Introduction

THE POETRY OF JONATHAN HART

Jonathan Locke Hart’s five books of poetry cover writing that extends thirty years, although most of his poems appear to have been written between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s. For their sensitivity to nuances of feeling and their technical care, Hart’s poems resemble those of another master from Alberta, E.D. Blodgett, to whom one of Hart’s books, Dream China (2002), is dedicated. But Hart’s poems are altogether less intimate than Blodgett’s. There is little of Hart’s personal life in them, or of our personal lives, in which we are held to one another by the spiderweb of nearly invisible but exceptionally powerful bonds. Nor is Hart a poet like Simon Armitage, for example, whose imagination is rooted deeply in one place, as in almost all English poets, however much they travel. Although they are always going down lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace, English poets are never lost themselves. They know where they are and where they come from.

Hart is different, and in this, I think, intensely Canadian, or even Australian, for Australians are just like Canadians, only more so. Hart has traveled widely, in China and in every major country in Europe. He has lived long periods in China, but also in England, often at its great universities in Oxford, Cambridge, and London. He has also had extended stays in the United States, at Princeton and especially at Harvard, a university with which he has had close personal connections. Trained in history and English literature, a scholar of the European Renaissance and of Shakespeare, and of the history of colonialism, Hart is a creature of the elite university world — his PhD is from Toronto, where he lived in Massey College — but he is also a citizen of the world outside the universities. His poetry is intensely a poetry of place, place known and felt in historical depth; but the places in question are many. His is not a poetry of roots but of mobility.

One of Hart’s heroes and teachers, Marshall McLuhan, spoke not unfavorably of the rootlessness of modern man in the age of modern communications. Another of Hart’s heroes and teachers, Northrop Frye, influenced by McLuhan’s mentor, Harold Adams Innis, spoke of how Canada, because it is a vast, sparsely populated territory and obsessed, as a result, with communications, is a post-national country just because of this fact. Communications — a transcontinental railway and telegraph, a trans-Canada highway, a growing trade in Canadian books, aircraft, immigration, radio, telecommunications, the Internet — were needed to unite the vast country. But this unifying effort overshot its aim because there was no reason, nor is there now, for communications to stop at national boundaries. Communications, the “extensions of man,” as McLuhan called them, break through all boundaries whatever and connect us with the world, and with others in the world, sometimes unpleasantly. Paradoxically, in trying to unite and define itself as a country by means of communications, Canada succeeded in doing the opposite. It became a post-national country.

Every young Canadian (and not only young Canadians) gets on an airplane as soon as she or he can and flees the country for some other place, for any other place, and preferably for many other places. They do so not out of any particular dislike of Canada (on the contrary) but out of the sense that this is what Canadians do: travel to other places on the globe and experience other cultures as directly as they can. Canadians have a strong sense of home, but this sense of home is, so to speak, dialectically determined by the experience of being away, even by the need to be away. If a Canadian who has lived in the United States for twenty-eight years may venture to say so, this need to be away from home in order to be home is one thing — not the only thing, of course, but an important one — that makes Canadians different from Americans. Americans feel American enough when at home. They feel American enough when abroad, no more, no less. The world is on TV.

Jonathan Hart’s poems are widely traveled works. Yet it is not so much a sense of home that they awaken dialectically as it is the sense of consciousness itself, consciousness reflecting on history, on the passage of time and on the specificity of earlier times, the haecceitas of the past.

In Breath and Dust, the earliest collection of poems, written from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, Hart starts out in one poem in Canada, with a Canadian title, “Cabin Fever,” describing a sparrow that collided with the window and froze there, the river beyond “stacked and heaving / With broken ice.” It is a place where “even the dead are cold.” But the poem ends with an escape that is provided by books, another mode of communication, books from afar, with their “imported signs,” fire and roses (from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets) and the final, sweet, beautifully paced lines, “would that I were young / Again and in your arms.” Natural in their longing as they sound, those lines are a canny translation from another place and another time, from a famous, fourteenth-century English lyric poem. Their place at the end of this poem, apart from the emotional relief they provide, has the effect of relieving the Canadian’s cabin fever, confined within national boundaries, and opening the way to England. But not today’s England. This is the England of another time.

What’s naïve about Canadian wanderlust is the supposition that there is a world, a truly other world, that exists elsewhere and now. But in truth the entire planet is becoming much the same, as older, more traditional cultures huddle in pockets and modern communications envelop everything. To get elsewhere you have to go into the past. That is where Hart’s historical training comes in and serves him so well as a poet. He knows that to get to a place where we are far enough from home to know home again, we have to turn to the past.

The past is known in books, and Hart is a subtly but deeply learned poet, a doctus poeta. In “The Charles” (also from Breath and Dust), as he and a friend walk alongside the basketball courts beside the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard, listening to the squeaking shoes, the friend comments, “the only thing real . . . is the jazz of basketball” and “the slow movement of a woman on a bicycle, asserting nothing.” The friend is gently reproached for this overly phenomenological view as the poem turns decisively on the word “but,” returning us to “books / About books” and “the self-congratulation of critical discourse, finding / Ourselves in smoke.” Notwithstanding that “self-congratulation,” the point is not as negative as it sounds. Hart is not saying that in reading of the past we fail to find ourselves but are instead lost in smoke. He is saying that only in the smoke of the past, which seems so unreal — for much of what we know of the past has literally gone up in smoke, and books themselves, even in libraries, are very slowly on fire — do we find “the only thing real.”

We should not be deceived by the superficially easier, imagist delights of Dream China (2002) and Dream Salvage (2003) into thinking that these books escape history into pure meditation on the image. Far from it. They meditate on Greek mythology and Roman history, especially the great Roman historian Tacitus, on war in China and in the West. They cover an extraordinary range of poetic influences scattered throughout the history of the West. We seldom think how strange it is that in the modern world, with its vast archaeological scholarship, and its editing of almost every significant work of literature ever written, however obscure the language (from Frobenius’s translations of African folktales to Robert Bringhurst’s translations of the Haida epic poet, Skaay), poets, visual artists, and musicians have the whole extent of known history before them. They can choose at will from it. A contemporary artist in Paris can step into the Musée du quai Branly to find inspiration in Australian aboriginal art, which only half a century ago was as remote from the West as any art could possibly be. The same is true for contemporary musicians, who can choose from the music of the world — and in the same museum, which has extensive ethnographic music collections. “World music” is now the name of a musical style.

Any poet with a good university library (and Hart has spent years in them) has all the poetry of the past at his disposal with a rapidity that is disconcerting if one cares at all for poetry as the product of a place, having, like wine, distinctive qualities produced by local soil and climate. Nowadays, art is always rushing off for its influences and for its inspiration to somewhere else, somewhere formerly far. In such circumstances, having roots is an encumbrance, limiting one’s range and certainly one’s speed. Hart’s poems range widely and in some of the sequences are amazingly swift, succinct for speed, as Milton says. They are never in one place but often in all places, and this is what makes them at times so unsettling, and so contemporary. It is not his erudition, which is deep but worn lightly, that unsettles. It is the sense of speed. He can go anywhere, fast, and the reader has to keep up. The effect is dizzying, for him as well as us. We try to find our feet.

The exhilaration may be worth it, but the exhaustion of being everywhere at once tells. This is not an aesthetic criticism of the poems but an account of how they tell us what it feels like to be, in our time, so unnaturally aware of the past. So, in Dream Salvage, after a horrifying but exhilarating poem on Caesar’s wars, with the faces of Caesar’s troops bespattered with the blood of their Germanic enemies, who are dying “like massacred bison,” Hart writes of lying awake at night, his sheets soaked with sweat, thinking of such events by the thousand, in “the confusion of time / misplaced,” asking “why these / fragments [the very word is a famous fragment from Eliot] haunt / why these ancient wars in the ruin of an after-time?” The poet feels the burden of our exceptional and, as I said, unnatural and fragmentary knowledge of the past as an excuse for our own fragmentation, an imagined cause, “invented after, the wind / At my back.” But perhaps our vast, rootless knowledge, our ability to travel so far and so widely in the past, our “confusion of time,” is the true cause of our fragmentation. The wind is in our face.

The intellectual and spiritual project of these books is carried forward in Dreamwork (2010), with its more open acknowledgement of what Hart calls “the pathology of a time we call history.” Those of us who teach complain that students no longer care about history. Is it possible they, and we, care too much for the content of history while obliterating time, the time of the setting sun as continuous with the time of the decline of an empire? This thought may be lodged in the meaning of the lapidary lines, “A life that asks too many questions / Is like one that asks too few / A nightmare.”

A splendid, chewy, Anglo-Saxon sound is heard in these poems, evoking twentieth-century horrors: “The crushed rock mounts against the chain-link fence / The coils of barbed wire line the top rung.” It is a splendid sound, and a horrible memory. But it is not the death camps that are being directly described, although they are evoked. It is the rail line outside Newark, New Jersey, juxtaposed to the razor wire one sees incongruously and brutally on the college walls at the University of Cambridge. Cambridge recalls Spenser and Marlowe, among others, evoking the verse of the Elizabethan age, and even Spenser’s pastoral verse is now seen by us, from our vantage in the future, as if through concentration-camp wire.

Musing, the book presented here, is unexpectedly a book of sonnets, another Elizabethan form. Given the nature of that form, it is hard to speak generally of a series such as this in terms that accord it the praise it deserves, except to say that these poems — 109 of them — are technically impressive, imaginatively resourceful, wide ranging, and often, in the peculiarly detached way I have described as unfolding in the earlier books, emotionally moving. Inevitably, a series of sonnets of this length invites comparison of some kind with the greatest series of sonnets ever written, Shakespeare’s, but in this case the comparison draws attention first to their difference thematically. Illustrating the difference between our time and all others, that is, the hypertrophied availability to us of the material remains of the past, these sonnets range far and wide over historical time and space.

After Shakespeare, whose sonnets are concerned almost exclusively with love and time (though he finds astonishing variety in these themes), the possibilities of the sonnet were considerably expanded, especially by Milton and Wordsworth, the former making the sonnet a political form, the latter a means of theological reflection, among other things. To the reader attuned to such subtleties, Hart’s poems show continual awareness of the history of the sonnet form, and especially of the place and time of their origin with Petrarch at Avignon, in the south of France. But Hart’s sonnets do something remarkable with the form, which is consonant with all his poetry to date. Unlike Milton or Wordsworth, Hart retains the original thematic core of the sonnet as a love poem, and the many comments on love in them are deeply moving. Yet even as Hart reaches back to the origin of the sonnet, he pushes the form down into a layered reflection on history and the world, from Greek and Phoenician traders to the present.

I have said that Hart has traveled widely and thought deeply about the places he has been. As his diction reveals, he possesses in memory the poets who have written of those places. Chinese poetry, perhaps Li Po, is recalled in the final verse, “the river is our breath,” though the river in question is the Seine. The line “In Provence far from the snows of then” recalls one of the great lines of medieval French poetry, by François Villon, lamenting the beautiful, proud ladies celebrated in Provençal verse, who disappear like snow before the sun: “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” The poems resonate throughout, as very good poems do, with the sounds of other and earlier voices in song. Sappho is delightfully captured and parodied — though the humour is deliberately at the author’s expense — in the following poem, which conflates her song of blinding passion with her sadly ironic reflection on age:

My eyes dim, my desire

Unabated gets lost on the way. This

Tongue stumbles into the tyranny of thorns

And the surfaces condemn me to be

Alone: death — rude, savage, cruel — empties me

And leaves me to waste by the road I once

Strode along when I was young. Youth is never

Wasted: there’s just not enough of it.

No one wants a dry repose: the music

Seems sadder now. There’s nothing to be done.

From the outset, it is clear Hart expands the formal possibilities of the sonnet, using a looser rhyme scheme balanced by the final, Shakespearean couplet. But soon even this level of adherence to the traditional form is loosened and a wider, more flexible range of structures obtains within the fourteen-line form. In one instance (sonnets 73 and 74) a sentence crosses over from one poem into the next. All these technical innovations are happy, giving the series variety and avoiding the occasional monotony of even the best sonnet series. Sonnet 48 is an ars poetica, in which Hart states fairly clearly his own expectations of the form, and its challenges.

One thing the sonnet was made to do, although this has not always been apparent to poets who write them, is to deliver lapidary observations. Hart does this time and again, for example, in the second sonnet, “Time happens to other / People,” or in the fourth, “children being what we were and might have been.” Also, “When I was young the world was young: you know / The rest”; “The dead stacked up like wood”; “The crumbling mill, the soul”; “The ineffable / Unthing that is us.” There are many other examples.

The final sonnet, on Paris, is a beautiful example of what I see throughout this collection, which is a mind typically Canadian. It is also a mind deeply educated in European history and culture, but contemplating European history and culture from a uniquely Canadian, paradoxical point of view. The European past is us, and it is not us, and the more we go to Europe, or even to the United States, away from ourselves, so to speak, the stronger this sense of marriage and separation is. That fissure in our lives is re-expressed in this last poem, which is set in Paris. It is the speaker’s separation from the addressee, the loved one, and this separation calls up the most famous of separated lovers, Héloïse and Abelard. The speaker knows the very streets (the tangled warren around the church of Saint Julien le Pauvre, on the left bank of the Seine, just opposite Notre Dame), where Héloïse and Abelard loved. These are the very few medieval streets that were not bulldozed and overlaid with avenues in the nineteenth century by the great city planner, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. A personal, erotic separation becomes Paris’s separation from its medieval past, which resonates with the separation of the North American consciousness from its European origin. This separation is alluded to by the erasure of the history of Paris by Haussmann’s straight avenues — which are beautiful but not nurturing of love’s obliquities. In the end, the elaborate urban comparison seems about to collapse, until the river Seine returns, with its natural obliquities. However much the city changes, the river is the same, and is like the breath of life:

The barges slip along the Seine, the wind has died

By Notre Dame: the heat of August burns the stone

Even as the night has come. The winter of our hearts

Is gone, and your absence here is the only

Way this city lacks. The moon is snow

Over the Sorbonne, the voice of Héloïse

Fleeing down the few crooked streets Haussmann left.

The avenues are gorgeous, but love is seldom

Linear. It would be folly to lose

Paris or you to metaphor. At Christmas

We will come here and watch the shadows

Between the ruined trees and remember.

Love is in the place and feels the types

Words might make: the river is our breath.

These deeply thoughtful poems bring layered historical consciousness into the sonnet. They also touch and stir the heart through all its levels.

Gordon Teskey

4 May 2010