"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations
"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy
I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike
"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, "How's the little lady today!" you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.
I feel that the task of criticizing my poetry is best left to others (i.e. critics) and would much rather have it take place after I am dead. If at all.
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that is wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not "Am I really that oppressed?" but "Am I really that boring?"
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
* * * * * * * *
Talking Volumes: Margaret Atwood reads "Night Poem"
Regarded as one of Canada’s finest living writers, Margaret Atwood is a poet, novelist, story writer, essayist, and environmental activist. Her books have received critical acclaim in the United States, Europe, and her native Canada, and she has received numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Governor General’s Award, twice. Atwood’s critical popularity is matched by her popularity with readers; her books are regularly bestsellers and her novels have been adapted into popular movies and television series.
Atwood was born in Ottawa and earned her BA from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and MA from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She first came to public attention as a poet in the 1960s with her collections Double Persephone (1961), winner of the E.J. Pratt Medal, and The Circle Game (1964), winner of a Governor General’s award. These two books marked out terrain her subsequent poetry has explored. Double Persephone dramatizes the contrasts between life and art, as well as natural and human creations. The Circle Game takes this opposition further, setting such human constructs as games, literature, and love against the instability of nature. Sherrill Grace, writing in Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, identified the central tension in all of Atwood’s work as “the pull towards art on one hand and towards life on the other.” Atwood “is constantly aware of opposites—self/other, subject/object, male/female, nature/man—and of the need to accept and work within them,” Grace explained. Linda W. Wagner, writing in The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, also saw the dualistic nature of Atwood’s poetry, asserting that “duality [is] presented as separation” in her work. This separation leads her characters to be isolated from one another and from the natural world, resulting in their inability to communicate, to break free of exploitative social relationships, or to understand their place in the natural order. “In her early poetry,” Gloria Onley wrote in the West Coast Review, Atwood “is acutely aware of the problem of alienation, the need for real human communication and the establishment of genuine human community—real as opposed to mechanical or manipulative; genuine as opposed to the counterfeit community of the body politic.”
Suffering is common for the female characters in Atwood’s poems, although they are never passive victims. Atwood’s poems, West Coast Review contributor Onley maintained, concern “modern woman’s anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (although also exploiting) by the imposition of a sex role power structure.” Atwood explained to Judy Klemesrud in the New York Times that her suffering characters come from real life: “My women suffer because most of the women I talk to seem to have suffered.” Although she became a favorite of feminists, Atwood’s popularity in the feminist community was unsought. “I began as a profoundly apolitical writer,” she told Lindsy Van Gelder of Ms., “but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me.”
Margaret Atwood, 1984 | Harry Palmer Photographs
Atwood’s 1995 book of poetry, Morning in the Burned House, “reflects a period in Atwood’s life when time seems to be running out,” observed John Bemrose in Maclean’s. Noting that many of the poems address grief and loss, particularly in relationship to her father’s death and a realization of her own mortality, Bemrose added that the book “moves even more deeply into survival territory.” Bemrose further suggested that in this book, Atwood allows the readers greater latitude in interpretation than in her earlier verse: “Atwood uses grief … to break away from that airless poetry and into a new freedom.” A selection of Atwood’s poems was released as Eating Fire: Selected Poems 1965-1995 in 1998. Showing the arc of Atwood’s poetics, the volume was praised by Scotland on Sunday for its “lean, symbolic, thoroughly Atwoodesque prose honed into elegant columns.” Atwood’s 2007 collection, The Door, was her first new volume of poems in a decade. Reviewing the book for the Guardian, the noted literary critic Jay Parini maintained that Atwood’s “northern” poetic climate is fully on view, “full of wintry scenes, harsh autumnal rain, splintered lives, and awkward relationships. Against this landscape, she draws figures of herself.” Parini found Atwood using irony, the conventions of confessional verse, political attitudes and gestures, as well as moments of ars poetica throughout the collection. “There is a pleasing consistency in these poems,” he wrote “which are always written in a fluent free verse, in robust, clear language. Atwood’s wit and humour are pervasive, and few of the poems end without an ironic twang.”
Atwood’s interest in female experience also emerges clearly in her novels, particularly in The Edible Woman (1969),Surfacing (1972),Life before Man (1979),Bodily Harm (1981), and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Even later novels such as The Robber Bride (1993) and Alias Grace (1996) feature female characters defined by their intelligence and complexity. By far Atwood’s most famous early novel, The Handmaid’s Tale also presages her later trilogy of scientific dystopia and environmental disaster Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). Rather than “science fiction,” Atwood uses the term “speculative fiction” to describe her project in these novels. The Handmaid’s Tale is dominated by an unforgiving view of patriarchy and its legacies. As Barbara Holliday wrote in the Detroit Free Press, Atwood “has been concerned in her fiction with the painful psychic warfare between men and women. In The Handmaid’s Tale … she casts subtlety aside, exposing woman’s primal fear of being used and helpless.” Atwood, however, believes that her vision is not far from reality. Speaking to Battiata, Atwood noted that “The Handmaid’s Tale does not depend upon hypothetical scenarios, omens, or straws in the wind, but upon documented occurrences and public pronouncements; all matters of record.”
Atwood’s next few books deal less with speculative worlds and more with history, literary convention, and narrative hi-jinx. In The Robber Bride, Atwood again explores women’s issues and feminist concerns, this time concentrating on women’s relationships with each other—both positive and negative. Inspired by the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom,” the novel chronicles the relationships of college friends Tony, Charis, and Roz with their backstabbing classmate Zenia. Lorrie Moore, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Robber Bride “Atwood’s funniest and most companionable book in years,” adding that its author “retains her gift for observing, in poetry, the minutiae specific to the physical and emotional lives of her characters.” Alias Grace represents Atwood’s first venture into historical fiction, but the book has much in common with her other works in its contemplation of “the shifting notions of women’s moral nature” and “the exercise of power between men and women,” wrote Maclean’s contributor Diane Turbide. Several reviewers found Grace, a woman accused of murdering her employer and his wife but who claims amnesia, a complicated and compelling character. Turbide added that Grace is more than an intriguing character: she is also “the lens through which Victorian hypocrisies are mercilessly exposed.”
Atwood continues to investigate the conventions and expectations of genre literature in The Blind Assassin (2000), which won the prestigious Booker Prize. The novel involves multiple story lines; interspersed with these narrative threads are sections devoted to one character’s novel, The Blind Assassin, published posthumously. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called The Blind Assassin an “absorbing new novel” that “showcases Ms. Atwood’s narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic.” Atwood’s next novels, however, return to the speculative terrain she mapped out in The Handmaid’s Tale. Oryx and Crake,The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam form a trilogy about a world of fundamental environmental catastrophe. Reviewing Oryx and Crake, Kakutani in the New York Times wrote, “once again she conjures up a dystopia, where trends that started way back in the twentieth century have metastasized into deeply sinister phenomena.” Science contributor Susan M. Squier wrote that “Atwood imagines a drastic revision of the human species that will purge humankind of all of our negative traits.” Squier went on to note that “in Oryx and Crake readers will find a powerful meditation on how education that separates scientific and aesthetic ways of knowing produces ignorance and a wounded world.” Atwood’s most recent novels include The Heart Goes Last (2015), which she began in serial installments online, Hag-Seed (2016), a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the graphic novel Angel Catbird (2016).
Atwood is known for her strong support of causes: feminism, environmentalism, social justice. In Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Atwood discerns a uniquely Canadian literature, distinct from its American and British counterparts. Canadian literature, she argues, is primarily concerned with victims and with the victim’s ability to survive unforgiving circumstances. In the way other countries or cultures focus around a unifying symbol—America’s frontier, England’s island—Canada and Canadian literature orientate around survival. Several critics find that Atwood’s own work exemplifies this primary theme of Canadian literature. Her examination of destructive gender roles and her nationalistic concern over the subordinate role Canada plays to the United States are variations on the victor/victim theme. Atwood believes a writer must consciously work within his or her nation’s literary tradition, and her own work closely parallels the themes she sees as common to the Canadian literary tradition.
Atwood has also continued to write about writing. Her lectures Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing were published under the same title in 2002. She has also released several essay collections, including Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004 (2004) and Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing, 1970-2005 (2005). In 2008 she published the collection Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Examining the peculiar financial straits of the 21st century, Atwood also traces the historical precedents for lending, borrowing, and debt. Her collection In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011) explores the resources of science fiction as speculative thought. According to Nick Owchar in the Los Angeles Times, “Atwood explains how the genre fits into a continuum dating to the world’s oldest myths and continuing today with authors who use the genre to examine social ills, not run away from them.”
Although she has been labeled a Canadian nationalist, a feminist, a gothic and science fiction writer, given the range and volume of her work, Atwood both incorporates and transcends all of these categories.
Margaret Atwood on grief, poetry and the past four years.
In an exclusive new poem and essay Margaret Atwood reflects on the
passing of time and how to create lasting art in a rapidly changing world.
I can say with a measure of certainty – having consulted my poor excuse for a journal – that my poem “Dearly” was written in the third week of August 2017, on a back street of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, with either a pencil or a rollerball (I’d have to check that) on some piece of paper that may have been anything from an old envelope to a shopping list to a notebook page; I’d have to check that as well, but I’m guessing notebook. The language is early 21st-century Canadian English, which accounts for the phrase “less of a shit”, which would never have been used in, for instance, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam AHH”; though something like it might have appeared in one of Chaucer’s more vernacular tales – “lesse of a shitte”, perhaps. This poem was then taken out of a drawer, its handwriting more or less deciphered by me, and typed as a digital document in December 2017. I know that part from the date and time identifier on the document.
The poem was composed much as described at the beginning of it. I was indeed making my way along the sidewalk, rather slowly. My knees were in poor condition due to my having recently spent five hours in a twisted position in the back seat of a car with a one-and-a-half-year-old, with a bunch of luggage piled on top of me. (Improved now, thanks. Or the knees are.) I was in fact carrying half a cup of coffee in a takeout cup with a regrettable plastic lid. (Better options are available now, thanks to the justifiable uproar over plastic pollution.) Slow walking leads to rumination, which leads to poetry. Park benches are my friends, and it wasn’t raining. Scribbling ensued.
Why was I walking alone, and not with Graeme Gibson – with whom I’d walked many hundreds of miles, ever since 1971, in places as diverse as Scotland, Orkney, Cuba, Norfolk, the mid-north mixed forest Canada, southern France, the Canadian Arctic, and the Northwest Territories? Walking had been one of our chief joys – that and canoeing – until his knees started to go, earlier than mine. So he was at the bed and breakfast in Stratford which we had been going to for some years, and I had hobbled out for supplies, fuelling myself with caffeine along the way.
We were in Stratford on our annual visit to see a mix of Shakespeare, musicals, and surprises. Was I also giving a talk? Probably, since I’d just published Hag-Seed, my modern-novel riff on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the year before – set, not coincidentally, at a festival that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Stratford, Ontario one. Watching Shakespeare, researching Shakespeare, writing about Shakespeare – it’s a short leap to the contemplation of obsolete words, words that are fading, the malleability of language, all language – “gay” used to mean “happy”, and it once referred to the demimonde – and from that to the slipstream of time itself. We’re caught in time’s current. It moves. It leaves things behind.
That’s the foreground. In the near distance, Graeme had received a diagnosis of dementia in 2012, so we were five years into it. “What’s the prognosis?” he’d asked at the time. “Either it will go slowly, or it will go quickly, or it will stay the same, or we don’t know,” said the doctor. In August of 2017 it was still moving slowly enough, but the clock was ticking. We knew the what, but we didn’t know the when. As it turned out, Graeme was to die in almost exactly two years – in September 2019, two days after the London launch of my novel, The Testaments, he had a massive haemorrhagic stroke, typical of vascular dementia – and bowed out at about the time and in about the way he’d wanted to. Quick, relatively painless, and while he was still himself.
We’d talked about this a lot. We tried not to spend too much time under a pall of gloom.
We managed to do a lot of the things we wanted to do, and squeezed out enough happiness from hour to hour. Graeme was pre-mourned: all the poems about him in the book Dearly were written before he actually died.
At the same time, we were dealing with the MGM-Hulu television series of The Handmaid’s Tale – it had launched in April 2017 – and that in itself had been a blockbusting phenomenon. Its multiple wins at the Emmys were still in the future, as was the launch of the excellent mini-series made of Alias Grace – but both of them were still on my mind. Both were also backlit by the lurid glow cast by the 2016 presidential election, which I’d experienced like those nightmare movies where you’re expecting a girl to jump out of a cake and instead it’s the Joker. Had Clinton won the election, The Handmaid’s Tale TV series would have been framed as a bullet dodged. As things were, the viewership was not only very high but very horrified. However, few expected at this point that the efforts to undermine the foundations of American democracy – an independent, functioning media, a judiciary separate from the executive branch, a respect for the constitution and a military that owes its loyalty to the country as embodied in the constitution, not to some king or junta or dictator – would go as far as they were to go by November 2020.
Alias Grace, based on a real double murder of the mid-19th century, was also about to chime eerily, not only with the pussy-grabber-in-chief but also with the #MeToo uprising. The mini-series launched in September, the Harvey Weinstein allegations surfaced in October. But none of that had happened yet as I was limping along the street, meditating on the fading word, “dearly”.
What else was I doing in August 2017? I’d started my novel, The Testaments, about a year before – before the election, but in the lead-up to it. Having said for more than 30 years that I wasn’t going to write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and having thought that, in the 1990s after the end of the cold war, the world was moving away from dictatorships, I’d watched things turn around again after 9/11. Successful coups are staged at times of chaos, fear and social discontent, and by August 2016, we were already seeing a lot of that, not only in the US but around the world. We already knew, back in 1985, that the world of Gilead came to an end – otherwise it would not have been the subject of an academic symposium some 200 or more years later – but we did not know how. In August, I was in the initial or “mud pie” phase of exploring the possibilities, but I was not to send a one-pager to my publishers until February of 2017.
You can’t work easily on a novel while watching two plays a day. You can, however, scribble poetry. And so I did.
Here, then, is “Dearly”: a poem that’s part of its own zeitgeist, while claiming not to be part of it. It’s not exactly a memento mori; more like a memento vita.
To quote Ursula Le Guin (whose obituary I would shortly write, though that, too, had not yet happened), “Only in dark the light. Only in dying life.”
Poems – like everything else – are created in a particular time. (Two thousand BC, AD800, the 14th century, 1858, the first world war, and so on.) They’re also written in a place (Mesopotamia, Britain, France, Japan, Russia); and beyond that, in a location where the writer happens to be (in a study, on a lawn, in bed, in a trench, in a cafe, on an airplane). They are often composed orally, then written down on a surface (clay, papyrus, vellum, paper, digital screen), with a writing implement of some kind (stylus, brush, quill pen, steel nib, pencil, rollerball, computer), and in a particular language (Ancient Egyptian, Old English, Catalan, Chinese, Spanish, Haida).
Beliefs about what a poem is supposed to be (praising the gods, extolling the charms of a beloved, celebrating warlike heroism, praising dukes and duchesses, tearing strips off the power elite, meditating on nature and its creatures and botany, calling on the commoners to rebel, hailing the Great Leap Forward, saying blunt things about your ex and/or the patriarchy) vary widely. How the poem is supposed to accomplish its task (in exalted language, with musical accompaniment, in rhyming couplets, in free verse, in sonnets, with tropes drawn from the word-hoard, with a judicious number of dialect, slang, and swear words, ex tempore at a slam event) are equally numerous and subject to fashion.
The intended audience may range from your fellow goddess priestesses, to the king and court of the moment, to your intellectual workers self-criticism group, to your fellow troubadours, to fashionable society, to your fellow beatniks, to your creative writing 101 class, to your online fans, to – as Emily Dickinson put it – your fellow nobodies. Who can get exiled, shot, or censored for saying what has also veered wildly from time to time and from place to place. In a dictatorship, uneasy lies the bard that bears the frown: the wrong words in the wrong place can get you into a heap of trouble.
So it is with every poem: poems are embedded in their time and place. They can’t renounce their roots. But, with luck, they may also transcend them. All that means, however, is that readers who come along later may appreciate them, though doubtless not in the exact way that was first intended. Hymns to the Great and Terrible Mesopotamian Goddess Inanna are fascinating – to me at least – but they don’t cause the marrow to melt in my bones as they might have done for an ancient listener: I don’t think Inanna may appear at any moment and level a few mountains, though I could always be wrong about that.
Despite the way the Romantics went on about timeless fame and writing for the ages, there’s no “forever” in such matters. Reputations and styles rise and fall, books get spurned and burned, then unearthed and recycled, and today’s singer for eternity is likely to end up as the day after tomorrow’s fire starter, just as the day after tomorrow’s fire starter may be snatched from the flames, extolled and embossed on a plinth. There’s a reason the Wheel of Fortune in the tarot pack is, in fact, a wheel. What goes round comes round, at least sometimes. It’s not called the Inevitable Straight Road Pathway to Fortune. There isn’t one.
That advance warning having been issued, I’ll quote the postman in the film Il Postino, who’s nicked Neruda’s poems and ascribed them to himself in order to serenade his love. “Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it,” he says. “It belongs to those who need it.” Indeed, after the poem has passed out of the hands of the one who’s written it down, and after that person may have departed from time and space and be wafting around as atoms, who else can a poem belong to?
For whom does the bell toll? For you, dear reader. Who is the poem for? Also for you.
