By Shane Neilson
Millicent Elizabeth Travis Lane was born in San Antonio, Texas on Sept. 23, 1934. As the daughter of Army/Air Force Colonel William Livingston Travis (1908 – 1998) and Elsie Ward Travis (1913 – 2010), she travelled around much of the United States during her early life due to her father’s military postings. She entered Vassar University in 1956 and earned her B.A., also editing and publishing in the Vassar Review. Her thesis, The Fences of Robert Frost: The Changes in His Ways of Approaching Philosophical Problems, was awarded an MA in 1957 by Cornell University. After the thesis was expanded into Agnosticism as Technique: the Poetry of Robert Frost, Travis was awarded a PhD by Cornell in 1967.
In 1960 she moved to Fredericton with Hannah, her one year-old daughter, and Dr. Lauriat Lane Jr., her husband. The three moved north because Dr. Lane took a job with the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick. In a “What Happened When He Went to the Store For Bread” moment, Larry, a nature lover, decided to take the job because (1) he was delighted that a fox darted across the Fredericton Airport runway as his plane touched down, and also because (2) the political climate in Canada was more temperate, as evidenced during the conclusion to his interview with Dr. McKay, the University president, when Dr. McKay said, “Now I have to go and play tennis with the campus communist!” At that time, America was ravaged by the red scare.
Travis raised Hannah and her son Lauriat Lane III while working as Honourary Research Associate for the Department of English. She holds that position to the present day. She became a Canadian citizen in 1973. She has published fourteen books of poetry and has also served as an astute reviewer of poetry for the Fiddlehead and other periodicals for over fifty years. Along the way she has won the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Bliss Carman Award. She is a member of the Raging Grannies and Voice of Women for Peace. She is a founding member as well as Honourary President of the Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick. She also is a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets, participating vociferously in its Feminist Caucus. Dr. Lauriat Lane Jr. died in 2005.
Travis continues to write poems and reviews.[i]
The Book and Its Cover
Divinations and Shorter Poems 1973-1978, the title of Travis Lane’s third trade book of poetry, gives Christianity title billing. The OED lists four definitions for divination, the first of which is: “1. The action or practice of divining; the foretelling of future events or discovery of what is hidden or obscure by supernatural or magical means; soothsaying, augury, prophecy. With a and pl., an exercise of this, a prophecy, an augury.” Not coincidentally, a function of poetry is to divine the self, to render unto the reader a clear sense of a poem’s speaker, the poetic consciousness that lays out a field of thought, that creates the thing called “voice” part by part to make an assembled whole. Religion claims prophecy as its province, yet perhaps form is the true arbiter of prophecy, for the desert tales of the Old Testament and the memorable apocalypse foretold in the New are written as poetry.
Religion, that ye olde clearinghouse of wholes, has had many holes shot through it by Western secularists. Modern literary audiences find devotional verse quite unwelcome, despite the multitudinous lay work on the Internet. Though devotional verse isn’t dead – if it were, awe in the face of mystery would have to be rooted out of the human species – it is unfashionable and even bears the stigma of amateurism. But it’s odd that the audience for literature, tenderized over the centuries by God-verse, has become sick of their daily bread. T.S. Eliot, a famous convert to Anglicanism, had this to say in 1935 – almost eighty years ago now, and more true today than Eliot could ever have prophesied:
[T]he reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think they have something individually to offer, but are really working together in the same direction . . . [a]nd there never was a time, I believe, when those who read at all, read so many more books by living authors than books by dead authors; there was never a time so completely parochial, so shut off from the past… it is more difficult today to be an individual than it ever was before.
(“Religion and Christianity”)
In an essay on Travis Lane, Brian Bartlett asserts that Lane is a poet “deeply informed by Christianity” (“Back to the Basket of Small Things”). Indeed, by choosing to write about religious themes, Lane faces a problem that any poet would face: she is often ignored. As Eliot wrote, “For the great majority of people who love poetry, ‘religious poetry’ is a variety of minor poetry.” Yet Lane is special: a major poet who bucked the trend away from religion. She stubbornly took it on, along with any number of other subjects. Stubbornly, she wrote well on topics few are disposed to read. Lane’s natural gifts with image, sound, pacing, and argument took on the challenge of writing spirit as poetry. Despite these formidable gifts and the successfully met challenge, Lane’s not received her due.
I hasten to provide two disclaimers: (1) to my knowledge, Lane has never been taken to task in a review for writing about religion in any of her books. But criticizing a person on the basis of their beliefs is gauche – the unwritten code of reviewing prefers to leave the topic of faith alone in favour of voice, or poetics of space, or “innovation.” Technical details are more important than vision in contemporary literary reviews. In fact, it’s hard to find a credibly negative review (or a series of mixed reviews which consistently point out a negative aspect) of Lane’s work at all, suggesting that Lane has not been taken seriously by the poetry establishment.
Perhaps a more general strategy of ignorance has been put in effect by Canadian critics who see religion front-loaded in her early books and decide such old-hat material is better passed over in favour of a book written by someone with body piercings. (2) The mantle of “religious poet” does not fit well on Travis, who can write some delightfully blasphemous things. Her treatment of religion as subject is difficult – she does not state things plain, but rather wrestles and complicates her religious theme by adding politics and gender into the mix, constructing her thoughts within a larger framework of meditation on beauty. Furthermore, Travis only ever wrote about religion part-time and the frequency drastically decreased over the years.
Though this essay focuses on the theme of religion in her poetry, Travis writes about much else – as Jeanette Lynes[ii] points out in the introduction to the thin selected volume of Lane The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand from Wilfred Laurier University Press (2007), Lane’s dominant themes are the decline of the environment and interiority (ix).[iii] In fact, Bruce Meyer speculates that Lane hasn’t been recognized as being of “the first rank” in Canada because of “the range her poetry takes up with considerable ease. She is not a poet of a single dimension nor a single voice. . . [t]he life she attempts to capture in her poetry is one of considerable variety that exists on a considerable number of planes, scales, and in a broad range of diction.”
Rebecca Gelyn concurs with Meyer when reviewing The All Nighter’s Radio (2010), writing that Lane’s verse “span[s] the spectrum of multiplicity of thoughts, musings, imagistic details and jots of stories. The collection is pluralistic in every sense of the word. Not only does Lane hold free range on the subject matter of her poems, but her variety of expression is daring.” Limiting Lane to the category of “religious poet” is incorrect and constitutes a strategy of relegation, for who wants to read poems about God by a church lady? Yet only the densest reader couldn’t see that Lane’s poems are more concerned about their integrity as poems than they are with revelation. On the other hand, only an illiterate non-reader could miss this poet’s contemplation of faith and belief.
Her first five books contain the largest amount of God-verse, but a steep decline in religious content followed. Did Travis rethink her strategy after reading the back cover of Reckonings, which unwisely states, “the abiding impulses of her work remain spiritously generous and affirmative” and that she “express[es] a powerful religious imagination about which W.H. New has written, ‘the processes of revelation are more central to the poems than are any messages about society or self.’” Sometimes it takes a professorial nincompoop to damn a poet with positives in order for the poet to realize how they are being interpreted. Using my own divination machine, I trance to see Lane looking at the cover for the first time and, in a moment of secular revelation, reconsidering her brand. Trance with me: there she is, and in her hand is the fifth book of five very strong books from a regional press, a book that is the culmination of an early wave of work that’s better than the first five books of any poet of her generation. No matter how hard I trance, I can’t get Travis to throw the book into a fire. That move is too out of character. But I do see a question pass like a shadow across her face: what does a woman have to do?
The shadow passes quickly. Never one to follow trends, Lane followed up Divinations with the aforementioned Reckonings that contains the very great long poem titled “The Witch of the Inner Wood.” You guessed it – it’s a reworking of the Christian creation myth. But what a reworking: it’s feminist, overtly a solution to the problem of “men,” and hilarious to boot.
The figure who comes to mind as foil is Margaret Avison. The latter-day Griffin winner (2003) famously converted to Christianity in 1963. Like Lane, Avison wrote God-verse throughout her poetry career. But differences matter more than the similarities: Lane left the United States and a PhD at Cornell to arrive in Fredericton, where she eventually got her start as a poet with Fred Cogswell’s local Fiddlehead Poetry Books (soon to become Goose Lane Editions). What’s the matter with her, the thinking might go, why did she come to us? (Never mind that Lane’s PhD thesis was on Robert Frost, whose reputation is on the rise once more, and that she marked papers for Vladimir Nabokov and was a section leader for M.H. Abrams.) Avison, on the other hand, left Canada for Chicago on a Guggenheim fellowship – a sexier proposition in terms of career, the old story of making it in the States as proof of quality to Canadians. While there, Avison wrote Winter Sun, a book published by a Toronto-based press that won her the Governor General’s Award in 1960.[iv] She returned to Canada and entered into graduate studies at the University of Toronto. Avison’s second book, 1966’s The Dumbfounding, arriving as it did three years after Avison’s conversion, came on much stronger about religion. Consider the last stanza of the old-timey-titled “Judgement”:
Judgement? Not His. It’s gaming
with loaded dice, & a god made like men
or men with power behind their couldn’t care less,
and not the Truth with the
bite of final cold, & marvelling in it
of bleeding, and waiting, and joy.
Be not afraid! The conclusion of the stanza concerns the Passion (Christ’s final entry into Jerusalem and crucifixion) but there’s lots of other religious gestures in the preceding lines, what with a capital “His” referring to the divine maker and some powerful capital-T “Truth” to buttress the brimstone. This is a poet who was unafraid to write about her Christian God in poetry. To think that Avison suffered for doing so relative to Travis Lane is to be struck dumb. Even so, David A. Kent, the author of the ECW monograph Margaret Avison and Her Works, figures it’s Avison’s third book, sunblue (1978), that marks Avison’s “emerg[ence] as a devotional poet in the English tradition.” Kent adds that Avison’s second and third books rely upon the Bible with an “increasing importance.”[v] Finally, Avison also taught creative writing at points in her life and took writing workshops – she networked harder amongst a community of poets in more powerful places. Part of the story behind her success is that A.J.M. Smith served as her critical champion “for over thirty years.”[vi]
To recap: Travis Lane and Avison had religion in their books from the beginning but Avison made her name before the adoption of a dogmatic poetics. Avison went to America on a prestigious writing grant but Lane came to an economically depressed part of Canada. Avison was born in Ontario, lived most of her life in Ontario, studied in Ontario, served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, and worked briefly for the CBC; yet Lane lived largely out of sight in Fredericton, taking care of her two children and working desultorily as a research associate for the English department at the University of New Brunswick.
Lane never took a creative writing workshop, nor did she ever run one, and until Jeanette Lynes took up the cause she’s never had a critic patron to promote her. Though Avison was criticized for her God-verse over the years, she was impossible to dismiss because of her early acclaim. Her work required attack to de-canonize it even though it is usually affirmative and Praise-The-Lord. In contrast, Lane too ignored the trend of contemporary literature by including religious verse as her main myth-kitty but suffered a status quo that casually ignored her, even though Travis’ use of religion is rather a questing complication of iconography and biblical wisdom, of how close the spirit gets to transcendence when it approaches the boundary line of the beautiful. Travis writes intellectually sensuous poetry that’s skeptical about God and the way things are as wrought by human beings. Even so, Travis continued on, unphased – even in her afterword to Lynes’s volume in the Laurier Poetry Series from 2007, she asserts that poetry has the “power to uplift the spirit” and to “evoke mysteries.” Indeed, she goes even further: “Mystery, I think, is the chief subject of poetry.” Some readers, though, would run screaming if the mystery were delivered with the vehicle of Christian iconography, which can often be the case in Lane. And that’s a shame.[vii]
Travis’s sense of mystery obscures didacticism – her message is poetry, form and content melded to make some larger point about being on the earth. She isn’t interested in saving anyone. Though as William Carlos Williams has said, men die every day for lack of what is found in poetry.
I too used to run screaming from the spectre of religion in modern poetry. I remain an agnostic who despises evangelicalism, yet I’ve grown to understand that there is a natural human attraction to mystery and that I possess that same attraction. For much of human history, our art has been sponsored or inspired by faith and its institutions. Despite the mixed practical effects of religion in historical terms, I honour the master artworks of religious traditions and can’t help but wonder if, somehow, the deity herself was responsible for them. In short, the only conversion I’m out for here is to convert an audience into appreciators of Lane.
Editorial note: This essay will appear as the introduction to a Frog Hollow Press monograph titled The Book and Its Cover, scheduled for spring 2015, and will feature the previously unpublished essay by Jeanette Lynes alluded to in footnote ii, as well as a substantial essay on Lane’s poetics by Jan Zwicky.
[i] In a 35th anniversary issue of the Fiddlehead (1980) that turned a spotlight upon poets associated with the publication, Travis is introduced by the editors in this way: “Travis Lane, though her name has not been on our masthead, has been, since 1970, our resident book reviewer as well as a contributor of poems. Her long, searching reviews and review articles have helped make that section of the magazine substantial and interesting.” Though entirely accurate, the brief bio says more than it knows: Travis didn’t want the power attributed to being on a masthead though she deserved to be there, a career-impeding decision; and the focus is on Lane’s prose and not her poetry, which is not a good recommendation amongst poets.
Though it’s unusual to footnote a biographical note in a monograph, I do so because this book contains a bibliography which lists all of Travis Lane’s prose publications (in a way, her real biography). A reason needs to be given for that decision. It’s simple: Travis Lane has been the most perceptive reviewer of poetry in Canada over the course of five decades. The publication of a Lane collected prose would be a great service to Canadian letters. Kathy Mac has written that Lane has published “numerous deeply nuanced reviews and essays on Canadian, West Indian, and European poets” (New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia). That Lane bothered to write on the latter two traditions of poetry speaks volumes about her concern for career –Travis disregarded the chief way to get ahead in Canadian poetry, which is to praise other Canadian poetry. Lane’s reviews are also like her poetry: “she chooses books that explore deeply the relationships between aesthetics and politics, form and faith.”
[ii] In the unpublished essay “M. Travis Lane, Ecopoet” Lynes has made an excellent case for Travis Lane to be included in contemporary discussions on ecopoetics, arguing that she belongs in the conversation with “Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky” (Travis Lane personal collection). Lynes deserves much acclaim for keeping some of Lane’s early work in print and for producing the most substantial scholarship on Lane to date. Because Lynes is the “authority” on Lane, I will refer to her comments more than once in these endnotes as a kind of conversation.
[iii] To this list I add race, gender, marriage, and various large-scale social upheavals including war.
[iv] Her writing in Winter Sun is very much like Lane’s in terms of religion. Kent writes, “preconversion Avison is a moral humanist with residual Christian sentiments writing in a tradition shaped by Christian premises” (Margaret Avison and Her Works 22). Kent describes Avison’s faith as “resid[ing] in the human imagination as a means of occasional grace and in poetry as the vehicle of timeless truths, productive of ‘epiphanies.’” Lane and Avison were much alike at the start, but Avison became increasingly dogmatic as time went on. If anything, Lane retreated from Christian iconography and sentiment, but not morality.
[v] This importance dwarfs Lane’s early-career usage in both frequency and intensity, so the comparison I’m making between Lane and Avison’s religious verse isn’t exact. Nevertheless, the comparison remains valid in terms of kind.
[vi] For all of Kent’s argument about Avison’s “fierce independence” and “self-imposed isolation,” it’s hard for any poet to compare to Lane’s sheer reclusiveness from trend and conference. I rest my case on this anecdote: Avison once had a chaste skinnydip with A.J.M. Smith (an incident recounted in her autobiography I am Here and Not Not-There). Try to imagine Penny Lane ever doing that. Though if Lane had, it might have helped her career . . .
[vii] There are more similarities to Avison and Lane in terms of their poetry. Both poets consider myth. Both know the history of poetry in the English language. Both share Gerard Manley Hopkins as devotional influences (as Kent remarks for Avison and Guy Hamel for Lane). There are also syntactic congruencies and much else but this is a subject for another day. I should also point out that Avison, like Lane, frequently reviewed books.
The Book and Its Cover: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane
Articles
By Shane Neilson
In 1960 she moved to Fredericton with Hannah, her one year-old daughter, and Dr. Lauriat Lane Jr., her husband. The three moved north because Dr. Lane took a job with the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick. In a “What Happened When He Went to the Store For Bread” moment, Larry, a nature lover, decided to take the job because (1) he was delighted that a fox darted across the Fredericton Airport runway as his plane touched down, and also because (2) the political climate in Canada was more temperate, as evidenced during the conclusion to his interview with Dr. McKay, the University president, when Dr. McKay said, “Now I have to go and play tennis with the campus communist!” At that time, America was ravaged by the red scare.
Travis raised Hannah and her son Lauriat Lane III while working as Honourary Research Associate for the Department of English. She holds that position to the present day. She became a Canadian citizen in 1973. She has published fourteen books of poetry and has also served as an astute reviewer of poetry for the Fiddlehead and other periodicals for over fifty years. Along the way she has won the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Bliss Carman Award. She is a member of the Raging Grannies and Voice of Women for Peace. She is a founding member as well as Honourary President of the Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick. She also is a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets, participating vociferously in its Feminist Caucus. Dr. Lauriat Lane Jr. died in 2005.
Travis continues to write poems and reviews.[i]
The Book and Its Cover
Divinations and Shorter Poems 1973-1978, the title of Travis Lane’s third trade book of poetry, gives Christianity title billing. The OED lists four definitions for divination, the first of which is: “1. The action or practice of divining; the foretelling of future events or discovery of what is hidden or obscure by supernatural or magical means; soothsaying, augury, prophecy. With a and pl., an exercise of this, a prophecy, an augury.” Not coincidentally, a function of poetry is to divine the self, to render unto the reader a clear sense of a poem’s speaker, the poetic consciousness that lays out a field of thought, that creates the thing called “voice” part by part to make an assembled whole. Religion claims prophecy as its province, yet perhaps form is the true arbiter of prophecy, for the desert tales of the Old Testament and the memorable apocalypse foretold in the New are written as poetry.
Religion, that ye olde clearinghouse of wholes, has had many holes shot through it by Western secularists. Modern literary audiences find devotional verse quite unwelcome, despite the multitudinous lay work on the Internet. Though devotional verse isn’t dead – if it were, awe in the face of mystery would have to be rooted out of the human species – it is unfashionable and even bears the stigma of amateurism. But it’s odd that the audience for literature, tenderized over the centuries by God-verse, has become sick of their daily bread. T.S. Eliot, a famous convert to Anglicanism, had this to say in 1935 – almost eighty years ago now, and more true today than Eliot could ever have prophesied:
[T]he reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think they have something individually to offer, but are really working together in the same direction . . . [a]nd there never was a time, I believe, when those who read at all, read so many more books by living authors than books by dead authors; there was never a time so completely parochial, so shut off from the past… it is more difficult today to be an individual than it ever was before.
(“Religion and Christianity”)
In an essay on Travis Lane, Brian Bartlett asserts that Lane is a poet “deeply informed by Christianity” (“Back to the Basket of Small Things”). Indeed, by choosing to write about religious themes, Lane faces a problem that any poet would face: she is often ignored. As Eliot wrote, “For the great majority of people who love poetry, ‘religious poetry’ is a variety of minor poetry.” Yet Lane is special: a major poet who bucked the trend away from religion. She stubbornly took it on, along with any number of other subjects. Stubbornly, she wrote well on topics few are disposed to read. Lane’s natural gifts with image, sound, pacing, and argument took on the challenge of writing spirit as poetry. Despite these formidable gifts and the successfully met challenge, Lane’s not received her due.
I hasten to provide two disclaimers: (1) to my knowledge, Lane has never been taken to task in a review for writing about religion in any of her books. But criticizing a person on the basis of their beliefs is gauche – the unwritten code of reviewing prefers to leave the topic of faith alone in favour of voice, or poetics of space, or “innovation.” Technical details are more important than vision in contemporary literary reviews. In fact, it’s hard to find a credibly negative review (or a series of mixed reviews which consistently point out a negative aspect) of Lane’s work at all, suggesting that Lane has not been taken seriously by the poetry establishment.
Perhaps a more general strategy of ignorance has been put in effect by Canadian critics who see religion front-loaded in her early books and decide such old-hat material is better passed over in favour of a book written by someone with body piercings. (2) The mantle of “religious poet” does not fit well on Travis, who can write some delightfully blasphemous things. Her treatment of religion as subject is difficult – she does not state things plain, but rather wrestles and complicates her religious theme by adding politics and gender into the mix, constructing her thoughts within a larger framework of meditation on beauty. Furthermore, Travis only ever wrote about religion part-time and the frequency drastically decreased over the years.
Though this essay focuses on the theme of religion in her poetry, Travis writes about much else – as Jeanette Lynes[ii] points out in the introduction to the thin selected volume of Lane The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand from Wilfred Laurier University Press (2007), Lane’s dominant themes are the decline of the environment and interiority (ix).[iii] In fact, Bruce Meyer speculates that Lane hasn’t been recognized as being of “the first rank” in Canada because of “the range her poetry takes up with considerable ease. She is not a poet of a single dimension nor a single voice. . . [t]he life she attempts to capture in her poetry is one of considerable variety that exists on a considerable number of planes, scales, and in a broad range of diction.”
Rebecca Gelyn concurs with Meyer when reviewing The All Nighter’s Radio (2010), writing that Lane’s verse “span[s] the spectrum of multiplicity of thoughts, musings, imagistic details and jots of stories. The collection is pluralistic in every sense of the word. Not only does Lane hold free range on the subject matter of her poems, but her variety of expression is daring.” Limiting Lane to the category of “religious poet” is incorrect and constitutes a strategy of relegation, for who wants to read poems about God by a church lady? Yet only the densest reader couldn’t see that Lane’s poems are more concerned about their integrity as poems than they are with revelation. On the other hand, only an illiterate non-reader could miss this poet’s contemplation of faith and belief.
Her first five books contain the largest amount of God-verse, but a steep decline in religious content followed. Did Travis rethink her strategy after reading the back cover of Reckonings, which unwisely states, “the abiding impulses of her work remain spiritously generous and affirmative” and that she “express[es] a powerful religious imagination about which W.H. New has written, ‘the processes of revelation are more central to the poems than are any messages about society or self.’” Sometimes it takes a professorial nincompoop to damn a poet with positives in order for the poet to realize how they are being interpreted. Using my own divination machine, I trance to see Lane looking at the cover for the first time and, in a moment of secular revelation, reconsidering her brand. Trance with me: there she is, and in her hand is the fifth book of five very strong books from a regional press, a book that is the culmination of an early wave of work that’s better than the first five books of any poet of her generation. No matter how hard I trance, I can’t get Travis to throw the book into a fire. That move is too out of character. But I do see a question pass like a shadow across her face: what does a woman have to do?
The shadow passes quickly. Never one to follow trends, Lane followed up Divinations with the aforementioned Reckonings that contains the very great long poem titled “The Witch of the Inner Wood.” You guessed it – it’s a reworking of the Christian creation myth. But what a reworking: it’s feminist, overtly a solution to the problem of “men,” and hilarious to boot.
The figure who comes to mind as foil is Margaret Avison. The latter-day Griffin winner (2003) famously converted to Christianity in 1963. Like Lane, Avison wrote God-verse throughout her poetry career. But differences matter more than the similarities: Lane left the United States and a PhD at Cornell to arrive in Fredericton, where she eventually got her start as a poet with Fred Cogswell’s local Fiddlehead Poetry Books (soon to become Goose Lane Editions). What’s the matter with her, the thinking might go, why did she come to us? (Never mind that Lane’s PhD thesis was on Robert Frost, whose reputation is on the rise once more, and that she marked papers for Vladimir Nabokov and was a section leader for M.H. Abrams.) Avison, on the other hand, left Canada for Chicago on a Guggenheim fellowship – a sexier proposition in terms of career, the old story of making it in the States as proof of quality to Canadians. While there, Avison wrote Winter Sun, a book published by a Toronto-based press that won her the Governor General’s Award in 1960.[iv] She returned to Canada and entered into graduate studies at the University of Toronto. Avison’s second book, 1966’s The Dumbfounding, arriving as it did three years after Avison’s conversion, came on much stronger about religion. Consider the last stanza of the old-timey-titled “Judgement”:
Judgement? Not His. It’s gaming
with loaded dice, & a god made like men
or men with power behind their couldn’t care less,
and not the Truth with the
bite of final cold, & marvelling in it
of bleeding, and waiting, and joy.
Be not afraid! The conclusion of the stanza concerns the Passion (Christ’s final entry into Jerusalem and crucifixion) but there’s lots of other religious gestures in the preceding lines, what with a capital “His” referring to the divine maker and some powerful capital-T “Truth” to buttress the brimstone. This is a poet who was unafraid to write about her Christian God in poetry. To think that Avison suffered for doing so relative to Travis Lane is to be struck dumb. Even so, David A. Kent, the author of the ECW monograph Margaret Avison and Her Works, figures it’s Avison’s third book, sunblue (1978), that marks Avison’s “emerg[ence] as a devotional poet in the English tradition.” Kent adds that Avison’s second and third books rely upon the Bible with an “increasing importance.”[v] Finally, Avison also taught creative writing at points in her life and took writing workshops – she networked harder amongst a community of poets in more powerful places. Part of the story behind her success is that A.J.M. Smith served as her critical champion “for over thirty years.”[vi]
To recap: Travis Lane and Avison had religion in their books from the beginning but Avison made her name before the adoption of a dogmatic poetics. Avison went to America on a prestigious writing grant but Lane came to an economically depressed part of Canada. Avison was born in Ontario, lived most of her life in Ontario, studied in Ontario, served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, and worked briefly for the CBC; yet Lane lived largely out of sight in Fredericton, taking care of her two children and working desultorily as a research associate for the English department at the University of New Brunswick.
Lane never took a creative writing workshop, nor did she ever run one, and until Jeanette Lynes took up the cause she’s never had a critic patron to promote her. Though Avison was criticized for her God-verse over the years, she was impossible to dismiss because of her early acclaim. Her work required attack to de-canonize it even though it is usually affirmative and Praise-The-Lord. In contrast, Lane too ignored the trend of contemporary literature by including religious verse as her main myth-kitty but suffered a status quo that casually ignored her, even though Travis’ use of religion is rather a questing complication of iconography and biblical wisdom, of how close the spirit gets to transcendence when it approaches the boundary line of the beautiful. Travis writes intellectually sensuous poetry that’s skeptical about God and the way things are as wrought by human beings. Even so, Travis continued on, unphased – even in her afterword to Lynes’s volume in the Laurier Poetry Series from 2007, she asserts that poetry has the “power to uplift the spirit” and to “evoke mysteries.” Indeed, she goes even further: “Mystery, I think, is the chief subject of poetry.” Some readers, though, would run screaming if the mystery were delivered with the vehicle of Christian iconography, which can often be the case in Lane. And that’s a shame.[vii]
Travis’s sense of mystery obscures didacticism – her message is poetry, form and content melded to make some larger point about being on the earth. She isn’t interested in saving anyone. Though as William Carlos Williams has said, men die every day for lack of what is found in poetry.
I too used to run screaming from the spectre of religion in modern poetry. I remain an agnostic who despises evangelicalism, yet I’ve grown to understand that there is a natural human attraction to mystery and that I possess that same attraction. For much of human history, our art has been sponsored or inspired by faith and its institutions. Despite the mixed practical effects of religion in historical terms, I honour the master artworks of religious traditions and can’t help but wonder if, somehow, the deity herself was responsible for them. In short, the only conversion I’m out for here is to convert an audience into appreciators of Lane.
Editorial note: This essay will appear as the introduction to a Frog Hollow Press monograph titled The Book and Its Cover, scheduled for spring 2015, and will feature the previously unpublished essay by Jeanette Lynes alluded to in footnote ii, as well as a substantial essay on Lane’s poetics by Jan Zwicky.
[i] In a 35th anniversary issue of the Fiddlehead (1980) that turned a spotlight upon poets associated with the publication, Travis is introduced by the editors in this way: “Travis Lane, though her name has not been on our masthead, has been, since 1970, our resident book reviewer as well as a contributor of poems. Her long, searching reviews and review articles have helped make that section of the magazine substantial and interesting.” Though entirely accurate, the brief bio says more than it knows: Travis didn’t want the power attributed to being on a masthead though she deserved to be there, a career-impeding decision; and the focus is on Lane’s prose and not her poetry, which is not a good recommendation amongst poets.
Though it’s unusual to footnote a biographical note in a monograph, I do so because this book contains a bibliography which lists all of Travis Lane’s prose publications (in a way, her real biography). A reason needs to be given for that decision. It’s simple: Travis Lane has been the most perceptive reviewer of poetry in Canada over the course of five decades. The publication of a Lane collected prose would be a great service to Canadian letters. Kathy Mac has written that Lane has published “numerous deeply nuanced reviews and essays on Canadian, West Indian, and European poets” (New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia). That Lane bothered to write on the latter two traditions of poetry speaks volumes about her concern for career –Travis disregarded the chief way to get ahead in Canadian poetry, which is to praise other Canadian poetry. Lane’s reviews are also like her poetry: “she chooses books that explore deeply the relationships between aesthetics and politics, form and faith.”
[ii] In the unpublished essay “M. Travis Lane, Ecopoet” Lynes has made an excellent case for Travis Lane to be included in contemporary discussions on ecopoetics, arguing that she belongs in the conversation with “Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky” (Travis Lane personal collection). Lynes deserves much acclaim for keeping some of Lane’s early work in print and for producing the most substantial scholarship on Lane to date. Because Lynes is the “authority” on Lane, I will refer to her comments more than once in these endnotes as a kind of conversation.
[iii] To this list I add race, gender, marriage, and various large-scale social upheavals including war.
[iv] Her writing in Winter Sun is very much like Lane’s in terms of religion. Kent writes, “preconversion Avison is a moral humanist with residual Christian sentiments writing in a tradition shaped by Christian premises” (Margaret Avison and Her Works 22). Kent describes Avison’s faith as “resid[ing] in the human imagination as a means of occasional grace and in poetry as the vehicle of timeless truths, productive of ‘epiphanies.’” Lane and Avison were much alike at the start, but Avison became increasingly dogmatic as time went on. If anything, Lane retreated from Christian iconography and sentiment, but not morality.
[v] This importance dwarfs Lane’s early-career usage in both frequency and intensity, so the comparison I’m making between Lane and Avison’s religious verse isn’t exact. Nevertheless, the comparison remains valid in terms of kind.
[vi] For all of Kent’s argument about Avison’s “fierce independence” and “self-imposed isolation,” it’s hard for any poet to compare to Lane’s sheer reclusiveness from trend and conference. I rest my case on this anecdote: Avison once had a chaste skinnydip with A.J.M. Smith (an incident recounted in her autobiography I am Here and Not Not-There). Try to imagine Penny Lane ever doing that. Though if Lane had, it might have helped her career . . .
[vii] There are more similarities to Avison and Lane in terms of their poetry. Both poets consider myth. Both know the history of poetry in the English language. Both share Gerard Manley Hopkins as devotional influences (as Kent remarks for Avison and Guy Hamel for Lane). There are also syntactic congruencies and much else but this is a subject for another day. I should also point out that Avison, like Lane, frequently reviewed books.