Full Description
A passionate believer in the power of art - and especially poetry - to influence and critique contemporary culture, Louis Dudek devoted much of his life to shaping the Canadian literary scene through his meditative and experimental poems as well as his work in publishing and teaching. All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek brings together thirty-five of Dudek's poems written over the course of his sixty-year career.
Much of Dudek's poetry is about the practice of art, with comment on the way the craft of poetry is mediated by such factors as university classes, public readings, reviews, commercial presses, and academic conferences. The poems in this selection - witty satires, short lyrics, and long sequences - reflect self-consciously on the relationship between art and life and will draw readers into the dramatic mid-century literary and cultural debates in which Dudek was an important participant.
Karis Shearer's introduction provides an overview of Dudek's prolific career as poet, professor, editor, publisher, and critic, and considers the ways in which Dudek's functional poems help, both formally and thematically, to carry out the tasks associated with those roles. Comparing Dudek's reception to that of NourbeSe Philip, Marilyn Dumont, and Roy Miki, Frank Davey's afterword locates Dudek in a pre-1980s version of multiculturalism that is more complex than many critics would have it. According to Davey, Dudek broadened the limits on the possible range and type of poetry for subsequent generations of Canadian writers.
Contents
All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek, selected with an introduction by Karis Shearer
Foreword Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction Karis Shearer
On Poetry and Profession
Functional Poetry: A Proposal
Theory of Art
What we Profess
Lesson
It Is An Art
Hellcats in Heaven (Report on the book Cerberus)
Kingston Conference
Poetry Reading
Line and Form
""Europe"" at Sea
Poetry
Advice to a Young Poet
The Retired Professor
Old Books
Dedications and Intertexts
For E.P.
Kosmos: The Greek World (For Michael Lekakis)
Emily Dickinson
James Reaney's Dream Inside a Dream, or The Freudian Wish
Irving Layton's Poem in Early Spring
Rich Man's Paradise (After F.R. Scott)
Quebec Religious Hospital by A.M. Klein
Carman's Last Home
Europe Without Baedeker But with Pound
Tar and Feathers
Reply to Envious Arthur
The Progress of Satire (For F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith)
The Demolitions (For John Glassco)
A Note for Leonard Cohen
Tao (For F.R.S)
For Ron Everson (After Ezra Pound, and Confucius)
Proust
Homosexuality
For William Carlos Williams
Long Poems
from Europe (Fragment 95)
from En México
Afterword by Frank Davey
Acknowledgements
