AN APPRECIATION OF PATRICK LANE
Albino Pheasants
At the bottom of the field
where thistles throw their seeds
and poplars grow from cotton into trees
in a single season I stand among the weeds.
Fenceposts hold each other up with sagging wire.
Here no man walks except in wasted time.
Men circle me with cattle, cars, and wheat.
Machines rot on my margins.
They say the land is wasted when it’s wild
and offer plows and apple trees to tame,
but in the fall when I have driven them away
with their guns and dogs and dreams
I walk alone. While those who’d kill
lie sleeping in soft beds
huddled against the bodies of their wives
I go with spear-grass and hooked burrs
and wait upon the ice alone.
Delicate across the mesh of snow
I watch the pale birds come
with beaks the colour of discarded flesh.
White, their feathers are white,
as if they had been born in caves
and only now have risen to the earth
to watch with pink and darting eyes
the slowly moving shadows of the moon.
There is no way to tell men what we do.
The dance they make in sleep
withholds its meaning from their dreams.
That which has been nursed in bone
rests easy upon frozen stone
and what is wild is lost behind closed eyes:
albino birds, pale sisters, succubi.
He would not take the world he was given. He came down a young man still out of the British Columbia high country with blood on his hands. He had been working the hardscrabble jobs of the northern interior and though not yet thirty when he arrived in Vancouver he would carry the aura of that with him always. He came out of a world of grief and death: the death of his four-year old niece; the death of his wife’s mother; the death of his elder brother, Red, a Tish poet in the sixties; the slaying of his father by a vengeful logger. He abandoned that world, the brutality of it. Abandoned, too, were his wife and three young children. What he wanted was oblivion.
He struggled. Struggle was the natural condition. He drifted east out of Vancouver. South to New York, west again. Writing poems the while, drinking the while. It was the long languishing end of the sixties and rootlessness was a way of life. In Mexico he ran out of money. In Prince George he nearly froze to death in a box in an alley. In Saskatchewan he kicked his way across a rickety bar table in his boots to hit on a young poet dazzled by his poems. That woman he would later share his life with.
Nothing was steadfast but the poetry. What he came to understand was that poetry might inhabit a second space, a world in which the struggle could be met with grace. That rhythm and syntax and the articulated thought carefully expressed could provide a solace, even a way out. For a poet so surrounded by destruction, the making of a poem must have seemed a radical gesture, a resistance against the world as it was.
Above all, he would be a poet of the local, meaning whatever his body and his mind were in proximity to. “If there is a single presiding constant in my poetry,” he would write, decades later, “it is that the poem be present in the world of my senses.” The concrete image became an essential block of meaning in his work. He would comprehend what was seen, felt, sensed. Knowledge, in his life and work, would be met through experience. He wanted to learn how to make the language extend itself, its syntax, its modifications, so that it became a tactile thing. He wanted to discover how a word could curl itself like a fist around another, then slowly tighten into meaning.
***
“Albino Pheasants,” quoted in full above, written in the 1970’s.
That decade would prove a watershed for him, a time when the landscape he had known began to fuse with the vast dark interior richness of myth. The fluidity of those long sentences that mark the poem’s second stanza, the way the language falls hushed and begins to accumulate the power of its rhythmic flexings, a shifting iambic tetrameter that finds its way to the pentameter of the sixth line, and from there to the dominant iambic pentameter of the eighth. I find it haunting at each reading, the way the poem slowly relinquishes itself, lets the singing take over. All of this weaving itself into twin sets of final rhyming couplets, the first again in tetrameter: “That which has been nursed in bone” driven by its strong falling trochees, incantatory, emphatic; and the closing couplet emerging in pure iambic pentameter, that ancient dominant line of English poetry. What remains behind in the poem’s closing is not the hard reality of a land emptied of its hunters, not a field of thistles, poplars, weeds, and fenceposts; but sheer dreamscape, the eerie and predatory music of poetry itself. A different kind of hunt, a different manner of prey.
***
I was nineteen years old, a student in his poetry class at the University of Victoria, enthralled and passionate and hopeless. I passed the course only through the kindness of a man who did not see the point in failing a youth for writing the execrable poetry of youth. The next year he walked into my second-year poetry class as a last-minute substitute and I sank in my chair, despairing. But it would prove a decisive year in my life. I learned from him the essential elements of poetry: the importance of wide reading, the value of the physical life, the worthlessness of praise, the need to listen for the moment when the poem betrays its own possibilities. I learned the writing of a poem is an act of listening as much as an act of speaking. He taught us patience when confronting confusion, humility when confronting the work of other poets. He introduced me to the poets that I read still. He reminded us that poetry is a collective art, a multistranded conversation, not a dialogue, and that there are responsibilities owed to the language itself. Many would disagree with much of this. Lane insisted such disagreements, in good faith, are vital, too.
He was famous, even then. But for twenty-year-olds, fame in the modest world of poetry means little. He was already drinking heavily. Though his life was entering a period of terrible self-destruction we did not glimpse any of that and he was not cruel in class, never impatient. He mattered to us, to me, because he read our work as if our words might someday matter to him. He spoke to us as fellow poets, as travellers met for a time on a shared road, and it was the generosity of that, the undeserved respect in it, that I would carry away with me. That the art of poetry is, whatever else, an art of encouragement; that it stands on the side of compassion, of human kindness.
***
from Winter 4
He is thinking of the end of Oedipus,
not the beginning, not the part
where Oedipus chooses by giving the answer
to the beast at the Gate of Thebes.
No, it is the end he likes. The part
just after he puts out his eyes
and stands, suddenly
in that certain darkness, decided.
The final two lines of this stanza, still startling to me, twenty years on.
What is it I am hearing? There is the consonantal music, of course: those echoed ‘s’ sibilants, the way ‘stands’ and ‘suddenly’ dominate the penultimate line but slowly give their music up to the plosives of ‘darkness’ and ‘decided’ – those staggered ‘d’ sounds gaining traction and drawing the stanza to its determined stop. And there is the way this music reflects the meaning – a sudden stillness, the action all at once completed, the long afterwards of a blinded life not yet begun.
But I am more caught up, I think, by the syntax, the leap across the line break. Entering that final line through the enjambed “suddenly,” a flash of movement created by the adverb and by the enjambment itself. I love the way ‘suddenly’ seems at first to modify “stands” but proves instead to be modifying the past participle “decided.” There is Oedipus’ (and the poet’s, and the reader’s) blindness, writ large, in that syntactical movement: the meaning itself cast in darkness, hidden, until the final word. One must first pass through the darkness, to find the sense illuminated.
It is such a small thing, the rightness of that. He could as easily have written: “and stands, suddenly/decided, in that certain darkness.” But blindness is not the point. Seeing is.
What else to say? I love how “decided” acts both as adjective, modifying Oedipus, and, in its simple-past verbishness, pushes against the present-tense action of the rest of the stanza. One participle, and the present gives way to the past; there is no going back. I love that the darkness here is “certain” – how it has absorbed the gesture of the blinding itself – so that everything in that final line seeks completion, wholeness. The horror of the act is secondary. Instead, relief: the worst has been decided.
Two lines, almost at random, from a body of work that spans decades.
***
As this is an appreciation, not a critical essay, I wanted to write about how his work has mattered to me, affected me. The truth is, for me, his work stands as a rebuke against my own faltering sense of the possible. And so, too, in its steadfastness, it has become a kind of consolation. The great serious compassion inside it, the sober endeavour of a life that has gradually deepened and spread outward through language. The unwavering faith in the efficacy of poetry to do whatever it is that it does, to do it steadily, in beauty, re-generatively.
There are poets who seek to relinquish the self, in their honouring of the world. There is a kind of grace in that. He cannot be counted among them; his work stands as a chronicle of a life lived, a mind as it experienced the twentieth century and buckled or bore up under its griefs. He never sought to make himself separate from the work; but his presence in it was also, importantly, never the thing itself, always secondary to the craft of the poem, the artistry of the work, the greater utterance that came through him and from him but was more than simply of him.
I open his Collected Poems now and see a different kind of grace: the taking up of one’s place in the world, no longer apart from it, no longer privileged in it, but simply one among the many. The slow dissolve into belonging.
***
A last poem, from Washita. Seeming to touch again in passing on his earlier “Albino Pheasants,” but filled too with the quiet of a long life lived, the end-stopped lines finding both peace and solitude. He has spoken of this recent book in interviews and at readings, describing how an injury to his shoulder forced him to type with one finger, how this slowed the poems’ making and led to an accumulation of end-stopped lines, of long completions. That slowness is everywhere on display:
Sabi
A pheasant rises wild from the pea vines.
A shadow settles in the maze of poverty grass.
Home at last, I scrub my hands, the peasant’s song in me.
Things move through things. My son’s first hands in air.
Each time I see the crescent moon I see his small head crowning.
The past declines.
A pale cloth hangs between me and the sun.
Years ago my mother strained blueberries through white muslin.
I wore it over my childish face, a thin ghost laughing.
Stained shroud, my skin streaked with berry blood.
In the desert lichens eat my father’s stone at the speed of stars.
We are of this world and no other.
Crude and rough, my old eyes searching among the weeds.
Is it enough to say that I find this immensely moving? That I read this and feel a stillness coming up in me that I don’t wish to disturb? I want to resist a close technical reading of its workings. Yes, there is the use of the present-tense, in a poem about time and the way time marks a human life. The poem itself is transient, already filled with its own loss. “Stained shroud, my skin streaked with berry blood.” Yes, that. And the closing line: “Crude and rough, my old eyes searching among the weeds.” Those two sentence fragments, unverbed, syntactically kin, both lines to themselves and binding each to each. What are those failing eyes seeking? The moment. The moment after.
Permission has been received from the author and the publisher Harbour Publishing to use the poems in this article — “Albino Pheasants” and “Winter 4” from The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (2011) and “Sabi” from Washita (2014).
To learn more about Patrick Lane, please visit his website.
Steven Price is the author of two collections of poetry: Anatomy of Keys (Brick Books, 2006), winner of the Gerald Lampert Award, and Omens in the Year of the Ox (Brick Books, 2012), winner of the ReLit Award. His first novel, Into That Darkness (Thomas Allen, 2011), was shortlisted for the BC Book Prize. His second novel, By Gaslight, will be published in 2016 by McClelland & Stewart. Here is an interesting essay “Steven Price On Beauty” at Lemonhound.