Author: Tanja Cvetkovic
OUR
STORIES – SEED CATALOGUE
Seed Catalogue (1977)
continues Robert Kroetsch’s tradition of long poems (The Stone Hammer Poems, The Ledger 1975) and is considered one of Canada’s most
essential poems. The poem takes on a new poetic form with Kroetsch’s use of postmodern technique of negation and
meditation through memory. Kroetsch’s concern about the inability of language
to capture reality and the importance of oral tradition resound in these lines
from the poem: “We silence words/by writing them down.”
Throughout
his poetic career Kroesch was fascinated
with the notion of place, with finding a new poetic form that would suit the
place he lived in, and with finding a new language expression for physical
landscape. In his poetic manifesto “Unhiding the Hidden” (1974), he explains
that under the influence of foreign cultures, the language that is used in
Canadian literature is not authentic anymore and under the layers of
inauthenticity, we must dig for fragments that are our own. The Canadian writer’s
task is
“that
he works with a language, within a literature, that appears to be authentically
his own, and not a borrowing. But just as there was in the Latin word a
concealed Greek experience, so there is in the Canadian word a concealed other
experience, sometimes British, sometimes American.”1
Writers resolve the
tension between being someone else and the demands of authenticity “by the
radical process of demythologizing the systems that threaten to define them.
Or, more comprehensively, they uninvent the world.”2 Kroetsch’s
terms “uninvent”, “uncreate”, “unhide”, “decreate”, denote a cultural process
of creating an order which is unique and different from the process of
imitating an order and literature. The search for the original language and
place of origins is named “dreams of origins” by Kroetsch.
Kroetsch
uses archaeological method and oral tradition as the basis for his inquiry into
place and the meditation on a common object. While the objects of meditation in
previous long poems were the stone and the ledger found at home, the seed
catalogue was dug up in the public place in the Glenbow archives by chance in
1975. Kroetsch explains in “The Moment of the Discovery of America”:
I
found a 1917 catalogue in the Glenbow archives in 1975. I translated that seed
catalogue into a poem called ‘Seed Catalogue’. The archaeological discovery, if
I might call it that, brought together for me the oral tradition and the dream
of origins.”3
In the poem Kroetsch
lifts the seed catalogue, the document, to a literary expression by combining an
objective narrative with lyrical elements. The document assumes the element of
fantasy and is turned into a poem by the poet’s imagination. The poet retells
the history of the prairie town in this palimpsest by unhiding, erasing and
recreating meaning through meditation.
The
poem rewrites one of the most popular myths of North America, the story of the
prairie as garden. Kroetsch again continues the long tradition of prairie
writers and poets who present the prairies of the West as the garden to be
cultivated offering a new promise of the “unnamed” country. Kroetsch is one of
the prairie writers along Ralph Connor, Nellie McClung, R.J.C. Stead, whom Dick
Harrison considers as the writers choosing “the garden and not the earlier
‘Frontier Myth’ of the American West when they needed a way of ordering their
perceptions of the new environment.”4 What we see at work in the
poem is actually the construction of place, the prairie town, as a new world
garden where the dominant question is “How do you grow …?” out of the seed
advertized in the catalogue. The seed promises the growth and “wondrous beauty/of both flowers and
foliage”5, which could bloom “into the dark of January,”6
planting the prairie as the new Eden. The growing of the mythic garden in the
plains reminds of the colonial expansion and the westward settlements as the
poet indicates at the very beginning of the poem:
No.
176 – Copenhagen Market Cabbage: ‘This
new introduction, strictly speaking, is in every respect a thoroughbred, a cabbage of highest pedigree, and is creating
considerable flurry among professional
gardeners all over the world.’7
The words
“thoroughbred”, “highest pedigree”, and even “professional” carry with
themselves the whole colonial value system which the poet tries to disintegrate
to reach for the authentic prairie value.
The
poem is also about the very nature of
poem and the way it grows. In section six the speaker asks “But how do you grow a poet?” and
answers:
“Start: with an
invocation
invoke
–
His
muse is
his
muse/ if
memory
is
and
you have
no
memory then
no
meditation
no
song (shit
we’re
up against it)”8
These
lines show how memory and meditation merge into poem. By using memory and
remembering the past events, the poet is engaged in the act of creation while
telling the stories and reordering events. In that vein, Seed Catalogue is the poem determined not only by place, the
prairie, but also by the meditation on the seed catalogue items: vegetables,
flowers, grass, beans and grains, which write the garden poem of the prairie.
Since it speaks for the prairie, defining it anew, the poem is the prairie or
as the speaker explains:
“This
is a prairie road.
This
road is the shortest distance
between
nowhere and nowhere.
This
road is a poem.”9
The
poem as a road which leads to nowhere is synonymous with the place which waits
to be put into words because place is constructed through language, stories,
myths. The speaker points that fiction is most appropriate to denote place, taking
Rudy Wiebe’s fiction as an example, who “must lay great black steel lines of/
fiction, break up the space with huge design and, like/ the fiction of the
Russian steppes, build a giant/ artifact. No song can do that…” 10 As for the poet, the creator of both poem and
space/place, after the poem comes into existence, he leaves “no trace”, only “a
spoor of wording/ a reduction to mere black.”11
The garden is both the literal garden on
the poet’s homestead in Heisler, Alberta, and the metaphorical garden, the
field of his poem, which is grown and dug by way of literary archaeology.
Section one of the poem opens by introducing the poet’s garden in the
transition season from winter to spring. We find out that the fall has set in
before the poet has had a chance to learn how to garden. The poet’s family
homestead is barren, unsettling, unstable:
“No
trees
around
the house.
Only
the wind.
Only
the January snow.
Only
the summer sun.
The
home place:
a
terrible symmetry.”12
The
poet erases his home place depicting it as treeless, lifeless and waste. The
process of de(con)struction of the prairie place starts in section one, and is
emblematically represented by the destruction of the Heisler hotel in section
four. The Heisler hotel was burnt down one night on June 21, 1919: “Everything/
in between: lost. Everything: an absence.”13 The presence is lost in absence and the poet
starts speaking of presence through the string of absences. After the burning
down of the Heisler hotel, the poet lists the absence of all these culturally
modified things:
“Everything: an absence
of
satin sheets
of
embroidered pillow cases
of
tea towels and English china
of
silver serving spoons.”14
But
after the destruction, a new beginning is at sight. The poet asks the question
of the new beginning: “How do you grow a
prairie town?”15
The
absence of trees is emblematic of the process of unnaming and erasure that the
poet starts. The trope of the tree is particularly important for Kroetsch’s
poems. Since Kroetsch deconstructs the garden myth, the tree, as a symbol of
knowledge and origins in the garden of Eden, is associated with absence in this
poem. In the end of the poem, the description of treeless homestead is followed
by the question:”Adam and Eve got
drownded -/Who was left?”16 The poet introduces the shade of his
homestead, the shade of the myth of Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden as well
as of his mother from the very first section of the poem. Everything that is
left of the garden of his homestead is the voice of his dying mother: “bring me
the radish seeds.”17
By
erasure and negation, the poet gives the whole list of absences of the European
cultural history. On the list we find the absence of “silkworms”, “kings and
queens”, “Lord Nelson”, “Sartre and Heidegger”, “pyramids”, “lions”,
“Heraclitus”, but also “the Seine, the Rhine, the Danube”, etc. The prairie
becomes culturally erased place without history. Thus the poet finds
himself in his inquiry in the home place
which he calls a “double hook”: a place erased by the poem but still there for
the poet to deal with it. After the
erasure and unnaming, the poet is in an uneasy situation. On the road leading
“between nowhere and nowhere”, he starts asking questions: “How do you grow a
garden? How do you grow a prairie town? How do you grow a poet?”, the questions
which do not affirm presence immediately. We arrived at the point of place
erasure, nowhere, facing the poet who, after uncreating, as an archeaologist,
searches for a way to create anew. The prairie road and the poem leading
nowhere symbolize the impossibility of language to articulate place.
Destruction
culminates in section nine, when the poet describes “the dangers of merely
living” and his ancestors who returned to the Old World and died in the bombing
of Cologne – “a strange planting”18 - the act marking the absence of
his cousins: Anna Weller and Kenneth MacDonald.
The poet ends the section in the same way he ends the description of his
homestead: “A terrible symmetry.”19
In
order to create a fixed and stable home, the poet determines the exact position
of his home place:
“the
home place: N.E. 17-42-16-W4th Meridian.
the home place:
one and a half miles of Heisler, Alberta,
on the correction
line road
and three miles
south.”20
Kroetsch
gives us the address of his homestead: Heisler, Alberta, on the correction
line, three miles south. The correction line divides the place into smaller
prairie settlements and its importance is underlined by Deborah Keahey:”The
correction line and the physicist’s relativity both function wonderfully as
metaphors for the fundamental instability of our notions of place, of the way
we impose various and changeable perceptual grids on space.”21 That the place is the result of our own imagination
and creative perception is witnessed by Kroetsch himself who, in one of his
numerous essays, explains that prairie places and farms are remembered,
imagined real places:
“On
the prairies the small town and the farm are not merely places, they are remembered
places. When they were the actuality of our lives we had realistic fiction, and
we had almost no poetry at all. Now in this dream condition, as dreamtime fuses
into the kind of narrative we call myth, we change the nature of the novel. And
we start, with a new terrible, energy, to write the poems of the imagined real
place.”22
Kroetsch
insists on finding new names for the prairie place and landscape, since the old
ones carry with themselves the inherited layers of meaning of the European past
and culture which are not a true reflection of the new environment anymore. The
impulse of rewriting place and discovering a new sense of belonging to home is
inherent in his phrase ‘local pride’. ‘Local pride’ draws on the authenticity
of our life and experience. By citing Williams Carlos Williams, he concludes:
“the acquiring of a local pride enables us to create our own culture – by
‘lifting an environment to expression.’”23
Seed Catalogue
abounds in different prairie stories:
the story of the poet’s homestead, of
his father trying to shoot the badger,
of Pete Knight, king of all cowboys, the poet’s love story with
Germaine, the burning down of the Heisler hotel, the bombing of Cologne, the
story of Rudy Wiebe, Al Purdy, Jim Bacque. The short fragment about the
porcupine trying to cross the road and ending up “dead in the ditch” is
especially significant. The porcupine is caught up in the intertextuality
crossing from one fragmented text to another. The story can be related to
Kroetsch’s essay “The Exploding
Porcupine” in which Kroetsch argues in favor of violence necessary to explode
narrative conventions making space for new poetic forms. The erasure of the
dominant narratives and images of the prairie place leaves a possibility to
create and build anew.
The
prairie poet, who “under the quick erasure/ of snow, invites a flight,”24 is still in search of traces, fragments,
absences that may point to presence in absence. Following the erasure of the
home place and the story of the garden of Eden, the poet plants a new garden
which marks “the end of winter: seeding/time.”25 The prairie garden
is “the other garden” which doesn’t grow the seeds of “wondrous beauty”, but the seeds of plain brome grass resistant to colonial influences and fit for
survival in the prairie environment:
“”No
amount of cold will kill it. It withstands
the summer suns. Water may stand on it for several weeks without apparent
injury. The roots push through the soil, throwing up new plants continually. It
starts quicker than other grasses in
the spring. Remains green longer in
the fall. Flourishes under absolute
neglect.’”26
The
brome grass which “flourishes under
absolute neglect” is suggestive
of a presence in an empty land that follows erasure. It withstands the summer
sun and remains green longer in the fall, pointing to resilience, survival, the
qualities which are important in differentiating the prairie from the colonial
notions of landscape. The brome grass becomes an important element of writing
the prairie into existence since it is congenial to the local environment.
The
model for a new place-making strategy is the gopher.
“The gopher was the model.
Stand
up straight:
telephone
poles
grain
elevators
church
steeples.
Vanish,
suddenly: the
Gopher
was the model.”27
The
gopher as well as the badger in section two stand for disappearance and
erasure. Unlike telephone poles, grain elevators and church steeples, the
gopher and the badger live underground and subvert the garden and town. The
town buildings vanish suddenly when the gopher appears at the end of the
passage. The two burrowing rodents undermine and violate the garden from within
the way dominant narratives, images and conventions should be exploded and
subverted. The prairie story itself is hidden underground and it is by means of
archaeology that the poet brings it to the surface.
Kroetsch subverts and mocks dominant
poetic conventions in this poem. The importance of poetry is undercut by the
introduction of Al Purdy, the poet of the vernacular, and one of the key
figures in Canadian poetry. The setting of the scene is a local restaurant
where the sublime notion of Purdy’s poetry is merged with the triviality and
marginality of the public place. Reciting poems in the restaurant, in a
different context and in a different atmosphere, has a special power but is in
contrast with the unusual setting: “the waitress asked us to leave. She was
rather insistent.”28 There is a sharp contrast and a resistance of
the lyrical to the dominant way of perceiving and representing the prairie. The
local landscape and atmosphere that is
lifted to literary expression is violated and erased by the socially and
culturally performed and accepted norms of behavior.
Kroetsch’s
method of subverting the dominant myths
of the West is explicit in parodying the cowboy myth and the garden myth. The
poet, assuming the role of the anti-hero subverting the overarching Western
myths, tells the story/the poem like Al Purdy or Jim Bacque. Jim Bacque
perplexes a woman at the airport in Toronto telling her the story of Pete
Knight “Bronc-Busting Champion/of the World”29 who died by falling off a horse. The
vernacular story, part of the oral tradition, is put down on the pages of Seed Catalogue and silenced into written
language. The paradox and irony lie in the fact that “we silence words/by
writing them down”30 where the oral tradition and myth lose its voice when turned into a written story.
Kroetsch’s
ironic treatment of the poetic figures like Jim Bacque and Al Purdy resembles
his treatment of heroic myths in his fiction. In The Studhorse Man, Hazard Lepage is a parody of the questing hero
who is neither handsome nor strong, who is never in control of his destiny and
is finally killed by his horse. Both the poets and Pete Knight are brought down
to a comic travesty like Hazard Lepage and turned into anti-heroes. As Dick
Harrison explains, this ironic treatment of popular myths by Kroetsch “does
place him nearer than any other Canadian novelist to the ‘New Western’ in
America”31 as described by Leslie Fiedler in his The Return of the Vanishing American.
In
his essay “Robert Kroetsch’s Poetry”, Robert Lecker describes Seed Catalogue as “a compendium of
stories”, “a collection of conceptions, a list of various seeds”.32
Like Kroetsch, Lecker acknowledges the importance of oral tradition and points
to the fact that “you grow a prairie town, then, by filling it with listeners”.33
The quality of the poet’s creation depends on the ability to listen to the
poem. The aural perception is important for Kroetsch to that extent that it
brings him in contradiction when writing poetry. It seems as if written word and
language distort reality and Kroetsch turns to unnaming and uncreating or even
to the possibilities of preliterate communication as, for example, in How I Joined the Seal Herd.
From
the very beginning of the poem, the poet asks for the perfection of his ears,
the ability to listen:
“I
swear it was not the hearing
itself I first refused
it
was the sight of my ears “34
In
his discussion of How I Joined the Seal
Herd, Lecker concludes that this poem is “a kind of
ultimate regression, and in that position it calls for nothing less than the
death of writing.”35 In Seed Catalogue the poet is at work
disintegrating the inherited layers of meaning of foreign culture including
written tradition too. Through the complex strategy of unnaming and unfinding,
the poet searches for a voice through memory, the unique voice of the prairie
that the readers should hear. By avoiding definite structures and
demythologizing dominant social and written realities, the poet arrives at the
point of renaming, recreating and recovering of authentic voice of the prairie
as his home place.
1
Robert Kroetsch. The Lovely Treachery of
Words: Essays Selected and New. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989): 58
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.,
7.
4
Dick Harrison. Unnamed Country: The
Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction. (Edmonton: The University of
Alberta Press, 1972): 72.
5
Robert Kroetsch. Field Notes: 1-8 A
continuing poem. (Don Mills, On.: General Publishing Co., 1981).
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Deborah Keahey. Making It Home: Place in
Canadian Prairie Literature. (Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press):
4.
22
Robert Kroetsch. The Lovely Treachery of
Words: Essays Selected and New. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989): 7-8.
23
Ibid. 6.
24
Robert
Kroetsch. Field Notes: 1-8 A continuing
poem. (Don Mills, On.: General Publishing Co., 1981).
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
31
Dick
Harrison. Unnamed Country: The Struggle
for a Canadian Prairie Fiction. (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press,
1972): 207.
32
Robert Lecker. “Robert Kroetsch’s Poetry”. Open
Letter Third Series No. 8 (Spring
1978): 85.
33
Ibid., 86.
34
Robert Kroetsch. Field Notes: 1-8 A
continuing poem. (Don Mills, On.: General Publishing Co., 1981).
35
Robert
Lecker. “Robert Kroetsch’s Poetry”. Open
Letter Third Series No. 8 (Spring
1978): 86.
