Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott

By F. r. Scott and George Elliott Clarke

Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott’s poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott’s artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and immigration. Scott is best remembered for “The Canadian Authors Meet,” “W.L.M.K,” and “Laurentian Shield,” but his poetic oeuvre includes significant occasional poems, elegies, found poems, and pointed satires. This selection of poems showcases the politics, the humour, and the beauty of this central modernist figure.

The introduction by Laura Moss and the afterword by George Elliott Clarke provide two distinct approaches to reading Scott’s work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781554583782

Book preview

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Introduction

There is an ice-breaking game where participants have to list five people they’d like to have dinner with and then explain why. I have rarely played this game when someone hasn’t said Albert Einstein or Mother Teresa. As much as I respect these two historical figures, they aren’t on my list. I’d rather have a real wrangling conversation than the respectful fawning and series of awkward silences I suspect would ensue at a dinner with Einstein or the lazy guilt I’d feel at a dinner with Mother Teresa. One of my five is the poet F.R. Scott. He has the marks of a good dinner companion—wit and a sharp tongue; a passionate commitment to art and politics; a long life full of stories, friendship, and influence; and the ambivalent experiences of being a public and counter-public poet. I would like to ask him what it was like living in Montreal in the 1920s and being cocky enough to try to reform Canadian poetry; in the Depression of the 1930s, fervently planning a democratic-socialist future for the nation while struggling to get a collection of formally innovative, socially minded poetry published; in the 1940s, during a war he saw as driven by capitalism, surrounding himself with a burgeoning poetry scene that had its own heroic dramas; in the 1950s, reassessing Canadian identity and the role culture played in it; in the 1960s, taking part in the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and hosting poetry evenings in his Montreal living room with poets moving between French and English; and then, in the 1970s, finding that he had come to be viewed by the younger generation of nationalists and postmodernists as a venerable figure of the Establishment he had spent his life kicking against.

I’d love to ask Scott about his trip with Pierre Trudeau to the Mackenzie River (testing his strength / against the strength of his country [Fort Smith]) and his lifelong friendship with A.J.M. Smith, about his legal defence of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover against charges of obscenity in the Supreme Court of Canada (see A Lass in Wonderland), and about his deep involvement with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). I’d ask what he thought of Leonard Cohen’s jazz recitation recording of Villanelle for Our Time on his album Dear Heather (2004). I’d want to tell him that his poems All the Spikes But the Last and Laurentian Shield make my students sit up and take notice. Scott’s life and my own overlapped by a few years, and I believe we lived just a few blocks away from each other when I was a small girl and he was an older man. I imagine we waited at the same light once or twice to cross Sherbrooke Street together. I suspect he waved to me out a car window. At dinner I’d want to compare his Montreal with mine. Mostly, however, I’d want to engage with the poet whose work often, not always but often, gets me in the gut as well as in the mind, and whose art keeps me rethinking my relationships with place, power, privilege, and