No. 145 February 2007
Summoned to Ottawa
LAST DECEMBER ALCUIN member John Pass travelled to Ottawa to receive a Governor General's Literary Award for his poetry collection Stumbling in the Bloom. John has kindly allowed Amphora to print the speech he gave that evening at Rideau Hall . . .
Your Excellencies, fellow writers, honoured guests, what a singular pleasure it is to be acknowledged in this way by my country, to be a poet summoned to the capital, and without a hint of the apprehension that must accompany such a summons in less enlightened times or places, where a room at the fine hotel might be prelude to a prison cell, a place at the banquet a portal to the beheading. What a privilege it is to write in Canada, where one pursues poetry, if mostly in obscurity, most importantly and for the most part in security and comfort.
I do confess, however, to one tiny apprehension since my nomination-that I might now reasonably be called upon to make profound pronouncements about poetry, or worse, to summarize my own. It won't, of course, be summarized. Like any art, like reality itself, it is haphazard and orderly all at once, and resists generalities, insists upon the integrity of its particulars.
So from the fabric of Stumbling in the Bloom I'd like this evening to tug one thread only, one that is not especially vibrant nor central to the weave but seems appropriate to prizewinning, and has been for me a kind of lifeline throughout this extraordinary experience. A number of poems in the book engage the dilemma, the jeopardy even, of human accomplishment. The most specific of these is the poem sequence Everest, which sprang from the coincidence that Edmund Hillary made his famous ascent of the mountain in May 1953, the month that I arrived, at age five, with my parents and three-year-old sister, in Canada, immigrants from the U.K. From serendipity to the heart of things:
Since Hillary 1200 summiteers, 175 deaths against the tallest question: what to do with a life?
What indeed? Human endeavour is paradoxical, is brought up perpetually against its antithesis; a mountaineer engages and comes to respect most what is not the mountain: precipitous space, fierce and frigid wind. Alongside my gratitude for this award, the generous certainty of its gesture, I'd like to place these few less certain lines, an edgy moment from my life in poetry where words encounter their antithesis, that is also their bedrock and raison d'être-the wordless world. Here is the final section from Everest, entitled "Horizon":
Horizon
Like a streak of morning under overcast, the wordless under the word, little curve
of earth's surface one covers even going to the compost bin, even mowing the lawn.
Unknown, unknown but for cadence in us, a pace participant in permanence, a vibrancy, pulse not dramatic, not abstract either, of eternal
presences, of everywhere. A steady light. Where gods move to accomplish the pointedly pointless, deeply impossible thing.
For helping to sustain the possible-human imagination, artistic life-against our tantalizing horizons, I thank you all.
To read a brief essay reflecting on winning the award, which John wrote specially for the Amphora site, click here. Also posted are binder Lise Dubois' description of her design and binding for the award copy of Stumbling in the Bloom.