March / April 2002 Vol. 34, no. 2

Phyllis Webb: Elemental

Catherine Hobbs
Research and Information Services

An easy climate with all the elements,
earth, air, fire, water.

["Countered" from The Sea Is Also a Garden by Phyllis Webb, Ryerson Press, 1962]

Through the four elements: water, earth, air and fire, the exhibition Phyllis Webb: Elemental explored the contribution of one of Canada’s most admired and mythically elusive poets. The exhibition took place from January 8 to February 28, 2002, in Exhibition Room D of the National Library of Canada and was curated by John Hulcoop, critic, editor and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, and Catherine Hobbs, Literary Manuscript Archivist at the National Library of Canada.

The exhibition displayed material from the archival fonds of Phyllis Webb held in the National Library of Canada’s Literary Manuscript Collection. Visitors to the exhibition were able to see portraits of Webb at various stages of her life as well as the manuscripts and typescripts in which Webb developed her published works. Recently, the poet has taken up visual art as a new mode of expression, and this exhibition was the first where reproductions of Phyllis Webb’s artwork were shown.

shapes fall in a torrent of design
and over the violent space
assume a convention;

["The Colour of the Light" from Trio, Contact Press, 1954]

...most of my summer hours were watery ones. Either in the water or on it.

["Summer" from a CBC Radio talk, 1956]

Born in 1927, Phyllis Webb is one of Canada’s major 20th-century poets. Webb was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and has always been drawn to the West Coast and West-Coast imagery. She has lived on Salt Spring Island almost continuously since 1971. The seascape of the West Coast is very much Webb’s natural element, and water imagery plays a primary role in her work. In fact, the powerful elemental imagery displayed by her works extends even to their titles: The Sea Is Also a Garden, Hanging Fire and Sunday Water.

Webb has had a long and important career as a poet and Canadian cultural figure. In 1949, at the age of 22, she ran as a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) candidate in Victoria, becoming the youngest person ever to run for office in Canada. Through the CCF, she met the poet F.R. (Francis Reginald) Scott, who was to become an important mentor.

During the 1950s, Webb moved to Montreal and joined a literary circle that included the poets Frank Scott, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Eli Mandel and Leonard Cohen. While taking part in the International Poetry Conference at the University of British Columbia in 1963, she met the American poets Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. In response to her rising awareness of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s, Webb recognized that her formative poetry influences had been predominantly male. She absorbed this realization into the subject matter of her poetry and into her continually evolving experimental style.

Webb has played a significant cultural role in Canada. During the 1950s, she formulated a questionnaire concerning Canadian publishing, which was sent to Canadian poets. Her findings were debated at the Canadian Writers’ Conference at Queen’s University in 1955 and led to some of the ideas taken up by those who formed the Canada Council for the Arts in 1957. Webb took a job at CBC Radio in the 1960s, where she headed the University of the Air and pioneered the long-running program Ideas with William Young, through which she worked with such luminaries as R.D. Laing, Martin Luther King and Glenn Gould. For CBC Television, she produced a centennial project of 13 interviews with 26 Canadian poets.

In the late 1960s, Phyllis Webb left the CBC and returned to her birthplace on the West Coast, where she has been living an intensely creative life that includes painting and making collages.

Phyllis Webb won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 1982 for her selected poems The Vision Tree, and, in 1992, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

The exhibition Phyllis Webb: Elemental celebrated this major force in Canadian poetry and gave visitors a chance to see the important letters, manuscripts, books and photographs of Webb’s life. People from across Canada and the United States came to see the exhibit. It is our hope that they went away inspired to read Phyllis Webb’s poetry.

and I would say Mulberry tree, Catalpa,
and you would say, simply, Phyllis.

["Frivolities" from Water and Light by Phyllis Webb, Coach House, 1984]

For more information, contact:

Catherine Hobbs, Literary Manuscript Archivist
National Library of Canada
Room 468
395 Wellington Street, Ottawa ON K1A 0N4
Telephone: (613) 996-7820
Fax: (613) 995-1969
E-mail: catherine.hobbs@nlc-bnc.ca