[In the following essay, Jones discusses the problem of finding an authentic Canadian voice in “Seed Catalogue.”]

“Once upon a time he was a gardener of the possible fruition.”

(Kroetsch, Completed Field Notes, 255)

LYRE, LYRE, PANTS ON FIRE

Robert Kroetsch’s essay “Unhiding the Hidden” begins with an expression of the desire for—and the impossibility of producing—genuinely “original” writing in Canada, that is, writing rooted entirely in its place of origin, writing that speaks with a singular Canadian voice. “The particular predicament” of the Canadian writer, as Kroetsch describes it, is that he¹ doesn’t really live in a new world, but inherits a pre-existent linguistic and experiential grounding from elsewhere: “he works with a language, within a literature, that appears to be authentically his own, and not a borrowing,” but which, no matter how familiar it may initially seem, is in fact borrowed (17):

The Roman writer borrowed a Greek word into a Latin context. The Canadian writer borrows an English word into an English-language context, a French word into a French-language context. The process of rooting that borrowed word, that totally exact homonym, in authentic experience, is then, must be, a radical one.

(18)

Kroetsch reiterates the problem in his essay “No Name Is My Name”: “The Canadian writer in English must speak a new culture not with new names but with an abundance of names inherited from Britain and the United States. And that predicament is in turn doubled—by the writing done in the French language in Canada” (51). Despite the “Adamic impulse” Kroetsch sees as characteristic of the literature of a “new place” (“No Name,” 41), then, the Canadian writer is no Adam in a New World garden, speaking a pristine language and simply naming the world into existence; his predicament (the word is used in both essays) is that his language and his world are prae-dicare, already spoken forth.

Kroetsch’s speculation on the problem of Canadian voice in both these essays fails to recognize a number of issues, not the least of which might include the different predicaments of Canadian writers whose first language is neither English nor French, or that of First Nations writers for whom the geography now designated as Canada is not a “new place” at all. What Kroetsch at least potentially does identify is a kind of postcolonial political struggle at the level of the sign. Even more generally, his essays skirt the possibility that the Canadian writer’s predicament is a particular version of every language-user’s struggle with what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the always “‘already bespoke quality of the world,’” which is tied up with “the ‘already uttered’ quality of language” itself (331):

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.

(294)

This “dialogic inter-orientation with the alien word,” Bakhtin notes, significantly, is a condition of speaking that could have been escaped only by “the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word” (279). Bakhtin condemns poetry—implicitly lyric poetry, which presumes to speak with an individual voice, for a unitary consciousness and single intention—as the form least capable of evoking the dialogic process. The language of the (lyric) poet, according to Bakhtin, aspires to be Adamic, appears to be his own: “he makes use of each form, each word, each expression according to its unmediated power to assign meaning (as it were, ‘without quotation marks’) that is, as a pure and direct expression of his own intention” (285).²

Kroetsch’s “Seed Catalogue” is a poem that is self-conscious about putting quotation marks and their equivalents into poetry. Quotation marks and various inferential agents³ indicate the appropriation of the words of others from elsewhere and their insertion into the poem, drawing attention to—and celebrating—the mediated assigning of meaning, the impure, indirect nature of expression. Shirley Neuman has described the conspicuously intertextual result of this strategy in Kroetsch’s poetry. The “intertext” (Kroetsch’s term) is “the space shared by the relations between different poetic texts in the frame of a larger ‘Collected Poem.’ The ‘poem’ exists in the lacunae and intersections between the different texts it holds in its space” (“Allow self,” 115). “Poetic text” is, in the case of “Seed Catalogue,” clearly a relative designation, since it encompasses much material that leads another life as discursive prose. “Seed Catalogue” is, in Neuman’s term, a “collected poem,” because it is a poem whose constituent elements are obviously collected from elsewhere.

INORGANIC GARDENING

Despite the garden imagery that permeates “Seed Catalogue,” then, it is a text that resists the myth of organic form, according to which a poem grows “naturally” and homogeneously from the innate properties of its material and the personality of the poet. “Seed Catalogue” begins, for example, by drawing attention to the fact that it has already begun. It opens, not with the words of the poet, but with a citation from a seed catalogue advertising “Copenhagen Market Cabbage” (32), whose name reinforces its status both as a vegetable strain “foreign” to Canadian soil, and as an instance of the “alien word,” an imported textual product. While the poem begins, naturally enough, with the label “I,” the citation itself is tagged “No. 176,” emphasizing a slippage or discontinuity between “inside” and “outside” texts.

Each textual component of the poem is, to use a figure associated with gardening, “grafted” onto the larger body. The term “graft” is employed in Arturo Schwartz’s description of what he terms (recalling Dadaist practice in the visual arts) the “printed ready-made,” an extract of a printed text introduced by the poet into his composition: “Such intervention is of botanic nature: it has affinity with the grafting practised by the gardener to modify the flower or fruit of a plant” (29). This intervention may be of a botanic nature, but it is not, strictly speaking, organic. Indeed, the method is also a “graft” in the sense that the poet illicitly “plays dirty” with the poetic conventions of both lyric voice and organic form.

In “Seed Catalogue,” further, it is impossible to sustain an opposition between “rooted” and “grafted” texts. E. D. Blodgett identifies as dialogic—or what he terms “interdiscursive”—the effect of this strategy: “the various texts become commentaries for each other” (202). “Seed Catalogue,” then, is a choric locus, or what Kroetsch calls a “shared book” (“Statement,” 311), but not only because it is a communal document that incorporates other people’s words. The individual word is opened up and multiplied, and lyric voice itself is exposed as a fiction. The poem thus provides a provocative response to the linguistic dilemma posed in the two Kroetsch essays cited at the beginning of this article: it is literally pro-vocative in its teasing out of a multiplicity of voices using the “inherited word.” In “Seed Catalogue,” Kroetsch, significantly, finds (rather than originates) a response precisely by the repetition of inherited language, with a significant difference. Instead of attempting to replace the borrowed word—repeatability, as Derrida demonstrates, is a feature of writing (179–80), so that replacing “used” language is an impossibility—“Seed Catalogue” suggests a re-placing or resituating of it through citation. A citation is by definition a text that has precisely the same form as its historical antecedent; it is, in the words of “Unhiding the Hidden,” a “totally exact homonym” that “reroots” the word by excerpting and contextually rerouting it.

In “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues,” Kroetsch describes the “translation” of the 1917 seed catalogue he found in the Glenbow archives in 1975 into the poem “Seed Catalogue” as one such rerouting/rerooting (11). This “idiomatic” movement, in which the poet is as much an interpreter of the given text as an originating speaker, is clearly one version of “homolinguistic translation,” a poetic tactic Douglas Barbour identifies with the denial of the lyric impulse (58). In “Seed Catalogue” homolinguistic translation has the effect of producing a heterogeneous poetic voice which emanates, not from an “original” poetic speaker, but from within the already spoken or written local, communal language of the prairie town. “Seed Catalogue” repeatedly inquires into the origin and development of the poetic speaker—“How do you grow a poet?” (41, 42, 43, 44)—but as Blodgett comments in his discussion of Kroetsch’s The Ledger, the appropriation of “outside texts” into the poem prevents the poetic totalization of language, the exclusive valorizing of voice as monologic presence (200), because the “origin” of the “text” is another text. Indeed, to return to the Edenic scenario proposed earlier, “Seed Catalogue” not only parodies the myth of the Fall, as Smaro Kamboureli observes (112), but also parodies by textualizing the myth of an Edenic, “original” language. The poem is writing about writing about the desire for, the imagination of, as-yet-unrealized gardens: “Into the dark of January / the seed catalogue bloomed // a winter proposition, if / spring should come, then” (33).⁴ It is the seed catalogue, and not a garden that blooms forth here. The implied duplication of the poem’s title (“Seed Catalogue”/seed catalogue) is a reminder—indeed, an epitome—of the textual, citational nature of the poem’s affiliation with the “outside” that it literally reproduces. The title’s doubleness also signals the ambivalent relationship between prosaic and poetic texts that “Seed Catalogue” sustains.

One response “Seed Catalogue” provides to the question “How do you grow a poet?” (42) consists of a list of prescriptions that again contradicts the idea of an original, Adamic lyric speaker. The list humorously indicates not only the obvious necessity that the poet’s physical well-being be maintained, but also suggests the importance to the poet of an already written inheritance of language, and the pre-scripted nature of the linguistic utterance itself. “Seed Catalogue”’s prescriptions incorporate local wisdom about spiritual and physical health into the poem, re-reading and revaluing the “prosaic” regional idiom:

For appetite: cod-liver
oil.
For bronchitis: mustard
plasters.
For pallor and failure to fill
the woodbox: sulphur
& molasses.
For self-abuse: ten Our
Fathers & ten Hail Marys.
For regular bowels: Sunny Boy
Cereal.

(42)

The question “How do you grow a gardener?” doubles the query about growing a poet. The former question is followed earlier in the poem by a listing of seed-names (34), and the parallel implies a correspondence between poet and gardener, gardener’s seeds and poet’s prescriptions: words themselves. Indeed, the Derridean association between the Latin word for seed, seme, and the Greek for sign, sema, is persistently evoked in “Seed Catalogue.” This is, significantly, a false etymology, an apparently original “root” connection that turns out to be a purely textual one.

When the question “How do you grow a poet?” is again posed, the response takes the form of another foregrounded prescription, the citation of a product testimonial from the seed catalogue: “‘It’s a pleasure to advise that I / won the First Prize at the Calgary / Horticultural Show … This is my / first attempt. I used your seeds’” (42). The seed catalogue is a publication that provides a kind of local forum—it places on display (in order to profit from) the statements of its community of correspondents. So too does the “Seed Catalogue,” but the poem encourages a generically (at least) double reading. The happy gardener of the prose citation is, in effect, already a poet and doesn’t know it (“advise” and “Prize,” for example, are rhymes)—“Seed Catalogue” shows it. The gardener’s “first attempt” at horticulture is not primal (“I used your seeds”), and neither is the poet’s citational gesture original. The writer of the testimonial letter in the seed catalogue and its re-writer, the poet of “Seed Catalogue,” achieve a “spectacular” success based, in effect, on the fruitfulness of someone else’s prior seminal product …

NOW, LIST-EN HERE

… And on their own ability to tend seeds and attend to words, respectively. The poet in this context must be an avid listener to language: “My mother said: / Did you wash your ears? / You could grow cabbages / in those ears” (32). It should be noted that these lines are themselves a citation, a linguistic inheritance from the poet’s mother—they are juxtaposed with a quotation from the seed catalogue (another vernacular inheritance) that describes the Copenhagen Market Cabbage in terms of genealogy: “[it] is in every respect a thoroughbred, a cabbage of highest pedigree” (32). The poet, because he has attended to the metaphorical resonances of the language of the catalogue, has recognized its “poetic” potential, “transplanted” it into the poem, and allowed it to grow in significance.

This passage about the poet’s ears might elicit recollections of the poet in William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, a similarly fecund character whose voice is also both interrogated and interrogatory: “His ears are toadstools, his fingers have begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned under the falls)” (83). Williams’ poem is a kind of pre-text for “Seed Catalogue” in its “listening” to and poetic recitation of the language of locality, its use of unassimilated citations to generate a localized voice and sense of place. Paterson cites Ezra Pound’s comment on Williams’ refusal of formal closure in his poems: “Your interest is in the bloody loam but what / I’m after is the finished product” (37). The poets of both Paterson and “Seed Catalogue” have what amounts to a “dirty mind”: they provide a fertile matrix for the growth of given germs of meaning. “Seed Catalogue”’s interest in the “growth of the poet’s mind,” as Shirley Neuman perceives, places it in relation to Wordsworth’s The Prelude as well (“Allow self,” 121). The poet’s mind in Kroetsch’s text, however, is not presented as the source of an integral voice, but as a locus of textual intersection.⁵

What does remain of the lyric impulse in “Seed Catalogue” is an openness to, and foregrounding of, what Northrop Frye calls lyrical “babble” (275), in everyday speech, a playful affirmation of the singing voice of language, its musical possibilities that border on nonsense: “I don’t give a damn if I do die do die do die do die do die / do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do / die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die / do” (40). The words of this silly—but memorable—little ditty are, ironically, about the defiance of death. Their musical sound functions typically as a mnemonic device, demonstrating the “death-defying” ability of language to survive over time through the significant poetic gesture of recitation. “Seed Catalogue” is not just a “collected poem,” then; it is also a re-collected poem, in which recitation is a method of translating “then” to “now,” of “seeding/time” (44), or growing a past: “But how do you grow a poet? // Start: with an invocation / invoke—// His muse is / his muse/if / memory is” (41). The word itself is a kind of muse, and voicing it is in itself both an inspiration and a remembering. Implicit in the word “muse,” for example, is a connection between inspiration, the musical, mnemonic elements of language, and the poet’s meditative musings: “no memory then / no meditation / no song (shit / we’re up against it)” (41).

AN S-CATALOGUE-ICAL POETICS

The last lines of this passage seem to emphasize the poet’s limitations, which are elaborated at length in the list that catalogues “the absence of …” various commodities and qualities in the prairie milieu (39). “Seed Catalogue,” however, not only counteracts but subverts such limitations by producing what might be seen as a productively excremental vision (what more fertile place is there than up against shit?), in its poetically unconventional emphasis on the colloquial bawdy/body and its functions; in its formal recycling, via a citational strategy, of what might normally be considered a corpus of verbal refuse; and in its oral folk-tale or “bullshitting” impulse. Scatological imagery, for example, is used to describe the kind of record or trace that the poet leaves in his passage through the landscape:

          only a scarred
page, a spoor of wording
a reduction to mere black
and white/a pile of rabbit
turds that tells us
all spring long
where the track was.

(43)

The poet of “Seed Catalogue” tracks down accounts of the past, leaving a literally documentary record that is the trace of a trace of a communal past: this is, notably, “a pile of rabbit / turds that tells us” (emphasis added). In a poem named for a seed catalogue, “spoor” inevitably resonates with the botanical “spore,” and evokes the textual process of dissemination, a sowing/scattering-about of meaning, a planting that is limitlessly transplanted.

Early on in the poem, “Seed Catalogue” makes a connection between its scatological preoccupation, the notion of poetry as song, and the language of the seed catalogue:

No. 25—McKenzie’s Improved Golden Wax Bean: “THE MOST PRIZED OF ALL BEANS. Virtue is its own reward. We have had many expressions from keen discriminating gardeners extolling our seed and this variety.”

Beans, beans,
the musical fruit;
the more you eat,
the more you virtue.

(33)

Virtue, it would seem, is its own re-word. This popular children’s rhyme about flatulence (which is, after all, like the folk tradition of the tall tale, an expulsion of “hot air”) is (re)cited, and itself takes in the language of the seed catalogue, censoring the traditional last word of the verse in favour of the more decorous, but nonsensical “virtue.” Few readers of the poem, however, would forget that the conventional last word is the musical word, the word that rhymes, “toot.” Beans—and, by humourous extension, the linguistic endowment of the poet’s past—are both extolled and re-told/tolled (or resounded), with a difference.

WHAT'S NEW?

In a 1978 article on Kroetsch’s poetry, Susan Wood expresses what is essentially a dissatisfaction with the unconventional nature of this strategy, or what she calls Kroetsch’s “wavering” in “Seed Catalogue” between prose and poetry, as well as his unwillingness “to transcend the prairie town reality, which he records in its flat colloquial language. … We’ve ‘heard it’ before, so what’s new?” (36). Wood, in effect, restates the problem of originality, and relates it to the poem’s indeterminate genre. One effect of the generic instability Wood identifies is the possibility that the “flat colloquial language” used might be seen as a kind of prose poetry in its ability to voice a prairie colloquy. It is not, according to the logic of the poem, necessary to “transcend” prairie town reality in order to read it as “poetic.” In fact, “Seed Catalogue” offers the possibility that it is necessary only to repeat that colloquial language in a new context, to (aesthetically) frame it with quotation marks, to (poetically) re-cite it.

The poem stresses its own reliance on the oral tradition of re-sounding old phrases and stories, a tradition in which the storyteller is not an “original,” but remembers, elaborates on, and recontextualizes a legacy of stories: “—You ever hear the one about the woman who buried / her husband with his ass sticking out of the ground / so that every time she happened to walk by she could / give it a swift kick? //—Yeh, I heard it” (40). This “dirty” joke presents yet another twist on the botanical metaphor of “planting.” Not only is the anecdote strategically “planted” in the poem by the canny poet, the joke is that finality is again spurned through an act of iteration, since the wife in the story always gets another kick at the can. As does the storyteller: the punchline of his joke is the listener’s response, which draws attention to the context of reiterated telling. Or, to put it another way, response is, in this context, the “kicker.”

RE-SEEDING HEIR-LINES

“Seed Catalogue” represents another incident in which the speaker’s father tells and retells the story of his shooting at a badger, allowing the tale to conform, not simply to his original intention when he shot at the badger, but to his reconstruction of intention with each recontextualized telling. In the first version of the story, the poet’s father shoots at the badger, but misses and mistakenly hits a magpie, “A week later,” however, “my father told the story again. In that version he intended to hit the magpie. Magpies, he explained, are a nuisance” (35). In the context of the oral folk-tale, intention is not simply a prior design, a predetermined, immutable meaning; it is, pace Wordsworth, a postludic act, a playful reinterpretation of the given verbal text. In the interview Labyrinths of Voice, Kroetsch points out both the importance of the linguistic inheritance of the past, and the danger of “the heirloom model for inherited stories,” which suggests that the past is “a fixed thing”: “I suppose that is one of the things print did to us: we suddenly have a fixed text. I’m still tempted by oral models where the story in the act of retelling is always responsive to individuals, to the place, to invention” (13). The re-telling of received stories in “Seed Catalogue” unfixes the given text, gesturing toward certain characteristics of the oral tradition, and placing the poet in what appears to be a long (story/genetic) line of prairie bullshitters. His recontextualized telling of the father’s story allows yet another range of possible inflections, but it also allows the accents of his father’s voice to remain: the badger “was digging holes in the potato patch, threatening man and beast with broken limbs (I quote)” (35, emphasis added).

Since “will” or intention is something shown to be less than final in the inheritance of the past, the inclusion in the poem of a “last will and testament” must be seen as ironic indeed. What is inherited in that will, however, is not simply the material objects that it represents—“To my son Frederick my carpenter tools” (47)—but also the language of the document that is simultaneously prosaically familiar and poetically defamiliarized. “Seed Catalogue” uses the materials at hand—the will, the seed catalogue, letters, and other inherited texts—in order to reconstruct and revalue the local past, a past on which the present community depends for its existence. It is significant, then, that when the question, “How do you grow a prairie town?” is posed, the response provided—“Rebuild the hotel when it burns down. Bigger. Fill it / full of a lot of A-1 Hard Northern Bullshitters” (40)—allies the notion of reconstruction with the exaggerating impulse of the tall tale as “bullshit.” It also, significantly, names storytellers after a local variety of a seed (“A-1 Hard Northern”).

The poet’s father passes on the narrative tradition of the tall tale. It is his mother, however, who subtly alerts the poet—as well as the poem’s reader—to the traces of semiotic multiplicity in the most mundane of expressions. The poet in/of “Seed Catalogue” listens carefully to the inherited words of the (m)other, the voice that is at once familiar and alien, and represents it: “Bring me the radish seeds, / my mother whispered” (33). “Radish” is a word whose root is “root,” and “seeds” a word whose meaning is, at least in the false etymology already suggested, “meaning.” “Seed Catalogue” represents a search for roots and meanings, and, inevitably, a search for roots as meanings. This “radical” approach means that the poem is not simply a nostalgic return to an original Garden, or even a garden, but rather, as the title of the larger work of which it is a part indicates, the prolific yield of a “field” of “notes.”

Notes

1. I would like to thank Susan Rudy Dorscht for her valuable advice on this paper.

2. The gendered pronoun is Kroetsch’s. I have maintained it for the sake of consistency.

3. For a discussion of the difficulties Bakhtin encounters in trying to maintain the ultimately untenable binary opposition novel/(lyric) poetry, particularly when his theories about the dialogized nature of consciousness and the internally dialogized quality of the word itself are taken into account, see Tzvetan Todorov’s Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle.

4. Julia Kristeva calls “inferential agents” words that mediate between the author’s enunciation and that of others, such as “if, as Vergil says …” “and thereupon Saint Jerome says,” etc. (see pp. 45–6). As E. D. Blodgett implies, spatial arrangement in “Seed Catalogue” might be considered an inferential agent, since it too designates the enunciation of others (202).

5. All references to “Seed Catalogue” are in Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes.

6. For more on Field Notes and autobiography, see both Neuman articles listed in the Works Cited, and Susan Rudy Dorscht’s “On Sending Yourself: Kroetsch and the New Autobiography.”

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans., Michael Holquist, ed. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981.

Barbour, Douglas. “Lyric/Anti-Lyric: Some Notes About a Concept.” Line, 3 (Spring 1984): 45–63.

Blodgett, E. D. “The Book, Its Discourse, and the Lyric: Notes on Robert Kroetsch’s Field Notes.” Open Letter, 5th Series, 8–9 (Summer-Fall 1984): 195–205.

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, trans. Glyph I. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977: 172–97.

Dorscht, Susan Rudy. “On Sending Yourself: Kroetsch and the New Autobiography.” Signature, 2 (Winter 1989): 27–41.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957.

Kamboureli, Smaro. On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980.

Kroetsch, Robert. Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989.

———. “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues.” The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford, 1989: 1–20.

———. “No Name Is My Name.” The Lovely Treachery of Words, 41–52.

———. “Reciting the Emptiness.” The Lovely Treachery of Words, 34–40.

———. “Statement by the Poet.” The Long Poem Anthology. Michael Ondaatje, ed. Toronto: Coach House, 1979: 311–12.

———. “Unhiding the Hidden.” Open Letter, 5th Series, 4 (Spring 1983): 17–22.

———. Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Edmonton: NeWest, 1982.

Neuman, Shirley. “Allow self, portraying self: Autobiography in Field Notes.” Line, 1.2 (Fall 1983): 104–21.

———. “Figuring the Reader, Figuring the Self in Field Notes: Double or Noting.” Open Letter, 5th Series, 8–9 (Summer-Fall 1984): 176–94.

Schwartz, Arturo. “Contributions to a Poetic of the Ready-made.” John A. Stevens, trans. Marcel Duchamp: Ready-mades, etc. (1918–1964). Paris: le Terrain Vague, 1964: 13–41.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Vlad Godzich, trans. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1963.

Wood, Susan. “Reinventing the Word: Kroetsch’s Poetry.” Canadian Literature, 77 (Summer 1978): 28–39.