Ken Norris is a Montreal poet, originally from New York, but for the past twenty or so years living in Canada and much involved in the poetry, writing, and publishing scene here. Like A.J.M. Smith in the past, he has one foot in Canada and one in the United States. And like Smith he considers himself Canadian. But can we hold him — or do we even try?'

Currently he is lecturing on Canadian literature and modernism at the University of Maine, but he is constantly flitting between Orono, Maine, and Montreal, keeping his lines of communication open with Canadian poets and poetry. In fact, he edits a xeroxed poetry newsletter called "Somewhere Across the Border," which circulates among some fifty Canadian poets and strives to create a community for poetry here. In short, he is very much part of the Montreal scene, and of Canadian poetry as a whole, so we think of him simply as one of us, whatever the politics of nationalism and interna­tionalism may say.

He was one of the key figures in the Vehicule Poets group in the 1970s, of which more later. He has edited a number of important anthologies of poetry and of criticism — recently, with Peter Van Toorn, The Insecurities of Art, and with Bob Hilderley Poets 88 — and he has brought out a good dozen of his own books of poetry from Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto, through vari­ous presses. His most important work, however, and by far the most considerable to date, is the long poem I want to describe here.

This is the extraordinary long poem Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, projected in twenty-two books, to be completed with the end of the century. Six of these have so far been published (Books 1-4, 5 and 7), five others stand complete and ready for print, and as of July an additional five were still in rough manuscript — a total of sixteen so far, with six final books yet to be written. (Books 6 and 8-11, the ones "ready for print," are scheduled to appear by the end of 1991.) All this together adds up, without doubt, to one of the central large-scale poetic undertakings of our time.

This major project begins as an answer to The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot, which appeared in 1922. In the Preface to Books 1-4 (Guernica, 1988) Ken Norris tells us that the idea of the poem was simply "a response to Eliot's vision." In fact it began with an overwhelming feeling that despite Eliot's devastating verdict on modern life in the first half of the twentieth century, partly the result of a nervous collapse, the human condition in the second half of the century was actually much worse. And if Eliot wrote out of partial derangement or distortion of mind, Ken Norris writes out of pure sanity: "I hold now to sanity," he says in the poem, "and declare everything to be worse."

He says, however, in the same Preface, that "Eliot's Waste Land was a pretty accurate 'report' on the first half of the twentieth century." We now take it for granted, in literary history, that Eliot's poem is representative of a historical period: "The Waste Land Era." We are also aware that the period is seen through the distorting prism of Eliot's personality; yet the poem is the poem of an age, as all permanent poetry must represent in the end "the very age and body of the time" to human memory, whatever the actual age objectively was like — perhaps an impossible question. So in a useful Afterword titled "Writing My Report," appended to The Better Part of Heaven, Ken Norris tells us that the twenty-two books of his long poem should be read "as parts of an evolving whole that will terminate when the century ends." They also are poems that somehow will represent an age.

Let us pass by the word "accurate" as applied to Eliot's Waste Land. Norris says in the famous "Afterword" that when he began his poem he was actually averse to writing "political" or "socially relevant" poetry and that he has in some sense continued to be so. "Anyone who has read that book [Book 1] knows that I didn't manage to remain in a strictly political vein for very long. I quickly slipped back into the lyrical-confessional kind of writing I suppose I'm vaguely known for."

So how can one undertake an immense project entitled Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century if one has no taste for political and socially-relevant poetry? This question lies at heart of the poetic and critical problem involved in this highly readable and very important work. It is, in the end, why poetry must turn away from the world, only to come back to it with a vision of a higher kind — to a world renewed.

To a poet who "wasn't interested in presenting historical facts," who says that "relevant political writing doesn't seem to be my forte," the crucial turning point is recorded in a news­paper cutting inserted in Book 1. (This first book is interlarded with actual newspaper items, "historical facts," very much like Dos Passos' USA and numerous other "non-fiction" pieces and "found" poems in this century.) This particular newspaper item, dated February 21, 1976, struck deep into Ken Norris' personal life, as he reveals in the "Afterword":

Jim Mele sent me a news clipping from the New York Times about how our former creative writing teacher, Kofi Awoonor, had been arrested in his native Ghana for supposedly being involved in an attempted coup to overthrow the government ....

And the clipping, collaged into the poem, is followed by these lines, addressed to Endre Farkas, poet-friend, and editor of The Muses' Company Press:

Endre, we have been wrong

In thinking poetry and politics

Make for a heavy-handed marriage,

That there is a thin wire

We must walk when trying to bring

Politics into the poem.

It is impossible to keep politics

Out of the poem.

As Ken Norris then explains, "the first book of Report suddenly became easy to write."

But even before this, the seed of the long poem was planted, he says, in a conversation, or "medium-length monologue" I delivered in his presence sometime in the fall of 1975. Here I am obliged for a moment to consider my relation to Ken Norris. In that monologue, he tells us, I argued that his generation of poets, the so-called "Vehicule poets" then centered around the Vehicule art gallery in Montreal — Norris, Farkas, Morrissey, Gold, Konyves, Lapp, McAuley — were lacking in social concern. "There's the world,” I said, gesturing out the window. "Why don't you write about it?"

A few months later, this idea led to his undertaking the first book of Report on the Second Half of  the Twentieth Century, without any intention, at that time, of writing a multi-volume long poem. ("A first book!? . . . I didn't anticipate that there would be others.") So the first book came out of Dudek's lifetime preaching of the doctrine of 'social realism,' whatever that label may mean.

True, in an article on the contemporary long poem, in Open Letter (Summer, 1989), 1 say that "I have always believed that the aim of the major poems of this century was the representation of the age in poetry, to mirror the new century in poetic forms adequate to it." It is also true that from the beginning of my poetic and critical career I have been concerned with the need to bring poetry to bear on social facts, to be aware of the realities, although by nature I have no more talent for social realism — it is not my 'forte' — than Ken Norris has. Obviously, I descend from a poetic period, the thirties in British and American poetry, which was perforce politically committed. But that has since taken on a much wider meaning. And it is this torch which I have passed on to Ken Norris.

Perhaps we should consider the wider context. All poetry is drawn from a source of deep spirituality and idealism, as opposed to the actual; and the more this is so the greater is its value and promise of permanence. In simple terms, this idealism may be defined as "what the heart desires," in con­trast to banal and practical in everyday life; and what the heart desires is profoundly antagonistic to what the world has to offer, in the practical conditions of existence.

It is from this fund of great idealism and spirituality that we derived the Romantic movement in art and thought, then Tran­scendentalism in America, and finally Sym­bolism and Aestheticism in literature. And before that, from the same source, we derived the entire western religious tradi­tion, which consists in worshipping and honouring 'something other than this,' other than the surface of actuality, on behalf of a greater possibility and power. (The greatest sin against art, and against life, is to say that there is nothing 'other than this,' no glory under the surface of things, hid in the process of nature.)

Modernism, in reaction to those great nineteenth century currents, has opposed a stark reality, or mere perverse playfulness, to the high idealism of the past. And modern life, in its technology and commercialism, has displayed a nihilism toward the life of the spirit that parallels the cynicism and perversity of modernist art. The two are really aspects of the same dialectic, which makes modernism highly representative of the age — and yet opposed to it.

And finally, the realism of modern art, even in its cynicism, is there only to reconceive the nature of spirituality and idealism, to give a new meaning to that 'something other than this.' Therefore poetry must be more aware of contemporary reality only to become more profoundly responsive to the - spirit, to eternity — to that which is beyond time.

There is a sentence from the late Philip Larkin, dated 1970, which I am I fond of quoting: "Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are. The less a writer's work approximates to this maxim, the less claim he has on the attention of his contemporaries and of posterity." And yet it is not will in the realistic bent, this deliberate to keep one's feet on the ground, that I have a deep affinity with Ken Norris but rather in the opposite strain, the high idealism of his poetry. We will see much of this later. But now we must see how the 'documentary realism' of his first book shifts to a poetry of personal lyricism and how his entire project — the Report on the Century — must be viewed, problematically, through this personal perspective.

Turning away from the collaging technique of Book 1, the documentation through newspaper clippings and actualities, Ken Norris continues his subject in an entirely personal vein, viewing the world through his own consciousness. "The vantage point is that of the individual life: my own," he announces in the Preface to Books 1-4, speaking of the purpose of the work as a whole.

I have explained elsewhere, in the lectures The First Person in Literature, why this kind of choice for the modern poet is virtually inescapable. An objective view of truth, in the imaginative realm; has to be grounded in an objective or external belief such as the belief in God, which validates the ephemeral views of particular individualities. Without such external support in 'literal myth' we have only the individualities, the truth of subjectivity:

Subjectivity is opposed to universal truths, It

stands opposed not only to traditional religion

but ultimately to all objective claims to truth.

It leaves man stranded and alone, a solitary in‑

dividual, in a great sea of nothingness.

Yet through the personal and the subjective, the horizon of the permanent and the eternal must now be intu­ited, not as something known and sanctioned, but as something imaginatively sensed and humanly realized, in the poem. So in Ken Norris, at first, "To write about myself / Is to write about the age." But as one writes, aching for some lost truth, beauty seems to be “something breaking into the world." And "every soul . . . a manifestation / of the essence that constitutes / all there is." So that the "I" becomes “the perfect lens / for the world to look through / in order to be able to see itself."

The whole poem is shot through with these simple and moving reflections on the condition of poetry and of contemporary thought. They are pertinent to the state of late twen­tieth-century life. For example, a newspaper item in Book 1, about an earthquake in Guatemala in which “18,901 people died ... 62,432 were injured and more than one million homeless" — a recent catastrophe — can be compared to Voltaire's famous poem on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, with its dread conclusion that then echoed through­out Europe: "Le Mal est sur la terre!" In a strikingly similar vein Ken Norris follows his “news” account with the words —

I have begun again

To collect evidence

Of God's absence from the world.

Of man's inhumanity to man.

Like Tolstoy, and for the same reason, he is therefore set on a dogged and personal search for truth. And as in Tolstoy, the best style for this is an honest style, unadorned, intent only on true speaking. The poetry is in the truth, that is the only way to read this poetry. Or as Ken Norris defines it in his work:

". . . not writing down

words that attempt to be poetic

. . . but rather ... instants

in which all the poetry in life

is flooding in at the senses"

"Poetry has always been, for me, an open door"

“... a poetic diary"

"a journey into the self."

Presenting the truth, as he does, we may see at times a weak, suffering, pitiable creature — as at heart we all are perhaps — a version of the confessional self that certainly goes back to Rousseau, so that Ken Norris is truly the primal romantic in this respect. He presents the self in its most naked and vulnerable form.

Yet there is a paradox in this, in that he undertakes a most ambitious - project, "a panoramic view and investigation of our moment in history," and assumes for the self ultimately the greatest universality — "a manifes­tation / of the essence that constitutes / all there is" — while he displays the most complete humility and a sense of incapacity before such an impossible task:

"The truth of our lives is that we fail…”

"my insignificant life

writing it down, writing it up to the level of art

in an age bereft of art…”

“an episodic epic

Which is a house that has been condemned”

“when I stumbled over the word failure

Which lay on the ground like a fallen leaf.”

And so the question looms in all its simple enigmatic complexity. How can one "Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century," through a personal lyricism, "a journey into the self," a self which is no more than a frail reed, lost in a strange incomprehensible universe?

Very simply, one goes looking for the lost meaning that has vanished from the world, and along the way one notes the ravages and human impoverishment from the so-called theory of meaninglessness:

What I am writing about

is how it all comes apart,

how nature in pieces is nothing ....

Such a search alone, a search for essential meaning, would be a sufficient "Report on the Century," or on a civilization, but we have here all and something more. We have a kind of fulfilment which no one else has found, a true ecstasy, and that is a value in the Report which is worth any number of facts or documentations.

Louis Dudek and Ken Norris, late 1980s

After all, 'the meaning of it all' is the necessary question behind the poem: not the facts about the century, but the meaning of the facts that we already know sufficiently. And many of the excessive facts, the horrors in Book 1 — and in Book 7 or Book 8 — must also relate to the question of meaning. In what way? First, they negate the possibility of positive meaning, as does the earthquake in Guatemala. That is often the point, as it was in the Waste Land — where it led to much misinterpretation of Eliot's intent. Much in Ken Norris' Report, like much elsewhere in twentieth-century literature, is weighed down with the burden of nega­tion. That is our contemporary "realism" in another form. But this is not the full image of contemporary man. It is only the obverse side of the coin.

The full side, the front face, of this poetry is the huge idealism and poetic vision which seeks to be realized in the actual world. No less than four books — and these the largest and most impressive, also by far the most poetic — are reports of voyages to the South Pacific: Book 5, entitled The Better Part of Heaven (Coach House Press, Toronto); Book 7, Islands (Quarry Press, Kingston); Book 10, "The Wheel" (not yet published); and Book 13, "Island Stars" (not yet published). Some readers might think that these travels to the South Seas are irrelevant to the task, an escape from the realities that should be the subject of a "Report on the Century" (the modern wasteland). But they are a journey into the heart of the subject — a search for the wholeness that is missing from modern life, the true humanity we lack.

Explicitly, the journeys to the South Seas are a search for the earthly paradise, for Paradise, as these Pacific islands have always been conceived by travellers and artists from the west. The poem "Why They Said This Was Paradise" in Islands tells us why in so many words, with all the disappointment of that hope. Because the Paradise he seeks in the Islands is not to be found there, as it was not for Gauguin, who suffered much in that paradise, and as it was not for Melville, who could not live there more than a single month. (The two poems, “Melville” and “Gauguin” in “Marquesan Dreams” are among the high points of the book, condensed biography, informed and passionate correlatives of Ken Norris’ own autobiographical life-story.)

But he does not find paradise. And the disappointment worms through the South Seas poems, since like Melville and Gauguin he finds paradise and does not find it — "not finding it, finding it" — "found what he was looking for / and didn't find what he was looking for at all"— since the islands have the aura and atmosphere of paradise, yet the true paradise forever eludes one's grasp. As he says, "So close to paradise / and yet not that for me, which deepens the ravine of sadness."

This search for a paradisal place, however, is a measure of the hunger of the heart, an elevated idealism, which is the most precious gift of the poet, and the greater it is the greater the promise of lasting work. (Witness Dante, Shelley, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in our time.) It is like the 'hunger for God' in Dostoevsky, a passion that troubles and energizes all his work, vouched for by the bit of ecstasy which he saw only in an epileptic seizure. That you do not 'find' paradise is not the issue, but that you seek and desire it is everything. The ultimate paradise is not an actuality, it is a possibility, an aspiration, that has brought mankind from the caves to the star-lit heavens, from a religion of blood-sacrifice and 'myth' to enthralled reflection and the light of the intellect.

It is because this high idealism is fully awakened, in the South Seas books, that some of the finest poetry comes in these pages, poems like "The Eternal and the Infinite," so representative of the whole that I quote it here in full:

On a quiet night anchored off Yanutha

the sea is a calm field and the star path,

the Milky Way, is clear

Ito the naked eye. Dark sea-below,

dark sky above with its pinpricks of light,

of time and space existing forever,

the eternal and the infinite

gathered into the presence of the senses. Flat as glass

the sea stretches out, nudges past the horizon

until the two are one.

The sea suggests a nether boundary

but the sky deepens beyond all possible recognition of depth,

unfathomable galaxies, the stars

shining bright with such simplicity.

We float on the sea looking up.

It is all beyond us

but we are party to it, witness to it

for this brief moment.

And there are other, equally moving poems, "Rooms of the House," "The Guest House," "The Romantic Imagination," "Here/There.," in The Better Part of Heaven, and more, many more, in the book Islands, "Hearts and Flowers," "Marquesan Dreams," "Tristes Tropiques," "Pine," "The Touch of the Lover," "The Ocean," "Anthropomorphiks," "Nan Madol," "Making Art." It may seem a long list of titles, but all these seem to me extraordinary and beautiful pieces of writing, from a poet of intense spiritual sensibility, with a great capacity for suffering in a fallen world. His poems on the fire-walking ritual become a symbol of suffering as life experience: he walks on fire "willing to walk through the world as it burns not held back by the things I fear."

The nearest Norris comes to a conceptual statement of belief is in a passage like the following from The Better Part of Heaven:

And there's a heart that beats at the center of the world,

oblivious and all-knowing, insisting upon life,

its continuance, its evolution, filling all creation

with its pulsation, and yet is empty

unless all living things sing to it

the chosen power of their created voices.

Around this lies the reality of the South Seas, and the North Pacific, with all its modern degradations. Actually, of course, the Pacific was the scene of murderous slaughter, in World War II; and the technology that has decimated these islands and reduced them to ragged remnants of their former cultures — tourist itineraries, where "boys between fifteen and twenty-five have the highest suicide rate in the world" — is everywhere present in the landscape of modernity that has invaded paradise.

The horror of the Marshall Islands, destroyed with radiation, and the people of these islands subjected to atrocious transportation and poisoning, are episodes in the Pacific Islands poetry that bring us right into the center of twentieth-century politics and technological destruction; and this quite naturally, without deliberately taking up a political or factual subject, because the Marshall Islands fall simply into the poet's itinerary. This is the way that twentieth-century material has come unbidden into the poem, simply because it was part of the poet's life and consciousness. He runs into it, and it is absorbed into the poem.

"The Book of Return" (Book 8) that follows Islands is, like Book 6, "The Book of False Return," a transitional piece, much briefer and darker than the books preceding and following it. Both of these are still unpublished. Book 8 is an elegiac readjustment to life in the familiar and actual world, which is home — a lyrical meditation, philosophical, and almost religious. A recreation of the spirit in the true sense.

In this meditative poetry it is remark­able that the poet does not make use of other thinkers, philosophers, or religious writers, to guide him on his course. He seems to work from his own mind, in an existential state of doubt, emptiness, and private ordeal. But of course this existen­tial void is a consequence of three hun­dred years of philosophical and religious erosion, the history of modern analysis and pyrrhonism, running from Descartes, Hobbes, Voltaire, Diderot, Schopenhauer, Leopardi, Vigny, Baudelaire and Laforgue, through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, to the Beat poets, the postmodernists etc., and all the bric-a-brac of contemporary nihilism. Norris has certainly dipped into this stream of ideas and he is a conscious product of the modern liberating and destructive tradition.         

To me, personally, Ken Norris is the most important poet writing on the North American continent today, the most readable, the most meaningful, the closest to my own poetical concerns. Perhaps this is so because I have a close sympathy with his mind and his aesthetic; but poets have often paired off for a time in their intense "elective affinities," so this is nothing that should surprise or nonplus the reader. If the poetry moves me it may come to move others in the same way, as Wordsworth's poetry moved Coleridge, or T.S. Eliot's moved Ezra Pound.

Book 9, entitled "A Year of My Life," and like all the books after Islands as yet unpublished, is written in a Japanese haiku spirit, each entry for a different day, running through a whole year, being a brief thought, image, or suggestive bit of poetry. In fact, each of the twenty-two books of the Report is written in a different key, or mode of poetry, so that there is a good deal of mild experimentation in the work and deliberate control or ‘aesthetic distancing’ in everything that happens. As he says at one point, “The boy on the page is never the real boy…”

Book 10, “The Wheel,” is a flowing continuous poem, a magnificent realization of desire and aspiration, truly an aesthetic fulfilment of the paradisal element in these poems. It is the poem I myself would have wanted to write, but somehow have never been able to sustain, a long stretch of “pure poetry” of extraordinary naturalness and power.

And yet, as always, there is the paradox. “Poets,” he says surprisingly, "with their commitment to remain unenlightened."

Consider how new, how far-reaching, this insight might be. It explains, at once the stubborn integrity and singleness of mind of many poets we know, and their almost child-like innocence in a complex world of ideas, holding their own "ignorant" stubborn point of view, that they must protect at all costs. And it revises completely our image of the poet, as laid down in the modern tradition since Eliot and Pound.

Of the books that follow "The Wheel" I have only so far read the short surrealistic book "Radar Interference" (Book 11), which seems to be a rapid staccato catalogue of contemporary horrors and unresolved conflicts. The books to follow are "The Fire" (Book 12, written in Washington State in 1987; Book 13, "Island Stars," another turn in the South Seas; Book 14, tentatively entitled "Tenor," written in 10-syllable lines; Book 15, "Mortality Blues," written in the Bahamas in 1989; and Book 16, "Notes for Reconstructing Babylon," the first of three "mythological" books about lost civilizations. (As noted above, all these five books already exist in rough manuscript versions.) Book 17, "Mu," on the lost continent of the Pacific, and Book 18, "Tibetan Eye," centred around a man­dala painting, are still in conception, or being written.

"That will leave,” says Ken Norris, "the last four books, which I can't envision yet."

Clearly, it is a great and wonderful proj­ect. And after all, yes, it is representative of the age. It is the poetry distilled from time so that it defines a historical moment, the quality of human experience in a given time.

From all these books taken together I get a better sense, a tragic and painful sense, of the age we are living in than I do from the daily and nightly broadcasts of world news on radio and TV, or even from a book like Modern Times by the historian Paul John­son.

The sad personal vulnerability of this poetry, the kind of personal emotion that can only be found in poetry and in fiction, is perfectly representative and significant. Like L'Etranger by Camus, or Beckett's despair in book after book, it is the central characteristic of the age. So it provides the groundbase for the poetry of Ken Norris, as he struggles to overcome negation with his paradisal vision and his lyrical contemplations. And in all this he is profoundly original, open and vulnerable, with a unique personal note that speaks to the heart of the reader.

I want to make art out of the things that have broken my heart, so that they may break my heart again and never be lost, so that they may break your heart, or shatter your world, bringing a sense of awe into your quiet reading room. (Islands 15)