by Tanja Cvetkovic
THE
QUEST FOR THE OTHER – ADVICE TO MY
FRIENDS BY ROBERT KROETSCH
Advice to My Friends (1985)
is the collection of eight sequences of ‘continuing’ poems. It’s a kind of a
poetic journey on which the poet sets his readers on his own quest for the
other. Having been privileged to take a short route from “Advice to My Friends”
and “Mile Zero” through “Letters to Salonika”, “Delphi: Commentary”, “Postcards
from China”, “The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof”,
to “Sounding the Name”, and “The Poet’s Mother”, the reader is imaginatively
involved in the process of discovery of
the meaning of the poems.
Many poems mark a continuation of what has
gone before or are part of the texts to come. “Mile Zero” becomes a response to the poem “The Criminal
Intensities of Love as Paradise”, “Delphi:Commentary” is juxtaposed to Pausanias’
texts or fragments by Sir James Frazer. Shirley Neuman explains that “in the continuing
poem, each sequence becomes a part of the intertext of each new sequence; each
new sequence re-reads the poems already written”.1 One poem speaks
to another, one text to the next. The poems influence each other and become
each other’s intertext.
“Advice
to My Friends” is different from other sequences of poems because it uses the
sonnet sequence as the poetic form. As Jones argues “the sonnet sequence is
here ‘pastiched’, transformed into a collection of postmodern ‘piecemeal’
sonnets, that patch together various discourses, playing with the very idea of
the sonnet as a ‘fixed form’ and the lyric as a monologue”.2 Moreover,
the poem is written in the tradition of epithalamium celebrating the marriage
of two Canadian icons: painter Emily Carr and hockey player Howie Morenz.
The
central poem that focuses on the marriage of Emily and Howie is “the bridegroom
rises to speak”. The epithalamium of this match is celebrated through their
unique painterly and hockey talents in the next poem:
…has
about it the air
of
a painting of a forest exploding into light,
or
of a hockey game, under the lights, exploding.
but
the dance, the dance is the first decoding.3
The wedding guests
include Roy Kiyooka who gives away to Emily and Howie
an
escape plan as a gift. It is a collage
of
1,243 pages, in code, with maps and diagrams,4
and Michael Ondaatje
who is the wedding photographer and who explains that this match is not a
standard one:
This
will not be, Mr. Ondaatje explains,
your
standard epithalamium. He is taking
pictures,
both in colors and black and white.5
“Mile
Zero” is a narrative account of the poet’s journey “through western Canada in
the dead of six nights”.6 The poem becomes a response to the
question about the origin of language and the process of signification raised
in “The Criminal Intensities of Love As Paradise”. The poem has a very specific
form. Neuman notices that “’Mile Zero’ is a series of disjunctive forms,
narrative and ‘post-surreal’ poetics, passages from the unrealized
possibilities for the poem, footnotes (that which is separated from the main
text because it is, in content or form, disjunct from as well as related to it)”.7 The poem becomes the process of”the writing
of the poem”8 and many
possible lost texts on the side become intertexts of the poem. The intertext at the end of the
poem reads:
the
story of the poem
become
the
poem of the story
become9
What Kroetsch writes
and what the reader imaginatively constructs is the poem in the process of
becoming.
Most
of the poems in Advice to My Friends can
be read as Kroetsch’s exploration of the relationship between place/landscape
and language, the relationship of place/home and self, the quest for the female
figure who is either his lover or his mother, the quest for the other. The
poems are the exploration of the other, or as one of the reviewers puts it: “Advice to My Friends is a collection of poems written for and about
the other, about the self’s need for and discovery of that other.”10
“Mile Zero” is also about the connection
between place and self, the quest for the self
west based on his famous pun: “oust/or
quest or”.11 In the central poem of the sequence “Descent, as Usual,
into Hell”, the Orphic motifs are
anticipated by the author persona’s
descent into Hell and the search for Eurydice, stressing his quest for the
other. In the next poem “Awake, Awakening” the author refers to the deferral of
the quest’s fulfillment:
wrong
or alone
we
live, in delay’s body
bone,
altering
bone
after
the word (after
which
there can be no after)12
His desire for origins
conveyed by words: “first, archaic/be, become”13 speak of both his
quest for the origin of language and self and place since for Kroetsch self is
defined in relation to place through narrative. In Kroetsch’s poetry, the
search for the origin of language is a substitute for his search for home and a
lover. When he can’t find true home
where he could feel comfortable, he turns to language as a home, or a poem and
poetry that he creates as a way of self –recognition and self-definition.
In
“Letters to Salonika” the poet expresses the inadequacy of language and a poem
as home. He does not feel at home in his apartment in Winnipeg while his wife
is in Greece visiting her prior home. The poet’s desire for a secure home and
woman bring about pain and loneliness:
…
You on your quest, me
here
at home. I’ve burned up half our woodpile. Loneliness
and
a fire. Loneliness is a fire. …
Language,
too, gone back to its corner.14
However, while “trying
to fill my emptiness with words”,15 he concludes that “I want/ no
words, tonight/ dream your lovers”,16 anticipating that the poet can
find comfort only with his wife and a real home. The absence of his wife is
linked to the absence of his mother or his great-grandmother in the next poems.
In
the absence of his beloved, the poet sets out on a journey to China in “The
Postcards from China”, while the longing
for the absent other, now in the form of his mother, comes to its full light in
the poem “Sounding the Name”.
In
“Delphi:Commentary”, the poet is in Greece with his two daughters. The whole
poem is based on three intertexts: Pausanias’ Description of Greece, James Frazer’s texts and “The Eggplant
Poems” which are scattered throughout the poem and for which “we have no
reliable text”.17 We can only guess if the poem really exists. The
poem is written in two columns where Pausanias’ and Frazer’s fragments are
embedded in the Eggplant fragments. Neuman explains the specific structure: “In
yet another doubling, the two sets of (inter)text and commentary – Pausanias
and Frazer on one hand, ‘The Eggplant Poems’ and the journey of the poet and
his daughters on the other – become intertext of Delphi: the site/the poem”.18
Thus Delphi functions as both the poem and the site where the poet encounters
his father’s ghost through whom the oracle poses questions:
What
are you doing here?
Did
I teach you nothing?19
“The
Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof” finds the
poet in Germany where he tries to find the signs of his great-grandmother
though his search fails. While he remains lost in the Frankfurt Main Station,
he meets his double who points him the right way. The obsession with the absent
female figure as an agent of pain and an object of desire starts from “Seed
Catalogue” or “The Ledger” where he associates the idea of his mother or his
great-grandmother with fear and desire.
Advice to My Friends
concludes with the poem “The Poet’s Mother”. The poem relates the poet’s
writing, sexual desire and the memory of his mother.
I
have sought my mother
on
the shores of a dozen islands
I
have sought my mother
inside
the covers
of
ten thousand books.
I
have sought my mother
in
the bars of a hundred cities.20
The repetition of the
phrase “I have sought” emphasizes the poet’s continual quest for his mother and
his home, and since the quest is marked by deferral of fulfillment, the poet
has no choice but to continue his journey.
In
this collection of poems, Kroetsch really surprises us with his skillful
manipulation of literary conventions, with new experimental form of his poems,
and the new context in which he deals with his old but still new idea of the
quest for the other. What would then be Kroetsch’s advice to his friends? It is
his writing that celebrates ambiguity and contradiction, the merging and still
the opposition of fiction and reality, the marriage of opposites as Emily and
Howie’s marriage is, for between giving advice to his friends and publishing
the collection of poems Advice to My
Friends we can never be sure what
his real intention was.
1
Shirley Neuman. “Figuring the Reader, Figuring the Self in Field Notes: ‘Double or Noting’”. Open Letter 5 8-9
(Summer-Fall 1984): 186.
2
Manina Jones. “Advice Like Snow: Advice
to My Friends and the Lay of the Land”. Open
Letter. 9 5-6 (Spring-Summer 1996):
70.
3
Robert Kroetsch. Advice to My Friends. (Don
Mills, Ontario: Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, 1985).
4Ibid.
5Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Shirley
Neuman. “Figuring the Reader, Figuring the Self in Field Notes: ‘Double or Noting’”. Open Letter 5 8-9
(Summer-Fall 1984): 185.
8
Ibid.
9
Robert Kroetsch. Advice to My Friends. (Don
Mills, Ontario: Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, 1985).
10
Paul H. Jartarson. “Discourse of the Other”. Canadian Literature. 115 (Winter 1987): 138.
11
Robert Kroetsch. Advice to My Friends. (Don
Mills, Ontario: Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, 1985).
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15Ibid.
16Ibid.
17
Shirley Neuman. “Figuring the Reader, Figuring the Self in Field Notes: ‘Double or Noting’”. Open Letter 5 8-9
(Summer-Fall 1984): 187.
18
Ibid.
19
Robert Kroetsch. Advice to My Friends. (Don
Mills, Ontario: Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, 1985).
20
Ibid.