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    All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek
    All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek
    All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek
    Ebook101 pages49 minutes

    All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek

    By Louis Dudek and Frank Davey

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    About this ebook

    A passionate believer in the power of art—and especially poetry—to influence and critique contemporary culture, Louis Dudek devoted much of his life to shaping the Canadian literary scene through his meditative and experimental poems as well as his work in publishing and teaching. All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek brings together thirty-five of Dudek’s poems written over the course of his sixty-year career.

    Much of Dudek’s poetry is about the practice of art, with comment on the way the craft of poetry is mediated by such factors as university classes, public readings, reviews, commercial presses, and academic conferences. The poems in this selection—witty satires, short lyrics, and long sequences—reflect self-consciously on the relationship between art and life and will draw readers into the dramatic mid-century literary and cultural debates in which Dudek was an important participant.

    Karis Shearer’s introduction provides an overview of Dudek’s prolific career as poet, professor, editor, publisher, and critic, and considers the ways in which Dudek’s functional poems help, both formally and thematically, to carry out the tasks associated with those roles. Comparing Dudek’s reception to that of NourbeSe Philip, Marilyn Dumont, and Roy Miki, Frank Davey’s afterword locates Dudek in a pre-1980s version of multiculturalism that is more complex than many critics would have it. According to Davey, Dudek broadened the limits on the possible range and type of poetry for subsequent generations of Canadian writers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateAug 7, 2009
    ISBN9781554587858
    All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek
    Author

    Louis Dudek

    Louis Dudek was one of Canada’s most important and influential cultural workers. After gaining his PhD from Columbia University, Dudek in 1951 returned from New York to Montreal, the city of his birth, to take up a position as professor of English at McGill. Dudek’s return to Canada marked the beginning of his efforts to revolutionize the Montreal poetry scene through little magazines and small-press publishing, providing alternatives to commercial presses and opportunities for talented young poets. In 1956 he started The McGill Poetry Series, which gave a start to several young poets, including Leonard Cohen. The author of numerous books of poetry, Louis Dudek died in 2001.

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      Book preview

      All These Roads - Louis Dudek

      All These Roads

      The Poetry of Louis Dudek

      All These Roads

      The Poetry of Louis Dudek

         Selected with an introduction by Karis Shearer and an afterword by Frank Davey

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Dudek, Louis, 1918–2001.

      All these roads: the poetry of Louis Dudek / selected with an

      introduction by Karis Shearer; and an afterword by Frank Davey.

      (Laurier poetry series)

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-1-55458-039-2

      I. Shearer, Karis, 1980- II. Title. III. Series.

      PS8507.U43A64 2008           C811′.54              C2008-900620-8

      © 2008 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

      Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

      www.wlupress.wlu.ca

      Cover photograph © 2008 by P.J. Woodland. Cover and text design by P.J. Woodland.

      Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

      This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled).

      Printed in Canada

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

      Table of Contents

      Foreword, Neil Besner

      Biographical Note

      Introduction, Karis Shearer

      On Poetry and Profession

      Functional Poetry: A Proposal

      Theory of Art

      What we Profess

      Lesson

      It Is An Art

      Hellcats in Heaven (Report on the book Cerberus)

      Kingston Conference

      Poetry Reading

      Line and Form

      Europe at Sea

      Poetry

      Advice to a Young Poet

      The Retired Professor

      Old Books

      Dedications and Intertexts

      For E.P.

      Kosmos: The Greek World (For Michael Lekakis)

      Emily Dickinson

      James Reaney’s Dream Inside a Dream, or The Freudian Wish

      Irving Layton’s Poem in Early Spring

      Rich Man’s Paradise (After F.R. Scott)

      Quebec Religious Hospital by A.M. Klein

      Carman’s Last Home

      Europe Without Baedeker But with Pound

      Tar and Feathers

      Reply to Envious Arthur

      The Progress of Satire (For F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith)

      The Demolitions (For John Glassco)

      A Note for Leonard Cohen

      Tao (For F.R.S)

      For Ron Everson (After Ezra Pound, and Confucius)

      Proust

      Homosexuality

      For William Carlos Williams

      Long Poems

      from Europe (Fragment 95)

      from En México

      Afterword, by Frank Davey

      Acknowledgements

      Foreword

      At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada—writing and publishing it, reading and thinking about it—finds itself in a strangely conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed.

      But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media—and there needs to be more, and more different kinds, of publications that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available.

      The hope that animates this series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is that these volumes help to create and sustain the larger readership that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly be better known at home.

      Our idea is to ask a critic (sometimes herself a poet) to select thirty-five poems from across a poet’s career; write an engaging, accessible introduction; and have the poet write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology is much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s work. Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope,

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