Subject: Reply to "Reply to Comment (very late) on J.M. Smith's review of Dewdney"

April 14, 2005

Dear John Baglow:

To continue our slow-motion conversation.

I’m afraid that you only prove my point. By the measure of anything like the criteria for what has for a while now been called ‘nature writing’ (poetry or prose), almost every sentence in The Natural History is woeful.

But this just in…

In an unsympathetic review of Dewdney’s book from his A Lover’s Quarrel (2004), Carmine Starnino does at least provide us with some of the background information I’ve been looking for:

Allen Hepburn [an academic] will tell you that by ‘eliminating the distinctions between self and world, literary and scientific discourse, poetry and visual art, poetry and prose, and between sense and nonsense, Dewdney teases the mind insulated by the "opaque logos," and armed by habituated thinking, into unfamiliar regions of awareness.’ …. Dewdney sees [his poetry] as striking a blow against the ready-made referential logic of consciousness in order to provoke ‘unthought-of possibilities, suddenly hostile and chaotic’ (107).

He goes on: 

The problem, however, is that those ‘hostile and chaotic’ flakes of phrasing can’t perform their mind-refurbishing duty until the reader is taught to affix the appropriate avant-gardistic signature to them. When reading Dewdney it’s therefore crucial to keep in mind the basic idea that props up his practice – the rejection of a discredited, obsolete poetics founded on the reliable, stable transcription of reality – because that signpost will be all that exists to reassure you that [any given passage] is to be taken seriously (107-8).

Starnino’s aim in reviewing The Natural History seems not to have been to understand and assess the poem’s admittedly limited possibilities so much as to ridicule the posturings of Canadian experimental poets in general. (See John Paul Fiorentino’s purely ad hominem counter-attack [look under March 28, 2005] in a recent issue of Toronto’s Word.)

I tried (I believe) harder to make something out of Dewdney’s book, following such readerly cues as it provided. But I also ended up frustrated and displeased.

It is interesting that you, John Baglow, are eager to defend The Natural History as straight-up nature writing of the reliable old referential sort. I tried to read it that way too. I cannot tell if Mr. Dewdney would be amused by our theoretical naiveté, since the most exasperating thing about his book, ultimately, is not its clique-ish avant-gardism, but the fact (which you help to demonstrate) that its author tries to have it both ways. At will apparently he cuts free of ‘the logos,’ and yet everywhere relies on the referentiality of words to anchor his poem to a world of commonplace meanings.

Dewdney treats his naïve and his in-the-know readers with an equal lack of respect, playing to their credulousness rather than to their intelligence and resourcefulness.

This is a poet who has a few mostly unremarkable things to say about the cottage country north of Toronto, but who dresses the gist of his discourse up with the ornament of an excitingly theorized process. In centuries past, ornament was something a writer added at the level of phrase, or sentence, to spritz up a banal thought. Dewdney’s sort of ornament is also added afterwards. It is analogous to what one can do with the Photoshop program. Take an ordinary landscape photo, and the reality it refers to, and then put it through (say) a ‘paleontology’ filter. Or an ‘information theory’ filter. Etc.

The poem’s text has clearly not been produced only by stochastic compositional processes. Dewdney all too evidently owns and relishes various thematic hobby-horses: the barmy notion of subjectively experienced orgasm as a driver of evolution, for one. The giggle-inducing phrase "Norse gold forged / in orgasms and sun, her face vigilant…" is not just a one-off random compositional ‘event.’ It’s a pet thought – not what I would call a chance combination of words – and so it is for most of the phrases or sentences repeated in a number of slightly differently dressed-up formulations throughout the book. Few of these have any traditional poetic value (no power, no precision, no music). But nor can I see any great ‘experimental’ value in them, organized as they are by banal observations or thoughts (and hence by the shared meanings he otherwise scorns).

By the way – this addressed to TDR's readership at large –, in the ECW edition (2002) of The Natural History I reviewed, all parts of the poem are lineated, whereas in the edition that Starnino reviewed it appears to have been type-set as a prose poem.

J. Mark Smith