Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten

By Stephen Collis

Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence – and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, colonization, and climate change – the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing.

I go to see her because she is poetry’s old crone and I am seeking. I go to her – usually three, four times a year – because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finite – a long, slow embrace of nothing … If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped-for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality.

A meticulous collection of poetic, political, and philosophical digressions, Almost Islands weaves numerous themes together. At its crux lies a literary project: to build upon and extend Webb’s exposition of a “poetic” sense of the political, by proposing a political agent, the “Biotariat,” a government of Life, that is both human and more than human – arrived at after following as many pathways as possible through Webb’s own reading and thought. Ultimately, Almost Islands is a book obsessed with the problem of Webb’s not writing, and the implications of this for a writer like Collis who, in his own words, may be writing “too much” – as well as the wider social, political, and world-historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781772014143

Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is the author of seven books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize–winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010). Other titles include Anarchive (New Star, 2005, also nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008, 2014), To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013), Decomp (co-authored with Jordan Scott, Coach House, 2013), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks, 2016), and A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks, 2021), nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012). Collis is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks, 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions, 2006), as well as the editor, with Graham Lyons, of Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (Iowa University Press, 2012). His memoir, Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, was published by Talonbooks in 2018. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. Collis was the 2019 recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, which is given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.

Book preview

Crossing

Up early silent pre-dawn damp and mists when a soft thud makes me turn and a squirrel sits in the middle of the lamplit road having slipped from the dripping wet wires overhead. She considers herself a moment then slowly hops off-road into shadow and I move on through the damp the trees spiny silhouettes all shagged with silver and the bus comes and I arrive at the ferry and board the cold all about the night pressing on into the day and the old poet a thought lodged in this outer obscurity – destination I travel toward to myself be fronting the great isolation we have called death and which we know precious little about.

On the ferry I sit where I can watch Salt Spring Island unscroll to the west – a ragged outline in greys this morning lifting its shadow against sky and sea of similar hue. I go to see the old poet, I think, for renewal – for there to be a journey to take, a crossing of waters to the west of me, a destination and a return – for poetry to have a geography and a map. I take the journey to see the old poet because it is both more material and more mysterious than reading or writing alone – because it extends and complicates reading and writing – stretches text out into an ever-changing landscape where bodies persist – until they do not anymore.

Snow or thick frost whitens patches of cleared land high on Mount Tuam and Mount Bruce. I have changed ferries – the first taking me to Vancouver Island, the second, smaller one, where you can stand cold and wind-blown on the flat open deck, moving through the scattered and shattered archipelago to the deep inlet of Fulford Harbour on Salt Spring Island.

I go to see her because she is poetry’s old crone and I am seeking. I go to her – usually three, four times a year – because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for poetry, as she gently reaches into the finite – a long slow embrace of nothing.

The patches of cloud and island intermix as a moving arrangement of greys that lift and spread along a complex horizon. The many islands all around and afloat in silver and pewter light as dawn breaks a jagged aperture between heavy sky and leaden sea. Absolutely floating in the east where the sun spills among them a whitening blur that lifts and isolates their clumped forms. The wind comes hard, punches this world out like steel templates on its watery anvil. You can become drunk on light this subtly various, on the impossible range of greys expanding the space between black of night and bright white of day. Grow a profligate eye. Turn each etched island shape over and over in the mind. Find a tree line that fits perfectly into the folds of your brain, fishing out elusive thoughts.

Dear Reader

What on earth am I placing before you? I wander off the end of one book, toward whatever it is I might write next. In this space I myself become a reader again, immersed in words of others. Usually I know exactly what I am going to work on next (and next after that), even as what I have been writing is still moving toward conclusion. But not this time. I freeze on the edge of uncertainty. It’s that there are too many possible directions to turn in (which may be the very definition of privilege). I pick up a new/old book, randomly, and Cathy idly remarks that I look a little like Michel de Montaigne, whose Essays I hold in my hands. She googles it and shows me the drawing, his balding head, beard and moustache, and ruff. I do look like him – minus the ruff – and he is a good enough model for the sort of writing I am always attracted to – his wandering essais about everything and anything and nothing in particular, filled with endless details and digressions at every possible juncture, splitting and spilling off in new directions, paragraph by paragraph. Profuse. Everything I’ve written has been a mere attempt at something, an uncertainty, and a willing failure. I seek composite forms, complexes of ideas and modes, books within books, the defiance of genre, the unanticipated transformation.

Sometimes it’s about falling in two pieces and trying to imagine the impossible whole the broken parts might (did they once actually?) form. Sometimes it’s about two distinct objects and imagining what would happen if they were brought together. Robert Duncan likened the writing of poetry to obedience – to things outside the self, or deep inside the self, which we can barely comprehend, but whose suggestions we must heed and follow, if we are to write at all. Others prefer to compare poetry to freedom –

It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free and declare them so.

—C.D. WRIGHT

I suppose one might be able to obey the half-understood freedoms one is given to express? If writing is an obsession, then obsession may be the hinge between obedience and freedom: when obsessed, we freely (do we?) give ourselves over to the inward command. Then again, the human propensity to follow seeming whim has been described by some as our madness gene. It can cause problems, to say the least – set us off in the direction of unknown countries or distant planets, give us dreams of hidden wealth we might exploit there, find unanticipated uses of fuel sources among the dead forms of formerly living beings, alter planet’s chemistry. All this, if we are in fact free, which is of course debatable. We are always among structures we did not create – some visible and some invisible. Often it’s exactly because of such structures that I prefer the arbitrary, the unexpected, the elusive, the eccentric.

I am a poet attracted to another poet for her bracing independence and her life lived long and alone, according to her own idiosyncratic definition of freedom – obedient only to her own fraught complexity. A certain terror attracts me too: that, as Phyllis Webb says, words abandoned her – and I have so thoroughly constructed my identity as poet that I know no greater fear than that abandonment – even though I have barely ever for even a moment been able to stem the flood of words rushing through me for decades now, hypergraphically putting pen to paper each and every day, filling journal after journal. Even though she herself is the embodiment of the ability to survive the loss of words – and still be a poet, almost three decades after this silence descended – still a poet in the very fabric of her nonagenarian being.

But of course words and lives, lives and their words, do all come to an end. We write, perhaps always against death, under its cloud of inevitable finality, and perhaps all we are ever saying is I’m here! I’m here, like birds calling from the undergrowth, echolocating. Until one day we start to call, I’m not here, I’m not here, not for very much longer at least – don’t bother looking for me anymore, preparing for the inevitable enfolding in our end.

If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped-for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality. Phyllis Webb, her wonderful book Wilson’s Bowl, the abandoned Kropotkin Poems that haunt it – this is the node around through and from which I will constantly digress here as I write into the unknown, in search of I’m not really sure what.

The Kropotkin Poems

The Kropotkin Poems is a book or sequence of poems about the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin that the Canadian poet Phyllis Webb did not write. They exist only as a ghost in a mid-1960s grant proposal and as several fragmentary poems (some eventually titled Poems of Failure) that lie in the long gap between Webb’s 1965 book Naked Poems and her next volume, Wilson’s Bowl, in 1980.

I go to see Phyllis – the first time in almost a year, which is too long a gap when someone is nearing the end of their eighties. Up early bus to first ferry the grey sea chopping against the causeway – November in August, the power still out at home from last night’s late summer storm – lowering and layered sky of various monochrome charcoals torn to shreds and racing in and out of view – compressed slate layers of sea island and cloud-heavy sky.

With Phyllis as my inspiration, I’ve tried many times to write about poetry and anarchism – it’s too easy to fall into simple associations (the improvisational anarchy of contemporary free verse) – or to celebrate heroic figures and moments (Michael Bakunin, the Paris Commune) – a problem Webb found herself up against with Kropotkin and his saintly image, the contradiction of centralizing anarchism’s history and ideas into an identifiable canon or corpus or list of state-resisting saints.

I take the bus from the narrow fjord of Fulford Harbour at the south end of Salt Spring Island (a clump of low mountains rising out of the sea between other islands), up a long valley of impossibly tiny wooden churches and ragged old farms squeezed between mountains, rising under the prominent cliffs of Mount Maxwell through sloping vineyards and on through still-thick forests, the road winding and rising up and dropping down again, curving and twisting to the village of Ganges perched on another of the island’s deep inlets – an island that seems all mountains and inlets, vertical and horizontal variation – a geological tangle. Salt Spring is green in this storm despite the season’s long drought – brambles still laden with late blackberries, the smell of fir needles baked on mossy bedrock. Phyllis, too, is the same as ever, seeming not to have changed much over the fourteen years I have been visiting. I move quickly through the village (picking up our lunch at the market), along and then up and away from the harbour to her unassuming assisted living facility near the island’s hospital, up to the second floor and here she is, sitting in her blue-grey armchair, her grey hair wound and tied atop her head, glasses perched on her nose, books and paintings piled and arrayed all around her, things she has pulled out for us to discuss and query. She smiles, her long hands moving, eyes sparkling – always a mischievous look playing somewhere there, the droll sound of her melodic voice, questioning, probing, her throaty chuckle at the ready.

By chance or clairvoyance, Kropotkin’s 1898 Memoirs of a Revolutionist is on the table at her side. I don’t know how it got there … she says vaguely.

Poetry and anarchism become another take on poetry and the political generally. Many poets have been writing about this difficult nexus of late, the world lurching among outrages and disasters. Problems arise when poets set themselves up as arbiters and tell other poets exactly how this difficulty is to be negotiated, how they are doing it wrong – one way or the other, all or nothing: poetry becomes the sole political act one is allowed, or poetry is dismissed as no act, nothing political at all. Social struggle is a particularity we each figure out alone or in small groups. Though I think what we all want is the material, the street, real change – not escape into poems, but poems as avenues into the fray. Thing is, one size never fits all, every struggle refashions resistance anew, and difference is spelled out in the difficult days we each must live, often or largely alone.

Phyllis says, offhand, anarchism brought messages for my poetry (channelling stone-dead William Butler Yeats). I wonder what, exactly, those messages were? It’s not always so simply the poem’s proximity to action/activism that matters; often, it’s the passage walked in both directions between, the nature of the network – the relays that form an array between authors, ideas, movements – and yes, actual actions. We can become so mad for acts to replace words, for words not to supplant acts – like born-again iconoclasts, we lash out at each and every representation, dive down each aesthetic rabbit hole. Porosity is what I want in the relationship between art and politics. I want to go back and forth, as needed, sometimes as quickly as possible.

In her fragments of The Kropotkin Poems, Phyllis writes of the Insurrectionary wilderness of the I / am, I will be – a transformative process that ends in our being something other. Poetry pulls in the direction of such transformations – is a bridge built between self and other – and it’s such insurrectionary wildernesses that keep pulling me back to it, keep sweeping me on toward that something other, the wild insurrection bursting forth from between. In wildness is the preservation of the world, Henry David Thoreau wrote. I still think this is true – despite the ever-diminishing shreds of wildness and wilderness that are left.

Phyllis and I decipher some of the marginal notes in her Kropotkin (her cramped cursive script in dark blue ink), look at other books, many of them sent her by admirers, consider a bright abstract painting we haven’t paid much attention to before, ask after other writers we both know, events and publications, order pizza and drink a cold beer. With each of us holding a copy of her Collected Poems, me asking something about Kropotkin, Phyllis suddenly remembers a poem where someone is wearing a red hat, and we are both off searching for it, neither of us remembering. We find it at the exact same moment, working our way through the book from opposite ends.

Connections between unconnected things are the unreal reality of Poetry.

—SUSAN HOWE

It’s links and connections I want to pursue – however frail or frayed they may be. Because we spend our lives mostly oblivious to our connectedness – to places, persons, histories, plants, animals, ecologies – devastations and displacements too. I want to uncover and follow all the lines and links I can while I yet remain a part of this expansive web. Webb. Woven.

I would be the exegete of a text that was never written – a curious absence I would write my way toward here, with Webb as underworld guide or Eurydice I would have follow me back toward the light. I would be a scholar of the unwritten, of the never-quite-appeared, never-quite-available to be read and known.

Only from the negative impulse, from the labyrinth of the No, can the writing of the future appear.

—ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS

Poetry only changes if we refuse it. Just as the world is only changed by those who refuse it.

—HENRI MESCHONNIC

Just before I leave, Phyllis mentions that she is getting rid of books, lightening her load. I ask about Kropotkin’s Memoirs, on the table between us. No, she says after a long pause, I don’t think I can part with it just yet. Some electric shock prickles – maybe The Kropotkin Poems are not unfinished yet – not quite – still lingering in uncharted realms of possibility. It becomes a habit over the next year (her ninetieth) of visits – Phyllis mentioning she needs to get rid of books, me asking after the Kropotkin, Phyllis refusing, holding onto the book, a beacon somewhere in her night. This – this resistance – encourages me. It is call and response, an echo in the wilderness where a radical poem might still roam, sparking insurrection. I leave soon after, always with more questions than I have been able to bring myself to ask, and with Phyllis’s copy of George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović’s The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (Boardman, 1950) in my bag. It’s a good consolation prize.

On Failure

The ferry, the island, the other ferry, the other island, and I am at Phyllis’s once again, knocking. I hear her voice, cautious, frail, inquiring, behind the door. She has forgotten I was coming. She lets me in and there she stands in a long purple dressing gown, her hair spilling long and white onto her shoulders. I have never seen it like this – in all our years of friendship, her hair has always been neatly wound up on top of her head, everything about her carefully put together, prepared, ready for the interview, on. But here she stands, straight and proud at her walker, Priestess of Motion, threshold spirit. She seems unperturbed, tells me with a wave of her long hand that there’s some tea left in the pot, casually shuffles off to her bedroom to get dressed. She is the only poet to whom I make such regular pilgrimage. When I first visited, I had published one forgettable book, was deep into the writing of a second. Every book I have written since has been written in the spaces between visits to Phyllis – has been written since I have been in