I’ve been struggling with today’s post a lot. I intended to blog about Michael Crummey’s beautiful, epic, sweeping, exquisite Galore. I’d been planning for it all week, in fact. I was going to tell you how charmed I was by the book, and how taken in I was by its beauty.
And then I checked Twitter this morning. And I read that Robert Kroetsch died last night in a car accident. And thinking about literature in Canada at all today is just making me so very sad as a result. It’a hard to imagine the literary scene in Canada without his incredible presence.
As a youngish CanLit scholar, I really did come of age within Kroetsch’s ideas about literature and especially postmodernity in Canadian literature. I understand literature in his terms in many ways. His work was no longer “radical” by the time I stumbled across it in 2001, but it was radical to me — it represented, to me, a very contemporary way of thinking about literature after the very stogy approaches I had encountered in high school.
But more importantly, those words in Boundary 2 and elsewhere showed me something essential to who I have become: Canadian literature is worth it. It’s worth debate and discussion and impassioned argument and anger and hurt feelings and depth of thought and real emotion and tears and laughter and conversation. Conversation and time. Because sometimes outside of an English classroom, it’s easy to forget why our stories matters.
I was lucky to have been exposed to a lot of literature growing up, and my mum especially has always been a voracious reader of Canadian literature. So I knew, more than my classmates perhaps, that Canadian literature mattered to real people. But Krotesch’s writing showed me that it was worth conversation and time within the hallowed halls of academia and outside on the street corners, in the dark of my room by flashlight and at a cocktail party. That our literature is an innate part of ourselves, and that we need to talk about it.
Seed Catalogue was the first long poem I ever encountered, and quite likely the first poem I ever really liked. The rural Canadian setting and the simultaneous smallness and largesse of the world Kroetsch’s world created — it all stunned me. Poetry became more than merely academic in those first moments I sat flipping through Seed Catalogue in a Centretown bookshop in Ottawa. Utterly captivated by the world unfolding on the page before me, I realized that poetry is real life.
I’ve always been enamoured of this image from The Sad Phoenician:
but secretly at night I turn signs around, I point
all travelers in the wrong direction
And the right one, too.
RIP, Mr. Kroetsch. And thank you.
