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Since moving to B.C., poet, translator and literary historian E.D. Blodgett--who died in November of 2018--maintained his association with the University of Alberta Press.
Inspired by Gustav Mahler's 1904 song cycle called Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) which, in turn, incorporated five of 428 poems written by Friedrich Ruckert after the death of two of his children, Blodgett's Songs for Dead Children (U. of A. 2018) offer a contemplative search through grief for some consolation of meaning. Two of Blodgett's first twenty-seven collections of poetry have won the Governor General's Award.
E.D. Blodgett published numerous books of poetry as well as diverse criticism and literary translations. He was Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. In 1996 he won the Governor General's Award for Poetry for Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano. From 2007'2009 he was Edmonton's Poet Laureate.
Blodgett lived in Surrey, British Columbia.
**
E.D. Blodgett, F.R.S.C. and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, taught at the University of Alberta for 34 years. Having contributed to a number of journals both here and abroad, he also wrote and edited a number of books on aspects of the Canadian Literatures. He published more than twenty books of poetry.
Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano (Ottawa: BuschekBooks, 1996) was given the Governor General's Award and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. Two collections were awarded the Stephan G. Stephansson Poetry Award by the Writers Guild of Alberta. The University of Alberta Press has published various books of poetry such as Apostrophes II: through you I, Apostrophes IV: speaking you is holiness, Apostrophes VI: open the grass, An Ark of Koans, Elegy, and Apostrophes VII: Sleep, You, a Tree. Part of a series, the poems in Apostrophes VII (University of Alberta, 2011) are described as 'lyrical'.
He also published a renga with Jacques Brault, entitled Transfiguration (BuschekBooks and Editions de Noro't, 1998), which was given the Governor General's Award for Translation. From 2007-2009 he was Edmonton's Poet Laureate.
BOOKS:
Apostrophes VII: Sleep, You, A Tree (University of Alberta, 2011) 978-0-88864-554-8 $19.95
As If (University of Alberta Press, 2014) $19.95 978-0-88864-727-6
Songs for Dead Children (University of Alberta Press, 2018) $19.95 978-1-77212-369-2
Apostrophes VIII: Nothing is But You and I (University of Alberta Press, 2019) $19.99 978-1-77212-451-4
[BCBW 2019]
Courtesy of The Ormsby Review.
Apostrophies VIII: Nothing Is But You and I
by E.D. Blodgett
Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2019
$19.99 / 9781772124514
Reviewed by Christopher Levenson
*
Born in Philadelphia in 1935, Ted (Edward Dickinson) Blodgett came to Canada in 1966 to teach at the University of Alberta. After serving as Edmonton’s poet laureate (2007-09), Blodgett moved to Surrey, where he died in November 2018.
His final book, Apostrophies VIII: Nothing Is But You and I consists of love poems to his wife of 27 years, Irena. These are no ordinary love poems, writes reviewer Christopher Levenson. “They are all suffused with, and celebrate, the tenderness, solicitude, and shared memories of a long relationship that is brought to life not just by mutual love but also by the cumulative emphasis on uncertainty, not knowing.”
This collection, continues Levenson, “creates its own microclimate, which allows the poems to conjure up and focus on unseen or unheard presences.” — Ed.
*
In the clamour of attention accorded recently to the deaths of poetic superstars Patrick Lane and Joe Rosenblatt, another major talent, that of E.D. Blodgett, who died last November in Surrey, seems in danger of being overlooked. Despite having published twenty-three volumes of his own poetry, and having won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1996 for his Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano, his work as a poet and as a translator has never courted popularity, nor in death is he ever likely to become a household word. As this posthumous volume amply demonstrates, he is too original for that.
At a time when, whatever other stylistic features prevail, most poems that invoke the natural world are anchored to specific places and times, E.D. Blodgett’s work here is remarkably non-specific. He does not populate his poems with, say, Bohemian waxwings or pileated woodpeckers but with birds, while the woods he invokes are filled with trees and flowers rather than tamaracks and the lesser celandine. So too, apart from Trieste and Palestine, he names few actual places.
Why? Because they are all subordinated, mere walk-on parts in the scenery of an imagination that is focused on, and obsessively ruminates about, an ongoing love relationship, in all its changes and the growing awareness of impending death. By the same token such titles as “Beginning,” “Sky,” “Dissolution,” “Echoing,” and “Flowering” are mostly generic or abstract, Yet, against all expectation, it works.
How does it work? Strange though it may sound to put it that way, the secret is in the syntax and the highly personal sound that it creates.
Here is the whole of “Abiding:”
Trying to follow the drift of your mind growing slowly younger as
your hands unnoticed grow softer, how you turn to follow a bird’s
path
absorbed by certain measures of music or words in the language
that you spoke
when young, trying to fathom a world that is without the slightest
measure,
taking the summer of flowers in with well-remembered care,
Perhaps
an afternoon for single roses, full of awe as suns go down
over the bay, all your beliefs unshaken still and held in that
place where all the suns undisturbed still turn, no threnody
but theirs avails where, if the most ancient of light is traceable,
it abides, r in the first flower. What other drift does your mind
follow, there where love does not grow but infinitesimally
expands, the moment after the voices of singing children fall silent
but not a moment, rather an age where ice returns and
disappears
or single stars that flower, filling the night, until another appears?
Many of these poems, comprising two stanzas of fourteen to sixteen sinuously unfolding lines, contain only two or three sentences. This is not unique — the influence of Rilke, that master of the long, flexible colloquial line, is evident — but, apart perhaps from the late Don Coles no Canadian poet has proven so adept at handling and arranging multiple subordinate clauses and phrases in apposition so that all the twists and turns of a sequence of thoughts and feelings are presented in flux, seemingly as they occur.
Addressed to his wife and soon to be widow, these are no ordinary love poems. They are all suffused with, and celebrate, the tenderness, solicitude, and shared memories of a long relationship that is brought to life not just by mutual love but also by the cumulative emphasis on uncertainty, not knowing. Thus, transient states of mind and heart are paralleled and enacted by the fluidity of the cadences and of the sentence structure.
So, too, words and phrases such as “perhaps,” “you might say,” “how could I tell?” or “it’s possible” predominate, along with a penchant for the conditional and subjunctive moods and for the present participle, so that sometimes, as in “A woman sitting,” seven lines pass without a main verb, “Questions” ends with a question that has taken twelve lines to formulate, while in “Winter Dreams,” all twenty-one lines make up a single sentence, a feat only poets trained in classical grammar could manage.
In this way the book creates its own microclimate, which allows the poems to conjure up and focus on unseen or unheard presences, as here in “Waiting again:”
… not a dance for feet but something yet to be named,
calling out without a sound, and followed, as one follows
music never heard before.
Apart from the poetic skill involved, the mental and spiritual effort required to read it — even to oneself, let alone aloud — reinforces one of Blodgett’s main motifs throughout the book, the idea of becoming, which is something else that links him to the Rilke of the Duino Elegies and one of its injunctions, “Werde wesentlich,” that is, become essential.
Chary though I am of using the word “mystical,” I find myself suspending disbelief when he speaks, for instance, of “their souls like new birds suddenly aware of wings.” Of course there are occasional words or phrases that seem overwrought, but for the most part what Blodgett summons up in these meditations constitutes a spiritual and emotional journey that as readers we are privileged to overhear, to witness.
So, despite — indeed in a way because of — the apparent hesitations and tentativeness, what ultimately comes through is a kind of affirmation, a sense of revelation, a mutual bringing to light, and into words, a shared experience, a series of illuminations.
Read in sequence, the cumulative effect of these poems is not just a structural but also an emotional tour de force that will resonate at many levels.
*
Inspired by Gustav Mahler's 1904 song cycle called Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) which, in turn, incorporated five of 428 poems written by Friedrich Ruckert after the death of two of his children, Blodgett's Songs for Dead Children (U. of A. 2018) offer a contemplative search through grief for some consolation of meaning. Two of Blodgett's first twenty-seven collections of poetry have won the Governor General's Award.
E.D. Blodgett published numerous books of poetry as well as diverse criticism and literary translations. He was Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. In 1996 he won the Governor General's Award for Poetry for Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano. From 2007'2009 he was Edmonton's Poet Laureate.
Blodgett lived in Surrey, British Columbia.
**
E.D. Blodgett, F.R.S.C. and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, taught at the University of Alberta for 34 years. Having contributed to a number of journals both here and abroad, he also wrote and edited a number of books on aspects of the Canadian Literatures. He published more than twenty books of poetry.
Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano (Ottawa: BuschekBooks, 1996) was given the Governor General's Award and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. Two collections were awarded the Stephan G. Stephansson Poetry Award by the Writers Guild of Alberta. The University of Alberta Press has published various books of poetry such as Apostrophes II: through you I, Apostrophes IV: speaking you is holiness, Apostrophes VI: open the grass, An Ark of Koans, Elegy, and Apostrophes VII: Sleep, You, a Tree. Part of a series, the poems in Apostrophes VII (University of Alberta, 2011) are described as 'lyrical'.
He also published a renga with Jacques Brault, entitled Transfiguration (BuschekBooks and Editions de Noro't, 1998), which was given the Governor General's Award for Translation. From 2007-2009 he was Edmonton's Poet Laureate.
BOOKS:
Apostrophes VII: Sleep, You, A Tree (University of Alberta, 2011) 978-0-88864-554-8 $19.95
As If (University of Alberta Press, 2014) $19.95 978-0-88864-727-6
Songs for Dead Children (University of Alberta Press, 2018) $19.95 978-1-77212-369-2
Apostrophes VIII: Nothing is But You and I (University of Alberta Press, 2019) $19.99 978-1-77212-451-4
[BCBW 2019]
REVIEW
Courtesy of The Ormsby Review.
Apostrophies VIII: Nothing Is But You and I
by E.D. Blodgett
Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2019
$19.99 / 9781772124514
Reviewed by Christopher Levenson
*
Born in Philadelphia in 1935, Ted (Edward Dickinson) Blodgett came to Canada in 1966 to teach at the University of Alberta. After serving as Edmonton’s poet laureate (2007-09), Blodgett moved to Surrey, where he died in November 2018.
His final book, Apostrophies VIII: Nothing Is But You and I consists of love poems to his wife of 27 years, Irena. These are no ordinary love poems, writes reviewer Christopher Levenson. “They are all suffused with, and celebrate, the tenderness, solicitude, and shared memories of a long relationship that is brought to life not just by mutual love but also by the cumulative emphasis on uncertainty, not knowing.”
This collection, continues Levenson, “creates its own microclimate, which allows the poems to conjure up and focus on unseen or unheard presences.” — Ed.
*
In the clamour of attention accorded recently to the deaths of poetic superstars Patrick Lane and Joe Rosenblatt, another major talent, that of E.D. Blodgett, who died last November in Surrey, seems in danger of being overlooked. Despite having published twenty-three volumes of his own poetry, and having won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1996 for his Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano, his work as a poet and as a translator has never courted popularity, nor in death is he ever likely to become a household word. As this posthumous volume amply demonstrates, he is too original for that.
At a time when, whatever other stylistic features prevail, most poems that invoke the natural world are anchored to specific places and times, E.D. Blodgett’s work here is remarkably non-specific. He does not populate his poems with, say, Bohemian waxwings or pileated woodpeckers but with birds, while the woods he invokes are filled with trees and flowers rather than tamaracks and the lesser celandine. So too, apart from Trieste and Palestine, he names few actual places.
Why? Because they are all subordinated, mere walk-on parts in the scenery of an imagination that is focused on, and obsessively ruminates about, an ongoing love relationship, in all its changes and the growing awareness of impending death. By the same token such titles as “Beginning,” “Sky,” “Dissolution,” “Echoing,” and “Flowering” are mostly generic or abstract, Yet, against all expectation, it works.
E.D. (Ted) Blodgett. Photo courtesy of Surrey Muse Arts Society
How does it work? Strange though it may sound to put it that way, the secret is in the syntax and the highly personal sound that it creates.
Here is the whole of “Abiding:”
Trying to follow the drift of your mind growing slowly younger as
your hands unnoticed grow softer, how you turn to follow a bird’s
path
absorbed by certain measures of music or words in the language
that you spoke
when young, trying to fathom a world that is without the slightest
measure,
taking the summer of flowers in with well-remembered care,
Perhaps
an afternoon for single roses, full of awe as suns go down
over the bay, all your beliefs unshaken still and held in that
place where all the suns undisturbed still turn, no threnody
but theirs avails where, if the most ancient of light is traceable,
it abides, r in the first flower. What other drift does your mind
follow, there where love does not grow but infinitesimally
expands, the moment after the voices of singing children fall silent
but not a moment, rather an age where ice returns and
disappears
or single stars that flower, filling the night, until another appears?
Many of these poems, comprising two stanzas of fourteen to sixteen sinuously unfolding lines, contain only two or three sentences. This is not unique — the influence of Rilke, that master of the long, flexible colloquial line, is evident — but, apart perhaps from the late Don Coles no Canadian poet has proven so adept at handling and arranging multiple subordinate clauses and phrases in apposition so that all the twists and turns of a sequence of thoughts and feelings are presented in flux, seemingly as they occur.
Ted Blodgett. Photo by Yukiko Onley
Addressed to his wife and soon to be widow, these are no ordinary love poems. They are all suffused with, and celebrate, the tenderness, solicitude, and shared memories of a long relationship that is brought to life not just by mutual love but also by the cumulative emphasis on uncertainty, not knowing. Thus, transient states of mind and heart are paralleled and enacted by the fluidity of the cadences and of the sentence structure.
So, too, words and phrases such as “perhaps,” “you might say,” “how could I tell?” or “it’s possible” predominate, along with a penchant for the conditional and subjunctive moods and for the present participle, so that sometimes, as in “A woman sitting,” seven lines pass without a main verb, “Questions” ends with a question that has taken twelve lines to formulate, while in “Winter Dreams,” all twenty-one lines make up a single sentence, a feat only poets trained in classical grammar could manage.
In this way the book creates its own microclimate, which allows the poems to conjure up and focus on unseen or unheard presences, as here in “Waiting again:”
… not a dance for feet but something yet to be named,
calling out without a sound, and followed, as one follows
music never heard before.
Ted Blodgett, Poet Laureate of Edmonton, on the North Saskatchewan River, Edmonton, 2008. Photo by Ed Kaiser, Edmonton Journal
Apart from the poetic skill involved, the mental and spiritual effort required to read it — even to oneself, let alone aloud — reinforces one of Blodgett’s main motifs throughout the book, the idea of becoming, which is something else that links him to the Rilke of the Duino Elegies and one of its injunctions, “Werde wesentlich,” that is, become essential.
Chary though I am of using the word “mystical,” I find myself suspending disbelief when he speaks, for instance, of “their souls like new birds suddenly aware of wings.” Of course there are occasional words or phrases that seem overwrought, but for the most part what Blodgett summons up in these meditations constitutes a spiritual and emotional journey that as readers we are privileged to overhear, to witness.
So, despite — indeed in a way because of — the apparent hesitations and tentativeness, what ultimately comes through is a kind of affirmation, a sense of revelation, a mutual bringing to light, and into words, a shared experience, a series of illuminations.
Read in sequence, the cumulative effect of these poems is not just a structural but also an emotional tour de force that will resonate at many levels.
*
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Sleep, You, A Tree (University of Alberta Press $19.95)
Review
Sea gazing is much like gazing at lilacs, the moon, and apple trees in blossom or a familiar field in snow. It's always the same and always different.
This same is not "same old same old;"; that would be boring. This gazing is a new "same old"; and that induces trance states. E.D. Blodgett would understand.
His new collection of unrhymed sonnets, Sleep, You, A Tree, is a long contemplation in seventy-eight parts-with repeated motifs that include infinity, eternity, silence, unsayability, darkness, whiteness, childhood, paradise, God, moon and stars-in which almost every poem includes a tree.
Blodgett's weaving of form and content is rare in contemplative poetics. "And so the colour of the air is the colour of the sea when it in absolute transparency wells up before our eyes, the clouds the only waves, and all that comes in sight is what eternity holds up, the sound of it inaudible and lapping at our skin.";
Blodgett's rhythms, both formal as in traditional sonnets but also relaxed in their line ends and break-up of rhythm, are delicious to the ear. Such poetry is made to be read aloud. When read silently off the page, these pieces have a tendency to blur. They are so alike in their soft-edged, gentle ruminations that a reader could be excused for asking if she has not already read this one.
It seems as if Blodgett has used the same hundred words for every poem. He held the words in his hand, scattered them and then made a new poem out of their different arrangements. It's a legitimate way of poem making ... if the poet has no intent for linear sense.
"If God / is everywhere, then he is here in this passage where you have stopped / but it is God that is the simplest tree that bears the air alone / above itself, and all that moves within its compass stands within the large divinity of all that passes.";
What do such passages mean? They are not rational nor are they childlike pre-rational. It is a different mind that can receive this kind of writing, a transrational mind. They are like kirtan chanting in Sanskrit of the sacred names.
Mystical poetry is an elusive door. The content in Sleep, You, A Tree is not the point; rather it's the effect that chanting produces. You either really get it or you don't. The knowing is not-knowing, the unknowability of divine things. When inner receptiveness is present, the "transported"; state can be elicited in a moment by a phrase.
Of course, there is the irony of a poet saying skillfully how unsayable are these things: infinity, paradise, death and the tears of God. A reader who is looking for specificity, the name of the bird, or the star, will be frustrated. There isn't a single hard edge in this collection.
For some readers the repeated petals falling or wind over snow will seem too bland, but mystics, contemplatives and dreamers will find this lack of substance appealing.
In Drifting, a poem ostensibly about lilacs, Blodgett allows their scent to drift him into memory: "How can we breathe without the breath of childhood, the cries / that rush among the leaves, their taking of the world, the stars that fill / their eyes, the innocence that sheathes their bodies, childhood that is / its own eternity where nothing enters but itself.";
Blodgett, who won a Governor General's award some years ago, has recently moved to the West Coast. Especially skilled at evoking childhood, he is a welcome addition to the B.C. poetry scene.
978-0-88864 554 8
[BCBW 2011]
Hannah Main–van der Kamp
