurst’s Oral Polyphony.” Lee outlines the brief history of the performances these works have received, and calls for recordings of these innovative works to be made public. In her essay “Water Music: Close Listening to The Blue Roofs of Japan,” Katherine McLeod provides a description of a CBC radio recording of the poem broadcast in 1986 but available only in the network’s Vancouver archives. McLeod examines the evolution of print versions from its limited first edition by Barbarian Press through its most recent incarnation in the Selected Poems. The poem’s careful organization around the elements of air, earth, water, fire, and music is highlighted in her exegesis of Bringhurst’s first serious attempt at handling two simultaneous voices which discourse on the same subject from related but differing angles.
Scott McIntyre, founder of Douglas & McIntyre, the publisher responsible for putting The Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers and The Black Canoe into print, shares his insider’s perspective on the twenty-year trail that led Bringhurst from the job of designer of books on Indigenous west-coast art to the large-scale translations of Skaay and Ghandl. McIntyre’s essay “Bringhurst in West Coast Book Design and Publishing” like Peter Koch’s invites us backstage to watch the publishing process unfolding, and reveals the professional context in which Bringhurst’s Haida translation project developed, including a look at his initial collaboration with Bill Reid on The Raven Steals the Light. When Erica Wagner, then literary editor of The Times of London, England, discovered Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, she was astounded at the way the paradigm-changing power of oral narrative had been channelled into book form. Wagner’s commentary, “Story and Silence,” discusses how her world “shifted on its axis” when she encountered the mythtales, and ponders the challenges the texts face in accomplishing their mission of sharing masterworks of pre-colonial North America with the rest of the world. Wagner asked Margaret Atwood to write a piece for the Times introducing the trilogy to the British reading public. “Uncovered: An American Iliad” is reproduced here in full with Atwood’s permission, and is the only text not written specifically for this volume. Atwood’s article is of historical significance as a public defense of Bringhurst’s work by a literary personality of international stature closely identified with progressive social outlook, political awareness, and Canadian cultural identity.
Nicholas Bradley’s “At Land’s End: Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers” offers the most sophisticated critical examination of the trilogy to date. Bradley builds upon his two previously published scholarly essays on the same topic in constructing an analysis of the texts’ making and reception, a close reading of Bringhurst’s translation of the Ghandl story about a hunter who marries a bird with which A Story as Sharp as a Knife begins, and a discussion of the significance of Bringhurst’s presentation of Skaay and Ghandl’s mythtales as “classical” literature for a re-conceiving of North American literary history. Ghandl’s story of the hunter who enters the skyworld but cannot remain there is shown to have implications for Bringhurst himself as cultural translator. Bradley’s essay sets the bar for future scholars delving into the mythtales and into Bringhurst’s role in completing the project begun a century before by Swanton and Moody.
A short piece by Vancouver-based broadcaster of Haida and Cherokee descent Káawan Sangáa (W.F. Morrison) entitled “Sgalangáay Díinaa lijang: ‘This Is My Song’” revisits his encounter with Bringhurst and his Haida translations in the context of the politically fueled critiques that arose following their publication. Sangáa interprets Haida figurations of song, wind, and water to direct skeptics to look into Bringhurst’s translations “from a different angle.” Ishmael Hope’s article “The Reincarnation of Stories” offers another Indigenous northwest perspective on the effect of the trilogy’s publication within the context of his own family. Hope, an Alaskan storyteller of Iñupiaq and Tlingit heritage, acknowledges the epiphanies we might have when giving ourselves over to the mythworlds of Skaay and Ghandl, necessitating the recognition that “we belong to a community that reaches beyond our species” – what Hope’s father called the “Raven Creator bioregion” of the Pacific northwest.
Concluding the book is the editors’ own essay on Bringhurst’s ambitious polyphonic script Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers and Dancers, entitled “Ursa Major: Polyphony, Myth, Ecology.” This essay undertakes the tasks of unravelling the complicated web of Cree and Greek stories, recreating the work’s original setting, and examining its significance with respect to the particular brand of post-colonial thought central to Bringhurst’s project. Bringhurst’s provocative juxtaposition of Ovid and Homer with Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw, the Cree mythteller whose “Bear Woman” story was recorded in 1925, is documented in detail and its intercultural resonances and intertextual ironies explicated. Ursa Major can be heard as Bringhurst’s way of applying what he had learned from the visual polyphony of Reid’s formline art in order to let the classical literatures of two continents resonate with one another in sounding the depths of post-colonial conundrums and ecological crisis.
This introduction to the first volume of scholarship devoted to the work of Robert Bringhurst would not be complete without an acknowledgment of the isolated critical commentaries which precede it and the “lover’s quarrel” Bringhurst has had with the contemporary academy. The quasi-independence from both politics and marketplace which defines the university would seem to make it a natural fit for an individualist polymath such as Bringhurst. Yet by his own admission, his relationship with the academy has not been an easy one. He completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees independently through self-directed learning programs. After lecturing for a few years at the University of British Columbia, Bringhurst freed himself from the institution and set about earning his living outside it. The resulting lack of academic credentials became an issue when he was harshly criticized as a dilettante by linguistic anthropologist John Enrico, a scenario discussed in depth by Bradley’s previously published essays “We Who Have Traded Our Voices for Words” (2004) and “Remembering Offence: Robert Bringhurst and the Ethical Challenge of Cultural Appropriation” (2007). Bringhurst acknowledged that forging ahead on the Haida project without PhD or faculty position was considered by some a violation of academic protocol. When granted an honorary doctorate by University College of the Fraser Valley, he said that the honour felt like a “vindication” of the independent mind by an institution whose members might often be “suspicious” of such work. “Robert Frost said he had a lover’s quarrel with the world; I’ve had one with the university,” Bringhurst confessed. “I’ve been a student all my life, but never a model student – and I haven’t proven a model teacher either” (UFV website).
The serious extant criticism on Bringhurst may be summarized quickly. An essay by John Whatley of Simon Fraser University, “Readings of Nothing: Robert Bringhurst’s ‘Hachadura’” (Canadian Literature, 1989) was until now the only peer-reviewed work of criticism on Bringhurst other than Bradley’s. Whatley exposes “Hachadura” as a response to Wallace Stevens’s “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” and demonstrates how Bringhurst reveals Stevens’s mocking wish for a return of the muse as a force pushing his poetry to a “self-enclosed, self-contained world” and a “corrupted myth” (Whatley 121). Whatley’s observation that “Bringhurst likes edges and sharp boundaries” (112), evident not only in “Hachadura” but in the “dressed edge of air” of “Song of the Summit” and in the “bright blade of blue sunlight” of “One Glyph” (Selected 17, 19), foreshadows Bringhurst’s choice of title for A Story as Sharp as a Knife, derived from a northwest coast proverb rendered in English as “The world is as sharp as a knife” (Story 373). Peter Sanger responded to Whatley with his article “Poor Man’s Art: On the Poetry of Robert Bringhurst,” adding Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, and Lucretius to the mix of influences, and wrote an extensive afterword to the first edition of Ursa Major entitled “Late at the Feast.” The publication of The Calling in 1995 motivated Iain Higgins to write an extensive review which prefigures his essay in this volume, showing how Bringhurst as idiotes (Greek for the person “who goes his own way entirely”) takes the ethos of “do-it-yourself” to new heights. A dozen years before she married Bringhurst, poet/philosopher Jan Zwicky analyzed the reflection in elegant patterns of sound, syntax, and image in “Herakleitos” of ideas about exchange which are the poem’s central concern in her essay “Bringhurst’s Presocratics: Lyric and Ecology,” published in Poetry and Knowing, to which Bringhurst also contributed his essay “Everywhere Being Is Dancing, Knowing Is Known.” Sean Kane, the scholar of oral narrative with whose co-operation Bringhurst first launched his investigation into the Haida mythtales, included an early translation by Bringhurst of the short Skaay story “Sapsucker” in his book Wisdom of the Mythtellers, and later wrote an essay entitled “Skaay on the Cosmos” in which he explores connections between ancient Irish mythtales and those evident in Bringhurst’s translations of Skaay.
Nor have anthologists of Canadian literature shown a widespread appreciation for Bringhurst’s work. He may have been too young to slip into Jack David’s and Robert Lecker’s popular anthology Canadian Poetry in 1982, but Bringhurst was also excluded from Lecker’s recent Open Country: Canadian Poetry in English. Cynthia Sugars and Laura Moss felt it unnecessary to include any of his work in their massive Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. Russell Brown and Donna Bennett put only “Essay on Adam,” “These Poems, She Said,” and “Deuteronomy” into the first several versions of Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, expanding the selection with a proper biographical and critical note in the 2010 edition. Only Gary Geddes, editor of the 15 Canadian Poets anthologies for Oxford, seemed to grasp Bringhurst’s work, offering a wide selection of poems and insightful critical perspective in his 1988 and 2001 volumes, thus opening a door to this world for students. Though Geddes appeared prescient in a review essay speculating that Bringhurst was in the process of turning a corner with Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, could he have guessed that the new “openness” of the work would be realized not through lyric poems but through an evolving interest in polyphonic art? Beginning with The Black Canoe in 1991, which documents and analyzes Reid’s famous masterwork and its predecessors in Haida formline art, the impersonal detachment which had been read by not only Geddes but by reviewers Don Clark, Jane Munro, and John Biguenet as a weakness in Bringhurst’s lyric poems became the strength of his prose, translations, and polyphonic compositions.
It may be that Bringhurst is simply too much a throwback to the academy of ancient Greece to fit comfortably within the twenty-first century university’s rubrics of knowledge-production and transmission. Or, it may be that he is actually ahead of his time, pointing the way forward by pointing back. In stubbornly following his own path in crafting texts that assume “the gods” as their first listeners, Bringhurst has created a body of work which will undoubtedly attract more scholarly attention in the future. The global ecological crisis provides evidence every day of the hubris which drives colonial expansion and technological consumption of the natural world. Our only path through the evolving malaise may be a collective re-awakening to humility, a polyphonic epiphany owing something to a renaissance of North American Indigenous cultural ideals, activated paradoxically through the networks of artificial intelligence which both unite and isolate us. In such a scenario, Bringhurst’s listening skills may prove a valuable catalyst in cultural transformation, rendering him doubly deserving of the epithet “Renaissance man.”
Biguenet, John. Review of Bergschrund. West Coast Review 11:2 (Oct. 1976): 39.
Bradley, Nicholas. “Remembering Offence: Robert Bringhurst and the Ethical Challenge of Cultural Appropriation.” University of Toronto Quarterly, 76.3 (2007): 890–912.
– “We Who Have Traded Our Voices for Words: Performance, Poetry and the Printed Word in Robert Bringhurst’s Translations from Haida.” Essays on Canadian Writing 83 (2004): 140–66.
Brown, Russell, and Donna Bennett. Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992, 2010.
Clark, Ron. Review of Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Wascana Review 22:1 (Spring 1987): 93–5.
Geddes, Gary. 15 Canadian Poets x 2. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988.
– 15 Canadian Poets x 3. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001.
– Review of Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Journal of Canadian Poetry 3 (1988): 16–18.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
Higgins, Iain. Review of The Calling. Journal of Canadian Poetry 12.6 (1997): 27–46.
Hodgson, C.W. “Letters to the Editor: Sharp Knives.” Books in Canada 29.1 (2000): 4.
Kane, Sean. “Skaay on the Cosmos.” Canadian Literature 188 (Spring 2006): 11–29.
– Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Peterborough: Broadview, 1994; 1998.
Lecker, Robert. Open Country: Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto: Thomson/Nelson, 2008.
– and Jack David. Canadian Poetry. Toronto: ECW, 1982.
Moss, Laura, and Cynthia Sugars. Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. Toronto: Pearson, 2009.
Munro, Jane. “Bringhurst’s Range: Essential Information.” CV II 5.2 (1981): 10–17.
Sanger, Peter. “Late at the Feast.” Afterword to Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers and Dancers. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2003, 77–90.
– “Poor Man’s Art: On the Poetry of Robert Bringhurst.” Antigonish Review 85/86 (1991): 151–69.
Society for Linguistic Anthropology website. www.linguisticanthropology.org/about/prizes.
University of the Fraser Valley website. www.ufv.ca.
Whatley, John. “Readings of Nothing: Robert Bringhurst’s ‘Hachadura.’” Canadian Literature 122–3 (Autumn/Winter 1989): 108–22.
Zwicky, Jan. “Bringhurst’s Presocratics: Lyric and Ecology.” Poetry and Knowing, Tim Lilburn, ed. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1995, 65–117.