In commemoration of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb (1927-2021), producer Stephen Collis charts a path through her work by following the "stars."
This episode is a commemoration of the life and work of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb (1927-2021). Drawing upon archival recordings of Webb’s readings, poet Stephen Collis, a friend of Webb’s, charts a path through the poet’s work by following the “stars” frequently referred to in her poetry—from the 1950s through the 1980s. Included in the podcast are two interviews, discussing specific poems, with former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah, and poet Isabella Wang, with whom Collis discusses a recorded reading of an unpublished, uncollected poem.
Special thanks to Kate Moffatt for her production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books and Library and Archives Canada for the archival recordings featured.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), Once in Blockadia (2016), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
Works Cited:
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf, 1961.
Duncan, Robert. Quoted in Thom Gunn, “Adventurous Song: Robert Duncan as Romantic Modernist.” The Three Penny Opera no. 47 (Autumn 1991): 9-13.
Keats, John. Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters
Library and Archives Canada. Item: Webb, Phyllis - Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac.gc.ca)
Robinson, Erin. Wet Dream. Kingston: Brick Books, 2022.
Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb. Ed. John Hulccop. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2014.
00:19
SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:
[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don't know how much projection to do here.
00:19
Hannah McGregor:
What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].
My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I'll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. "She was someone I needed to know, someone who made the writing of my own poetry possible." That is one of the ways that SFU English professor Stephen Collis remembers Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. Webb passed away on November 11th, 2021. Steve has created this episode as a site of thinking through and thinking with Webb's poetry and her long and acclaimed career as her friend and her literary executor. This is another podcast episode that shows us how ideas and literary learning communities can be cultivated by preserving and caring for archival recordings. Those recorded writers continue to be vocal teachers. Phyllis Webb's voice resounds through this episode. We hear her in the archival recordings of her beautiful and deliberate poetry readings. We hear her work flowing through Steve's memories, analysis, and reflections. And we hear her animating the conversations that Steve records with poet Isabella Wang and former Canadian parliamentary poet laureate Fred Wah to discuss their memories and interpretations of her life and work. This episode allows you to engage with the presence and power of Webb's legacy in these audible scenes of remembering. Steve invites us to participate in the constellations of ideas and people that are connected through Webb's life and poetry.
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, a memoir of his friendship with Webb. He created this episode with production support from Kate Moffatt and with additional audio courtesy of Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University and Library and Archives Canada. Here is Episode 10 of Season Three of the Spoken Webb podcast, 'Starry and full of Glory': Phyllis Webb, In Memoriam. [Musical Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]
03:08
Stephen Collis:
[Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] When Phyllis Webb, Canadian poet and former broadcaster, passed away last year, it felt like a cosmic event. She died on November 11 2021—remembrance day—just as a massive storm—an atmospheric river, in fact—arrived out of the Pacific, flooding farmland, overwhelming river banks, and sending hillsides, weakened by the summer’s forest fires, rushing down into gorges, washing out bridges and sweeping away homes on the floodplain. It has been a wet and grey winter. Whenever I can, I look for the stars' rare appearance in the nighttime sky. “Passed away” is such a strange expression. Into the stars, we sometimes have imagined—that’s where the dead go, “starry and full of glory,” as Phyllis wrote.
Where to begin? Phyllis Webb began in Victoria, in 1927, where she was raised by her mother, later attending the University of British Columbia, studying literature and philosophy; was the youngest person, at 22 years old, to run for elected office in Canada, as a candidate for the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, lost, began to write poetry, publishing many volumes in the decades ahead, worked for the CBC, co-founding the long-running radio program Ideas, stopped writing when words "abandoned her", as she said, in her sixties, began to make collages and to paint, carrying this practice into her 80s. That’s the one-sentence biography.
But, that’s not where I want to begin either.
“There Are the Poems,” Phyllis Webb titled one of her poems, offering an answer to my question. Start with the poems. I leafed through the almost 500 pages of Peacock Blue, her Collected Poems, published by Vancouver’s Talonbooks in 2014. I felt like I was star-gazing—just looking in wonder at the familiar and fixed, constellations of words that had long guided me. I visited Phyllis at her Salt Spring Island home, three or four times a year, for the last two decades of her life. I don’t know that I can call her a mentor. That word is both too large and too small. She was someone I needed to know and enjoyed knowing, someone who made the writing of my own poetry possible—just by being there. Just by existing—and being reachable, by letter, phone, or ferry. In returning to her poems after her death, I wasn’t sure what might rise to the surface this time. The atmospheric river passed on, the night skies cleared. I saw—stars
06:15
Archival Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1964:
[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking In] It's called "The Glass Castle". The glass castle is my image for the mind that if out motive has its public beauty, it can contain both talisman and leaf and private action, homely disbelief. And I have lived there as you must and scratched with diamond and gathered diamond dust have signed the castle tents and fragile glass and heard the antique cause and stoned Cassandras call me and I answered in the one voice I knew: I am here. I do not know, but move the symbols and polished up the view. For who can refrain from action. There is always a princely kiss for the sleeping beauty. When even to put out the light takes a steady hand for the rewarded darkness in the glass castle is starry and full of glory. I do not mean I shall not crack the pain. I merely make a statement judicious and polite that in this poise of crystal space I balance and I claim the five gods of reality to bless and keep me sane. [Sound Effect: Tape Finishing, Clicking Out]
07:49
Stephen Collis:
The stars were everywhere in Phyllis’s work, it turned out. If one polished the mind, however fragile it might be, however likely to increase the darkness surrounding thought, the reward was starry and glorious. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] Stars often spangle the darkest passages of Webb’s poetry—they are there in the closing lines of her poem of existential crisis, “To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide,” where she invokes “the bright crustaceans of the oversky.” Poetry, for this poet, is a crucial mode of thought—and living. Her “consideration” of suicide here is related to French philosopher Albert Camus’s claim that whether to end or continue one’s life was the “only” philosophical question. Luckily Webb also had other questions to ask of her stars.
They are connectors, bridges, means of relating the above and below, the distant and the near—the unfathomably long reaches of spacetime that cosmic light crosses and the immediacies of the days and nights of humble human lives. So “the star in the cold, staring sky” (this is from an early poem called “Double Entendre”) is also “the star reflected in the human eye.” In a poem written over three decades later, Webb is in a more playful mood, willing to “tangle with invisible / superstrings” as she entertains quantum theory “while the planets burn” (this from the poem “A Model of the Universe,” from her final, 1990 collection, Hanging Fire). Poetry, despite being, as Webb writes, quote, “cloaked in sheer / profundities of otherness,” is about the reach over and towards that otherness. I think Webb would have agreed with the contemporary American poet Tongo Eisen-Martin, who describes poets as, quote, “the healers of the continuum.” Stars provide healing light. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]
10:04
Stephen Collis:
Not long ago, Simon Fraser University student Isabella Wang brought an unpublished, and to me previously unknown poem of Webb’s to my attention. That poem was under the influence of the stars too. Isabella is a fine poet in her own right, author of the wonderful debut collection Pebble Swing, which contains a sequence of poems written in response to Webb’s Ghazals from her book Water and Light. I spoke to Isabella in my office at SFU, where we also listened to the poem, “Here I Am, Reading at the Planetarium.”
10:40
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Isabella, how did you find this poem?
10:42
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
So I was working as an RA for SpokenWeb in my first or second year. And so I was introduced to the BC Readings Archive of over 5,000 tapes in the Special Collections vault. And of course, the first tapes that I gravitated towards, that I searched for were tapes of Phyllis Webb. And, this was a poet whom I had studied significantly in classes and stuff and heard so much about through other poets' stories. And for someone I had never met and someone who doesn't do live readings anymore, who doesn't publish anymore, it was just surreal. And it was astounding. I couldn't believe it when I put it into a type player [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking] and her voice came up and her readings came up of poems I had actually read. It was just amazing.
11:42
Archival Audio, Phyllis Webb, at SFU Art Gallery, 9 July 1981:
[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, In] Here I am reading at the planetarium. The planet – arium. Arium. The planet I have just discovered in downtown Toronto. Stars, stars, stars, stars. Give me poets a handfull of dust before the skies fall down. [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, Out]
12:15
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
[Music Interlude: Atmospheric Tones] And so later on, I had the idea to make recordings, 30 minute long recordings of her readings at past events, into individual playlist of poems so that each poem would be titled and be cut into their own kind of playlist. So that instead of going into the 30 minute long recording not knowing what to look for they could just look up any poem they wanted to listen to.
12:44
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Nice.
12:44
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
So I had the idea of doing that. So “Here I Am, [Reading] at the Planetarium” was the first poem that came up for the first recording that I worked with, cuz I was cutting the poems in order. And this was the first one that she came up and of course it makes sense cuz she read this as a preface to her reading.
13:07
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Yeah.
13:08
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
But when I heard it, I was like, [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] I don't ever remember reading it in the Collected Poems. And then I looked back and I couldn't find the title anywhere in the table of contents. So of course I wrote to you and I was like, "Do you remember this poem? Have you ever read it anywhere?" And at first you thought you had read it somewhere. But then when we tried to look for it on paper, we just couldn't find it.
13:34
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Yeah. So my suspicion was that maybe I'd read it in the archive once in Ottawa, but I can't be sure. And we don't have a paper copy and don't have access to that archive right now. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]So we're in this position of having to reconstruct a poem on paper that we've never seen if we wanna create a written copy. So how do you think we go about figuring out things like line breaks or layout or anything like that with the poem?
13:55
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Yeah. So we had the cool and fun idea of just listening to this poem separately and then coming up with our own version or two of this transliterated poem on paper and then comparing it with each other. So it's kind of like a surprise and reveal. And we had, we ended up with really different versions of what the poem might look like, but we kind of had similar approaches. We looked, we listened to the recording, we looked at the metadata of the tape. So we knew when this reading took place. And then in that recording, Phyllis did mention that she wrote this poem for another reading that happened recently, quote, "recently". So we knew it kind of happened between, I think The Sea is also a Garden and her book Wilson's Bow. So we knew kind of the forms that she was working with, her styles and her line breaks her kind of, her voice. And the flow of her voice at the time. And that was one approach that we took.
15:11
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Like I think we had similar line breaks didn't we?
15:13
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
We did have similar line breaks.
15:14
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Different layouts, but similar, like she reads with such emphasis, you could sort of hear where a line break would go.
15:20
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Yeah. So the way I structured my version was more like in the traditional stanzas. Everything is aligned to the left. We – it had traditional line breaks. And I just worked with where her voice kind of emphasized and paused and all that. You had the idea of transcribing it in a version that kind of flows a bit more kind of in terms of the form as well. And kind of moves across the page to almost like a painting it's more free flowing. And that was really cool because this poem actually precedes her poem. What was it? Snowflakes?
16:03
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Snow crystals...What is it? Field Guide to Snow Crystals.
16:05
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Field Guide to Snow Crystals.
Yeah. So in the reading, she read this as a preface. And the right after she read that poem. [Start Music: Chimes Instrumental] And the thing is, we do have a transcription of this poem published in her book Talking. And the way Field Guide to Snow Crystals. is structured is also in that similar free flowing form, you know, lines kind of move kind of organically across the page. And so we were able to go on that a bit and see, okay, where did she emphasize and pause while reading “Snow Crystals” poem and then yeah. And so we ultimately worked with and decided to go with your version more. [End Music: Chimes Instrumental]
16:53
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
I win. [Laughs].
16:54
Isabella Wang, Interview,3 Feb 2022:
Yes. You win.
16:55
Stephen Collis, Interview,3 Feb 2022:
Well, you know what, the other thing I find interesting is in snow crystals, it's kind of one of those sciencey poems.
17:01
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Yes.
17:01
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
She uses scientific language and has this flow all over the page, like she's thinking her way through these complicated sounds and words. There's other poems like that too. I think whenever she's dealing with scientific kind of things. The form becomes more fluid and less, you know, traditionally poetic and more exploratory maybe. And so that's kind of what I was thinking. And I think you agreed that with this poem that might make sense.
And just, just finally, what do you like about this poem? What attracts you to it? Or what do you find interesting in it?
17:28
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
First of all, it's such a concise poem. It's one of her shorter poems and yet it packs so much, it just, those last lines just grabs at me The sense that this was a poem she had composed for a festival at the planetarium. Yeah. And just that alone. Right. Poets gathered to read it none other than the planetarium feels so dreamy. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones]
17:54
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Under the stars. [Laughs]
17:55
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Exactly. I wish we had that all the time here.
17:59
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
[Laughs] Right.
18:00
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
And then, so, and in some ways she captures that exact feeling, not only of kind of the stariness of the planetarium itself, but also the feeling of being held and supported and connected with poets, other poets kind of like a community of constellations, individual poets. And then that line, right. "Give me poets a handful of dust before the skies fall down." It lands with that community. It lands in that burning moment.
18:35
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Yeah. And that feeling of danger and the need for each other and a fragile world. Yeah it's Lovely.
18:42
Isabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Yeah. For me, it's like that –the planetary of it, it's supposed to be such a big space, but maybe it's because it's a short poem it just feels really small. It feels compact.
18:51
Stephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:
Yeah. I love that. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]
19:04
Stephen Collis:
I like Isabella’s description of the way words, in the Planetarium poem, “flow across the page” irregularly, as she said, like a painting [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] (that is, like paint on a painting—the surface of the page or canvas taken as a spatial field where the elements can be arranged relationally). I suggested this was “exploratory”—a way of using the poem, perhaps, to discover something—and then, in a brilliant turn of phrase, suggested you could see this in Webb’s “sciency poems.” [End Music: Strings Instrumental] That’s a technical, literary term—“sciency.” [Clears Throat]
Let’s have a listen to one of those “sciency” poems, one Isabella mentioned too—“Field Guide to Snow Crystals,” which Webb included in her 1982 collection of essays and radio commentary, Talking.
19:58
Archival Audio, Phyllis Webb, SFU Art Gallery, 9 July 1981:
[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, In] Field Guide to Snow Crystals. Stellar rime,/ star crystals. In a sunfield / of snow. No/ two crystals exactly alike, like / me and the double I've never known / or the four-leaf clover./ A down drifting / of snow. Spatial dendrites,/ irregular germs,/ snow grows, scales, skeletons fernlike extensions,/ needles, scrolls / and sheathes, branches./ Lightly or heavily/ rimed / Stars on cold ground shining./ Ice lattice! For the field guides me/my / flutterhand to a fistful of/ plates, clusters, minute columns./ Graupel-like snow of lump type/ solid and hollow bullets / cup / Cupped in my hand / thrown across a fiel / “or… a series of fields folded.” A ball, star (“tiny columns and plates fallen from very cold air”)/ a quick curve into/ sky/my / surprised/ winterbreath/ a snowflake / caught midway in your throat. [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, Out]
21:49
Stephen Collis:
[Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] I suggest that poetic thinking—relational thinking—thinking by intuitive leaps and links—lateral connections and sudden shifts of scale, position and voice—allows not logic nor rational argument but embodied and felt movement over and through and in and along the contours of language. Webb, like many poets, works under the assumption that there is a valid pursuit of knowing that is lateral, oblique, latent, and relational and that is the work of poetry. I like how poet Erin Robinsong phrases this in her forthcoming book, Wet Dream:“we must work across realms / and poetry will be how.” In her “sciency” poems, Webb is doing just this: working across realms. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]
Webb’s “Field Guide” poem takes its title, and quotes liberally throughout, from a book of the same title published by Edward Lachapelle in 1969. The use of source material this way—a kind of repurposing of found material—is such a common poetic practice that is hardly bears mentioning, although it’s clear this particular book was a rich resource, as Webb [Start Music: Chime Instrumental], in an almost painterly way, applies the unique lexicon to her page. If stars are to be my guide through Webb’s work in this podcast, the stars, here, are playing a game of as above / so below—a chemical transformation where falling or fallen snow crystals and the stars above “rime,” as she writes several times in the poem. This is an expanded sense of “rime,” which Webb adapts from poet Robert Duncan: things that look alike, or mean alike, as well as things that sound alike, can “rime.” There’s also the play on r-i-m-e rime—the accumulation of ice tufts on frozen surfaces. [End Music: Chime Instrumental] Okay—I could get carried away with a close reading of this poem; let me just draw attention to its gorgeous concluding lines—where the speaker’s “surprised / winterbreath” (all one word—winterbreath) is likened to “a snowflake / caught midway in your throat.” [Start Music: Chime Instrumental] And that’s it, the poem leaving us there, with its words in our throat, melting like a snowflake on the tongue—or a star fading out as the sun begins to blue the morning sky. [End Music: Chime Instrumental] ]
I asked poet Fred Wah if he’d be willing to talk about Phyllis’s work with me for this podcast, and he immediately said yes, and that he wanted to talk about one poem and one poem only. It's called “Leaning,” from Webb’s book of Ghazal’s, Water and Light. The ghazal or [pronounces] ghazal is a Persian form—a poem written in couplets, but in its traditional practice, following numerous other rules, including subject matter (they are usually about love). Webb’s poems are, as she often called them, “anti-ghazals.” “Leaning” is perhaps the most anti- of all the poems in Webb’s book—especially in terms of subject matter
25:13
Archival Audio, Phyllis Webb, from the Webb fonds at Library and Archives Canada:
[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, In] I am halfway up the stairs/ of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. // Don't go down. You are in this/ with me too.// I am leaning out of the Leaning/ Tower heading into the middle distance// where a fur-blue star contracts, becomes/ the ice-pond Brueghel’s figures are skating on.// North Magnetic pulls me like a flower/ out of the perpendicular// angles me into outer space/ an inch at a time, the slouch// of the ground, do you hear that? /the hiccup of the sludge about the stone.// (Rodin in Paris, his amanuensis, a torso ...)/ I must change my life or crunch over// in vertigo, hands/ bloodying the inside tower walls// lichen and dirt under the fingernails/ Parsifal vocalizing in the crazy night// my sick head on the table where I write/slumped one degree from the horizontal // the whole culture leaning...// the phalloi of Mies, Columbus returning/ stars all short out – //And now this. Smelly tourist/ shuffling around my ears// climbing into the curvature. /They have paid good lira to get in here. //So have I. So did Einstein and Bohr./ Why should we ever come down, ever?// And you, are you still here // tilting in this stranded ark/ blind and seeing in the dark. [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, Out]
27:21
Stephen Collis:
Fred calls it “one of the best poems in Canadian literature.” And I think he should know. Fred Wah—he will cringe at me saying this—is a treasure of Canadian letters. He has had a huge influence on me and many other poets, writers and artists of the past few generations. A founding member of the TISH group of student poets at UBC at the beginning of the 1960s, Fred has gone on to a distinguished teaching career, writing dozens of books of poetry and prose. He has been recognized with a Governor General’s Award for poetry, and served a term as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Fred and I have visited Phyllis together several times, and it feels like we are deep into a many-years long conversation about her life and work. We spoke at Fred’s Strathcona home in East Vancouver.
28:10
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
One of the things I'm realizing about, you know, when you said you wanted to talk about the poem. And you start thinking more and more about it, you and you can't – I can't stop thinking about it. It just goes on and on. How aware Phyllis [Laughs] I keep thinking of SpokenWeb, spoken Webb. Webb.
28:29
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
[Shared Laughter] Exactly.
28:30
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
But, Phyllis was so compositionally aware of what she was doing. That her kind of composition mentality, if you like, her cognitive ability to just putting things together. So, you know, the book at the poem “Leaning” is just, it's part of the section middle distance.
So the proposition is, if you start looking at like, and Pauline in her book on Webb, she did a lot of, she did some research on this from a particular point of view. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] But, you find that Phyllis has really been thinking about this in a larger context. This is an – this't just an incidental poem. This is a poem that fits into a kind of discourse that she's sort of in, in a large scale thing, over years.
29:28
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
That's right. I totally agree.
29:30
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
And it starts fitting into all kinds of other things. And I hadn't, I mean, I didn't realize, Pauline mentioned this to me that Virginia Woolf's essay “Leaning”. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]
29:45
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::
Oh my gosh. I didn't think of that either.
29:46
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
You know? And it's an incredible thing. I know this is Paula doing research, but...
29:52
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::
[Laughs] Presumably, so.
29:54
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
“The Leaning Tower” was a paper that Woolf presented to the Workers Educational association. Brighton May, 1940.
30:01
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Amazing.
30:01
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
She describes the privileged socioeconomic position of contemporary British writers as a leaning tower, quote, "trapped by their education, pinned down by their capital. They remained on top of their leaning tower and their state of mind as we see it reflected in their poems and plays and novels is full of discord and bitterness, full of confusion and of compromise." And further that "they are trapped on a leaning tower from which they cannot descend."
30:28
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
That's amazing. That's perfect.
30:29
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
So this is, I'm sure Phyllis would be very aware of this, right? Yeah. Okay. This is an address to that whole patriarchal construct. And there are more feminist links in there. But the fact that she's, this is a whole thing, like it's whole, it's a, there's kind of a whole cloth here. So although I love the poem “Leaning” because of its poem-ness –
31:03
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::
[Shared Laughter] Right, right.
31:04
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
– it's such a great, it's so well written. And I can read it without even paying any attention to the – or much attention to the references. Cuz the poem is constructed so musically so beautifully that I'm just – I don't really need to pay attention to the reference. I know they're there. Of course, once you get into the references, the thing just like [Vocalizes Expanding Sounds] – goes on and on and on.
31:29
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::
Well they're all men. Right. And which goes with, maybe Pauline's reading here in this kind of patriarchal context for that leaning. Right. Cause you've got, I mean, what we've got, we've got, Rodin, [Start Music: Low String Tones] we've got Brueghel. We've got, you've got Rilke, I think hiding behind Rodan. Because Rilke was Rodin's secretary and Phyllis loved Rilke and there's that "I must change my life" line in the poem. It sounds – that's pretty much Rilke right there. But then also Columbus, Mies van der Rohe, the architect and on and on. Right. Einstein. Bohr. It's all men that we mention the poem. Yeah. I love that idea of yours and I totally agree. But you can read the poem without noticing or thinking about its references. You can read it for its poem-ness.
32:15
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah. And just, you can just say, well, oh, they're all men. This is just this sort of, yeah. She's kind of hitting these guys for different things, but it's all very particular. But then as we can discover, Pauline pulled this up, in an interview with Ann Mutton, Webb explains the link between “Leaning” and “Following”, another poem –
32:41
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing!
32:41
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
– that isn't – that she kept out of middle distance. She says, the leaning tower is a phallic image and once I wrote that poem, a similar image kept flashing and that was a woman from Botticelli. I then wrote a poem called “Leaning”, dealing with Botticelli and the women. However, Webb adds that it's not a very good poem. It doesn't have the weight. It may be fatal for me to give up this male oppression on my psyche.
33:06
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
[Shared Laughter] Right. You need your demons sometimes like again, going back to Rilke, Rilke famously a friend said, "Hey, I can get you a session with Freud." Cuz he was having all sorts of depressive issues and Rilke said, "No, I don't wanna be cured. This is how I write poetry." [Shared Laughter]
33:25
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Well, I think Webb is very aware of this – is playing around and that this is really a middle distance for her –
33:31
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's come back to that.
33:34
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
– in so many ways, and there, I mean there is this of course the feminist thing. And she does write to –it is – there's a correspondence with Daphne. And the poem, “Leaning” is dedicated to Daphne.
33:48
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
That's right.
33:48
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
So, there's that. But there's also a whole bunch of other –the way I take it, the way I played with it was through Negative Capability.
33:59
Stephen Collis:
Negative Capability was poet John Keats term for, as he wrote in a letter to his brothers in 1817, the creative state of [Start Music: String Instrumental] “being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, it is the ability to reside in between doubt and certainty, to carry on thinking about a problem that you don’t know the answer to. Poet Robert Duncan had something similar in mind when he spoke of poetry as “the intellectual adventure of not knowing.” [End Music: String Instrumental]
Perhaps Fred and I get a little carried away here—we had a lot to say about this poem. In the second part of this interview we discuss what Fred calls the “germ of thought we’re still trying to unravel” which lies at the heart of Webb’s poem—“all these binaries,” as Fred says, going on to discuss the possibly dialectical space of the between—here’s Negative Capability again—and the idea that “betweenness is a place to be”—maybe the place to be.
35:06
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
And I'm attracted to "Leaning" because of it's playing around with this, between-ness.
35:13
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
I was gonna say – the space between. Yeah, exactly.
35:15
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
But there are so many other ways to play with this poem too. There's that feminist thing which is very obvious once you start realizing that yes, these are guys, they're all guys here. But then because we're now in a kind of –we're trying to address the entropy of our social climate. And I'm thinking of all the [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] sort of microrisal structures, the networks, the plants and the fungus, the mycellial networks –
35:58
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::
That's in there too.
35:59
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
– and all of this requires, as the ecologists tell us, we have to learn how to balance these things, balance these contradictions. And so the poem is right in bed– and this is what, 1982, she's writing this poem I think?
36:15
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah, yeah. About that.
36:18
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
She's right in this. She's got a sense of that germ of thought. That we've now come to where we're still trying to unravel this, all these contradictions, all these binaries.
36:37
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Absolutely.
36:38
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
And we keep – the poet, I think, is reminding us of this. I don't think she's finding, she's not offering a solution. She's just reminding us that it's very imbalanced. And am I gonna have to remain under this patriarchal mindset just to keep going...or?
37:01
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
It's even right there in that mentioning Einstein and Bohr, which I don't think accidental that those two have a big argument in the early 20th century about basically reality essentially. Quantum physics and Einstein was a holdout, not loving the conclusions of quantum mechanics and Bohr was the advocate and they were not in agreement and this whole spiraling leaning tower, you know, it seems so cosmological in some ways.
37:30
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
But also Bohr on the atomic thing, like entropy is–
37:34
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Entropy. Exactly.
37:34
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
– is the basis of the atomic physics. And so, [Laughs] ...
37:41
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
And it's even here as a colonial process that entropy and that apocalyptic Columbus returning, stars all shot out. [Shared Laughter] He's blown that cosmology away in sense. So, and we should come back to your "fur-blue stars" [Start Music: Chime Instrumental] and the "middle distance". I think we're in a realm of aesthetics. That's one interpretation of middle distance, right. Is that it's an aesthetic painterly term. If you're looking at a painting what's in the foreground, there might be figures in the foreground, there's a background, you know, Renaissance painting, you'll see maybe mountains or towers or a town in the far away, but there's a middle distance, or who knows what it could be like animals in a field portrayed or something.
But the art historians will talk about and use those terms. So middle distance is also an art historical term, an aesthetic term for interpreting a painting. So I think right after, is it right after it's first mentioned that we get...? Yeah. The next line after the mention of middle distance, is "the fur blue star" and Brueghel. And I wonder if that's a description of a painted star, right. That might look fur blue might look, I mean, think even Van Gogh – those kind of crazy fuzzy, blurry looking stars.
38:53
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah. It could be. I mean, I still, as I said earlier, I don't still don't know what fur blue star, if it's a particular reference in the sky. You know, if there is a fur blue star that's in some story.
39:10
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver ,8 March 2022:
Or in Brueghel's painting [Laughs].
39:11
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
But that becomes – the fact that it becomes the ice pond Brueghel’s figures are skating on. In other words, that all of these perceptions are all this the sky and the earth. Another binary. Earth and sky.
39:28
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yes. Yes.
39:30
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Trying to find that. "A north magnetic pulls me..." So it's a – there's a directional thing, a geometric or a geo thing here.
39:40
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
That's right.
So part of what I see you describing here Fred, is that you constantly transform [Start Music: String Instrumental] from one reference to the next couplet. Couplet by couplet. This constant movement and shaping in the poem going on. Constant shifting and moving to different locations, but always working with kinds of binaries. And when you get to Rodin it's Rodin and his "amanuensis".
40:01
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Right. Right. [Shared Laughter]
40:02
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah. So you constantly got these, this pairing or binary working through of things.
40:08
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah. Yeah. And she's – I think she's realizing that this middle distance is, the dynamics of this middle distance is rife just with all these binaries [End Music: String Instrumental] and the equivocation that we find ourselves in trying to deal with the binary aspect of our world.
40:31
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah.
40:31
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
So this, like the ground, the here, this it's "angles me into outer space an inch at a time", "the slouch of the ground, do you hear that?", "the hiccup of the sludge about the stone".
40:44
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
[Shared Laughter] To that the hardness of that phallic tower and the wooshing of the ground or something, another binary.
40:55
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
And at the back of mine, mine is [ostranenie?]. The stone makes the stone, the stone stoney. [Laughs]
41:05
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah, yeah. Right. Oh amazing! [Laughs] I love that.
41:05
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
I don't know. [Laughs]
41:12
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
But there's even a binary or a relationality, I guess we could say too, and then focus on the idea of the, of the middle or the, between, and that relational space. But in between the speaker of the poem and the reader, right. You, this directedness right. Are in this with me too. And at the end, and you, are you still here? That's another really interesting betweeness.
41:32
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Mm-hmm . Yes.
41:33
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Addresser and addressee or something.
41:36
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
But it's also that – it's the one and the many.
41:39
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yes!
41:41
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Okay. It's the paradox. Well, not so much a paradox. I think she's trying to – she doesn't pose it as a paradox. She's just posing it as a condition of this "I" and "you". The local, the universal. The sky, the earth, the... [Laughs] –
41:58
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Exactly.
41:59
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
– all these oppositions. And so even these – I guess what you're suggesting is perhaps even all these men are part of this. They're both, they're both part of it. They're also part of that accusation from Virginia Woolf that they're caught in this leaning tower.
42:18
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
42:19
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
And they can't come down. [Laughs]
42:20
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Does the – is the speaker gonna walk away at the end? [Laughs]
42:25
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Well, so I guess, in a sense, this sort of goes to buttress up my notion that between this is a place to be. Right. And that we're actually – there are that, we're kind of – like my metaphor of it is the cafe door.
42:47
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Exactly.
42:47
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Caught in the doorway. And I've always been interested in trying to, or for a long time, I've been interested in trying to describe, or trying to figure out the character or the dynamics of where you are when you're caught in the doorway, you're standing the doorway. The advantage is you can see both rooms at the same time, so you see a larger view. The disadvantage is, is that you're in the way! [Laughs]
43:12
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Right, right. [Laughs]
43:13
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Get outta the way!
So there's lots of – there's both. There's both, once again, you're in a middle place. Yeah. So there's both things going on. Yeah. And trying to negotiate. So how to negotiate between this. And I'm not so sure – I don't know if she's coming up, thinks she's coming up with an answer to her. I don't think so. But that "And you, are you still here/tilting in this stranded ark /blind and seeing in the dark." Well, the ark is, that is what the collectivity, it's the kind of humanity all collected together. Everything's together. But it's stranded. [Laughs]
43:56
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Not getting anywhere, not getting outta the flood. [Shared Laughter]
44:00
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Even that. That "I" and "you" that becomes "we" is still stranded. So it's in that sense, I suppose one could say it's perhaps, not a negative statement, but she's not coming up with an answer to this problem of balancing the binaries. I think she's simply pointing out that there are binaries there. And we have to find some, or we're in it. That's what we're in. It's not –there is no, you know, polar black and white. [Laughs]
44:41
Stephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Right. Well, I dunno if it's anyone's job to decide this, but I certainly don't think it's the poet's job to decide that right. The poet's job is to be in, well, I always think these days of entanglement. The post job is to identify and illuminate our entanglements. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] Here's where we are. Here's where, we're what we're all bound up and what we can't get out of.
44:58
Fred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:
Yeah. And reacting to it with language.
45:09
Stephen Collis:
There’s something of the very essence of poetry, for me, in this matter of the stars in Webb’s work—something of the supercharged task of grasping at the ungraspable—of rendering in words—what tries to escape words. To “see in the dark,” as the speaker is doing at the end of “Leaning,” is perhaps to see by starlight—faintly, but gloriously, luminously. And while the coldness of that starlight might sometimes read as isolating, I was glad to see both Isabella and Fred take up the image of the constellation in their comments—the constellation of poets in the planetarium, as Isabella had it, making vast cosmic space smaller, more intimate, and Fred’s sense of Webb’s “compositional awareness,” as he called it, of how everything in the poem fits together seamlessly, and how the poem itself fits into larger “constellations” through its wide field of references.
But what about that “fur blue star”? Well, for one thing, it’s an image of “betweenness” once again—of something touching both furry animals and burning cosmic bodies in their deep space orbits—that which is above, and that which lies below—and the strangeness of being human, with our capacity to partake of both the furry world and starry contemplation, shuttling between with our poems and stories.
But I’m also tempted to connect the “fur blue star” from “Leaning” with the “starry rime” (r-i-m-e) from “Field Guide to Snow Crystals.” If stars seem fuzzy to the human eye—if they radiate blurry halos in certain atmospheres—why not furry? Why not blue? Or, at the end of the day, why not … just not know, for sure, and let the image’s Negative Capability pulse on in thought and undecidability?
I think, I will always be in media res, in a state of betweenness, when it comes to Phyllis Webb and her poetry. If this podcast is a tribute to her, it necessarily takes the form of an in-progress thinking through and thinking with the example of her life and work—and with other poets similarly caught midway in their thinking through her life and work. That’s the thing—despite often cutting the image of an isolato, alone on her island for all those years, Phyllis Webb was always forming constellations of poets, always a part of important poetic constellations, and always allowing new poets into her orbit. That was her star power. Thanks for listening. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]
48:15
Hannah McGregor:
[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Stephen Collis English professor at Simon Fraser University.
Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. And our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and thanks to Judith Burr for hanging around and continuing to help us out. A special thanks to Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University and Library and Archives Canada.
To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada, stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with Katherine McLeod, many stories about how literature sounds.