Sorting Out Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Style

Sonic resonances of "Animal Spirits"

wildcat horses echoes

As I returned to China, I was working on an article about Gwendolyn MacEwen’s The T.E. Lawrence Poems (1982). That essay is forthcoming in a special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature, but it’s also part of what’s become a pet project of mine: to rehabilitate a poet I’ve always loved but whom I’ve found to have fallen increasingly out of favour with pretty much every camp of Canadian poets. Criticized for the odd cringeworthy line; praised in older criticism for some vaguely defined spirituality, mysticism, or expansiveness; described in one article as having a poetics borne of alcoholism and hypoglycemia (!); there’s really something for everyone not to like in MacEwen.

I think something else is happening in her work, though, even if it’s hard to pin down. Let’s forget her biography and the points about cultural singularity and transgressivity I make in the article about The T.E. Lawrence Poems, a unique book about Lawrence of Arabia and his own transgressions. Let’s just take a look at a poem. One that I like but had to leave out of the article is “Animal Spirits”: 

Is it true, then, that one fears all that one loves? 
These spirits are my awful companions; I can’t tell
               anyone when they move in me.
They are so mighty they are unclean; it is the end
Of cleanliness; it is the great crime. 

I can only kill them by becoming them. They are all
I have ever loved or wanted; their hooves and paws
	       smell of honey and trodden flowers.

Those who do not know me sip their bitter coffee
	     and mutter of war. They do not know
             I am wrestling with the spirits
             and have almost won. They do not know
I am looking out from the camels’ eyes, out
             from the eyes of the horses. 

It is vile to love them; I will not love them.
						                               Look—
My brain is sudden and silent as a wildcat.
						                               Lord,
Teach me to be lean, and wise. Nothing matters,
	     nothing matters.

There’s something like a smooth formal resonance that also manages to accommodate a steady incongruity. “They are so mighty they are unclean”? The last word is echoed in cleanliness, the final syllable of unclean echoed more faintly in crime. But the conceptual jump from mighty to unclean remains (for me) buried beneath the sonic resonances.

I see something similar in “Those who do not know me sip their bitter coffee / and mutter of war.” Bitter/mutter and coffee/of war grind a trochaic pattern down into something like an underwhelming spondee, but what’s with the part about not knowing the speaker? Where’s the connection? Moving from here, we find out that “They” also don’t know the speaker is “wrestling with the spirits.” Even MacEwen’s supporters have pointed out a corniness that mars her work, and the spirits line seems like that. At least until we’re told that the same speaker has “almost won.”

The doubling-down then puts MacEwen’s spirit wrestler almost literally inside the animals—looking out from their eyes, having a wildcat’s brain. The insistence of some kind of gauche, declaiming lyric voice is underscored in the poem’s final cliched phrase. But then that phrase surprises by repeating itself with the dreaded italics-for-emphasis: “nothing matters.”

One could carry out similar readings of almost every line of “Animal Spirits.” But maybe what makes MacEwen’s poetics not quite a poetics is how these techniques don’t really appear consistently, or, even when we can identify such patterns in a single poem, really add up to much. It’s not Language poetry, but the joints in imagery and meaning are often pretty worn out—even as they insist on working together to tell some comprehensible story. 

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Leave Carl Watts some love about his essay regarding Gwendolyn MacEwen’s style.