EN:

John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" now appears on the ten-dollar bill, its place firmly established within Canadian iconography. Yet the poem has been dismissed by both critics and poets as blithely Romantic and/or jingoistic, yet a close reading of the text reveals a deeper, conflicted significance. In the first two stanzas, McCrae uses conventional pastoral imagery to disrupt the familiar association between Christian ideals of redemption and renewal with nature, hauntingly capturing the uncertainty and fear that pervaded the collective consciousness of soldiers and civilians alike, both during and after World War I. However, in the last stanza, McCrae abandons his skillful representation of the war torn, spiritually diseased soul by applying an ideological gloss that reads like a recruiting poster. The critical silence surrounding the complexities of this poem have led to its reappropriation by the Canadian government as a symbol of the military and heroism rather than a rite of genuine war remembrance.

EN:

In both his life and his work, Robert Service struggled within a continuous gender identity crisis. Service was at once reacting against the definition of manhood situated in antithesis to feminine and Christian values and rejecting the Victorian ideal of the intellectual, controlled male. This led to an exploration and celebration of a primitive and passionate conception of "manliness", exemplified most notably in the poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee". The harsh wilderness of the Klondike allowed for a reconception of masculinity not possible within the confines of civilization proper and a testing ground for the absolute limits of masculine individualism and homosocial attachment. However, the mythologized "rough and tough" men of these narratives lack layered characterization. Their taciturn and elemental manhood creates a tension between emotion and expression and their autonomy is ultimately isolating rendering them tragic or comic, rather than heroic, figures.

EN:

Charles Mair portrays the First Nations people as embodying the intersection point between ecology and race. In Tecumseh, Mair contrasts their communal connection with nature with the devastating effects of their political mistreatment. His poem "The Last Bison" is a dual narrative of dispossession, showing how both the First Nations peoples and the buffalo were reduced to servile scarcity. The implied sensitivity of these works seems incommensurable with Mair's employment as a government agent participating in the Western expansionist movement that was directly responsible for the destruction of First Nations people. The critical examination of this paradox in Mair's life and work illuminates his efforts to reconcile civilization and wilderness even if he cannot offer any feasible solution. However, it is significant that Mair's poetry performs a nuanced dialogue that others his subject while simultaneously allowing the other a voice, elevating his work beyond a narrative of dispossession to one of possession.

FR:

Auteurs de poèmes en prose parus au Québec à la fin du XIXe siècle, Georges Lemay, Edouard-Zotique Massicotte et Silvio ne cessent de réclamer une filiation à la poésie française dans leurs œuvres. Tel qu'il existe en France, le poème en prose demeure peut-être le genre par excellence de la modernité, toujours qu'il se trouve en ruptures et en recommencements, toujours qu'il relève de la fécondité de ses transferts génériques ainsi que de la négation d'une éventuelle tradition littéraire dans laquelle s'inscrire.

FR:

Cet article explore la corrélation faite par les historiens de la littérature québécoise entre l'autonomisation de la littérature québécoise et la synchronie de son évolution avec la littérature française. De plus, lorsque la poésie des femmes du Québec et de la France est considérée du point de vue synchronique, une différence importante s'impose : l'impossibilité chez les poètes françaises d'accéder à la postérité quant à leur inscription dans l'histoire littéraire. Quelle est la nature de la capacité d'intégration au Québec qui permet non seulement que la poésie québécoise contemporaine incorpore de plus en plus des poètes migrants et d'autres qui, sans voyager, s'imprègnent de ce multiculturalisme qui peu à peu caractérise le Québec, mais aussi que les oeuvres de poètes comme Anne Hébert et Rina Lasnier soient retenues par l'histoire littéraire québécoise?

EN:

The contents of The Canadian Mercury (1928-29), especially the poems of A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott, embody the kind of struggle with which an emerging strain of vitalizing modernism attempts to counter a prevailing strain of late Canadian Romanticism. Both Smith and Scott decry excessive description and precious diction, but their attempts to depart from the Romantic aesthetic are only partly successful. Because they represent an early attempt to establish a new poetry but still manifest some structural and aesthetic elements of Romanticism, the poems of Smith and Scott exemplify The Canadian Mercury's transitional poetics: between the dominant tradition in early twentieth-century Canadian poetry and the modernism that would replace it.

EN:

Despite the recent surge in scholarship on early Canadian modernist poetry from between the wars, Bertram Brooker has been among a number of overlooked poets, partly because his interest in mysticism sets him apart from the more prevalent modes of modernism. Brooker's poetry, written in the 1920s and early 1930s but collected for the first time in Birk Sproxton's 1988 edition, Sound Assembling, demonstrates his view of verbs (as representations of spiritual participation in reality) in an otherwise limiting system of language and his belief that all living things are linked in a way that transcends individuality. The mystical elements of his poetry reveal the alienation of the modern individual from the cosmos; however, Brooker remains focused on cosmic unity rather than revelling in fragmentation with contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Through his art and poetics, he seeks a solution to the perceived problem rather than simply embracing it.

EN:

Critical attention has been given to the natural and metaphysical elements of Anne Wilkinson's poetry, but the significance of the home and images of everyday life have been ignored. Although it is often obscured, the domestic plays a vital role in the unfolding of Wilkinson's poetics and modernity. Tension between the domestic and the mythic constitutes an ongoing philosophical and poetic inquiry in her works; Wilkinson juxtaposes the decorative and the monumental in an attempt to grapple with modernist conceptions of reality. Her diction and contradictory images alter the reader's understanding of the everyday to involve the intangible and metaphysical. Wilkinson's use of house and home imagery is not intended to domesticate, but to map out a topography of memory, imagination, and the location of the self.

EN:

Vision, at once limiting and enabling, functions in P.K. Page's poems to foreground her early concept of the limitations and subjectivity of perception, advancing her notion of an unmapped but intuited space of enhanced perspective. In her early poems, published before she travelled to Brazil in 1957, Page explores the capacities inherent in the intuited well of visual potential behind the eyes, and touches on issues of subjectivity and the reconciliation of the social self with sensory experience. Ultimately, Page is unable fully to close the subject-object distance to achieve the union she desires, to surmount an alienating limited perception, and to describe a whole experience without imposing upon it the subjectivity of language.

FR:

La poésie des années 80 démontre un retour au privé, indiquant la possibilité de dire l'intime dans la ville. Cette écriture, exempte de toutes contraintes formelles, cherche à explorer la question identitaire, l'émotion et le corps, la sensualité et les actes "menus" de l'existence. Le ≪ je ≫ en poésie, qui crée un rapport avec l'Autre et le lecteur, en conjonction avec l'espace complexe de la chambre, répond aux tentations et aux constraintes permanentes du moi poétique moderne. Dans l'œuvre de Louise Dupré, François Charron, Hélène Dorion, Madeleine Gagnon et Jacques Brault, la chambre figure non seulement comme espace clos, sécurisant et protecteur, mais elle est aussi perçue comme espace de liberté, qui refuse d'être simple élement du décor, figé dans son cadre.

FR:

Les années 1970 marquent le début de l'institutionnalisation de la littérature acadienne. Cet article conteste l'affirmation que la qualité de la poésie depuis les années 1970 est en baisse et qu'il n'y a pas de relève contemporaine. Les recueils de cinq jeunes poètes acadiens, tous finalistes du prix Antoine-Maillet-Acadie-Vie, exhibent la richesse de la poésie acadienne actuelle. Cette poésie est très loin de sombrer dans le discrédit, même si la thématique acadienne en est occultée : les revendications nationalistes ou communautaires paraîtraient moins insolites sinon carrément désuètes. Cette poésie est vivante, souvent expérimentale, et elle s'invente constamment en contribuant au renouvellement d'une littérature pour ainsi dire universelle.

EN:

Tim Lilburn's ninth book, the 2003 Governor General's award-winning Kill-site, is grounded not only in the harsh, rural Saskatchewan landscape that he calls home, but also in a philosophical and theological poetics that draws on multiple ancient eastern and western sources. Lilburn's essays of the 1990s, collected in Living in the World as if it were Home in 1999, provide insight into this poetics, including his perspectives on nature, the contemplation of God, and the idea of knowledge as the darkening of the mind. An understanding of these themes is essential to a critical appreciation of his poetry. The central spiritual conflict or dialectic in Lilburn's poetry is between the presence and absence of the divine in the world. Despite this constant tension, the negative or absence takes precedence, and his poetic emerges in Kill-site as concrete and anti-transcendental.

EN:

John Barton's poetry constantly considers how Canada's national ambivalence towards the landscape can be expressive of an equally pervasive sexual dissidence, particularly for those who diverge from the heteronormative tradition. Echoing Peter Dickinson's Here is Queer, Barton conceives of homosexuality in nationalistic terms; he uses the Canadian landscape to articulate the gay experience, just as earlier writers had used it to attempt to communicate an authentic Canadian experience. In early works like A Poor Photographer (1981) and West of Darkness (1987), Barton uses the sky, sea, and trees as images of alienation from society. In Great Men (1990) and later poetry, they become symbols of broadened horizons and the ability to see past culturally prescribed roles. This change in symbolic significance is just one manifestation of the way in which Barton anchors his exploration of homosexual identity in landscape imagery.

FR:

J.R. Léveillé se situe parmi les poètes explorateurs adeptes de la métapoésie et du déconstructionisme. Le thème polymorphe de la mort, évoqué par les multiples images poétiques de Léveillé, rejoint une architecture du retentissement, soit une étude de la perception des images poétiques au-delà des doctrines causales de la psychologie ou de la psychanalyse. Les images poétiques de Léveillé permettent la construction d'une hétérotopie de la mort au sens de Michel Foucault; nous y trouvons l'irreprésentabilité de la mort, à savoir son caractère à jamais énigmatique.

EN:

In No Language is Neutral and Land to Light On, Dionne Brand suggests that language can be used as a willful act of resistance against a hegemonic, seemingly monolithic "standard English." In the tradition of what Deleuze and Guattari call "minor literature," Brand's literature effects a subtle, yet crucial, internal alteration of the dominant language by means of deterritorialization. The result is a new, at once subversive and creative way of inhabiting language. In No Language is Neutral, lived experience and the words to convey it are integrated; the book celebrates empowerment and agency rooted in language. However, Brand's tone shifts from determined to ambivalent in Land to Light On. The speaker feels disempowered and harmed by language, recognizing not only its inadequacy and probable failure to effect lasting political change but also its power to gloss over subversive truth-telling, to which even the poet is susceptible.

EN:

Fred Wah challenges the binary opposition implicit in the postmodern idea that, as experimental texts expose and explode the artificiality of accepted norms, they are soon recuperated into the mainstream. Wah's theory of synchronous foreignicity privileges neither the reified/modern nor the vital/postmodern; by inclusively pairing the conventional and the radical, it places both author and reader in the "and" or the "hyphen" between binaries. Wah does not identify with any one ethnic group, enabling him to draw from multiple perspectives. His sequence "Music at the Heart of Thinking" exemplifies his notion of synchronous foreignicity. The formal changes defamiliarize the familiar in order to break down reified thoughts and perception without obliterating them. The text itself is both old and new, modern and postmodern, conventional and radical, provoking the reader to an evolution, rather than revolution, in thought.

FR:

Dans son épopée intitulée La Fille de Christophe Colomb, Réjean Ducharme met à l'œuvre tout en les subvertissant les codes historique, littéraire et épique, ce qui lui permet de mieux exprimer une spécificité culturelle québécoise. L'article démontre que la théorie postcoloniale contemporaine, qui prend comme objet des sociétés et des phénomènes très divers, peut éclairer la pratique littéraire de Ducharme par rapport à sa contestation du métarécit historique : celui de la découverte du nouveau monde. La narration fragmentée du texte contribue à une hybridation du sujet de l'énonciation, et cet espace indéterminé de l'énonciation permet également au sujet québécois d'affirmer une identité provisoire qui ne peut être contenue par les discours historiques conventionnels.