A Review of Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten
“Play what you know, and then play above that.” Miles Davis
It’s already tattered, my copy of Almost Islands. It sits beside me; I open it. I carry it. I leave it behind and write of it from far away. I find it again. What is a book? Does a shut book still present words? A silent poet, after all, is still a poet. We can read into Phyllis Webb’s lengthy poetic silence what we will, but anything we read into it we must be prepared to own, for it is ours, not Webb’s. Stephen Collis, in Almost Islands, his defense of the unwritten, successfully does his “owning.”
Phyllis Webb was born in 1927. The legendary Contact Press published her first work in 1954 inside a volume of poetry by three poets: Webb, Eli Mandel, and Gael Turnbull. Her own first book was published two years later by McClelland and Stewart, and her second full collection came out in 1962 from Ryerson Press. Since her words first appeared in print, she has been a respected poet: her books awaited, her risks felt and questioned, her contributions entering the conversation that is poetry and reverberating in the minds and works of other poets. Then after the appearance of her Naked Poems from Vancouver’s Periwinkle Press in 1965, fifteen years elapsed before the publication of her next full collection, Wilson’s Bowl. Meanwhile, in 1965 she’d co-created the influential CBC Radio program Ideas and was its Executive Producer for several years before leaving the CBC in Toronto and returning to BC. Her selected poems, The Vision Tree, received the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1982. In that decade she published two full collections with Coach House Press, the last, Hanging Fire, in 1990. Early in that final decade of the 20th century, she published two more books, of essays and radio talks. Her work in public broadcasting, political thought, feminist and eco-criticism (including self-criticism), and poetry (combined variously) makes her not just a poet of enduring influence, but a national treasure. Yet over two decades before Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb appeared in 2014, she announced that she had stopped writing poetry.
In her own seminal study Seeing in the Dark: The Poetry of Phyllis Webb (WLU Press, 1997), Pauline Butling spoke of Webb’s continuing influence and of the risks she took in poetry in terms of political thought and feminine subjectivity. She called Webb’s a “poetry of resistance” and explored Webb’s epistemological and ontological incursions. As part of her analysis, Butling laid bare her own critical writing practice, one of political and formalist analysis, and differentiated it from Webb’s. She wisely stated: “Webb’s work is more meaningfully seen in terms of recurring concerns and diverse but intersecting writing strategies than as a progressive development.” Butling wisely encouraged an approach to Webb’s work that “posits recurrences, intersections, and interventions within social and epistemological formations that expand the boundaries of sense or normalcy.”
In Almost Islands, Stephen Collis gazes into his own scholarly relationship with Webb and her work, exploring in depth the dark of Webb’s silence. Collis is a BC poet respected in his own right for his political and poetic ethics and for his work on political futurity and the environment, in and outside of poetry. The structure of Almost Islands is guided by Webb-like intersections and recurrences, this time seen in the light of friendship, that grace which defends us all against isolation. His title, Almost Islands, borrows from John Donne the image of the island that no one is, and heads into the almost, to explore the peninsula that is Webb’s planetary aura. I think here of all the explorers of islands who later found them bound to the main. As Collis says in his own earlier poem “Almost Islands” (in To the Barricades, Talon 2013):
People of earth
there are no islands now
the planet is peninsular
jutting in space
On this shared peninsula, how can one paint a portrait of a beloved poet without in some way painting a portrait of oneself? How to say anything on a subject that does not in some way include one’s own personal machinery and framework? What, and how, to know the interiority of another human being, another poet?
Almost Islands is gorgeously expansive and unruly, always polite and kind, always curious and seeking.
Almost Islands teems with different forms, deftly and gently “expanding the boundaries of sense.” The pulse and pull of poetry, memoir, political philosophy, and history are all here, as are photos and spaces, intersecting in a prose that wants to undo itself, unravel itself into further and more peninsular modes. Perhaps every text in prose holds the promise of this kind of undoing, and its writer is expected to prevent it. As such, in most prose, so much is not said, not articulated; so many links and rhythms are quashed at the outset in the attempt to mould the text into acceptable forms of prosody. Collis does not quash. Almost Islands is gorgeously expansive and unruly, always polite and kind, always curious and seeking. It has a larger ecological import as well, as it considers climate change and colonialism and their effects: Collis recognizes the necessity of this work so as not to repeat the same old errors made by those (of us, here and elsewhere) whom Capital privileges. Unruly yet loquacious, Collis’s thinking is the high tide that fills the stone bowl, replenishing it, rather than the low tide that leaves it unfed and diminishing.
What is poetic speech? What is silence? Can there be a universal speaking, a cosmic practice, created from a space upon an island in the far east of the Pacific where it touches the far west of a rocky land? To go nowhere is now ecological (keeping a small footprint means staying out of planes). But Webb is not nowhere, and has not gone; where she and her thinking are is always somewhere. And that somewhere is, yes, despite silence, the poem.
It is as if Phyllis Webb’s poems were seeds, and I a bird, inhabited by desires and parasites. Phyllis Webb’s work has been a beacon for me since I started writing and publishing poetry over 40 years ago. My own ways as a poet would be impossible without Phyllis Webb; I have so learned from her. At my first encounter, in 8 More Canadian Poets, I was enthralled and frightened in reading her Naked Poems. The possibilities of spaces, silences, and how words could frame those silences! Then she was the poet who dared to write about suicide in Wilson’s Bowl, which was for me a book as stone rising out of the sea, anticipating tide and a fill of water, of life. Here language was and is anticipation, anticipatory. Not founded on the already written but already founded on the unwritten. Then Water and Light, the first of two extraordinary Webb works of the 1980s, and their touch of one image upon the next, forming meanings in and between images not available to logic. A use of Apollonian form—the ghazal—to Dionysian effect.
In writing his way toward Webb, Collis illuminates not just her work but his own place in the web—the weft and grain—of poetry itself, the weave that is never that of one sole voice or thread, one set of hands.
In all the works of Webb, there is a notion of reading that I share, one that pushes not on the written, or on the unwritten as condition of possibility. To me, poetry is a limit case of language; not all poetry has to engage that limit but, yes, all poetry exists as credence or belief in the possibility that it can go to the limit. Then it can “play above that.” In Water and Light, Webb speaks of inhabiting that limit:
“The hand moved along the wall.
I was able to read, that’s all.”
In writing his way toward Webb, Collis illuminates not just her work but his own place in the web—the weft and grain—of poetry itself, the weave that is never that of one sole voice or thread, one set of hands. The weave of voice that touches threads at every crossing until it is a listening. Collis too speaks of resistance, of “the poem of the revolution” in Webb (her Kropotkin poems) that remains unwritten. He too has attempted this poem in his own practice; resistance has written and unwritten him as well. He is refreshingly aware of where he lives, and of what the stakes of this life are: that he exists on Indigenous lands never ceded to the settler peoples of whom he is part, or ceded under conditions not respected by the white signers of treaty. He is attentive throughout the book to his being a white male, educated, and admits the privilege that comes with these conjunctions. While exploring Webb’s own study and exploration of anarchism over thirty years ago, and her pull toward the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, Collis questions the “colonial mind’s beyondery” in his own time, which is a mindset welded to commodity; he longs instead for the “utopian mind’s beyondery, which is an undisclosed community in waiting.”
To read Webb, as I am trying to do, as a bellwether of the complexities of writing poetry on this far-flung and deeply entangled West Coast, is to confront a deeper problematic: How to write as a settler in the wake of colonialism—how to write, in this place, under the signs of liberty and justice, in ways that do not entirely erase the history of erasures?
Collis sees Webb’s poems as “…avenues into the fray.” He reveals how Webb finds her place in the explosion of subjectivity (so often a received thing; we don’t realize that we make it too), in the “insurrectionary wilderness of the I/am, I will be.” Does one drag toward silence (almost) and the other (not-yet) so as to “keep speaking”? Collis addresses the gaps in Webb’s production as well: I think of Naked Poems, which appeared in 1965, and then Wilson’s Bowl, her next book, in 1980. Is a gap nothing? Or is it eloquent? Of what does a silence speak? There is a ghazal-like link between all Webb’s leaps, all her stanzas, from the minimal glints that shape our realization of desire in her Naked Poems to the bowl sculpted to emerge from rock but is still attached to it.
Collis sets out to share, to endure this binding across the work and words of others that nourishes poetry itself.
The Kropotkin poems that Webb did publish in Wilson’s Bowl were poems of failure, she declared. Yet they are unrelenting. In Phyllis Webb, to stop is a writing action. The stop as active gesture. A kind of Zen? Collis probes all of this: as he writes in the first pages of his book: “If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing?”
Collis sets out to share, to endure this binding across the work and words of others that nourishes poetry itself. He shares his sharing with us. He foregrounds Almost Islands with an epigraph from Edmond Jabès, exiled Jew and philosopher of being, from The Book of Shares. In this book, Jabès finds that sharing is what binds humans together, across the very distance that separates us and makes us alone (and opens us to human conflict). The lines that act as Collis’s epigraph come from a chapter in italics called “Burned Pages” at the very end of Jabès’s book, from a paragraph in which Jabès cites, as he often does instead of narrating, an unnamed sage:[1]
In the end, he said: “We can only use words we know. Hence any
book we write is a book we have already read.”
And added: “Writing means perhaps desperately destroying our
very work, obsessed by the book we shall never write.”
The last phrase, without quotation marks, begins Collis’s book, as if Collis too is obsessed by the book that, by peninsular extension, he will never write. How do we destroy what we will never write? We do it every day, by writing in the words we already know. Unless we decide, as Webb did, to stop.
To Edmund Jabès, the goal of writing is silence. Our words drive us ever further from our goal. “Our debt to the absolute,” says Jabès, “can never be paid in full.” (19)
Like Wilson’s bowl, that site of ritual or welcoming, of joining water and rock on the western shores of the coast of British Columbia, Almost Islands is hollowed rock open to the sky. It endures as bowl though the making of it is over by the time we read it. In recording this migration of one poet through another poet’s life, admitting his own life and opening the two lives to each other in resistance to the vital and necessary urge toward silence—in a world whose seams are straining—Stephen Collis has written a necessary and important book of poetics.
PS The funny thing is that Phyllis Webb has not been totally silent. She has, albeit rarely, responded to the work of others with a text or poem. Strangely, then, I wish to leave her the last word, in the form of a poem she wrote me in 2010 in response to a section in a long poem from my book O Resplandor, which itself borrowed from the lexicon of Montreal poet Oana Avasilichioaei’s then unfinished translations (they appeared in her Limbinal, 2015) of Paul Celan’s Romanian poems. The conversation and tissue of poetry—its ghosts, Webb says—vibrate here as happy fuel.
[1] Edmond Jabès, The Book of Shares. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop from Le Livre du partage. U Chicago Press 1989.
