Re-Greening the Undermusic
Dennis Lee
Acclaimed poet Dennis Lee reviews a 50-year career, discussing works that comprise a “panoply of voices … live scenes from the battlefront.” He explores the musical substratum of his poems, where language itself finally erodes in concert with the environment it describes. Like Testament, this is a brilliant, fierce, and inspiring response to the environmental devastation we are witnessing globally.
Lee connects “with a teeming rhythmic energy … a swoop and pummel and glide … a kind of undermusic, which the poem sought to track and embody. I called it cadence … the pulsing coherence of what-is, transmitted as a rich, untamed array of kinaesthetic frequencies.”
Re-Greening the Undermusic
Dennis Lee
$20.00
Arbutus Editions, 2016
48 pages, 4 ½ x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-896886-12-3
“A poet’s home turf is words. And if the planet is re-greenable, language is one of the domains in which that needs to happen, for words are imprinted with the titanic project of our civilization, whose triumph is making the earth uninhabitable. If I crave a transformation of the way humans dwell on earth, I have to look for the energies of transformation in my own territory. The job of giving witness in words can’t set the bar any lower than the greater job of changing our imprint on earth. It is not a substitute for concerted public action, but a subsidiary dimension of the challenge.
So the question is not, ‘What themes should a contemporary poet take up?’ It’s rather, ‘What undermusic rings true?’ If the constitution of what is undergoes a seismic change, events in words must change their rhythmic topology in like measure. The goal is a vibrational witnessing adequate to the deep structure of our era.
Poets participate in the planetary campaign when they become attuned to the endangered energies of earth and let them shape the music of words. Both the energy and the endangerment have to enter the musical substratum of the poem. It’s a matter of onto-acoustic realism.
A poem rehearses a particular gesture of being. It’s a form of contemplative practice open to anyone who chooses to take part, with no creedal tests or barriers. The technical moves the poem makes should be workaday sacraments in that discipline.
—Dennis Lee
Dennis Lee co-founded the House of Anansi Press, directed the poetry program at McClelland & Stewart, and served as Toronto’s first poet laureate. He has published 20 books of children’s poetry and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. Lee has received many literary prizes including the Governor General’s Award. He wrote the song lyrics for Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock and contributed script copy for Henson’s The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
Read an interview with Dennis Lee in Portal 2013.
Lecture
Lee delivered The Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poets Lecture on October 18, 2012.
Poetry
Kingdom of Absence (1967)
Civil Elegies (1968)
Not Abstract Harmonies But (1974)
The Death of Harold Ladoo (1976)
The Gods (1979)
The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets (1987)
Riffs (1993)
Nightwatch (1996)
Un (2003)
So cool (2004)
The Bard of the Universe (2007)
YesNo (2007)
Testament (2012)
Heart Residence (2017)
Within Lee’s long list of children’s poetry books are classics Alligator Pie (1974) and Garbage Delight (1977).
Lee’s non-fiction includes Savage Fields (1977), Reading Adonis (1987), and Body Music (1998).
His editorial work includes An Anthology of Verse (1964), The University Game (1968), T.O. Now: The Young Toronto Poets (1968), and The New Canadian Poets (1985).
Poetry
Kingdom of Absence (1967)
Civil Elegies (1968)
Not Abstract Harmonies But (1974)
The Death of Harold Ladoo (1976)
The Gods (1979)
The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets (1987)
Riffs (1993)
Nightwatch (1996)
Un (2003)
So cool (2004)
The Bard of the Universe (2007)
YesNo (2007)
Testament (2012)
Heart Residence (2017)
Within Lee’s long list of children’s poetry books are classics Alligator Pie (1974) and Garbage Delight (1977).
Lee’s non-fiction includes Savage Fields (1977), Reading Adonis (1987), and Body Music (1998).
His editorial work includes An Anthology of Verse (1964), The University Game (1968), T.O. Now: The Young Toronto Poets (1968), and The New Canadian Poets (1985).
RE-GREENING THE UNDERMUSIC
Dennis Lee
Acclaimed poet Dennis Lee reviews a 50-year career, discussing works that comprise a “panoply of voices … live scenes from the battlefront.” He explores the musical substratum of his poems, where language itself finally erodes in concert with the environment it describes. Like Testament, this is a brilliant, fierce, and inspiring response to the environmental devastation we are witnessing globally.
Lee connects “with a teeming rhythmic energy … a swoop and pummel and glide … a kind of undermusic, which the poem sought to track and embody. I called it cadence … the pulsing coherence of what-is, transmitted as a rich, untamed array of kinaesthetic frequencies.”
Arbutus Editions, 2016
48 pages, 4 ½ x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-896886-12-3
$20.00
“A poet’s home turf is words. And if the planet is re-greenable, language is one of the domains in which that needs to happen, for words are imprinted with the titanic project of our civilization, whose triumph is making the earth uninhabitable. If I crave a transformation of the way humans dwell on earth, I have to look for the energies of transformation in my own territory. The job of giving witness in words can’t set the bar any lower than the greater job of changing our imprint on earth. It is not a substitute for concerted public action, but a subsidiary dimension of the challenge.
So the question is not, ‘What themes should a contemporary poet take up?’ It’s rather, ‘What undermusic rings true?’ If the constitution of what is undergoes a seismic change, events in words must change their rhythmic topology in like measure. The goal is a vibrational witnessing adequate to the deep structure of our era.
Poets participate in the planetary campaign when they become attuned to the endangered energies of earth and let them shape the music of words. Both the energy and the endangerment have to enter the musical substratum of the poem. It’s a matter of onto-acoustic realism.
A poem rehearses a particular gesture of being. It’s a form of contemplative practice open to anyone who chooses to take part, with no creedal tests or barriers. The technical moves the poem makes should be workaday sacraments in that discipline.
—Dennis Lee
Tom Wayman holds an MFA from the University of California and worked as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun. He has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Windsor, Alberta, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Toronto as well as at SFU. His bibliography includes over twenty poetry collections, and he co-founded the Kootenay School of the Arts and the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union. He has been the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. He received the Acorn-Plantos Award in 2013 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark in 2015.
Read an interview with Tom Wayman in Portal 2008.
Dennis Lee co-founded the House of Anansi Press, directed the poetry program at McClelland & Stewart, and served as Toronto’s first poet laureate. He has published 20 books of children’s poetry and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. Lee has received many literary prizes including the Governor General’s Award. He wrote the song lyrics for Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock and contributed script copy for Henson’s The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
Read an interview with Dennis Lee in Portal 2013.
Lecture
Lee delivered The Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poets Lecture on October 18, 2012.
Poetry
Kingdom of Absence (1967)
Civil Elegies (1968)
Not Abstract Harmonies But (1974)
The Death of Harold Ladoo (1976)
The Gods (1979)
The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets (1987)
Riffs (1993)
Nightwatch (1996)
Un (2003)
So cool (2004)
The Bard of the Universe (2007)
YesNo (2007)
Testament (2012)
Heart Residence (2017)
Within Lee’s long list of children’s poetry books are classics Alligator Pie (1974) and Garbage Delight (1977).
Lee’s non-fiction includes Savage Fields (1977), Reading Adonis (1987), and Body Music (1998).
His editorial work includes An Anthology of Verse (1964), The University Game (1968), T.O. Now: The Young Toronto Poets (1968), and The New Canadian Poets (1985).