Editor’s introduction

Anne Szumigalski died in 1999, and a year later Hagios Press published a book of her prose fables, Fear of Knives. In 2006 a collection of posthumous poems, When Earth Leaps Up, appeared from Brick Books, and in 2010 Signature Editions came out with A Peeled Wand, a modest volume of selected poems. Why in the world, you might be wondering, would Coteau want to publish yet another posthumous book? Shouldn’t the woman be allowed to rest in peace?

It’s a legitimate question. Anne played a crucial part in the growth of Saskatchewan’s literary culture and its wider artistic community, and I trust most readers of Canadian poetry would agree that she was a talented, original writer. But she was not so important a poet that all of her utterances, all of her first drafts, all of her attempts to breathe life into words need to appear in print. That’s what archives are for. If Anne chose to publish none of these writings in book form, does this final volume deserve to exist?

Here are a few reasons why it does.

The first is that it offers, as no previous book has done, a panoramic overview of Anne Szumigalski’s career – her writing life through four decades. Her debut collection, Woman Reading in Bath, was so polished, so accomplished, that it gave no hint of the struggles Anne had endured as a writer. It appeared in 1974, when she was over fifty; by the time her second collection came out, she was nearly sixty. Some of the poems for which she is best remembered are the harvest of her old age. But her accomplishment was hard won. Like so many writers, Anne had long struggled to find and fine-tune her voice. The poems published in the first section of this book may not always be successful, but they are always interesting – and the interest derives partly from the hard labour they reveal. The disappointments and false starts that she suffered made Woman Reading in Bath possible.

She did not always write as “Anne Szumigalski.” As a child she was Nancy Davis (informally) or Anne Howard Davis (officially). When she began to send poems to Canadian magazines at the beginning of the 1960s, she called herself “A. Szumigalski,” feeling, I assume, that male editors would be more likely to accept her work if they believed she was a man. “M. Atwood” did the same. The strategy worked: two letters survive from Milton Wilson, the managing editor of Canadian Forum in 1961, accepting the poems of “Mr. Szumigalski.” The third time her work appeared in the Montreal magazine Delta, the editor, Louis Dudek, wrote a patronizing comment informing his readers that A. Szumigalski “is a woman. Owes her name to a Polish spouse…. No relation to Sarah Binks.” Anne published nothing in Delta after that. The typescript of “The Pit” shows that she entered it in a literary competition under the name “Howard Davis.”

The handwritten notes on these early poems tell a story of imaginative hardship and artistic isolation. As a housewife and mother of four, living in a cramped house in an unfashionable neighbourhood of Saskatoon, she fought to maintain a sense of herself as a poet – someone whose work might, in the end, find readers. “Sent in for lit competition. No luck,” says a scribbled note on “Theo’s Mother.” “No-one likes this either,” she wrote above another poem – “nor I.” Anne never took success as a writer for granted. Even in her last years, after she had won a host of awards, she gained sustenance from writers’ groups. The affirmation she earned by workshopping her poems helped her develop as a poet in the late ’60s and early ’70s; so did the stringent criticisms. She thrived on both friendship and contention.

Anne liked to identify herself as a “prairie poet,” but many pieces in this book suggest that the role did not come naturally to her. She worked to master it. In her imagery, her cultural references and her use of language, her early Canadian poems are still thoroughly English. Unpublished work alludes to Highgate Hill and Charing Cross Road, in the evident hope that her readers, if any, will understand the London references. Admittedly “Three Facets of the Poet’s Dilemma” mentions a dollar, not a pound, and talks about ice splitting a river in spring. But it also contains phrases like “the count was got up as Christ,” “if you were to stop” and “I’d better make haste,” revealing the deep Englishness of Anne’s voice.

Only gradually do the prairies take over her imagination and her language – “Lion in the Salt Mine,” probably her first attempt to ground a poem in the Saskatchewan landscape, contains an inexplicable lion and a British “blasted.” By the mid-1970s, when she was writing poems about her father’s death, her voice and most of her settings had become those of a prairie writer. Yet “On Being a Stranger” (published in the 1988 book Journey/ Journée) includes the admission that “I am truly a stranger, not quite/At home anywhere. /Always some part of me/Away in another country.” A State of Grace, a tantalizingly unfinished novel, takes place in the dreamt-of England of Anne’s youth. But one of its characters imagines himself as a kingbird, and kingbirds fly only through the Western hemisphere.

A further reason why I think this book is necessary: it gives rich and perhaps surprising proof of the variety of forms in which Anne worked. Of course she was a poet before all else. But as long ago as 1974 the dust-jacket of Woman Reading in Bath declared that “she is currently at work on a collection of short stories,” and beginning in the early 1980s, prose would infiltrate and enrich all her books of poetry. Indeed the volume for which she won the Governor-General’s Award for poetry is largely made up of prose, some of it excerpted from her novel-in-progress. In her last decade she completed a memoir (The Word, the Voice, the Text) and a play (Z), and spent a good deal of time translating theatre pieces from Catalan and Dutch. A Woman Clothed in Words includes that never-completed novel along with a text for dance, an unfinished play, a children’s fable, excerpts from a radical liturgy, several essays, and a few pieces that straddle the disputed border between prose poem and short story.

Anne was, in short, not just a poet but a writer who tried her hand at a range of genres. Facing the blank page, she was fearless. What she cared about was the imagination, not the formal constraints we impose on its productions. The title of this book comes from a line in her long poem honouring a fellow prairie writer, Patrick Friesen. I intend the title, of course, to apply to Anne Szumigalski herself. Words were among her passions, and the interplay between language and the female body shapes much of her work.

Besides, it’s wrong to insinuate – as I did in the second paragraph – that Anne decided not to publish these writings. She was happy to see many of them appear in magazines, and to hear others performed. Admittedly I have taken the liberty of resurrecting poems from the 1960s and ’70s that were never published – though in some cases she had tried. A note on the typescript of the untitled poem that begins “falling on gravel” indicates that she mailed it off to Harper’s in April 1975. This is not the act of someone who considers the poem a failure. The bibliographical note at the end of this book reveals how many of these pieces had already appeared in print. I have merely brought them together and organized them into a more or less coherent whole.

Part of the coherence comes from some key influences that underpin much of her work. William Blake, of course: Anne was always ready to pay him tribute and to give him credit. The King James Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: once she had shed her faith in conventional Christianity, she had less to say about these influences. Yet their cadences and images underlie several of the pieces in this collection, not just the obvious Prairie Mass but also early poems like “Three Facets of the Poet’s Dilemma” and much later prose works like A State of Grace. And Samuel Beckett too: Anne’s late pieces for two voices often seem like extended riffs on Beckettian dialogue, reimagined by a woman.

With much of her work now out of print, her reputation stands at a kind of watershed. Of course the standing of many authors falls in the years after they die. In some cases, we see their writing more clearly without the interference of their personality. In others, the bluster and bravado of the living obscure the silent excellence of the dead. It would be a shame if this happened to her, as I think she was a writer of lasting merit.

For me, the final justification for assembling and publishing A Woman Clothed in Words is also the most important: the excellence of Anne’s work. This book contains some amazing writing; it scrapes the bottom of no barrels. There is much else I could have included – a play called Nursey, which displays her recurrent tendency to whimsy to the worst possible advantage; a co-written novel for children; dozens of abandoned poems; some book reviews; several unfinished pieces on diskettes. But it would do Anne’s reputation no favours to publish such material. The scholars can always forage in the archives.

I don’t mean this as a book for scholars. It’s a book for people to read, and I hope its contents will surprise and please you. Ideally they will make you want to return to Anne Szumigalski’s other writing, the lavish, idea-laden product of what Judith Krause once called “a tongue of heaven blessing all the vowels and consonants on earth.” I offer these pages not in a spirit of apology but of celebration.