'!.: 0V.i_i_:MBER 1942 Perplexed, I lean against the iron bars, painted in sickening pea-soup green. A concatenation of decibels of no sure pitch pervades the gaseous skin, the atmosphere. The noise of street-cars, like panzer divisions on the march. Street-cars, cheesy-white, flitting like wraiths through the city of tremendous night, Bea.ring their fated cargoes of zombies. Street-cars, huge white whales, swimming the unplumbed salt estranging sea Whales bloa.ted with impotent Jonahs, ever and forever evaders of the ,:.:ord. The sound of their twaddle as the car twitches to a stoiJ-.,. The twaddle of craven Zeros running avvay from the \:\ford on journeys of no origin, no route, no end On spiral circuma111bient journeys, indifferent as long as they go not to the Elysian Fields, the Valley of Avalon. For in the haunted valley the ieros fear they might see the overwhelming spook, the ghostly wraith, the ferociously hated ones: the forms of their inner selves. Their true and murdered selves, whom they interred many millennia ago and still must needs inter nightly-I mean Socrates by the rocky Aegean, corrupting them, I 111ean Spinoza scrawling on the oppressive gate of Amstordrun nu1 tima Barbari '', I mean Jeremiah bearding the bloated kings of Judah, I mean Christ, the light that was the light of men but they understood it not I mean the transcendent Im.nanence who always has been and ever shall be Terrible but merciful, the word that tried to shine among them but they desired the Plutonian vacuu.m, the demonic void. And on dreadful nights the street-cars wail in the shadows like the Flying Dutcl1.rnan Doomed never to anchor at the City of God. The noise of groggy youths Fuddled with spiked charn.pagne Skating like witches' ice-boats along the curiously abrasive pavement. Fuddled whippersnappers, their fierce sensuousness an omen of their outrageous pride. For their voluptuary addiction is their fawning rapture toward their own motile cadavers and so also is refractory vain-glory. page 2 And so their drunkenness is but an indicium of· the.ir pr·bud·:.·heart.a. And so they grovel in the furrows and eat the husks that the swine fo.in would oo.t. ·. ·:. I look around~ welders with blow torches adumbrate an Edgar Varese fantasy in the cold night. For music is the sweetest inner rhythm of the mores; It comes from the deepest crags and highest cliff-sides of the heart It is fed by the radiations from the interacting of folk and environrn.ent And these absorbed radiations, inside the soul, are forged by the inner self out of its outrageous fortune Into fill architectonic of the Holy Spirit that justifies the ways of God to man. But when the Rhythmus of the soma is choked at the root by the Ford Assembly line The inner self has no resource to build a pleasure-dome to the Holy Ghost And Edgar Varese procreates an assembly line in score-sheets And welders adumbrate an Edgar Varese fantasy in the cold night. The popping of motor-cycle exhausts is redolent of rockets to the moon, Of palatial rockets with a bar at each gun-sight and a brothel on each floor. The 1noon is a dead planet, well -picked by the dead men within Swizzling Labatt's and floating bonds to pepper it with su..mmer resorts. Dead men who still twitch as the legs of frogs twitch long after their somatic end Dead men who know not they are gone But persist in golf and bridge until the last trumpet is blared from an angry Valhalla And fly tropismatically like moths to the dead moon's gold and platinum. Though there is no life on the Moon and the gold will be interred in Kentucky But dead men have always been so And they will enfuriated choke to death any who show signs of life As they stoned Jeremiah and jailed Thoreau. Lord will these bones live? . . The squeak of kitchen taps like a lovely Sibelius adagio The opening of tin cans like a lilting Bartok scherzo An aeroplane whizzes overhead, a vulture to the dying m.en below whose ghats are in themselves. Nonplussed I turn tow atch the night grass (Oh sweet hour of slimy earthworms after rain }) A bat plays a Strauss overture by the chlmney A robin tootles J\ff.ozartian cadenzas in 111y ear,, Ma r1c Edrnund Gordon. page 3 • A live movernent in poetry will reflect s.nd often foreshadow the creative movements in its social environrnent. p.Q.fit__s sensitive j:;o _the growing forces of their age will give symbolic expression to those forces and will becorne a potent instrument of social change. The more revolutionary their epoch the more markedly will their writing differ from that of their predecessors, for they will be obliged to experiment with new form and i1n&gery in order to convey 1 their new i.deas. I1heir style will thus at first appear crude and unpolished, and will shock the established taste. They will be laugh-/ ed at for their clumsiness 8Xld obscurity. So the poets of the Romantic Revival absorbed the revolutionary fervour of regicidal France, ·· ·: threw overboard the outmoded classicism of the 18th century, and faced 1nisunderstanding and sharp criticism. until time had carried their contemporaries forward to the new positions. So too the .American poetry revival in the first quarter of this century, with its greater freedoin, variety and humanism, prepared the way for the new social thinking which-emerged politically through the E·ew Deal. Carl Sandburg's robust popular verse heralded the 'forgotten man' of the new poli0ics and broke ground for the C.I.O. The .English revival of the 1930 1 s showed at least a deep dissatisfaction with the pre-war English society, A dead tradition of poetic writing, on the other hand, reflects nothing but the attitudes of the past, expressed in the cliches of the past. It will fear and oppose the new in literature because the new spells death to itself. In Canada, where so rnuch tradition, deprived of content, has become mere habit, this influence produces the kind of poem with which we are all too painfully familiar--neat, accurate, unarnbiguous, earnest and ordinary. The surprising thing is how long such sterility can live and go on reproducing itself" Ulti1nately, however, the gap between itself and life grows so wide that collapse-occurso Usually the well-established tradition is sanctified by state approval in some form. At meetings of its devotees medals are given, the 'rn.oderns' are scorned_, and tea is poured. To read VOIC.t;S OF VICTORY, described as nRepresentative Poetry of Canada in VJartime'' (Tviac1nillans, 1941) is to find oneself buried in just this kind of tradition. In other days the inclination would have been to throw the book aside and waste no more time over it. In . these days of critical choices for humanity, and for Canada as part of humanity, such a phenor11enon as this anthology is perhaps worth a n1oment is analysis. 1.Ne ca.n all feel the uncertainty of the present world situation, poised as we are on a political watershed. Our doubt is not with regard to military victory, which we believe can be won, but with r0gc.rd to the:pence,· which. can, so oc~~ily .b~ . l~§t. Trxor~_, ~~,:~·:=: eloo..rly bo·crt little chn.ngu-;:sin'cc· tho wo.r bogo.n. in·· thb, so·c.~ia1 ·Out~cc-i: of some ·of t,J.1..op·;a1ncipo.l Allio,d powers, and 1.Gnst oi:te:ola.,Jdn_,-,J;runucio.(4.. ·, Pcrha.ps in C·o..na.p.c. more th2.n· o..nywhorG o_lso :tho old traditions•_:BJr.e,>. still with us, us dominnnt ·. o.s, 1 ·.bofor0 .~ WhGr,G-Vur wo, lo.ok'""~·iJ11... pol.-i tics·, 11n thO' churches, in. oduco.ti0ri·, in· bus.inuss, in th~ pr~~s.~_-tht;. pr:onwo.r ·cc.n{_1dio.n soci;--.l orde,T survivus, sl:i.ghtl_y modU.iu_d .· but..bc.i'.$j_c o.lly ·u.nroformod. Yet there nro nuv, forces ..st_irring·· unao--rnb~~th tho.. -old ··crust, page 4 • raoving deeply in the hearts and minds of rnen, giving us common cause with other races and nations. Of these forces a vital poet ic movement might be made. VOIC~S OF VICTORY does not seem to be aware that they exist. It is bad enough to have so little external sign of these new impulses in Canadian politics, but this is partly understandable since the primacy of military effort over social re form app~als to many. ·.l\fhat is n1ore discouraging is the utter lack on the part of these Canadian writers of the sense of· impending ch8_nge, of the need for democratic advance, and of any new outlook on the contemporary world. Judging by this volume, nothing has altered in the realm of poetry or politics since 1914. Needless to say there is no new style or diction, no venture in original modes of expression. These poen1s were selected from 766 entries to a contest organised by the Poetry Group of the Toronto Branch of the Canadian Authors' Association. The purpose of the contest, we are told, was twofold~ first, to contribute the proceeds of sales to the Canadian Red Cross British Bomb Victims Fund, and secondly, to nlet the poetic genius of Canada and the Canadian people sound a spiritual challenge to the brutality of enemy despots and tyrants". The frontispiece, a reproduction of a prize med~l donated by the Athlone's and containing their effigy, prepares the reader for this priority of ideas. Then comes Charles G.D. Roberts' llCanada Speaks to Britain'': 11 She calls. And we will answer to our last bre8.th. n This sets the tone for what follows. Canada's essential colonialism stands o~t everywhere in this answer to England's call. One would gather that before the call ca.me all was right with the world, and after the call ceases no doubt the noets will return to their non- J.. American nightingales. The prize poem, 1jRecornpense 11 , leads us through the 11faery foam/ of blackthorn blossoms breaking11 to 11England 1 s dower/ of deathless lovelinessi1 It has the lush glamour of a • cricket match, all Gentlemen anG no Players. The second prize goes to "Canadian Crusade 11, a poen1 which is 8.t least free from nostalgia; its sentimentality is local rather than transatlantic. The third prize is given to a eulogy of Churchill. There follow twenty poe:ms receiving honourable mention, ''in order of rr1eri t 11 • After this the contrJ.butors are unranked. Most of the poems deal in traditional 1nanner with the standard then1e s of sacrifice, suffering, death, with special reference to torpedoed children, Nowhere in the entire volume is there an echo, even faint, of a people's ,Nar or a people 1 s peace, or of the war '\/vithin the war represented by the great cry of exploited humanity for the promised four freedoms. Exception should be made for a poem by Kenneth Leslie (unranked) who has at . least perceived the significance of Russia 7 s part in the struggle. Nor is there any evidence that these writers perceive the profound drama of man 1 s attempt to purge himself through suffering of his own making·, or that they feel the profound tragedies of an age that threw away j_ts last victory and hesitates now to make vital its war aims by an innnediate application of their principles. All is apparently quiet on the philosophic front. So we get sentiment but no passion, loyalty but no dynamic assertion, Ministry of Information leaflets but very little poetry. po.ge 5 • Of all ·the contributing factors th.at go to 1nake up the state of n1ind reflected here tl'1e deepest c.nd m.ost dominartt, in my opinion, is our Canadian colonialism. This has little (though some) -relationship with outward goverru110ntal forms. It is more a cast of thought, a mental climate . 1rhe colonial is an incomplete person. He must 16ok to others for his guidance, and far away for his criterion of va1ue. He copies the parental style instead of incorporating what is best in son1ething of his own. He undervalues his own contribution and ovorestiinates ·what others can do for hirn, Old greatness is 1nore to him th8n new truth. Above all he fears originality., which might cut him off from his secure base. The outside world of men seems foreign and hostile to him, and he will cling to ancient traditions long after they have been abandoned in his metropolis. No matter how great his sincerity or how c-:_8voted his attacbrnent, he is incapable, while suff0ring f rorn this political Oedipus complex, of rising above the ordinary. For the most perfect copy is second-rate, while the least origin8.lity is unique ,. Jnd ,Nhen the wave of any future reaches him, it is but a ripple. How a country can shape itself out of this state of mind I do not know, but the duty of the poet is to help in the enfranchisement, not to decorate the ancient chariot. F.R. Scott F001I1:i/ OtB ~ .2;xtract fro~m . 11 Tho Polit .ical D8 s tiny of Canada n, by Goldvvyn Srn.i th, 1878, I' . 61 ~Jhen the Canaciun Nationalists say that patriotism is a good thing, they are told to keep their wisdom for tho copy-books; and the rebuke would be just if those who ac@inister it would recognize the equally obvious truth that there can be no patriotism without nntionali ty. In a depandenc-y· there is no love of the country, ho pride in the country; if an appeal is made to th0 narne of the country, no heart responds as the heart of 8.n Bnglisrunan responds when an appeal is made in the narne of ~ngland . In a depondency every bond is stronger than that of country, 8Very interest prevGils over that of the country. The province, the sect, Oran6eis:m, .Fonianis:m, Preemasonry, Oddfellowship, are more to tha ordinary C2no.dien than Co.nada o So it raust be while the only antidote to sectionalism in a population with strongly marked differences of raca 2nd creed is the sentiment of allegiance ton distant throne. 1I1he Young Cano.dian 100.ving his native country to seek his fortune in the States feels no greater wrench than n young Bnglishn1an would feel in leaving his country to s 0ek his fortune in London . Want of nationality is attended, too, with a certain want of self-respect, not only political but social, as writers on colonial society and character have ·observed. W~al thy men in a depenc:tency are inclined to look to the Irnperial Country as the social centre and the mark of their socie.l ambition if not o.s their ultin1ate abode , and not only their patriotic munificence but their political and social sarvices are withdravrn from the country of their birth. page 6 POEM You on your man mndo rock turning the intellectual light like Abglard who was so schooled in love·, the analysis liken song upon us- young doctors, young professors; piercing tho dark that hodgos us about, tho wasteful syst0ms of romantic night, cut.us with light and cut tho cancer out- catching with boams the hidden colours, uxplode on glasses nnd, n lono.ly thougg't :: the athletes muscle and the lovers smile collect to will, with science and d0light. Patrick Anderson LOVE POEM I lift ray hand. 'Th0 air is weightless •. Tho falling boys drop without sound in tha closing air around ray haunted hand., You move your head, your hnir is falling over your brow, the facile use of snow, then a woak shadow ·1 s hanging on the wnll. You move your head crammed with tho dead, gracefully from sido to sido. Only the running hoadlights, a long touch, like silver foxes in our ceilingis north light us to bed. O, love, your snowy limbs are galleries where blood Qnd flesh are twisted. We lio and our two bodies echoing those far-off tortures are d0formod, and our heads lie on tho pillow like bloody globes: and saying love our tongues toll inwardly. Yet stande You aro tall as Europe. Yet s tnnd. t: am. tall as Asio.. Shall wo havo children? Shall our childron ,live in slavery or in ponce? Patrick Anderson po.g0 7 BOY -1942 Ho wo.nted to boa soldier of fortuno, ho so.id, And his words crnwlod botweon The hush drum cough of high mnchinos Which 100.nt a.cross his stoncillod soul. I:ioro romo.nco, more o.dvonture, he suid, While bullets l e:: apt from lazy fingertip And cyos, the sudden walls, Wore dead with others' deaths. Watch me, ho thought, in rigid c0remonio.l clothed Swing boyond th0 squo.tting sunset And r 0ach with mile-long arm The ensy sch0ming villain. Seo tho grnvoyo.rds I shall m~ko, he said And in his mind ho rockonvd Up himsolf in bodies, Told them all ago.inst his birth. Behind his lenthor face blow winds of emptin0ss, And o.11 the oxcusos of worlds Fall boforo thu sad accusing stare Which th0y had coldly made. S0 0 him loaning against, tho city's quictn0ss Shaken by his bursting thought And in all his yearning Denying hin1s0lf. Neufville Shaw paga 8 BANK STRIKE V\Jhen tho t ir.a.o c 2.J110, a:fter the histori0d ·wo_iting, they woro r0 c_dy with thoir strikers I j s ck0ts £'end their po.int ed Signs II Gn grove 11 ' facing tho 1mown stroots and th0 rough sergo knees and 0lbows of polic0. Time was bald on their skins; their desks and counters and cages criod in their oyos liko a strategical retreat and the unrelieved picket lino had a stained, for-all-time porman0nc0 on tho distorted streot. In the foreground church tho flames of tho sacred candl0s burnod, in th0ir suddenly foreign hom0s their meals w0ro stiff as religious paintings ~nd tho bullet of ~fired 1 was wodgod in their skulls. Yot from the collo.r of certainty they came up the long escalator to defeat, their hGarts b_urting thoir ribs, their hands heavy; blew hot 2illd cold and scratched tho solid curb like wenth0r worrying on iron city. P .K. Po.go SCEllARIO St. Potur stro0t is still. Youvillo SquGr0 is empty. In the dnrk buildings groun disinfoctnnt is rolling up tho dusty corridors. A spont frnyod world surveys its nc_vel o.nd oxploros its hot dry noso. Hunchod in o.n uptovvn block, drop for~ city, sotting for o. mo.le documonto.ry o.r0 tho dull flo. t flanks of th0 Y. Evenings directly from co.fetoriQ o.nd counter tho dovm-town horoos sprawl in the brown rooms disc~rding tho cl0ric fnco engorg0d with tho two-bit sp0ci2l. At dusk or in struot-c~r thu soul o.nd tho vnluod sox nro swaddled in surge. But, here, in brilliQnt shorts tho sthonic pinkly lolls waiting the c~lcifiud nrtory Qnd tho mol~ncholic scrag sto.r0s ~t the tr~nsom. Sho.11 I sit s11.1iling gonio.lly in tho sun fooding pig~ons nnd apprQising logs? Or picking lint from. n1y lo.pols c..cl:miru tho shining cr0sc0nts of my no.ils? Poorer thnn muttGring monk o.ro thoso whoso pin-striped gods par~d0 in limousines. Brue o Ruddick We would remind our renders that we welcome contributions, although WG aro not able to pay for thGm at pros0nt. Subscriptions ()1.00 p0r year) and manuscripts should b0 sont to i1,irs o Kit Bho.w, 5593 Coto St. Luke R oc.d, 1~. D. G., Montroo.l. I