The first thing
I remember is how she looked out at me from the photo on the cover of Rosemary
Sullivan’s biography, Shadow Maker: The
Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen. She looked like a Toronto poet from the 1960s, all
bohemian and lit up, all shadow and light, all mysterious and mystical, with her
eyes rimmed dramatically in black kohl. She looked a bit haunted, too, as if
she had a secret that you wanted to beg her to share with you. “Dark Pines Under Water,” the first poem of
hers I ever read and fell in love with, is part of that ‘secret,’ I think.
What draws me
to her (and yes, I know I speak as if she still lives) is that she seems a
creative and poetic enigma to me. I’ve studied her work, read the Sullivan
biography, and have read and seen Linda Griffith’s play, Alien Creature: A
Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen. I
studied her work first, pouring over her poems, drawn to the depth of her imagery,
rich symbolism, and metaphor. Here was a person who wasn’t afraid to travel the
world, live sensuously as a woman and poet, falling in and out of lust and
love, and breaking her heart thoroughly in the process. But she seemed fearless
to me, in her work, and later, in what I read about her life. I have longed to
be fearless for most of my life, but often struggle to be brave in what others
might think are the simplest of ways.
In MacEwen, I
could see a spirit stuck in a body, a bright spark, creative and tormented by
both her gift and her intelligence. It must have seemed, I think, like both a
blessing and a curse to her. So many people have written about how creativity
and madness, or light and darkness, have courted one another for centuries in
art and literature. You only need to think of the ghosts of Virginia Woolf, Anne
Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, along with those who might be considered to have been
indirectly damaged, those women who chronically struggled with addiction, mental
illness, and difficult lives. They could include the likes of Dorothy Parker,
Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Elizabeth Bishop. There are others, of course, but these
are ones whose work has influenced me as a woman writer.
I have never
been an alcoholic, but I have seen the results of the destructive ripple of
alcoholism in my family, and I have dealt with depression, so I can understand
how a writer can get lost in her own mind, searching for a doorway out and
maybe never finding one. Minds are complex places within which to work and
live, and writers spend a lot of time in cerebral, introverted, and solitary
landscapes. I imagine that, if you were to add addiction to that, it could be a
very scary place indeed.
In “Dark Pines
Under Water,” published in her Governor General’s Award-winning collection, The
Shadow-Maker, MacEwen seems to write, on the surface, in simple ways, of the
essence of Canada. This was during the time when a number of Canadian writers
were questioning identity and what it meant to ‘be Canadian.’ Margaret Atwood’s
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian
Literature (1972), as well as her book of poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1970) come quickly to mind, of course. (MacEwen’s poem would pair nicely, too,
with Atwood’s stunning poem, “This Is a Photograph of Me,” if one were ever to
play matchmaker for poems.)
The thing that
transfixes me about “Dark Pines Under Water” is that it’s so compact, just
thirteen lines in length, and a fine example of what a good poem is all about. The
imagery is sharp, the lines are tight, and the metaphor is strong. It’s the
kind of poem every poet would love to write just once in their lifetime. She
begins with these iconic lines: “This land like a mirror turns you inward/And
you become a forest in a furtive lake.” She writes of “dark pines of your mind”
and of how you “dream in the green of your time.” What begins as a seemingly simple rendering
of a landscape that seems archetypally Canadian soon deepens, though. The
speaker addresses herself: “Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came
for. . .You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,/You had planned a heavy
grace, an anguished dream.” The landscape gets darker and more metaphorical.
It reminds me
of swimming in Georgian Bay, off Killarney’s little islands. There’s a stunning
sort of Group of Seven landscape there, but when you canoe the mouth of the North
Channel, or you swim in the water, you quickly see that the depth is greater,
and darker, than the surface beauty would lead you to believe. A wind warning can change the weather
quickly, so that what once seemed like calm water is soon quite dangerous.
The dark pines
of that first ‘lighter’ stanza reappear in the last one. They “dip deeper,” so
that the speaker sinks into an “elementary world,” a place where there is a
story that needs to be told, something to be revealed. What began as a poem
about surfaces soon becomes one about depth. I love this about her work. It’s
complex and rich, always challenging and thought provoking.
MacEwen haunts me.
She died in 1987, at the too young age of 46. I always think of what else she
would have written had she lived. She was prolific and gifted. That her mind
pulled her under, in so many ways, is the saddest part. But it also makes me want
to be a better poet, a more wise and courageous explorer—less fearful and more
fearless. When I think of her, when I see her face in my mind’s eye, and read
her work out loud, I’m thankful it’s enough that this grand shadow-maker poet came
before me, and that I know parts of her now, through her work.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in
Sudbury, Ontario. She is the fourth poet laureate of the City of Greater
Sudbury, and is the first woman to be appointed to the role. Kim has
published three volumes of poetry, and her fourth, Some Other Sky, is being published in Fall 2017 by Black Moss
Press in Windsor. She has also had two of her plays, Ghost of a Chance and Sparrows Over Slag, workshopped at the
Sudbury Theatre Centre. Kim has just finished her first novel, a
historical piece called The Donoghue
Girl, which is set in the northern mining town of Creighton, a place that
once existed just outside of Sudbury. She is a member of the League of
Canadian Poets, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and PEN Canada. Kim blogs at
kimfahner.wordpress.com at The Republic of Poetry.
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