(1971)
The Messianic stance has long been indigenous to the West Coast, and West Coast Seen does not fail to adopt it. The anthology opens with a sermonistic piece by Jim Brown in which dogmatically-formulated snatches of antidogma are interspersed with hymns of praise (to Vancouver as a “source of energy,” to Tish Magazine) and with mystic quotations from Words and elsewhere. After being told that we are “moving through the mystery,” though, it’s a slight letdown to turn the page and find the editors going on about money, publishing and Canada Council grants just as though they were Torontonians.
Despite the naiveté of this juxtaposition, the introduction does make some valid points. Vancouver is, as Brown claims, an open city, which may account for the collection’s extreme diversity. Phillips is quite right in stating that the book’s relevance is “immediate:” he seems to fear that these poems won’t stay representative of what’s going on in Vancouver for very long, and indeed several of the poets are already elsewhere. All anthologies are necessarily retrospective, but this one is a little more so than, for instance, T. O. Now or Canada First: the poems date roughly from 1965 to 1969. They’re no doubt a reasonably fair cross-section of what was being done in those years among new (though not always young) poets, if one chooses to skip the customary quibbles (if X, why not Y, if Hulcoop and Jungic, why not Yates, where are Jamie Reid, Daphne Marlatt, etc?). On this point Brown defends himself in advance:
Our conception that the scene here has not been easily defined since the early days of Tish is even more true today. There are so many people writing here now that it would be impossible to say that this is a complete and absolute statement of the WC thing/scene in Canada.
This comment underlines one of West Coast Seen’s problems: its attempt to contain a sort of poetic urban sprawl. Vancouver is a city that poets go to rather than come from; the result is a book that can either be praised for its range and inclusiveness or reprimanded for its lack of focus. Stylistically, WCS has something for everyone: for an editor whose “whole conception of publishing is centred around the personal aspect,” Brown’s taste is surprisingly eclectic. But he seems aware of this too, and the shifts in typeface are perhaps intended as a comment rather than simply as a decorative device.
West Coast Seen’s variety makes it unsatisfactory for trend-spotting purposes, but a reviewer is honour-bound to make the attempt. The cover provides a clue of sorts: on the back is an alphabet with some of the letters replaced by images (a clock, people walking); on the front is something that looks like a geological strata diagram (reflecting perhaps the editor’s intention of presenting simply what has happened, with critical judgement kept to a minimum) until it is turned sideways, when it becomes a series of thin pictures: trees, houses, telephone poles. Here then are two concerns important to West Coast poets (though not altogether unknown elsewhere); the concern with image as physical object stripped of rhetoric, and the concern with language as visual and aural medium, stripped of what Brown calls “intellectual meaning.”
The first direction was taken some years ago by, for instance, George Bowering, Lionel Kearns, and some of the other early Tish poets, and (less programmatically but sometimes more profoundly) by John Newlove. It is followed here most notably by Ken Belford, Pat Lane and Barry McKinnon. Belford is a delight: he has his language well under control, and such poems as “Carrier Indians,” “Stove” and “Omega” read with the kind of inevitability of image and rhythm that makes other poets grit their teeth with envy once they have recovered from the poem. Pat Lane is finally discovering his own voice; some of the selections here lack the austerity and condensation of the best work in his recent collection, Separations, but one outstanding poem, “Last Night in Darkness,” appears in both. Barry McKinnon’s most impressive poem here is the roughly-finished but powerful “Letter II: for my wife.”
The second direction is rapidly gaining adherents, but the local source of energy is undoubtedly still Bill Bissett. At their best, his poems transcend the technical peculiarities and conventions of much “sound” poetry—phonetic spelling, distortion or abolition of syntax, serial repetition, and a childlike preoccupation with sounds for their own sakes and with the fact that two words of different meanings can be pronounced alike (producing what would be known in other circles as “puns”). Such poems as “the tempul firing” are invocations, conjuring (as opposed to descriptions) of the ecstatic vision, and Bissett does them better than anyone. Siebun, Tan Trey, Mayne (sometimes) and Phillips (in a much cooler way) are somewhere in the vicinity of the same wave-length. “Image” poems usually concentrate on the outer world, describing things (and the poet’s reaction to them) as they are; “sound” poetry leans toward the magical, the inner, toward the evocation of a world transfigured. The difference is illustrated by the work of Brown himself, which moves from the earlier “image” poems such as “Poem to my father” to later “sound” ones such as “th breath.”
But these two kinds of poem-making are not the only ones going on in West Coast Seen. Some poets, such as Stephen Scobie, are exploring the visual type of concrete poetry, though this area is not adequately represented. Others, such as Pat Lowther, are happily unclassifiable: they are simply writing good poems. Others are either very versatile or still searching for a personal style. Another group, if group they be, are trending towards neo-surrealism; among these are Andreas Schroeder, the interesting Zoran Jungic, and Pierre Coupey —a more ambitious poet than many in this collection.
Is Vancouver special? Is it really, as the introductory letter of David Phillips implies, that much different from Montreal or Toronto as a place to write poems, that much better? Does West Coast Seen have a distinctive flavour not found in, for instance, T. O. Now? There is certainly a difference in editorial attitude: anthologizers further east at least pretend that they are cool, semi-professional and semi-objective; they are more willing to comment, less willing to preach. The isolation of Vancouver and its consequent cultishness result in a gleeful do-it-yourself attitude towards publishing—a kind of “I’m doing this for me, my friends and the rest of the converted, but you can watch if you like” posture. It’s as much of a pretense as the other one, but it does produce a different kind of grab-bag. If cultivated maturity results in quality control and a certain uniformity and dullness (like a convention of Iowa Writing School old boys), cultivated youthful enthusiasm obviously results in sloppiness. West Coast Seen is too long and too undiscriminating: it includes a number of pretentious, silly and trivial poems as well as a number of good ones. But children, though sometimes tedious and aggravating (to others: never to themselves) are also refreshing and delightful, and the Vancouver poets seem more willing to take the more obvious risks, to branch out, to experiment and fail, than their more cautious eastern counterparts. On the other hand, wit seems to flourish better in the East: the WCS poets, though they play wordgames, do not as a rule turn phrases. However, making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors.