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

May 1, 2005

Dear Mark Smith (since you insist on personalizing this exchange—I prefer reference to The Danforth Review as Speaker of the House, proper Parliamentary goings-on, but that’s just me):

Let’s cut to the chase. I am as uninterested in Dewdney’s theorizing as I am in Shakespeare’s alleged notion of the implications of killing the king. That is to say, I am not incurious, but I don't confuse the power of the poetry itself with specific intellectual ideas that might be identified in it. Moreover, I don't believe that creative work is produced programmatically. There is a drive among many to found their work, and among many others to found other people’s work, but for me the work must stand on its own. Otherwise critics get away with the too-easy exercise of judging it by the supposed intent of the author, a critical position that I thought had been blasted to bits more than half a century ago. Clearly some mop-up action is required.

I am bored beyond measure by your imported ally’s posturing. Here’s the delicious kernel of it all: Dewdney, we are told, rejects “an obsolete poetics founded on the reliable, stable transcription of reality.” Indeed. So does nearly every poet I can bring to mind, and that’s a considerable list, going back to Caedmon and across a few borders. Never mind mimesis: show me a poet who provides us with a “reliable, stable transcription of reality,” whatever that is. Whom is your import thinking of? William McGonagall? 

You compound the felony by having a go at my intentions as well. I am not “eager to defend The Natural History as straight-up nature writing of the reliable old referential sort.” I am eager to defend it for what it is: imaginative writing that follows Pound’s dictum to “make it new.” Dewdney has a keen observer’s eye coupled with an unsettling vision that transforms and re-orders what is observed. He’s not transcribing, he’s imagining, and the result is a unique and consistent poetic language that alters the landscape of southwestern Ontario forever—at least for those who are not plumbing for bad authorial motives instead of coming to grips with the poetry.

Hence comments about Dewdney’s alleged “lack of respect” for his readers, or references to his “excitingly theorized process” simply won’t wash. You are evading the poetry in favour of an extended ad hominem attack on the poet. “No power, no precision, no music”? You just aren’t listening.

Sincerely,

John Baglow