“Where Is the Voice Coming from?”: Toward a Western Canadian Aesthetic

Abstract

Essay Review “WHERE IS THE VOICE COMING FROM?” : Toward a Western Canadian Aesthetic RePlacing. Edited by Dennis Cooley. (Downsview, Ontario: ECW Press, 1980. 323 pages, $7.50.) Draft: An Anthology of Prairie Poetry. Edited by Dennis Cooley. (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press/Downsview, Ontario: ECW Press, 1981. 198 pages, $9.00.) Homage, Henry Kelsey: A Poem in Five Parts. By Jon Whyte. Illustrated by Dennis Burton. (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1981. 84 pages, $7.00.) A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe. Edited by W. J. Keith. (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981. 256 pages, $8.95.) Sinclair Ross: A Reader’s Guide. By Ken Mitchell. (Moose Jaw, Saskatche­ wan: Coteau Books, 1981. 115 pages, $7.00.) This began as a usual reviewing project: confronted by a pile of books, I plunged in, bent on discovering a thread of commonality — but something happened. Reading these books and thinking about them, I found myself less concerned with the books themselves than I was intrigued by the phe­ nomenon they represent. Thus while this is a “review” of sorts, it is perhaps better described as a progress report on western Canadian writing at the beginning of the 1980s. These books emphatically confirm the emergence of a prairie aesthetic in western Canada; “renaissance” is probably too grandiose a word, but without question the region is— in literary terms — the most vital in Canada today. Readers of Western American Literature have seen assessments of the literature of Canada’s West in these pages before; the second volume con­ tained an article by Donald Greene entitled “Western Canadian Literature” (WAL, II: 257-80). It was followed in 1971 by a spirited response and corrective, Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe’s “Western Canada Fiction: Past and Future” (WAL, VI: 21-30). Of the two, Wiebe’s is superior, since he was (and is) actively engaged in western writing north of the border, and so was far better informed than Mr. Greene, who was not. But much has hap­ pened on the prairies (as the Canadians call their plains) since then: 1978 saw the “Crossing Frontiers” conference held in Banff, Alberta, the first con­ certed effort to study the histories and literatures of the two Wests in tandem. 42 Western American Literature That conference was followed in 1982 by “Intersections,” held at the Uni­ versity of Nebraska - Lincoln, where bi-western scholarship of the intervening years — much of it prompted by the Banff conference — was presented and discussed. At the same time, WAL has consistently reviewed books of western Canadian writing, both primary and secondary, and at least one panel on Canadian writing isnow a regular feature of the Association’sannual meeting. In view of these developments, a contemporary assessment seems appro­ priate, given the dozen or so years since Wiebe’s article, and these books provide ample opportunity. They demonstrate the vibrance and vitality of prairie writing generally, but especially poetry and criticism. As such they reflect a new maturity in the region’s literary life, a maturity achieved during the 1970s. After describing his objections to Greene’s article, Wiebe states his inten­ tion to “give a brief outline map of where Western Canadian fiction has not and where it has been, then look ahead ... to seewhere it could continue to go.” He chooses fiction, he says, because that genre, “not poetry or drama primarily, is the mode of the Canadian prairie, as it is the mode of the Russian steppes” (p. 23). Wiebe has never hidden his preference for fiction and, at the time he was writing, prose fiction was the dominant literary form on the prairies. It probably still is— given the 1970s output of prairie novelists such as Wiebe and Robert Kroetsch — but poetry is challenging fiction for prairie primacy, as three of these volumes demonstrate. Draft, edited by Dennis Cooley, fol­ lows two other anthologies of prairie poetry published in the latter half of the decade, Laurence Ricou’s Twelve Prairie Poets (1976) and the Thunder Creek Co-Op’s Number One Northern: Poetry From Saskatchewan (1977) -1 The three anthologies make interesting reading, side by side, since each opts for a different editorial approach: Twelve Prairie Poets presents twelve major figures, Number...