Louis Dudek, poet, editor, publisher, professor, essayist, social and literary critic, encourager of poets and poetic activity, not only lived a long life (1918-2001) but a very examined and engaged one as well. This is certainly the impression that comes across from the thirty-one contributors in Eternal Conversations: Remembering Louis Dudek, A Tribute Anthology.
Dudek was probably the most influential if not the most well known Canadian poet of his generation. He certainly was the most committed and most thoughtful. His influence was not in creating clones and schools but an environment in which poetry in Canada could grow and bloom. Michael Gnarowski’s “Introduction as History” gives a thorough overview of his accomplishments and influence, of which his role as teacher is one of the important ones.
He was the Canadian Socrates who engaged students, writers and the public whenever and wherever he met them. And he met them in classrooms, at readings, in delis, pubs, in newspapers and on the radio.
The poet Ray Filip remembers in “The Verdun Years”: “The Great Encourager… fed me sandwiches and abstractions.…we found ourselves engaged in convivial duels, exchanging counter-arguments about art, aesthetics, metaphysics…with the joyous air of musicians trading fours.” Even at home, as glimpsed in Gregory Dudek’s “Eulogy”, “…our dinnertime conversations often centered around the meaning of randomness and indeterminacy, the nature of the number pi, or the manner in which the Ancient Greeks did or did not express democracy.”
“I am a poet who at one time infiltrated the university—to see if I could somehow transform the teaching profession. To make it relevant to the concerns of life and of living poetry. I have been a radical reformer in this way--but the radicalism is not destructive, it is to bring back the values of our civilization.”
Dudek was also the godfather of Canadian literary magazines and presses. He believed that the establishment of little magazines and small presses, owning the means of production, were essential in the fight for a civilized society. As well, these magazines and presses brought Canadian poetry into the twentieth century by first publishing Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Al Purdy, and Margaret Atwood. Lionel Kearns writes about his first encounter of Dudek’s Delta magazine in the late 1950s. “Delta gave me my first sense of a community of poets in Canada.”
Kearns’ and testimonials of others are proof of his elitist proletarianism. In “Beginnings” Dudek writes, “Elitism is a good thing and highly democratic, if rightly used on behalf of the majority. Democracy was not achieved to make us all mediocre, but to make us free and superior, each in his own way.” His elitism was inclusive.
Dudek loved engagement. For him it was essential for a healthy literary scene. His tangles with Layton, is part of Canadian literature’s history. It’s too bad that none of those are in this book. There is, however, a detailed description and analysis of his disagreements with McLuhan in Tony Tremblay's’ fine “Unrepentant Idealist: Louis Dudek’s Quarrel with Marshall McLuhan”: “So incensed did Dudek become with McLuhan’s drift from the old values that he started publishing anti-McLuhan propaganda in letters and literary magazines. Dudek even went as far as accusing McLuhan in 1968 of being a fascist in his populist demagogy.” This essay makes you want to read the original texts themselves.
Also there are enough poems by Dudek in number and variety to give the reader a chance to appreciate Dudek’s scope and get an insight into his themes. Dudek didn’t have one style but like any real artist, he had a large palette. There are short poems, excerpts from his long poems, poems serious and poems of wit scattered throughout the book. There is even handwritten draft and the finished version of a poem, which serves as another window into Dudek’s creative process.
Dudek’s influence is not only felt far and wide but deep as well. Many of the contributors state that you could never walk away from a conversation with Dudek without feeling both satisfied and frustrated; satisfied that in this mundane world of mind-numbing pursuit of the mindless, you had just spent some worthwhile time with a person who valued art and ideas and frustrated because he made you aware that there was still so much more to know and to do. And though Louis is gone, there are many who are having the eternal conversation with him still. And perhaps that is the ultimate tribute.
The editors have given us a tribute anthology that isn’t saccharine (comes close in the tribute poems) to an important Canadian who deserves to be better known and appreciated, not for his but for our sake. The book ends, appropriately, with Dudek’s own words. A poet of commitment to the end, Dudek dictated his “Last Poem”, a poem of continuation and cultivation, on March 9, 2001, a few days before his death.
The cloud-filled heavens
crashed down on us
But we cultivate
our greens and asparagus
as we did before.
