Essay collection worth the heavy lifting

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/06/2024 (494 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Up for a challenge?

Poet, translator, culture historian, book reviewer and lover of language, Bruce Whiteman has sifted and scrutinized 50 years of his critical writings and selected those that still have delight to offer the curious reader.

The title comes from a quote of composer Igor Stravinsky — “Poetics is the study of work to be done” — and the opening piece, What’s Poetry?, sets the critical tone that threads through the entire book. On the first page we read, “April is National Poetry Month, thirty days out of the year when poetry gets a nod from libraries, publishers and other cogs in the literary machine that usually give it short shrift,” adding “The average Canadian or American doesn’t give a pinch of prairie dog scat for poetry.”

How, then, to keep the average reader from immediately closing the book when the topic is poetry?

Whiteman’s ability to share his enthusiasm, knowledge and love of poetry should soothe hurt feelings or assuage fears the article will be one long harangue or nostalgia fest for “when I was in school we had to memorize … etc.”

He does promote, defend and encourage readers: “What makes a poet is that he has the ache; the ear is where the events of the world focus and become a poem,” adding a Jack Spicer quote, “Prose invents — poetry discloses.”

The late Tom Oleson, when he was the books editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, insisted that a review must entice, entertain and engage the reader, whether or not they were likely to read the book in question. Whiteman’s choice of reviews do just that. This includes his thoughts on the likes of Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust. These pieces read as if Whiteman didn’t have a deadline, or as if he waited until he had read every other biography on his subject before adding his own comparisons and confidences.

The cover of Work to Be Done shows an old-fashioned (aren’t they all?) typewriter with a spreading flow of white rising from its platen, reflecting the range of the 34 chosen pieces and the author’s interests.

The book is divided into five sections — the reader can jump from The Art of Poetry to Canlit, from Antiquity to Europe. In the last section, The World of Books, Whiteman’s lecture Waiting for the Barbarians: Rare Books and the New University in Canada raises the spectre of technology as the sirens’ call to librarians to discard the book in the hand for the bright prospect of accessibility.

This piece is from 1996, and the title makes reference to a poem by Constantine Cavafy — which, he says, like ourselves, has the Romans awaiting the arrival of the barbarians who are “dazzled by beautiful silver and gold work, and are “bored by rhetoric and public speaking.”

Whiteman’s answer to this tsunami? He quotes Tertullian: “In this world anxious for Progress, we offer the tradition of the past in order to March forward.”

This not a book, then, for scanning or skimming. A dictionary to go with your glass of Scotch is recommended since, as the author says of the thousands of poems found in the volume titled The Greek Anthology, “it is perhaps indigestible as a whole, but endlessly fascinating in bits.”

Ron Robinson quit his intro Latin course at the University of Winnipeg when he was offered paid work elsewhere.