Document généré le 25 sept. 2021 21:09 Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne Listening at the Edge: Homage and Ohmage in Don McKay and Ken Babstock Travis V. Mason Volume 33, numéro 1, 2008 URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/scl33_1art04 Aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) The University of New Brunswick ISSN 0380-6995 (imprimé) 1718-7850 (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer cet article Mason, T. V. (2008). Listening at the Edge:: Homage and Ohmage in Don McKay and Ken Babstock. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, 33(1), 77–96. All rights reserved © Management Futures, 2008 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ Listening at the Edge: Homage and Ohmage in Don McKay and Ken Babstock Travis V. Mason Listening to Public Readings Listen, slow one let me be your fool — Don McKay, “Song of the Saxifrage to the Rock” hen I attended the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival on Sunday, 12 September 1999, Don McKay and Ken Babstock read during the same session. On a rickety, wooden stage Woverhanging a winding river, McKay read poems from his forthcom- ing collection Another Gravity. As he read his narrative poem about Icarus’s plunge into the Icarian sea, a couple drifted by in a canoe. A relative newcomer, Babstock introduced a field of listeners to his particular brand of east-coast vernacular, reading from his first col- lection in rhythms strangely relevant to the outdoor setting. At the time, I was unaware that McKay had edited Babstock’s Mean. (I might have found out sooner had I the means to purchase a copy during the festival. An undergraduate at the time, the best I could manage was a promise to Babstock after the reading that I would buy the book as soon as I got home.) Further, I had not yet read McKay’s afterword to The Fiddlehead’s 50th anniversary issue, published four years earlier, in which he alludes to the ongoing editorial project of listening and attention that translates, via publishing, into audience. He credits “the editorial atten- tion, the listening, and the feedback provided by The Fiddlehead editors” for the journal’s lasting presence in and influence among a community of writers (“Common Sense” 233). As one of the journal’s former editors himself, McKay’s assessment seems not only valid but central in the way it continues to inform his role as editor for Brick Books and House of Anansi, and as mentor to numerous Canadian poets. 78 Scl/Élc In his discussion of The Fiddlehead’s community of writers and read- ers, McKay echoes Anansi co-founder Dennis Lee’s focus in Civil Elegies on civil, urban existence, which Nicholas Bradley claims “provides an extraordinary representation of the city as part of the natural world and demonstrates a profound concern for the environmental health of both the city and the wilderness beyond it” (15). In much the same way Lee’s poem “demands that urban spaces and damaged ecosystems be included in any study of representations of nature in Canadian writing” (Bradley 15), McKay’s observant lyric and prose writings invite ecological read- ings, and his editorial role incites public awareness of a thriving poetry, a sort of verse ecology interested in public listening. His ideas about poet- ics — figured by prose writing about metaphor, aurality, poetic atten- tion — and public life — figured by a post-publication listening audi- ence — resonate generally with an environmental awareness and more particularly with a poetry that enacts what it scribes. If, as Bruno Latour argues in The Politics of Nature, there is “little point in differentiating between those groups of people who want to understand ecosystems, defend the environment, or protect nature, and those who want to revive public life” (8), then McKay enacts connections in his poetry between understanding ecosystems and reviving public life that parallel the con- nections he helps create between himself and the poets whose work he edits on the way to publication.1 In this paper, I turn an ear to these connections by focusing on how McKay develops both visual and aural linguistic tropes that record poetic responses to the non-human world, how he emphasizes the importance of a listening (public) audience and, by looking closely at Ken Babstock’s first collection of poetry, how he extends his editorial influence to other poets. The ecopoetical content of the poems under scrutiny here, in other words, combines with certain linguistic tropes along with other poets’ formal and topical attempts to construct a community, if not an ecology, of listening that has potential to inflect the way readers hear and think about contemporary poetry interested in humans’ relations to the non-human world. McKay recognizes in the editorial and publication process “a qual- ity of attention that is the nerves and sinews of community,” and wants to connect that attention to public life, wants to “call it audience” (“Common Sense” 235; original emphasis). His emphasis on the word “audience” resonates with his emphasis on a poem’s sound and on how it enacts a listening that readers can identify and to which they can Don McKay and Ken Babstock 79 attend. Poetry, McKay argues, is “written with the ear. If you don’t hear something, it’s not working” (“Appropriate” 47). And if it is not working — aurally, lyrically, ecologically — it ceases to be of any real use in a public context and fails “to make a place for nature within public life” (Latour 2): that is, in the relations between the world, the text, and the audience. One of McKay’s projects as poet and editor concerns actively engaging with the tensions between language (i.e., poetry) and matter (i.e., poetic subjects). More specifically, McKay’s interests, at least as they play out in his own writing, lie in attempting to portray a humble relation between word and world that calls into question the colonial impulse of the (human) writer while simultaneously paying homage to the (non-human) others about which he writes. The measure of this relation, the distance between word and world that manifests itself in homage, occurs in a style of word play endemic to McKay’s oeuvre: metaplasm. Equal parts anagram, palindrome, and pun, metaplasm, according to cultural anthropologist Donna Haraway, refers to “a change in a word . by adding, omitting, inverting, or transposing its letters, syllables, or sounds” (20). In The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Haraway co-opts the term meta- plasm to articulate a linguistic mode of rethinking humans’ relation to the non-human world and to refer to what she calls, in her own meta- plasmic moment, “the remodeling of dog and human flesh, remolding the codes of life, in the history of companion-species relating” (20). Haraway’s attention to linguistic tropes in a book ostensibly about dog training implies a relation between metaplasm and listening toward which McKay gestures in his writing. I use the term metaplasm in two ways: first, in the tropic sense Haraway acknowledges (from the Greek, meta, denoting change, and plasmus, to mould or form), to refer to what I recognize as particularly McKavian2 movements between, for example, homage and ohmage, grave and gravel, loop and pool, thrush and thresh(hold), material and matériel; and second, in the biological sense Haraway neglects to acknowledge (which botanist J. von Hanstein developed into the German metaplasma), which refers to the granular, dead portion of cytoplasm within a cell.3 This dual sense of metaplasm makes space for both the linguistic and the scientific in McKay’s poetry; but, more importantly, both McKay and Babstock insinuate the speakers of the 80 Scl/Élc poems under discussion into the spaces between each sense of meta- plasm, effectively positioning readers between the two meanings and inviting consideration of an active correspondence between the meta- phorical and ecological aspects of their poetry. More than simply isolating instances of McKay’s and Babstock’s linguistic manipulation to extra linguistic ends, I want to demonstrate how metaplasm operates at the level of poetics by emphasizing each poet’s practice of both homage to an other and ohmage, a measuring of the language/music/rhythm of poetic attention. Where homage is a form of respectful remembrance of and address to another, ohmage is a form of measurement — literally of electrical resistance and metaphorically of another’s resistance, conscious or not, to being made into metaphor. In other words, both homage and ohmage position poet and reader in relation to someone, or something, else: while the former acknowledges the fact of the relation, the latter attempts to measure the relation, to articulate linguistically a non-linguistic phenomenal relationality. Integral to this ecopoetical project of measuring the distance between, for example, poet and bushtit is the production both of poetry and of a listening audience. Much as a reader scans a line of verse, or an electrician measures resistance in a circuit, to position herself in relation to the potential wisdom of the poet or the kinetic power of the current, respectively, McKay cultivates a humble listening (necessary to enact both homage and ohmage) by carefully mentoring other poets whose work will eventually reach a public audience.