Edited by Mark Dickinson and Clare Goulet
ISBN 9781897151716 | 5.5" x 8.5" | HC | $30
Categories:Non-Fiction - Essays/Letters
Purchase:Local Bookstores | amazon.ca | chapters.indigo.ca
Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky (Preview)
Preface
Here is what is paradoxical: that a significant part of the meaning of words rests in wordlessness.
— Jan Zwicky
Fifteen years ago, one of the editors of this book accepted a cat-sitting job during February term break. It was cold; Fredericton had been buried in snow for four months and would be for several more; the cat was the colour of dark marmalade, overweight, and grudgingly tolerated the hands that fed. The woman stroking its fur appeared, by contrast, to have wide-open enthusiasm for anything — a joke, a soup recipe, a series of poems by another writer upending the project of Western categorical thought (“Look!” she entreats, “here”). At the same time, a deep and necessary silence seemed to hover round the edges of her chat. Later, she disappeared for solo violin practice on the floor below, twilight on the far side of the glass, notes drifting up. Recalled most clearly from those first encounters is what has struck others in Zwicky’s approach and has long been central in her own work: attention, leaps of connection, respect for the distinctness of things, thinking in music, in silence.
Those central, striking concerns form the subject of this book. Jan Zwicky, a violinist, poet, and philosopher, has attempted for two decades to think these vocations together in order “to give voice to an ecology of experience” (LP L68); her work attempts nothing less than to limn the shape of what-is. The twenty-five pieces here trace certain aspects of Zwicky’s thinking and point to what others have made of it, where it has gone, and why it is a significant (at times seismic) shift from the Western intellectual attitudes that have dominated recent centuries.
Tim Quick, an important friend to this book, once described Zwicky’s work as a series of meditations on integrity. Alongside, or in place of, rational analysis — which disassembles the whole, the better to collect and inspect its parts — Zwicky invites us to think differently, lyrically:
… when thought whose eros is clarity is driven also by profound intuitions of coherence — when it is also an attempt to arrive at an integrated perception, a picture or understanding of how something might affect us as beings with bodies and emotions as well as the ability to think logically. (LP L68)
She is concerned with the irresoluble tension in the separateness and connectedness of things, with problems of clarity (rather than certainty or doubt), with articulation that includes but moves beyond argument, and with a particular — radically altered — relationship to loss, which she has called “the ultimate philosophical problem”: dwelling in its possibility rather than securing ourselves from it. Don McKay, with whom she has long been in conversation, describes her work as embodying part of “the shift from an ethos of mastery embedded in the colonial mindset to one of loss” (30). Zwicky’s poetry and philosophy, he says,
call for a radical re-thinking of the situation and allow for a redemptive mode of knowing called “lyric.” Does her category of the “domestic” offer the possibility of occupying history differently? Zwicky’s work seems like an essential meta-philosophy setting out ways in which key concepts can be reconstrued (music, history, wisdom, metaphor, poetry and thinking itself) in the light of poetic modes of knowing. A figure as important as [George] Grant in terms of conceptual shift, and an acute heart-stopping poet. (30)
Her work to date includes seven books of poetry and two major philosophical works, Lyric Philosophy (1992) and Wisdom & Metaphor (2003) (she tellingly garnered, in a single year, nominations for the Governor General’s Awards in two categories, for both her poetry and philosophy). She has lectured internationally and taught within Canada for decades while nurturing scores of writers through Brick Books, Sage Hill, the Banff Centre, and smaller workshops across the country. Most of this work happens quietly, out of the spotlight; Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, winner of the 1999 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, began life as a plain hand-sewn book on recycled stock, made upon request, whose value spread by word of mouth. She remains one of the country’s most innovative yet unsung intellectual figures.
Jan Zwicky’s work speaks for itself. This book, the first formal measure of her influence, does not attempt translation; instead it offers reasons to listen to that work, an introduction to some of her ideas, a sense of where those have led, and companions along the way. Two previously published essays by Peter Sanger and Andre Furlani give context to her poetry and philosophy, respectively; the remaining twenty-two original pieces — poem, essay, letter, review, analysis, aphorism, song — were gathered over two years from people for whom Zwicky’s mode of thinking has been significant; these include poets, philosophers, and musicians who have known her as collaborator or critic, writer or editor, student or teacher, or some combination of these. Their topics are as indicated by McKay above: “music, history, wisdom, metaphor, poetry and thinking itself,” while a reprint from JackPine Press allows Zwicky’s voice to address the reader more directly, in conversation with long-time fellow poet and philosopher Tim Lilburn.
Their conversation, “Contemplation and Resistance,” takes place in the midpoint of this book, which might be read from its centre outward or, of course, from any point; each approach stands on its own; each has something to say to the others. Pieces fall along a roughly chronological line of Zwicky’s published work as the book proceeds, in its first half, from Lyric Philosophy through Songs for Relinquishing the Earth; and, in its second, from Wisdom & Metaphor through to Thirty-seven Small Songs and Thirteen Silences. Peter Sanger’s opening review in the first half is reconsidered in the second; H. L. Hix’s “Why I Teach Jan Zwicky” opens a series of reflections on Zwicky as classroom subject, student, and teacher that walk us out of the book. Her recent volume Plato as Artist (Gaspereau, 2009), which did not appear until after this anthology had been compiled, extends the teaching and the conversation.
Readers hoping for a singular discursive argument will instead hear how particular concerns or passages from Zwicky recur; will hear how, despite differing interpretations, these pieces reveal a pattern of chosen poems or lines from poems, certain melodies attaching to particular philosophical propositions like leitmotifs — clarity to “Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet in B Minor”; bees, in their various guises, with metaphor; resonance with “Small Song: Mozart.” And over and over they offer Wittgenstein’s reminder of silence, the collection becoming in one sense a sort of unexpected fugue with its returning melodies (longing, home, loss), its variant voices taking up a single subject, its roughly contrapuntal form. The voices here are in no way comprehensive — another twenty-five might be drawn up on the spot — but are one place to begin: our aim in this endeavour is to point to Zwicky’s thinking, to invite more (and more diverse) voices into the conversation, and to bring new readers to her work at a time when the need for integrative, ecological thinking seems more urgent than ever.
This collection began as a panel discussion organized by Tim Quick as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at York University in 2006. Over time, it grew into what you now have in your hands, an assemblage of contributors whose enthusiasm and care in response says something about their subject not covered in the text that follows — though it’s there in what is unsaid, and perhaps Charles Barbour, in his final lines at the far end of this book, comes close. He also leaves the reader with questions Zwicky left with him: “What does it mean to love that which vanishes each time we approach it? What does it mean to know that you have already failed, and that failure is the ineluctable condition of every beginning? What does it mean to live in a world — an environment — the only ethical relationship to which is to relinquish?”
We are grateful for the generous attention and patience of our contributors, who made space for this project in their lives, as well as to Sandy Bannikoff, Samara Brock, Hector MacIntyre, Tim Quick, and Bruce Vogt for their substantial contribution and to River Smith, Lesley Carson, Crystal Vaughan, and Kate Kennedy for assistance in preparing the manuscript. Many thanks to JackPine Press for permission to reprint Contemplation and Resistance and to Konrad Polthier for his Klein bottle images. “Lyric Philosophy Lyric” by Andre Furlani first appeared in Canadian Literature and “Almost Blind with Light” by Peter Sanger in The Antigonish Review; many thanks to both journals for permission to reprint. Andrew Steeves made useful suggestions, and we thank Robert Bringhurst, Sean Kane, and Dennis Lee for guidance. Heartfelt thanks to Amy Handyside and Graham Fraser for ongoing encouragement and to Jackie, David, and Sadie for the Peterborough hospitality that made co-editing possible. This book exists because of the care and support of Marc Côté and Barry Jowett at Cormorant Books. In keeping with its ideas and to offset its carbon cost, a donation in Jan Zwicky’s name, in lieu of contributor and permission fees, has been made to Ocean Arks International for their ongoing reforestation work in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica.
Clare Goulet & Mark Dickinson
Halifax, Nova Scotia · Peterborough, Ontario
April 2010
Works cited:
McKay, Don. “Great Flint Singing.” Open Wide a Wilderness. Ed. Nancy Holmes. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009.
Zwicky, Jan. Lyric Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.
Preface
Here is what is paradoxical: that a significant part of the meaning of words rests in wordlessness.
— Jan Zwicky
Fifteen years ago, one of the editors of this book accepted a cat-sitting job during February term break. It was cold; Fredericton had been buried in snow for four months and would be for several more; the cat was the colour of dark marmalade, overweight, and grudgingly tolerated the hands that fed. The woman stroking its fur appeared, by contrast, to have wide-open enthusiasm for anything — a joke, a soup recipe, a series of poems by another writer upending the project of Western categorical thought (“Look!” she entreats, “here”). At the same time, a deep and necessary silence seemed to hover round the edges of her chat. Later, she disappeared for solo violin practice on the floor below, twilight on the far side of the glass, notes drifting up. Recalled most clearly from those first encounters is what has struck others in Zwicky’s approach and has long been central in her own work: attention, leaps of connection, respect for the distinctness of things, thinking in music, in silence.
Those central, striking concerns form the subject of this book. Jan Zwicky, a violinist, poet, and philosopher, has attempted for two decades to think these vocations together in order “to give voice to an ecology of experience” (LP L68); her work attempts nothing less than to limn the shape of what-is. The twenty-five pieces here trace certain aspects of Zwicky’s thinking and point to what others have made of it, where it has gone, and why it is a significant (at times seismic) shift from the Western intellectual attitudes that have dominated recent centuries.
Tim Quick, an important friend to this book, once described Zwicky’s work as a series of meditations on integrity. Alongside, or in place of, rational analysis — which disassembles the whole, the better to collect and inspect its parts — Zwicky invites us to think differently, lyrically:
… when thought whose eros is clarity is driven also by profound intuitions of coherence — when it is also an attempt to arrive at an integrated perception, a picture or understanding of how something might affect us as beings with bodies and emotions as well as the ability to think logically. (LP L68)
She is concerned with the irresoluble tension in the separateness and connectedness of things, with problems of clarity (rather than certainty or doubt), with articulation that includes but moves beyond argument, and with a particular — radically altered — relationship to loss, which she has called “the ultimate philosophical problem”: dwelling in its possibility rather than securing ourselves from it. Don McKay, with whom she has long been in conversation, describes her work as embodying part of “the shift from an ethos of mastery embedded in the colonial mindset to one of loss” (30). Zwicky’s poetry and philosophy, he says,
call for a radical re-thinking of the situation and allow for a redemptive mode of knowing called “lyric.” Does her category of the “domestic” offer the possibility of occupying history differently? Zwicky’s work seems like an essential meta-philosophy setting out ways in which key concepts can be reconstrued (music, history, wisdom, metaphor, poetry and thinking itself) in the light of poetic modes of knowing. A figure as important as [George] Grant in terms of conceptual shift, and an acute heart-stopping poet. (30)
Her work to date includes seven books of poetry and two major philosophical works, Lyric Philosophy (1992) and Wisdom & Metaphor (2003) (she tellingly garnered, in a single year, nominations for the Governor General’s Awards in two categories, for both her poetry and philosophy). She has lectured internationally and taught within Canada for decades while nurturing scores of writers through Brick Books, Sage Hill, the Banff Centre, and smaller workshops across the country. Most of this work happens quietly, out of the spotlight; Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, winner of the 1999 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, began life as a plain hand-sewn book on recycled stock, made upon request, whose value spread by word of mouth. She remains one of the country’s most innovative yet unsung intellectual figures.
Jan Zwicky’s work speaks for itself. This book, the first formal measure of her influence, does not attempt translation; instead it offers reasons to listen to that work, an introduction to some of her ideas, a sense of where those have led, and companions along the way. Two previously published essays by Peter Sanger and Andre Furlani give context to her poetry and philosophy, respectively; the remaining twenty-two original pieces — poem, essay, letter, review, analysis, aphorism, song — were gathered over two years from people for whom Zwicky’s mode of thinking has been significant; these include poets, philosophers, and musicians who have known her as collaborator or critic, writer or editor, student or teacher, or some combination of these. Their topics are as indicated by McKay above: “music, history, wisdom, metaphor, poetry and thinking itself,” while a reprint from JackPine Press allows Zwicky’s voice to address the reader more directly, in conversation with long-time fellow poet and philosopher Tim Lilburn.
Their conversation, “Contemplation and Resistance,” takes place in the midpoint of this book, which might be read from its centre outward or, of course, from any point; each approach stands on its own; each has something to say to the others. Pieces fall along a roughly chronological line of Zwicky’s published work as the book proceeds, in its first half, from Lyric Philosophy through Songs for Relinquishing the Earth; and, in its second, from Wisdom & Metaphor through to Thirty-seven Small Songs and Thirteen Silences. Peter Sanger’s opening review in the first half is reconsidered in the second; H. L. Hix’s “Why I Teach Jan Zwicky” opens a series of reflections on Zwicky as classroom subject, student, and teacher that walk us out of the book. Her recent volume Plato as Artist (Gaspereau, 2009), which did not appear until after this anthology had been compiled, extends the teaching and the conversation.
Readers hoping for a singular discursive argument will instead hear how particular concerns or passages from Zwicky recur; will hear how, despite differing interpretations, these pieces reveal a pattern of chosen poems or lines from poems, certain melodies attaching to particular philosophical propositions like leitmotifs — clarity to “Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet in B Minor”; bees, in their various guises, with metaphor; resonance with “Small Song: Mozart.” And over and over they offer Wittgenstein’s reminder of silence, the collection becoming in one sense a sort of unexpected fugue with its returning melodies (longing, home, loss), its variant voices taking up a single subject, its roughly contrapuntal form. The voices here are in no way comprehensive — another twenty-five might be drawn up on the spot — but are one place to begin: our aim in this endeavour is to point to Zwicky’s thinking, to invite more (and more diverse) voices into the conversation, and to bring new readers to her work at a time when the need for integrative, ecological thinking seems more urgent than ever.
This collection began as a panel discussion organized by Tim Quick as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at York University in 2006. Over time, it grew into what you now have in your hands, an assemblage of contributors whose enthusiasm and care in response says something about their subject not covered in the text that follows — though it’s there in what is unsaid, and perhaps Charles Barbour, in his final lines at the far end of this book, comes close. He also leaves the reader with questions Zwicky left with him: “What does it mean to love that which vanishes each time we approach it? What does it mean to know that you have already failed, and that failure is the ineluctable condition of every beginning? What does it mean to live in a world — an environment — the only ethical relationship to which is to relinquish?”
We are grateful for the generous attention and patience of our contributors, who made space for this project in their lives, as well as to Sandy Bannikoff, Samara Brock, Hector MacIntyre, Tim Quick, and Bruce Vogt for their substantial contribution and to River Smith, Lesley Carson, Crystal Vaughan, and Kate Kennedy for assistance in preparing the manuscript. Many thanks to JackPine Press for permission to reprint Contemplation and Resistance and to Konrad Polthier for his Klein bottle images. “Lyric Philosophy Lyric” by Andre Furlani first appeared in Canadian Literature and “Almost Blind with Light” by Peter Sanger in The Antigonish Review; many thanks to both journals for permission to reprint. Andrew Steeves made useful suggestions, and we thank Robert Bringhurst, Sean Kane, and Dennis Lee for guidance. Heartfelt thanks to Amy Handyside and Graham Fraser for ongoing encouragement and to Jackie, David, and Sadie for the Peterborough hospitality that made co-editing possible. This book exists because of the care and support of Marc Côté and Barry Jowett at Cormorant Books. In keeping with its ideas and to offset its carbon cost, a donation in Jan Zwicky’s name, in lieu of contributor and permission fees, has been made to Ocean Arks International for their ongoing reforestation work in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica.
Clare Goulet & Mark Dickinson
Halifax, Nova Scotia · Peterborough, Ontario
April 2010
Works cited:
McKay, Don. “Great Flint Singing.” Open Wide a Wilderness. Ed. Nancy Holmes. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009.
Zwicky, Jan. Lyric Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.
