KEYNOTE ADDRESS, SASKATCHEWAN BOOK AWARDS, NOVEMBER 25, 2005

BY: LORNA CROZIER

A GOOD COUNTRY FOR SINGING

I’d like to think that the invitation for me to give this address was an honour, but the more people who spoke to me about the event, the more I heard that I was asked to speak because they knew I’d be short. At first I thought that the time had finally come to recognize and reward vertically challenged people. Then I realized they meant I was known for sticking to my time, unlike the last speaker, who I understand, talked for an hour and a half. I promise I won’t do that.

“Ride off any horizon and let the measure fall where it may,” is a famous line from John Newlove, a mean, bright Saskatchewan boy born in Kamsack and educated in Regina. Tonight the measure falls here in this room, and it’s not a measure of who is the best among you in the various categories but a measure of the talent this province has fostered, a measure of the infinite gifts singers and storytellers give to a people. Tonight is about worth; it is about history. We are taking the measure of our bond with our cities, with the land and its creatures. We are measuring the value of our dialogue with the sky and all it holds of human longing.  

Show me a man’s landscape and I’ll show you his character, another poet once said. What do our various landscapes say of the character of Saskatchewan people? I show you the short-grass plains of the southwest where I grew up, the boreal forest of the north, the Coteau Hills, the Big Muddy, Red Pheasant, Standing Buffalo, the seemingly endless Saskatchewan Rivers, North and South, the Sand Hills that seem to rise smooth and golden as if out of a Bedouin’s dream. Remember Wallace Stegner’s insight, so familiar to most of us and a source of grumpy pride. Fifty years ago he said that we come from a place that “breeds mystical people, egocentric people. But not humble people.” Yet for a long time most writers here had every reason to feel humble. My generation thought that everything of value happened in the Great Somewhere Else, the place where all the maps in the schoolroom began. And no one in that distant place cared to hear anything we had to say. We’ve come so far now in our own mapping that the poet Judy Krause can toss out this Elsewhere and tongue-in-cheek, locate Somewhere here under our feet. In a poem called “Saskatchewan,” she writes, “I hate Somewhere where the crops exude desperation//I hate Somewhere where there are bad roads, dry rivers, colourful locals// Where Culture is desconstructed in the Culture Department//and there are no spontaneous celebrations.”

Out of this new faith in ourselves, which allows us even to mock who we are or pretend to be, a culture has grown. Thirty years ago, Coteau and Thistledown came into existence out of a vigorous necessity. Their tradition has carried on with presses like Hagios —the newest literary publisher with ten nominations tonight. Look at all the authors of Saskatchewan presses who are in line for these awards. Not that long ago we couldn’t have filled such a room, and we didn’t have writers like Barclay and Hyland and Butala and Campbell and Currie and Sapergia and Cuthand and Simmie and Warren and  the wonderful Guy Vanderhaeghe, who the whole country read just a year ago when his novel came out on top in CBC’s Canada Reads competition.  In a piece he created this May for the Lieutenant’s Governor’s Gala Performance celebrating the Centennial, Guy wrote,“The Prairie landscape is often described in terms of broad brushstrokes, one of earth, one of sky. Whenever I am away from Saskatchewan, of these two, what I yearn for most is the infinite sky. As a pre-schooler, briefly exiled to British Columbia, I complained there was nothing to see: all those mountains got in the way.” Patrick Lane, would have agreed with him. When he first moved here with me in the early eighties, he was so overcome by the view and vastness that he said, “You people live on top of mountains. You don’t have to climb to see.” He concluded that prairie people seek visions not by going up but by going down into the coulees, the river valleys. As Liz Philips writes, “She learns to speak by putting earth in her mouth/ taste of bone meal and mint.”

That’s how I learned to speak—earth from my birthplace in my mouth. Whenever I write, even if it’s a poem about God creating the world, the setting that runs like a movie reel in my head, a movie that also makes me feel the wind and smell the dust on the grass just before rain, this setting is Saskatchewan, in particular the short-grass plains. In trying to figure out its endless appeal and mystery, I can’t help but go back to Wallace Stegner again who wrote: ‘…the world still reduces me to a point and then measures itself from me. Perhaps the meadowlark singing from a fence post—a meadowlark whose dialect I recognize—feels the same way. All points on the circumference are equidistant from him; …; all diameters run through him; if he moves, a new geometry creates itself around him. No wonder he sings. It is a good country that can make anyone feel so.”

Although I now live in lotus land, where the export of BC bud brings in more money than the fishery and forestry industries combined, where there is some outrageous startling flower blooming every month of the year, in my imaginery life I shiver in the cold, hear the squeak of snow under my boots, and in another season, I listen to Stegner’s meadowlark singing the song of the good country I am from. Needless to say, living in two places at once—one on the West Coast and the other somewhere near Swift Current—makes me a person of dislocation. It’s as if in having two homes, I’ll never be home again. In one way or another, I’m always trying to get back to what Gary Hyland so aptly calls the “Absence that holds me here. A space/that creates a landscape.”

My only transportation back is through language, the sweet and sometimes wounded language of home. The words that carry me to the place of my childhood are my mother tongue—and I mean this in more ways than one. When my mother who is now eighty-seven is no longer on this earth, I don’t know if I’ll return to my birth city, or if I do, like Al Purdy, I’ll have to enquire the way of strangers.

For the first few years after Patrick and I moved to Victoria, my mom would visit. One December afternoon when it was pouring rain, I took her to the Butchart Gardens. I grabbed two umbrellas from the stand near the entrance, opened one for her and handed it over. The umbrellas were shaped like upside-down tulips and were transparent. I could see her eighty-four-year-old face break into the grin of a four-year old. “What is it, Mom?” I asked. “I’ve never been under an umbrella before,” she said. “It works!” My mother was a child of the drought and the Depression, and she made me one as well, for though I was born long after that terrible decade ended, I grew up with her stories. Landscape and place are not only what we see—the topography, the weather-- but also what our ancestors have made of them, the stories, however true, that were born out of this light, out of these harsh seasons, this brutal history. Dust formed my bones. Water was so precious, my aunt tells me, that in those years she filled the basin with a dipperful in the morning, and she and her husband washed in it all day until they wore the water out.

My prairie in many ways is a memory-prairie, a dream-prairie, one where I return to my mother, as if to a womb, everything else I know unimportant in the face of this first belonging:

BLIZZARD

Walking into wind, I lean into my mother’s muskrat coat;

around the cuffs her wristbones have worn away the fur.

If we stood still we’d disappear. There’s no up or down,

no houses with their windows lit. The only noise is wind

and what’s inside us. When we get home my father

will be there or not. No one ever looks for us.

I could lie down and stay right here where snow is all

that happens, and silence isn’t loneliness just cold

not talking. My mother tugs at me and won’t let go.

Then stops to find her bearings. In our hoods of stars

we don’t know if anyone will understand

the tongue we speak, so far we are from home.

In his various writings, the naturalist Barry Lopez reminds us that the land is speaking; we just have to learn to listen. What are the vast plains of my childhood saying? How do they sound? In a 2004 Canada Day interview on CBC Radio, the singer k.d.lang claimed that growing up on the Alberta prairies influenced her voice. The huge distances and minimalism led to her long tones, the vibrato held back till the last moment. She said there’s so much horizon, that she learned to sing loudly, to reach out far.  Consul, Alberta, where she grew up, had no concert hall or theatre, but like every small town on the prairies, it had a curling rink.  She’d ride to the rink on her motorcycle, her small dog sitting on the gas tank, and in the summer when no one was inside, she’d slip in and sing, her voice sliding down the length of what in winter would be sheets of ice, her notes reverberating in that empty hollow and echoing back.

I wish I had a comparable story about my voice being shaped by the place I still call home. I know from having heard myself read poems on the radio that I draw out my vowels in a Midwestern way. Is that local accent influenced by the long stretch of road and sky? I hope like k.d. lang that my poems are reaching far, but that’s for someone else to judge, not me. I want to draw that unbroken undulating landscape into the poem without caging it, without crowding it around the edges. At the very least, I want my poems to keep the windows open so that a good wind can blow through.

The sheer enormity of where we come from resists words, but writing often begins with such resistance. How can the small letters you compose, standing as tall as possible on any page, make themselves visible in a landscape that diminishes the human? At the same time, the place demands that you keep your eyes and ears open because the space around you feels attenuated, on the verge, ready to reveal its meaning in the blink of an eye. It duplicates the feeling you get just before the curtain is about to open in a theatre, just before the violinist’s bow is about to meet the strings in a concert hall. Every single stone on the gravel road has its own shadow, sharply defined. Long before you hear any thunder, you can see the weather coming at you from miles away, lightning striding over the fields from the East, clear sky above you, the dark veils of rain draping the southwest corner. With your whole being you sense that something is about to happen. It could be a grouse taking off with your heart as it explodes from the bush in front of you or the sudden annunciation of a huge, flat-bottomed cumulous that drapes you in shadow. It could be an angel formed from all the light pouring off the roof and sides of a tin Quonset.  Is that what the dog sees? Is that the cause of its barking? 

Standing under a sky so blue it would ring if you threw a penny up into the air, you feel yourself vibrate like a tuning fork. The impossibility of translating the place, the people, your soon-to-be-over life, seduces you into language. Maybe this time I’ll get closer, you think, to what predates speaking, to what tantalizes you with all that can’t be named.

I’m going to conclude with a poem I wrote for this occasion. I used the titles of each the nominated books to compose this piece. Sometimes I could only manage a word or two, but they were important ones, not “the” or “they.” Once I sensed the mood and direction of the poem, I have to say my biggest challenge was Joe Campbell’s Take Me Out of the Ball Game—it became “take you out of yourself”—and I worried about how I was going to work in “tapas” and “Ramblas.” What I’ve come up with—with the help of all of the nominated writers and their imaginations—I hope is a kind of Saskatchewan anthem, one that uses the common, numinous words of this place, the mother tongues of our people.

CROW

The crow knows the children of the day, the light-fingered

wind that steals the scent of roses, their simple bliss

of fluttertongue and disarray. In its beak the crow carries light

that fell from the sun, light’s broken body, its divergences.

The crow carries songs to kill a wihtikow; it carries a prairie dog’s

small gifts, firewater, the bruised rind of a lilac moon.

Its eye is fixed on you, on a long man’s shadow,

the black brim of a Quaker’s hat, time’s body.

Encyclopedic, the crow’s caws take you

out of yourself. When you hear it

in early morning, you know this is not Eden

outside your window; you are not building your future

in a garden of art. Instead, at your door runs a highway

where the crow makes tapas out of roadkill, out of the sour

cherries of flattened gut and blood.  Here, trucks of commerce

travel tunnels of tyranny, the maps make no difference,

the twentieth century unravels a new history

the trees and rivers and muskeg lakes do not want to hear.

What the crow knows you know too. Together

you could build a monument to sorrow,

its bitter embrace, its joining. You could write

a legend in a new language of the plains,

call the crow a prairie phoenix growing its heart

from the dry flames red lilies flash along the roadside.

Tonight the crow flies over the stone house

in the middle of town, through the cleft in the Cuthand Hills,

through the eyes of the Cree and beyond. It flies

through a hundred years. When you see it lift above

the limits of your life, know you are seeing

the darkness beneath all things. This, finally, is crow:

your shadow-brother, death-alchemist and father,

your beautiful blood daughter and your charred letter home.