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Fred Cogswell: The Many-Dimensioned Self
It was thus to both entrance and obeisance that Cogswell’s forms were directed. Of the sestina, for example, he writes: “The spell is simple. Light shines in order / To lead us right. We are blind in black. Six / Light words can guide us as they are set down” (“The Black Swan” 47). The deepest grammar of the poem, then, is its form. It is likewise with the poem as the thing made. Not only does form admit the poet to the duende, that ineffable governing order, but the poem itself (as techne, craft, or matériel) should manifest that order, for “[o]nly a strong and well-wrought glass,” he explained, “should hold / creation’s finest wine” (“Form” 17). Likewise, as avatar of order, the poet becomes God-like in “draw[ing] from / Chaotic things to form a new creation” (“Joy” 26). And so it is the form of the poem that carries its immortality: “[w]hat’s left after time’s devouring worm” is “the stark skeleton of form / [p]reserving art’s symmetry” (“What Can?” 43). Rather than constricting freedom, then, Cogswell believed that “there is no freedom without form” (“Epigram” 26). Critic Wanda Campbell believes that this preoccupation with form is integral to the Maritime writer’s preoccupation with liminality, particularly a spatial liminality borne of being situated on the margins of land and sea (and, more importantly, on the periphery of power). “[O]ccupied not with authentic essence but with liminal uncertainty” (Campbell 160), poets on the periphery such as Cogswell therefore seek permanencies in speaking through the controls of form. To jettison form as disciplining order would align the artist on the margins with forces at the centre – namely “the literary dictatorship of leading poets, professors, and critics” (qtd. in Forsythe, Vision 142) – who are experimenting with formlessness to create that uncertainty, and thus endorse inequities of power while also reproducing those in the work of art. While Cogswell tended to mute his theoretical inclinations he was always conscious of the centre/margin discrepancies in Canada, particularly in how those played out aesthetically. No less a critic than George Woodcock noted this awareness in Cogswell when he lauded him for “display[ing] a most admirable strain of radical Toryism which has enabled him to understand and recognize poets who find they can best express themselves in traditional ways” (qtd. in Cogswell, Later in Chicago ix). Cogswell did indeed express this radical Toryism in oppositional language, stating that the “true poem . . . offers its readers an alternative universe to that in which they normally dwell.” Moreover, if that poem is “well done, it will offer a universe that coheres sufficiently for them to accept it imaginatively even though their own innate prejudices might have normally led them to reject it” (qtd. in Forsythe, Vision 150). This view fits exactly with what Campbell observes as the poet’s political use of liminality to “actively oppose contemporary consumer culture” (152), that culture, in this case, being one that eschews traditional metres. Cogswell’s career-long preoccupation with form, then, must be understood in two ways: first it emerges from a belief in (and an attempt to gain entrance to) the higher order and cadence of the universe; and, second, it develops as an oppositional poetics to the practices of George Bowering (see The Best Notes Merge 59) and other experimental poets whose innovations in a TISH-infused Canadian context were carrying the day. Form, by contrast, was Cogswell’s différance, the means by which, “in a world