A Woman Clothed in Words (2 page)

Anne was, in short, not just a poet but a writer who tried her hand at a range of genres. Facing the blank page, she was fearless. What she cared about was the imagination, not the formal constraints we impose on its productions. The title of this book comes from a line in her long poem honouring a fellow prairie writer, Patrick Friesen. I intend the title, of course, to apply to Anne Szumigalski herself. Words were among her passions, and the interplay between language and the female body shapes much of her work.

Besides, it’s wrong to insinuate – as I did in the second paragraph – that Anne decided not to publish these writings. She was happy to see many of them appear in magazines, and to hear others performed. Admittedly I have taken the liberty of resurrecting poems from the 1960s and ’70s that were never published – though in some cases she had tried. A note on the typescript of the untitled poem that begins “falling on gravel” indicates that she mailed it off to
Harper’s
in April 1975. This is not the act of someone who considers the poem a failure. The bibliographical note at the end of this book reveals how many of these pieces had already appeared in print. I have merely brought them together and organized them into a more or less coherent whole.

Part of the coherence comes from some key influences that underpin much of her work. William Blake, of course: Anne was always ready to pay him tribute and to give him credit. The King James Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: once she had shed her faith in conventional Christianity, she had less to say about these influences. Yet their cadences and images underlie several of the pieces in this collection, not just the obvious
Prairie Mass
but also early poems like “Three Facets of the Poet’s Dilemma” and much later prose works like
A State of Grace.
And Samuel Beckett too: Anne’s late pieces for two voices often seem like extended riffs on Beckettian dialogue, reimagined by a woman.

With much of her work now out of print, her reputation stands at a kind of watershed. Of course the standing of many authors falls in the years after they die. In some cases, we see their writing more clearly without the interference of their personality. In others, the bluster and bravado of the living obscure the silent excellence of the dead. It would be a shame if this happened to her, as I think she was a writer of lasting merit.

For me, the final justification for assembling and publishing
A Woman Clothed in Words
is also the most important: the excellence of Anne’s work. This book contains some amazing writing; it scrapes the bottom of no barrels. There is much else I could have included – a play called
Nursey,
which displays her recurrent tendency to whimsy to the worst possible advantage; a co-written novel for children; dozens of abandoned poems; some book reviews; several unfinished pieces on diskettes. But it would do Anne’s reputation no favours to publish such material. The scholars can always forage in the archives.

I don’t mean this as a book for scholars. It’s a book for people to read, and I hope its contents will surprise and please you. Ideally they will make you want to return to Anne Szumigalski’s other writing, the lavish, idea-laden product of what Judith Krause once called “a tongue of heaven blessing all the vowels and consonants on earth.” I offer these pages not in a spirit of apology but of celebration.

Three Facets of the Poet’s Dilemma

1

Shaggy man, O shaggy little man:

You with a thatch of red hair and red-rimmed eyes

What kind of bird are you?

Trying to prove that compassion is more than pity

Or swagger more than a beard?

•

With poverty I will put up my days

And count them as the pages of my book – turned over

To the other side of the penny; to violence,

Pity expressed in the beard around my dial.

•

Read the Gospel according to yourself,

According to Love as you see it. The count was got up as Christ,

But he believed in the sweat of honest toil

And, to all accounts, smelled strongly of it.

•

In middle age a poet may cut his hair,

Shaggy grey smacks too much of benevolence:

He may wear a sixty-nine-fifty suit, if he can afford such a thing.

Good God, what would a man of his age

Look like in a crown of thorns?

•

Don’t shave your beard O shaggy, shaggy man;

Don’t give up drinking or looking like TB.

For if you were to stop looking like a poet

You’d have to get down to the sweated labour of love

And a living in letters.

2

The poets on their small white hills

Combing their long red hair:

Their wives were worrying over bills,

Their children were pale and spare –

•

Two children each, and another one

By the looks of it, on the way.

“We must write” the poet said to his son

“For we haven’t learnt to pray.”

•

“If I only could pray I could be a priest

And intone a prayer in a gown –

Since I am a poet I’d better make haste

And write my sufferings down.”

•

The wife of the poet’s a poor little thing

With eyes the colour of hay,

And parted hair like silky string

And a baby on the way.

•

She sits on the step and calls to a boy

In a grey-green shirt in the street

To be less competitive in his play

And not to muddy his feet.

•

“Lean down, lean down O Superpoet

From your literary heaven on high,

And tell my dear husband if you know it

The answer to my cry.”

•

“Where bottles of wine are flowing all over

And, come in out of the heat,

The maddening houseflies swoop and hover

And buzz to the bongo beat –”

•

“Is this the day when Dollar and Dove

Sit down on the steps in the sun

And dice in the dust of consummate love

For the soul of my little one?”

3

If you had lived in my city or with my love

You would remember the tall King of Poland

Swinging a red curtain and a sword

Before and behind him, in and out of the gallery.

Did he have a beard? I can’t remember now –

But I remember the swagger and the rain

Dragging the curtain-cloak

Down to his sandalled feet.

•

To see and to suffer is what I’m doing here

Beside this river, in this prison-house

Where no one cares to show his heart and mind

Unless he can put a price-tag on them both.

•

Spring will be buzzed by dragonflies zipped out

Of their leather case. With a yell the river splits

His ice and breaks on the stones rolling and crashing

Before he is tamed and shaved.

•

– Shutter the house and dark it is in the room.

Look out on the wide river that has never run with blood.

– On whom no barge floats queens to their curtained palaces.

Let’s take a wand down there and teach these waters

To flow upstream and fetch history down in boats.

To Mr. L. a Puritan

Now famous Mr. L. what’s
with all this coupling

You celebrate by day and night in verses?

Has humanity sucked out all nature for you –

What, no bees? I’ll do my bedding at first hand thank you;

Your staggering, lurid males

May well be impotent.

•

It’s the same with those digestive systems

Celebrated in a staccato arc of words:

Parasites may infest us all,

And when we die they take over and chew us up.

But is there more to life and death than these

Hesitations doubts and small rewards?

Eternity may find you Mr. L.

Still playing on a harp strung with your own guts.

Magdalena

Shacked up in shacktown where all day women yell

Shrill and shallow at each other and throw things about

When business is less than good. Trying to find

At least a man to keep their hair from hanging ribbonless.

To sleep alone spells ruin – you scruffy has-been you!

•

But Mag walking to the well to wash – Oh when

Will they put running water in this place? –

Dropped her fragile jar and broke it at her feet

Which bled with sharp falling shards:

Looked up and threw off all her clothes

Let down her hair and burned the tawdry ribbon

In a candle’s flame.

•

Naked she stood in the market:

Sold all she had – herself –

And bought a man so she

Might have a god to worship.

Danuta

Learn

What shy pearl of truth’s hidden in the loins

Of such a lusty female as my wife.

I never saw a woman so bent on breeding. Her desire

Is burning up her self-respect,

Her youth, her beauty and her vivid mind.

•

Look

Here she lies interpreting God’s will:

Her breasts mauve-tipped, her mind in abeyance.

Alive as fire, as serpent and as river,

As sap, as bird, as whirlwind.

•

This

Is the moment of my capture, her capitulation.

And deeds will be sure to end the argument,

For I see the foreshadow of her female being

Married to godhead; pledged to

A dull material salvation

Through imperative incarnation.

•

Let

Me swim in her mind and see before she swoons

Her pulsing pity for mortality.

What actresses, waitresses are left unborn?

What corded hearts unbeating?

What women never to lie down and call upon men

To regenerate humanity upon a goddess supine?

Astarte’s Weaning

All moss-grown arches, nodding
violets mirror

The Thoreau-wise past that I envy my ancestors.

O spider, scorpion, betrayer: backward leaning

Over the bridged rapids. Swinging bridge and cherry tree –

Are these my enemies?

•

Enemies to the piercing vision enter and separate

Curtains to a pastiche of rundown time;

Passover, O meal of love come scatter

Unblessed bread on the grass. Let it become

Loaves and fishes again.

•

Again Destructor count down to the moment and

Let the wise go down to the depths with you;

Let them metamorphose to stone, to tree, to serpent:

Some future striver’s wreath. Some ear’s blessing

Speaks in the grove at night.

•

Night is over my suckling my serpent child