Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Citation: Davey, Elizabeth. A Persevering Witness: The Poetry of Margaret Avison. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2016. ***** Begin Content ****** TYNDALE UNIVERSITY 3377 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M2M 3S4 TEL: 416.226.6620 www.tyndale.ca Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Davey, Elizabeth. A Persevering Witness: The Poetry of Margaret Avison. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2016. [ Citation Page ] A Persevering Witness The Poetry of Margaret Avison ELIZABETH DAVEY Foreword by David A. Kent PICKWICK Publications • Eugene, Oregon [ Title Page ] A PERSEVERING WITNESS The Poetry of Margaret Avison Copyright © 2016 Elizabeth Davey. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401. Pickwick Publications An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3 Eugene, OR 97401 www.wipfandstock.com PAPERBACK ISBN: 978-I-4982-2392-8 HARDCOVER ISBN: 978-1-4982-2394-2 EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-4982-2393-5 Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Names: Davey, Elizabeth. Title: A persevering witness : the poetry of Margaret Avison / Elizabeth Davey Description: Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: isbn 978-1-4982-2392-8 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-2394-2 (hardcover) | isbn 978- 1-4982-2393-5 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: | Avison, Margaret, 1918-2007. | Canadian poetry—20th century. | Religion and poetry. I Title. Classification: PR9199.3 D19 2016 (paperback) I PR9199.3 (ebook) Manufactured in the U.S.A. 05/13/16 Excerpted from Momentary Dark by Margaret Avison. Copyright © 2006 Margaret Avison, Reprint- ed by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Excerpted from Listening by Margaret Avison. Copyright © 2009 Margaret Avison. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Excerpted from Always Now (in three volumes) by Margaret Avison. Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005 the Estate of Margaret Avison. Reprinted by permission of the Porcupines Quill. “The Butterfly” by Margaret Avison. Published by Oxford University Press, Don Mills, Ontario. Copyright © 1991 Margaret Avison. Used by permission. “In time the author of being, with authority,” “Nothing I do or know or speak or feel,” and “He breathed on the dust in His hand.” Published by John Deyell Ltd. © 1971 Margaret Avison. Used by permission. Excerpts from letters and unpublished poems in the Margaret Avison Fonds, University of Mani- toba Archives. Used by permission. The Scripture quotations in this publication are from the New Revised Standard Version, © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and used by permission. [ Title Page Verso ] Contents Foreword by David A. Kent | vii Acknowledgments | xiii Introduction | xv Abbreviations | xxiii Chapter 1 With or Against the Grain?: Avison’s Poetry as Christian Witness | 1 Chapter 2 Towards an Understanding of Christian Witness | 34 Chapter 3 “Come and See”: “All Lookings Forth at the Implicit Touch” | 76 Chapter 4 “Come and See”: Creatureliness and Imaging God | 133 Chapter 5 “Come and See”: “Truth Radiantly Here” | 165 Chapter 6 “Go and Tell”: The Missionary Impulse in Avison’s Poetry | 212 Conclusion: A Persevering Witness | 272 Appendix | 293 Bibliography | 327 Index of Works by Margaret Avison | 339 [ Table of Contents Page ] Introduction My first exposure to the lyrics of the poet Margaret Avison occurred in the 1970s when I moved to Canada from the United States. One of my early teaching assignments at Tyndale University College was a course in Canadian literature, a field with a large body of texts about which I knew very little. I read a small selection of Avison’s strange and difficult poems in The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Verse and admired her immediately for her sophisticated and intellectual verse, applauding her as a defender and promoter of the Christian faith in the highly secularized world of the Canadian academy. There is another connection of which I was unaware. That first year in Toronto, my husband and I attended Knox Presbyterian Church, the large university church on Spadina Avenue. Unbeknownst to me, this was Avison’s church as well, illustrative of her invisibility in that context as a prominent published poet. While she enjoyed the quiet recognition of select sensitive and thoughtful readers who recognized her worth as a writer, in the church community Avison seemed to be appreciated more as a vital force in her passion for evangelism and outreach. Years later, I wanted to study her poetry from the angle of a woman’s voice speaking from the margins of both society and church. Why, I won- dered, was she invisible in the church with her intelligence, giftedness, and spiritual sensitivity? Why was she not given a platform to speak of her insights about Scripture—about God? Was it because she was a woman? What critique of society and of the church would she reveal from her place on the margins? What anger or disappointment, however veiled, might she express? As I wrestled with these questions while reading poem after poem, I gradually came to admit they were not her concerns. Her body of poetry is conspicuously silent on issues of gender inequality and lack of women’s opportunity for expression and advancement. While her life may have been circumscribed by particular circumstances, her fertile mind was exploring [ Page ] xv [ Page ] xvi larger theological and philosophical issues with a clearly articulated sense of identity. Fundamental was her deep sense of calling as a witness to Jesus Christ. Therefore, if I wanted to appreciate Margaret Avison’s contribution to both the world of letters and the world of the church, I needed to explore how this passion is realized in her poetry. My understanding was relatively circumscribed as I saw Christian wit- ness as a process of introducing and defending Jesus Christ to those who have not embraced the good news. I anticipated cheering from the sidelines this modern and unusual champion of the faith who ably defends the claims of the gospel in my sphere of activity and interest. This understanding, in part, remains true. But in the slow process of unpacking the meaning of complex and dense lyrics, I learned and now know her witness to Christ and for Christ to be much larger. The poetry has been, in fact, a profound witness to me, a Christian reader, as well. Margaret Avison has become a spiritual mentor, calling me to a corresponding life of witness and service, much more mysterious and reflective than I have known before, the outlines of which emerge in the pages that follow. In the posthumous collection Listening, the poem “Witnesses” (L 36-37) introduces the poet’s complex method of accessing Christian wit- ness, starting the process of re-directing assumptions about the most basic of attitudes and action. Witnesses How could the runners-after the crowds running ahead, how could any of them have known they’d find them- selves there? I.e., at the hangman’s side? No, on it? One by one in the exhausted afterwards, fidgeting, miserable, at home, each had to find him- self immured with the undeservedly dead, for good. What’s “good”? Springtime? The cat just brought me a chewed fledgling, his love-token. [ Page ] xvii the afterward is a forever never knowing how the cords of who and what we are entwined and twisted so. I am implicit in a levigating of the incon- venient scree, grinding it down with the promise di- versely given all of us. Giver, I know now, anyone’s survival is to be on Your side. If it is not too late, may the many be there, not to be eased, but to learn how losing is not negation. Oh it is that, but inside-out, under the merciful down-side-up of, for example, sky. From the outset of the poem Avison establishes the focus of the witness on another—in this case, “the undeservedly dead,” identified more clearly in the last stanza as “Giver.” The event of Christ’s crucifixion is suggested in the details of the opening stanza. At the same time, the witnesses are named as “crowds running ahead” and “runners-after the crowds”—people unclear in both motive and action. They think they are “at the hangman’s side” but the preposition necessarily shifts to “on” [the hangman’s side]. When they leave the scene they are no longer part of the crowd, but individuals, carry- ing their own consequences: “One by / one in the exhausted / afterwards, fidgeting, miserable”—unsurprising reactions to the profound experience. The surprise is in the closing lines, as each witness had to find him- self immured with the undeservedly dead, for good. The connection with the event and the person is permanent, it seems. The next stanza introduces familiar wordplay and double-meaning, requiring the reader to revisit the first stanza. “What’s good’”? Furthermore, [ Page ] xviii in the puzzling images of the second and third stanzas there is a parallel word with “immured”—“implicit.” Avison suggests two pictures of inadver- tent destruction—of the “undeservedly dead”—the dead bird killed by the cat. The bird was “[the cat’s] love-token”; the cat by his nature has been on the side of the hangman. The next stanza suggests “I am / implicit” in the grinding down to powder of the “inconvenient scree” of a mountainside.6 The reason is unclear but “the promise di- / versely given all of us” could be the creation mandate to “subdue the earth and have dominion” over its creatures (Gen 1:28). This dominion in reality has meant in many ways “destruction,” not unlike the cat’s killing of the bird. People are on the hang- man’s side just by being who they are: the afterward is a forever never knowing how the cords of who and what we are entwined and twisted so. The closing stanza transforms the witness who looks to the cross and the crucified One with repentance and hope: Giver, I know now, anyone’s survival is to be on Your side. Being “immured with the / undeservedly dead” now seems “good”—in its several meanings of mixed blessing. Furthermore, the witness wants others to join in the seeing. “May the many”—“the crowds”—turn and look, “not to be eased,” but to learn the spiritual principle of not saving one’s life to lose it but losing one’s life to save it (Mark 8:35). This is “the inside-out” paradoxical way the gospel works. When Avison explores what it means to be witnesses in her poetry, she invites the reader to read the “script of the text” with her—to share in the experience of “the most intimate of poetic forms.”7 The invitation cannot be taken lightly, because she deals with pain- ful matters of the heart that take a lifetime of perseverance to work out. “Losing is not / negation,” she muses, and then backtracks, 6. "Levigate” means “to reduce to a fine powder; to rub down” (OED); a “scree” is “material composing a slope” ... the “mass of detritus forming a precipitous stony slope upon a mountain side” (OED). 7. This is Helen Vendler’s particular phrasing, providing a distinct perspective on lyric poetry: “A lyric poem is a script for a performance by its reader. It is, then, the most intimate of genres, constructing a twinship between writer and reader.” See Poems, Poets, Poetry, xl. [ Page ] xix ... Oh it is that, but inside-out, under the merciful down-side-up of, for example, sky. The music of the poetry combines with the puzzling language reversal “down-side-up,” softening any sense of awkwardness in the enjambment of the closing lines and offering a startling picture of grace. This book is an exploration of what the poet calls “a kind of perse- verance”—her obedient and deliberate response to the biblical mandate of Christ’s disciples to be his witnesses as particularly evidenced in the poems she has published.8 My engagement with both her poetry and her avowed witness does not attempt to legitimize her corpus of poetry; earlier liter- ary critics whom I cite in chapter 1 and elsewhere in the text have already established her contribution to modern Canadian letters in English. While I make frequent mention of such Christian poets as George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot, whose influence on her seems obvious, my focus is not an extended comparison with any of them. Though I frequently refer to earlier and later poems in her collection and suggest shifts in her thinking, this exploration is not a study of her development as a poet. I take seriously her context in my discussion; at the same time, I am not taking ei- ther a psychological or developmental or historical approach to her poetry. I am not doing philosophy or theology in any formal systematic way though I refer to both in the construction of my argument. Rather, I am offering a dose reading of her difficult lyrics to call attention to her singular accom- plishment of providing a particular space where different kinds of thinking can take place—where the theological and biblical merge with the poetic, producing a compelling witness to the Christian faith.9 In that process of reading, I inevitably draw on the reader’s participation in completing the meaning of the text. 8. The title of her Pascal lectures on Christianity and the University published as A Kind of Perseverance. 9. As such, this exploration might finally be identified as an exercise both in critical poetics and hermeneutics, a distinction Jonathan Culler articulates in Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. “Poetics,” Culler explains, “starts with attested meanings or effects and asks how they are achieved.... Hermeneutics, on the other hand, starts with texts and asks what they mean, seeking to discover new and better interpretations,” 58. Importantly, he qualifies the method of critics in actual practice. In spite of fundamen- tal differences in purpose of analysis, “works of literary criticism often combine poetics and hermeneutics, asking how a particular effect is achieved or why an ending seems right (both matters of poetics), but also asking what a particular line means and what a poem tells us about the human condition (hermeneutics),” 58. [ Page ] xx My approach to Avison’s work initially hearkens back to the formalist criticism of the American New Critics—literary analysis that specializes in the lyric poem. As a practitioner in a literature classroom, I echo Leland Ryken’s assertion that “[n]o matter what else teachers of literature do, they interact with literary texts in terms of the categories bequeathed by formal- ist criticism.”10 A close reading of the text brings clarity of focus, helping one arrive at an initial interpretation of difficult poems. As the concrete language of images takes precedence over abstract concepts, practical criti- cisms emphasis on accessing meaning via the imagination provides direc- tion for my argument. When Ryken speaks of “care lavish [ed] on written texts” with a concomitant response of humility, this interpretive strategy seems particularly apropos for the lyrics of a poet who demonstrates her own meticulous and humble preoccupation with her craft. Furthermore, as Ryken emphasizes, “This reverence before a literary text” is particularly congruent with a poet such as Avison who accept [s] the Bible as an authoritative repository of truth and are therefore committed to the principle that language can be trusted to convey understandable meaning. Christianity is a religion in which the word has a special sanctity. Openness to receive what the Bible has to say instead of imposing one’s own meanings on it has been at least the theoretic aim of many segments of Christianity through the centuries.11 Her commitment to the scriptural text invites a similar perspective from a sympathetic reader and critic. At the same time, an exclusive insistence on the autonomous text lim- its understanding of the poem. It becomes merely a piece of art, creating a disconnection with my central theme of witness. Witness by its nature involves more than aesthetics, and Avison’s poems, I suggest, are texts in- volved in a very specific form of communication. Throughout this book the consideration of Avison’s poetry as Christian witness directs the close read- ing and is more akin to a study in rhetoric and communication. As a result, the “literary transaction” of the reader-response theorists seems to naturally emerge when a poet suggests that one “come and see” and “go and tell,” the proposed model present in Avison’s writing.12 Focusing on the process of the act of reading—the mental and emotional activity engaged in receiv- ing the poetic text—can affirm Avison’s declarations of witness. Trying to 10. Ryken, “Formalist and Archetypal Criticism,” 1. 11. Ibid., 18. 12. See Vander Weele, “Reader Response Theories,” 140. In contrast to the formal- ist’s spatial view of a text, Stanley Fish emphasizes reading as a temporal process. [ Page ] xxi unlock her difficult poems matches the possible paradigm M. H. Abrams describes: “The experience of reading is an evolving process of anticipation, frustration, retrospection, reconstruction, and satisfaction.”13 Further, an engagement with reader-response criticism and texts re- opens the gate to both the context of the work and the context of the reader. Assumptions can be freely acknowledged.14 A false sense of detachment and unbiased and objective reading is named for what it is, allowing for more integrity in the proposed interpretations. The close reading of the text of individual poems is integrated throughout this study with a view toward the collection as a whole. I identify the assumptions implicit in the text and in the larger body of Avison’s work and the context of her recorded life ex- periences shaping her view of the world. Then I explore the assumptions of her implied and real readers as I interact with secondary critical mate- rial throughout the project. As a result, I explore the question of Avison’s poetry as witness of or witness to what and through what means—giving a rhetorical rather than aesthetic emphasis to this analysis, modifying the close readings. In chapter 1, I introduce Margaret Avison as a recognized national poet in Canada with multiple volumes of lyrics to her credit and as a Christian who self-identifies another vocation as Christian witness. I begin near the end of her life with one of the poems read for the Griffin Poetry Prize which reveals both her poetic skill and her religious faith embedded in her lyrics. Following is an overview of the publication of her poetry and a selection of critics’ commendations, including their recognition of her distinctive Christian voice. Her biographical data is framed in terms of her twin voca- tions as witness and poet, detailing her developing understanding of their intersection. This entangled nature of witness and poetry raises a double- pronged problem for the reader, challenging assumptions about both: On one hand, how can her difficult poetry be witness in the effort required to understand it? On the other, might its Christian witness diminish its appeal as poetry to modern readers? The call to spiritual and theological attention implicit in Avison’s po- etry suggested in chapter 1 is anchored in her interpretation of the mandate 13. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 257. 14. I appreciate Roger Lundin’s particular emphasis when he refers to Paul Ricouer’s work in his conclusion about hermeneutics: “The Cartesian claim of a radical new be- ginning is belied by the fact that all of our thinking is rooted in language which is satu- rated with the history of human shame and glory. When we pick up a word in order to use it to express our individual meaning, that word is already charged with a history of significance. .. . [Quoting Ricoeur] ‘There is no philosophy without presuppositions.’” See Lundin, “Hermeneutics,”160. [ Page ] xxii in Scripture to be Christ’s witnesses. She invokes the same biblical texts as traditional apologists do with their language of defense, but she gives less emphasis to the juridical metaphor framing the discussion. In her declara- tion of her dual vocations she offers an alternative model of Christian wit- ness, albeit indirectly. Her poetry is invitational rather than defensive in its witness—i.e., “without weapons,” a model I am exploring in this book.15 In chapter 2 I look at connections that can be established between the two in- dependent activities of witness and poetry, especially as the poet intertwines the two. Then I turn to the Scriptures to locate the witness in authoritative precedent—the witness in the activities of the Lukan narrative of his Gos- pel and Acts of the Apostles and the witness declared about and to Second Isaiah’s exiles. Finally, I turn to two metaphors from the Gospel of John that provide the paradigm for understanding Avison’s poetry as witness. The poet’s lyrics are simultaneously clarifying and concealing in their complexity, ambiguity, and riddling playfulness. They are fraught with chal- lenge both for the reader inclined to Christian belief and to the one opposed. The method of witness in her poems is redolent of Jesus’s words in the open- ing scenes of John’s Gospel, “Come and see” (John 1:39), inviting her readers to look deeply and meticulously and from odd angles with her as she looks into the book of nature and human nature, my theme in chapters 3 and 4, and the book of the Scriptures, the subject of chapter 5. Avison seeks and finds the hidden God paradoxically revealed and concealed, particularly in the person of the risen Christ. Her poetry, reflecting her own persevering faith experience, is an obedient response to the risen Christ’s directive to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, “Go and tell.”16 In chapter 6, I speak of the accompaniment of seeing with an unabashed telling, no matter how veiled the language ap- pears to be. In Avison’s own words, “The poet writes as a mix of the resur- rection life and marred everyday living.”17 15. In his chapter “The Witness That Was Karl Barth,” Hauerwas explains the influ- ence of “the theological teacher of [Barth’s] student years,” Wilhelm Herrmann, on Karl Barth. Tucked in a footnote, Hauerwas draws on Barth’s comments on “Hermann’s view ‘that apologetics is a subordinate and temporary activity destined to vanish.’” “‘Knowl- edge of God is the expression of religious experience wholly without weapons’” is Her- mann’s observation that Barth incorporates into his own thinking (Barth, Theology and Church 248). See Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 150. 16. “Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father ...’” (John 20:17). 17. Avison, Letter to Tim Bowling, October 5, 2001. ***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was brought to you by Tyndale University, J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****