Now that the feuds have died down it would no longer be appropriate for A. J. M. Smith to cry: “Layton shall tingle in Canadian air / And echo answer Dudek everywhere.” Omitting those polemics and parodies, salutary as they have been in stirring up the potage canadien, what is interesting today is a concern for the styles and techniques which have made each poet so differently “an intelligent, imaginative man” (“Functional Poetry”).

Of the two it is Louis Dudek who has been most articulate about the poetic art and its relation to the spoken word. Recently he has written his own Art Poetique, in a poem called “Functional Poetry: a Proposal.” Here he envisages poetry as “having the shape of clouds.” And it is this sculptural, visual approach that aligns him with the early Imagist movement of the century and with its re‑development under the aegis of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound:

But I go back always to the first three moderns

     Lawrence, Aldington, Eliot (then), Pound (1915)

     Lee Masters (yes! Sandburg too)

     for the beginning of what we need: straight

                        language

and relevance to our real concerns

            …………………………………………..

       i.e. some form of improvised rhythmed speech . . .

 This “manifesto” establishes Dudek as the contemporary Canadian poet most consciously concerned with shape, form and sound: the origins of rhythm. He feels that the widening scope of prose rhythm has set up an impasse for poetry which he would like to break through:

The problem, it seems to me, is simply

the loss of ground to prose over the centuries

            in the subject matter of poetry,

            and the loss of freshness in method

            as the residue of "poetic" substance

            became fossilized in decadent metre and form

—the coral reefs.

            We want a renewal      of substance, of technique

      that goes to the origin and source.

His aim apparently is to invade the fortress where prose has taken hold and return it to the rightful owner, poetry:

                        to write it as they write prose

Lots of it, on all subjects that call

            for communication

…………………………………

            as poetry of exposition and discourse.

Before he reached this eighteenth century critical posi­tion, Dudek as man and poet went through many phases. His earliest poetry in East of the City is lyrical and imagist: concerned not with sound effects so much as with pic­tures in rhythmic arrangement. Already the clouds and the sea he is so fond of observing represent his objective correlative for the world of poetry: a world where recur­rent rhythms subject to wind and weather, subject to sun and moon, are expressed through language:

The moon floated down

a river between two clouds

melted the stone banks and they

were gone.

(“Night Piece” 5)

In many of these short lyrical pieces the poet’s “eye” is on the object but in the background is a subjective, emotional “I” responding to these objects. So we get a “double take” as in a poem called “Revolving Door”:

Late, when near that waterwheel

the treaded doorway where

no man is, but momentary water

while outside the sun points

on hands, foreheads; and all fluid

sharp down spires and trees

skits the sun's lightning,

drawn and turned, I fall

loud down the sounding caves

of the watery wheel, out, and O

the light blinds me,

cells burst in trillion and spill

my mind of its surprise and fear.

(East of the City, 19)

Dudek’s search for “straight language and relevance” is certainly to be found in these early poems. Nonetheless he is not wholly free from the metrical bonds of the past. In the above lines, for instance, there is a movement outward, a loosening of the line: “while outside the sun points/ on hands, foreheads,” but he quickly lapses into iambic metre in lines such as “drawn and turned, I fall” or “my mind of its surprise and fear.” Also, when social criticism dominates a poem, as in “East of the City” itself, the rhythm is reminiscent of English poets of the 1930s—Auden or Day Lewis:

So that someday we may go, and see the sun rise

Outside this world of rubble. Drive out

Through factories, and brick walls of buildings

To the east, to the fields sweet with clover

Where over the heads of trees, in a cup of the sky,

Laughing, the earthwarmer comes, making day

warm for us.   (49)

There is a tentative groping here for an individual rhythm based on strong stresses, but the iambic or anapestic metre takes hold firmly in the last two lines quoted. Dudek has not yet found his own voice. In a later collec­tion, Cerberus, produced jointly with Layton and Souster, he is beginning to explore theories:

The way to freedom and order in the future will be through art and poetry . . . Language is the great sav­ing first poem, always being written; all others are made of it. We must prize it, protect it against the destroyers and perverters of our time. Journalists and advertisers, all who use words to “sell” . . . Anyone who understands this is capable of assuming a re­sponsibility, of becoming a citizen of the world. Any­one who reads a good poem with under‑standing—a poem that bites into the evil—or retrieves a truth— creates an order in himself. (“Preface”)

But as yet the poems do not match the theory. Stanzas like “Re‑visiting Montreal” remind one of Whitman; po­ems on Greek themes recall the voice of Pound (as in “For E. P.,” “For Christ’s sake, you didn’t invent sunlight”). Occasionally there are intimations that Dudek is experimenting with strong stress metre, caesura, and formal parallelism, as in  “A Drunk on the Sidewalk”:

He has a history older than England

and no doubt has a future, this Falstaff

He rolled on the floor of a mead‑hall

tottered through Piers’ dreamland.

Yet the poem ends, quite out of keeping, with a reminiscence of Sweeney:

now let us scatter, having seen

Christ escorted to his limousine.

These overtones of the 1930s, ironic in intent, abound in the Cerberus collection:

You’ll walk home to roses

leaning on your trellis, open the lock of love

with liberty in your pocket, Life under your arm.

It is unkindness to Auden! But one brief poem seems to achieve authenticity, “Alba”:

As you lay on the bed pale with

the humid breath of kisses

still moist on your cheek, openly

like a leaf your water‑lily limbs,

the river, past the bed, to the sea

below, to the city, dragged down our two

selves, slowly, down, to the sound of

cataracts in the street below, in

humming early morning light.

Every line here carries three strong stresses, balanced by carefully controlled junctures:

As you lay / on the bed / pale with/

the humid / breath / of kisses.

Moreover the poet has emphasized his rhythms by a happy use of vowel and consonant repetition: cheek, leaf; water‑lily limbs; below, slowly; and down, sound. Because the lines have simplicity, grace and movement, they are a preview of Dudek’s later style.

Even twenty years ago, then, Dudek had made his stand known. He was opposed to “musicality” à la Keats. He wanted poetry to reveal itself naked, without the props and embellishments of sound. His best poetry is unified, of a piece, and not discursive as is prose. It is “articulated music” in the sense that Suzanne Langer uses this term. Speaking of her views, a recent critic finds that “a poem is like a piece of music in that it articulates itself; and in thus establishing internal relations, estab­lishes also relations of feeling.” For Mrs. Langer the cen­tral fact of poetry as of music is “the creation of syntax, of meaningful arrangements.” Similarly, in one of his own metaphors about poetry Dudek writes:

yes, yes, imagination, if you like

but to steer the log boat, keep it level

plumb with the real thing

after all . . .

(“For I. P. L.” The Transparent Sea 104)

As soon as a poet makes “meaningful arrangements” his main concern, he approaches the attitude of the essayist towards his material. Dudek's recent collections, Europe and En México, are examples of this tendency. Again, however, this approach is justified by Suzanne Langer:

All poetry is a creation of illusory events, even when it looks like a statement of opinions philosophical or political or aesthetic. The occurrence of a thought is an event in a thinker's personal history, and has as distinct a qualitative character as an adventure, a sight, or a human contact; it is not a proposition, but the entertainment of one, which necessarily involves vital tensions, feelings, the imminence of other thoughts, and the echoes of past thinking. Poetic reflections, therefore, are not essentially trains of logical reasoning, though they may incorporate fragments, at least of discursive argument. Essentially they create the semblance of reasoning . . . (219)

The key phrase in this excerpt is that poetry “is not proposition, but an entertainment of one.” Thus Dudek’s apparent philosophizing, his didacticism, is in reality a consideration of possibilities. His prose content, like his prose syntax, is a kind of disguise. What then transmutes it into poetry? We can come to some agreement on this if we examine examples. An early poem from East of the City called “Basement Workers” is relevant:

Let me give you reminders to keep the image clear,

of roofs too near overhead,

of air sharp with particles, like gravel in sand,

boxes, and tables with torn fringes of metal,

blocked doors, stacks

of coffined cribs ready for crouching mummies,

paper to wrap around our pale corpses;

so, these dispersed, hang in the air between floor and ceiling,

where we, darker than miners between the hours

filter the dust in our collapsing lungs—

and think how noon light up there is rocking buildings,

and winds fling skirts about, cooling ankles.   (34)

Louis Dudek, 1989

It would be a mistake to assume that this simple, straight­forward use of languages, which never falls into obscur­antism or ellipsis and which is always syntactically complete, is necessarily the language of prose. Dudek's poems are rhythmic wholes. One might be able to say what he is saying here, in a few paragraphs or even sentences; but one would then become aware of his stricter limitations. Order and control are the keynotes to this poet's work: as in sculpture, the whole must be visible at a glance, but the detail must be exact, and highlighted where essential. Moreover, none of Dudek’s poems can be accused of being too short or too long (for even his “epic” poems are a series of short apprehen­sions). Quite frequently the poems seem to lack drama and dramatic tension, but they are a true rhythmic mirror of the poet’s intention. No word or phrase can be taken away; none can be added. There is, further, only the sparest use of adjectives; instead there is strong reliance on nouns, verbs, clauses.

In the poem cited above the poet begins with a con­sideration: “Let me give you reminders.” He goes on to fortify this line with a parallel list of “objects,” much in the manner of Whitman; size lines whose initial words are all prepositions or objects of prepositions:

of roofs

of air

boxes

blocked doors

of coffined cribs

paper.

After this listing, which dispenses with articles and uses modifiers that are nearly all verbals (as blocked; coffined; crouching) he pulls the argument back into perspective with his linking words; so; where; and think how. By such syntactical means is the rhythm established.

Further proof that Dudek is more concerned with musical articulation than with onomatopoeia— music as “cry”—is to be found in the texture of his vocabulary. Although he maintains a harmony of vowel sounds, there is apparently no effort towards alliteration, assonance or half‑rhymes (except in a few of the latest lyrics in En México). It is as if the poet had an instinct for the right sounds without consciously working to make them so. A short poem from Europe will illustrate:

The sea loves to move

but it is in no hurry

flops over languidly like an easy animal

waiting for storms

never still.

(Poem 16)

The first two lines play only on the vowel sounds /ij/, /a/ and /u/, /ow/. This pattern continues into flops over and then, as the sea turns over, a new vowel sound is heard: the /ae/ in languidly and animal. It is then followed through with reverberations and echoes of all the earlier vowels. The last line is weak and fading; so are its vowels. Note also that the poem comes to rest on the liquid sound of still which is an echo of animal. In addition to these inner harmonics, and supporting them, this brief poem takes its shape from the syntactic arrangement, the line lengths and the balance of primary, tertiary and weak stresses. In additional metrics the first line could be said to have as its pivot an ionic (loves) flanked by an iambic stress pattern. This pattern is reversed in line two: iambs are the pivot (it is /in no) with a trochee at the end (hurry). The rhythmic reversal exactly parallels the movement of the image: Upward to the sea loves to move and downward to waiting for storms. The total effect is not one of onomatopoeia, but a kinesthetic identification with the object seen and its flow. One identifies with sculpture in much the same way; and the metaphor for sculpture is “frozen music”!

On a larger scale “Poem 19,” also from Europe, uses the same techniques. It is a pleasure to hear the poet reading this poem aloud because his grave voice empha­sizes the necessity for giving every word its due stress and duration, and every juncture and end‑line its due timing (besides internal junctures, juncture at the end of each line is an essential part of Dudek’s patterning). In “Poem 19” the frame has been widened to embrace the whole of the sea and the sky. The small movements of the waves are seen as lives tossing against the fixed eternal laws of “gravity” (or death) and “just measure”:

The commotion of these waves

however strong

cannot disturb

compass line of the horizon

nor the plumbline of gravity.

It is not practicable to “scan” these lines into prosodic feet; they must be scanned as syntactic units with strong stresses between junctures. To aid the rhythmic pattern there is, in addition, a nice parallelism in the imagery between the “compass line” and the “plumbline.” Later in the poem parallelism creates the same effect again: “the dead scattered on the stage in the fifth act” who show nature restored to order and “just measure.”

Although this poem has several ancestors, from Nashe’s

Brightness falls from the air

Queens have died young and fair

to Yeats’ Lapis Lazuli,

All perform their tragic play

That’s Ophelia, that, Cordelia—

Yet they . . .

Do not break up their lines to weep . . .

nonetheless Dudek masters the past and creates some­thing new as he concludes:

            The horizon is perfect,

and nothing can be stricter

than gravity; in the relation to these

            the stage is rocked and tossed,

kings fall with their crowns, poets sink with their laurels.

It is a most satisfying poem because the rhythm is so completely wedded to the thought. Although “objective”—the poet simply names objects, elements and avoids figurative language as assiduously as he avoids musicality—the poem cannot escape from net of metaphor: symbols take the place of similes. It is, indeed, a characteristic symbolist poem.

If the evidence already presented is not sufficient to prove that Dudek’s rhythms are based on syntax, let us look at “Poem 46” from En México. Here he describes

a magnanimous mother with children

dancing towards the shore, in a nightdress

her opulent ankles tapering

down to her toes

(behind her the children shrieking)

poised, supremely graceful, gigantic—

America, the continent, dancing.

The rhythmic effect is achieved by the use of verbals—“ing” words: dancing, tapering, shrieking, dancing—all of them trochaic in pattern and therefore in falling rhythm. In between these metrical (and syntactic) phrases are upward—rising anapestic rhythms:

towards, the shore

in a nightdress

to her toes.

Throughout there is judicious use of what used to be called the “truncated” foot, but which may be more simply regarded as a strong stress with juncture on each side, placed initially in the line:

Poised . . .

Down . . .

This type of stressed unit is balanced by its opposite, the “outrider,” where we find a series of unstressed syllables: “America the . . .” The total impression is one of weight, balanced on light feet—Williams’ “variable foot,” per­haps—but certainly not a “foot” in the traditional metric sense. It is a phrasal foot, or unit, marked off by junctures; isochronic in its effect. The strong dancing movement arises from the syntactic incompletion of the phrasal structures: they are all in a state of being, and make no use of the finite verb. The adjectives too, always sparely used by Dudek, seem to be chosen because of their rhythmic pattern, as “magnanimous mother.” Out of this unity of rhythm and syntax evolves the conceptual image of a “continent dancing.” Symbolism once more!

“Poem 69” is a final example of the welding of rhythm (or “beat”) with syntax and concept:

Someday we shall come again to the poem

as mysterious as these trees, or various texture

leaves, bark, fruit

(the razor teeth so neatly arranged

so clean the weathered root).

There is the art of formal repetition

and the art of singular form—lines clean

like a wave‑worn stone . . .

This poem falls into three parts: first, three lines of three strong stresses each in a falling rhythm; followed by two lines of rising (or iambic) rhythm, also triple stresses; and ending with three lines which are dramatically broken up, divided so that line 7 pulls a spondee unto itself, from line 8. This pattern maintains the nine strong stresses but gives added “rhetorical” juncture and emphasis. Much care is evident here in the choice of sound harmonies. Consider for instance the line:

the razor teeth so neatly arranged

where the vowel repetition is made more forceful by the intervening fricative consonants.

Sound harmonies then, together with a beautifully balanced phrasal pattern, enhance the conceptual conclu­sion which is the theme of all Louis Dudek’s poetry: that harmony and order in nature towards which mankind strives. All his recent poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, with the exception of the satirical pieces of Laughing Stalks, repeats the same theme:

Beauty is ordered in nature

as the wind and sea

shape each other for pleasure; or the just

know, who learn of happiness

from the report of their own actions.   (Poem 95)

As a sculptor takes a lump of clay and fashions it into varying shapes he retains the essential element that makes it a work of art: rhythm. So in his cool, grave, lucent poems does Louis Dudek create and magnify his world.

Works cited:

·         Dudek, Louis. East of the City. Toronto: Ryerson, 1946.

·         En México. Toronto: Contact, 1958.

·         Europe. Toronto: Laocoön, 1954.

·         “Functional Poetry: A Proposal.” Delta 8 (July 1959): 1,6. [Rptd. Infinite Worlds: The Poetry of Louis Dudek. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1988. 126‑132.]

·         Preface to Louis Dudek's Poems. Cerberus. Toronto: Contact Press, 1952.

·         The Transparent Sea. Toronto: Contact Press, 1956.

·         Langer, Suzanne. Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner’s, 1953. 219.

·         Smith, A. J. M. “On Reading Certain Poems and Epistles of Irving Layton and Louis Dudek.” Canadian Forum (May 1957): 42.