THERE WAS A TIME in my life when I knew almost nothing about the writers of my own time or place. I was introduced to poetry in grade school and high school in the way most Canadians of my vintage were: when it came time to wade through the poetry “module,” a large survey of antique writers were rapidly explicated by teachers who had no particular love of the writers or the poems. And, at the end, there was a test to see if you could break one of Shakespeare’s sonnets into feet and draw in the rests and stresses.
Although by this point it was widely believed in my high school that people had stopped writing poetry after about 1950, I was lucky enough to have a teacher who smuggled in Ginsberg, Olsen, Creeley, Atwood and nichol. We were shocked that it was entirely possible that there were poets living in our own city. After this class, and starting in university, I began to rifle the poetry shelves in used bookstores. One of my happiest discoveries was a thin collection of poems called Lependu by Don McKay.
I don’t remember exactly where I turned this book up, but I do know the copy I own is the only copy I’ve ever seen. These are the first lines:
When Lependu loves you
he’s the shadow they discover on your lung
that whets each breath.
I can’t explain why these lines hit me like sock in the gut, but they did and they still do. Like McKay’s later work, Lependu is a wild roil of lyricism and goofball comedy; wordplay and unkempt syntax that hits the reader like jazz on the ear; and there’s a deep, abiding sense of history and nature too, as in all his work. (Lependu is about, among other things, London, Ontario, and McKay even draws us a historical plaque on page six, which he says is “stuck like a thought balloon in the city’s comic strip.”)
McKay mixes straight prose with poetry (slipping from one form to another like a man busting into drunken song), and the sacred with the profane. Lependu—the title means “the hanged” and refers to Cornelius Burleigh, the first man ever hanged in London—reset my poetic North.
McKay just lets it fly in these pages, it’s mayhem. You come across murderers, dainty ladies, Tom Thomson, phrenology, the London Life Insurance Company, and the trickster Lependu him- (or rather it-) self, who swims and swans through it all, the devil taking the fiddle. The sheer gusting power of the language knocks you back, as McKay filters an awesome range of impulse and energy through the poems:
Back and forth salaam salaam the sprinklers
graze and pray on plush
carpets of grass, beer becomes sweat, the heavy
air surrounds, mothers us to immobility, the mind
melts, the elements
slump, four fat uncles in their lawn chairs, while the flesh
well the flesh just ambles into town to get drunk with the ball players.
I just can’t believe that McKay wasn’t shouting whoa! whoa! as he wrote this, at least I hope he was. Look at that “salaam salaam” there in the first line. Onomatopoeia meets sight gag. I see those sprinklers bowing low in wet obeisance with their greetings of peace in the midst of such heat, not to mention the four elements transubstantiated into “four fat uncles” … man, it makes me want to cry.
Lependu was published in 1978 by Nairn Publishing of Coldstream, Ontario. It’s never been reprinted. Lependu made me want something for myself as a writer, the first book to do that for me. The fact that it’s so hard to find, and therefore not enough read, is sad considering that McKay is still very much alive, and it would be wonderful if more people could tell him what a great book it is. (Although the chance to appreciate McKay is regularly presented: his most recent book, Another Gravity, builds on the promise of Lependu. Where else but in McKay’s work do “… Chestnut-backed Chickadees kibitz and flit …”?) Anyone who is lucky enough to come upon this lost classic of Canadian poetry will identify with Christopher Columbus (a Lependu cameo), who “walking through his newfoundforests/ whispers mama mia to himself.”