Like the novella in fiction, the long poem is an oft-neglected form. Too long for publication in most literary journals and anthologies, too short to merit a book-length publication, the long poem occupies a lonely space in our literature. Yet, M. Travis Lane is a master of the form, and it’s here that her considerable poetic skills reach their apex.
Lane’s poetry is modernist, dense, and highly allusive, drawing adeptly on classical and biblical sources and imbued with a feminist and ecocritical perspective. Her musical lines, vivid metaphors, and phenomenological acumen reach their highest expression in the long poetic form. There are few that match her brilliance.
This exquisite volume brings together, for the first time, the complete collection of Lane’s long poems. Together, they offer an astounding journey through five decades of imaginative space and time.
“Canadian poetry has always had secret masters; poets who, without fanfare, deepened their style and vision — and extended the presiding genius of our tradition. M. Travis Lane is one of these figures. She has become, for our attitudinizing era, an especially powerful example of how emotional complexity and psychological depth aren’t a matter of ‘spontaneous overflow’ but are built from lucid stanzas, uncompromising compression, and effective metaphors. These qualities can be seen in the astonishing long poems selected for The Witch of the Inner Wood, a book that will cement Lane’s status as one of our most significant poets.”
— Carmine Starnino
“With a multiplicity of voices, these poems offer a generously imagined theatre of the human. M. Travis Lane’s The Witch of the Inner Wood is more than a rich, wide-ranging collection. Here is one of Canada’s finest poets at work, revealing the power of her lyrical voice. A treasure of a book.”
— Anne Simpson
“‘You either go or you get sent.’ If you’ve never thought of poetry as page-turner, wait till you delve into M. Travis Lane’s masterful long poems, collected together here for the first time. Hypnotist, conductor, and hobgoblin, she liberates life from its usual haze, so we may consider it in the changing light — so we must. Almost any single line by Lane seals the case for the necessity of the lyric. This welcome volume reshapes the narrative around the Canadian long poem, placing one of our finest poets at the centre of the rise of this widely beloved form, now an essential component of our literature.”
— Anita Lahey
“M. Travis Lane keeps the Aristotelian tradition in poetry: to move from lyric poetry to longer verse forms. Thus she has always done — with meet cadence, with right diction, with sweet wisdom. But the Collected Long Poems gather at long last her consistent achievement, her persistent excellence, her insistent, epic impulse. Lane accepts our collective debt to classical poets, the undead —deathless — bards of antiquity. The wording is precise, the imagery compelling, the verses supple. If you have not read Lane before, prepare to travel: like T.S. Eliot, she wants you to have a transporting experience in your imagination. If you have read Lane before, prepare for fresh astonishment. She is Homeric breadth and Sapphic brevity in this suite of superb poems.”
— George Elliott Clarke
CAUTION:
This e-book contains poetry. Before the invention of writing and books, and long before the harnessing of electricity, poetry roamed the earth. Poetry adapted to the book and welcomed the electric light (with which it could be read longer hours). Poetry is still uneasy about the recent invention of the e-book and does not always respond well to the dynamic environment an e-book reader offers.
To set your poetry at ease, and to ensure the best possible reading experience, we recommend the following settings for your e-book reader:
Different typefaces (fonts) can change the length of lines and the relationships between characters on the rendered page. If you can change the typeface on your reading device, choose one that you find pleasing to the eye, but we recommend the following for the best results: for Apple iPad (iBooks), use Original or Charter; for Kobo devices or apps, use the Publisher Default, Amasis, or Baskerville; for Kindle devices or apps, use Baskerville, if it is available.
Set the font size as small as you can comfortably read; ideally it will be one of the 3 or 4 smallest font sizes on most apps and devices.
Use portrait (vertical) mode.
Use the narrowest line spacing and the widest margins available.
If you can adjust the text alignment, use the publisher default or left justification.
If you use a Kobo device or tablet app, turn “Kobo Styling” off.
You will find the ideal settings for your device if you experiment on a poem with long lines and observe where the lines break and the visual shape of the poem starts to change as the text enlarges. If you follow these general guidelines, you should find the poems presented as the poets meant them to be read.
Enjoy your new e-book.
Goose Lane Editions
Also by M. Travis Lane
Crossover (2015)
The Essential Travis Lane (2015)
Ash Steps (2012)
The All-Nighter’s Radio (2010)
The Book of Widows (2010)
The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane (2007)
Touch Earth (2006)
Keeping Afloat (2001)
Night Physics (1994)
Temporary Shelter: Poems 1986-1990 (1993)
Solid Things: Poems New and Selected (1989)
Reckonings: Poems 1979-1985 (1988)
Divinations and Shorter Poems 1973-1978 (1980)
Homecomings: Narrative Poems (1977)
Poems 1968-1972 (1973)
An Inch or So of Garden (1969)
Copyright © 2016 by M. Travis Lane.
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Shane Neilson.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Copyright to the poems appearing in this collection is held by M. Travis Lane, who has granted permission for their publication in this volume. The poems originally appeared in the following collections: Homecomings: Narrative Poems (1977) and Divinations and Shorter Poems 1973-1978 (1980), published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books; Reckonings: Poems 1979-1985 (1988) and Temporary Shelter: Poems 1986-1990 (1993), published by Goose Lane Editions; Solid Things: Poems New and Selected (1989), published by Cormorant Books; Night Physics (1994), published by Brick Books; and Keeping Afloat (2001), Touch Earth (2006), and The All-Nighter’s Radio (2010), published by Guernica Editions. Poems reprinted from collections published by Goose Lane Editions and Guernica Editions are reprinted by permission of the publishers.
Edited by Ian Letourneau.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Printed in Canada.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lane, M. Travis (Millicent Travis), 1934-
[Poems. Selections]
The witch of the inner wood : collected long poems / M. Travis Lane ;
edited by Shane Neilson.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-86492-899-3 (hardback).—ISBN 978-0-86492-938-9 (epub).—
ISBN 978-0-86492-939-6 (mobi)
I. Neilson, Shane, 1975-, editor II. Title.
PS8573.A55A6 2016 C811’.54 C2016-902295-1
C2016-902296-X
We acknowledge the generous support of the
Government of Canada,
the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com
To those from whom these stories come
The lyric, speaking in solitude,
speaks to another solitude
— M. Travis Lane
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Beginning
Introduction: The Long Game by Shane Neilson
from HOMECOMINGS Narrative Poems Homecoming
The Letter
The Bomber Pilot
The Daughter
Bushed, a pastoral
from DIVINATIONS and Shorter Poems 1973-1978 Divinations
from RECKONINGS Poems 1979-1985 The Seasons
Six Poems Looking at a Sculpture by Űlker Őzerdem (“An Arch in Ruins Contemplating Completion”)
The Witch of the Inner Wood
from SOLID THINGS Poems New and Selected Life Insurance
from TEMPORARY SHELTER Poems 1986-1990 Hills
Local Suite
Dear Tiger
from NIGHT PHYSICS Fall-Winter 1990-1991
Anachronic Gnat Music
from KEEPING AFLOAT Solar Remission
“Cracked”
from TOUCH EARTH To Persevere
In a Glass House
Grouse
The View from under the Bookcase
from THE ALL NIGHTER’S RADIO The Pickup Poems
Afterword: On The Long Poem by M. TRAVIS LANE
Editor’s Notes & Acknowledgements
Introduction
THE LONG GAME
Our memories are short, as are most of our poems.
Between May 29 and June 1, 1984, the Long-Liners Conference took place at York University.1 Frank Davey, Ann Munton, and Eli Mandel organized the conference to discuss the poetics of the long poem, and many of the greatest living practitioners of the form participated, including bpNichol, James Reaney, Michael Ondaatje, and Charles Bernstein. Davey and Mandel provided academic heft, as did Smaro Kamboureli, future author of On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem (1991) and Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Also in attendance was D.M.R. Bentley, editor of Canadian Poetry and author of the bible of the early Canadian long poem, Mimic Fires (1994).
Other than Kamboureli, does this seem like a lot of men? It does. Ann Munton, Dorothy Livesay, and Magdalene Redekop gave papers at the conference; Canadian literary biographer Rosemary Sullivan mixed it up from the audience floor during entertainingly confrontational panel discussions; and Barbara Godard wrote a fantastic Foucauldian epilogue to the conference, but of the nineteen papers printed in the proceedings, fourteen were by men. The gender imbalance was contentious at the conference itself, appearing in Mandel’s remarks after the keynote address, when he confessed to a conspiracy-like moment:
I think we ought to be talking about something else, too, which I carefully left out of my paper because I got warned about it yesterday. No, it seems to me that we really aren’t facing up to the question of the role of the woman writer of the long poem. And I was told if I say that I’m ghettoizing the question so I can’t say it.
Munton and Davey recognized the gender-balance problem in their foreword, pointing out the “absence of panels on long poems by women or by young writers” and “the absence of many of the writers of such work” at the conference.
The gender-balance problem has gained greater visibility in recent years through the work of organizations like Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA). Following the lead of VIDA, an American organization, CWILA undertakes necessary gender counts in Canadian literary magazines. But with that higher profile, it can be easy to forget that the problem of gender equity is one that has been pushed against since the 1960s by a life member of the League of Canadian Poets and a longstanding participant in its feminist caucus. Of course, the poet I am speaking of is M. Travis Lane.
Lane attended the Long-Liners conference and delivered “Alternatives to Narrative: the Structuring Concept,” the most substantial paper in her section. She was part of a flight of presenters that included Dorothy Livesay, George Bowering, and bpNichol. Livesay talked politics and history with fire, but her analysis was limited to political quarry (feminism, class). Nichol gave less a paper and more a thoughtful long poem that qualifies as analysis only in terms of his own compositional poetic. Bowering delivered a rambling and jokey line-by-line analysis of Robert Kroetsch’s “Stone Hammer Poem.” Lane, on the other hand, gave what audiences love to hear: a good, streaking argument right out of the gate. Here’s her opening paragraph:
Are there alternatives to narrative? We live in history — or herstory — the story that is telling itself, and any utterance of ours makes part of that unfinished narrative. Time is the grammar of our perceptions. Our desires, our memories, and our sentence shapes have chronology and the assumptions of causality. Narrative assumes and implies chronology and causality, with their structural implications. And the beginning and the end of a narrative are defined by the choice of a subject. The hero dies, or the war is over; what comes next is a different story.
A welcome political message, yes, but nevertheless an activism embedded within concepts like time, space, language, myth, and meta-narrative. The rhetoric at play has a manifesto-like tone. Lane offers a world from the start, and as she continues, that prose world only expands and opens up with examples.
The impact of her address can be measured in the ensuing panel discussion which began, naturally enough, with Dorothy Livesay’s nomination of Lane’s paper as her favourite:
What hit me, not intellectually but with my whole body, was the remarkable way that Travis kept firmly in front of one the feeling of shape, the feeling of construction, like someone doing a vase, a potter doing a vase, and finally you know she’s working toward a shape and the shape emerges and it’s there then. I have a great feeling of satisfaction listening to how she worked that out.
The rest of the panel largely centred on Lane’s ideas for the remaining twelve transcribed pages. One moment is worth mentioning in particular: shortly after the Livesay quote, bpNichol remarks that, during Lane’s presentation, he kept “trying to match myself to Travis’s categories.” He agrees with them to a certain extent, but then he admits that he had “trouble” with their rigidity. What happens next is beautiful and shrewd: Lane makes a general shrug about her own address, saying, “I think you’re quite right. Categories exist to be broken and qualified and changed.” In other words, Lane provides the conference with the meat it needs to think through the long poem’s possible challenge to narrative default, and then she doesn’t defend her propositions. Rather, she rests her case on the need for propositions that can themselves be challenged. In this way, she’s both scholar and mischief-maker — until those categories need to be changed, of course.
Lane’s mischief-making at the Long-Liners conference is only my second-favourite anecdote in her long and colourful history. Here is the best one, in which she goes to school to take the school to school, commenting upon what she found on arriving in New Brunswick from Ithaca in the early 1960s:
Another eye-opener was Barry Davies’s reading list for his class in contemporary Maritime poetry. About thirty or so names appeared on that list, and all of them were male except for one — Elizabeth Brewster. The names included several members of UNB’s English department who had, like most English professors, written, possibly even published, one or two poems or even produced a tiny chapbook. Incensed, I instantly typed out a much longer list of Maritime women poets who had actually published books (including me) and taped the list on all the doors of the English department offices.2
Now that would not have been an easy thing to do in the New Brunswick of that time. But that’s Travis — a diminutively potent firebrand.
* * *
As Lane pointedly admitted at the Long-Liners conference, narrative is hard to escape. We are all part of a larger story, just as this book will be part of the larger story of Canadian literature. Lane’s work will find its way to readers, or not, and be taken up in a serious way by scholars, or not. Her contribution to writing in the Maritimes and to the nation will be recognized, or not. It’s fair to say that, so far, Lane’s role in the larger narrative of the long poem is under-recognized. Ondaatje’s Long Poem Anthology (1979) erred on the side of the so-called “avant-garde” by including Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Robin Blaser, Frank Davey, George Bowering, Roy Kiyooka, and bpNichol. The only straight-up lyric writer in the book is Don McKay. Ondaatje also erred in terms of gender balance by including only one female writer. That Travis is female and not-TISHy makes two strikes against her. That Ondaatje doesn’t include any poets from Eastern Canada makes for three strikes. But since Lane had published only one book of long poems for Ondaatje’s consideration, 1977’s Homecomings, perhaps 1979 wasn’t her moment.3
Because Lane’s two long masterworks appear in subsequent collections, Divinations (1980) and Reckonings (1985), this makes the case different with the other important anthology of Canadian long poems, Sharon Thesen’s New Long Poem Anthology (1991 and 2001). Lane’s exclusion from these volumes is a bigger problem. Thesen admits that, since the time of Ondaatje’s anthologizing,
the form has become so well-established that to include even a sample of the best long poems written in the last decade would require many more volumes. So I begin by stating that this anthology is not meant as an encyclopedia of the Canadian long poem but rather as a continuation of Ondaatje’s work in 1979 and a record of my own pleasure in reading poems that in many different ways, occasions and structures are “long.”
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