Europe: Revised According to the Original Manuscript With Emendations

Europe is the poetic journal of author's cultural pilgrimage to the famous buildings and fabled sites of Europe. This title includes poem that are arranged chronologically in the order of author journeyings.

Louis Dudek: A Personal Memoir

I can vividly recall when, as a sophomore at McGill in the early sixties, I saw him walk into the classroom to open the book on European Modernism, a tall, thin, scholarly-looking man who seemed a little tilted to one side as if he were listening to the conversation of a shorter world. There was an air of expectation in the room of the kind that attends a man who precedes his reputation by force of sheer presence, but without a hint of the intimidation or superiority that professorial entities often radiate. What endeared him to me most at first was his expression, which I have never forgotten and which was constantly rekindled even in his old age: a look of habitual concern and earnestness that would suddenly vanish to be replaced by the puckish grin of a clever street urchin who had just picked Shakespeare’s pocket.

Allied to his unfailing courtesy, this had the effect of putting us all at our ease and turning the proceedings away from seminar seriousness toward something like a social occasion in which peers met to discuss intellectual issues. Yet we understood that we were being addressed, questioned, prompted and taught by a polymath who seemed to know incalculably more than his subject, whose lectures seemed like unrepeatable performances (except that he repeated them every week throughout the academic year, each one different from the last) and whose classes would frequently conclude to a spontaneous burst of applause.

In thinking about Dudek as a tutor and guide, charismatic’ is not quite the right word to apply, since he could also be so appealingly modest and self-effacing. He was, in fact, the archetypal teacher, whose lectures one looked forward to the way one anticipates going to a movie or a play. Something was always happening. As his student over a period of several years, I cannot attest to a single moment of boredom. He had the art of bringing ideas to life, of drawing brilliantly apt comparisons, and of choosing illustrations from any historical period or apparently unrelated discipline. Moreover, he carried his erudition, which was encyclopedic, as casually as a Rolodex. I still remember the highlights twinkling off his glasses like little asterisks indicating the commentaries, jokes and asides with which he would sprinkle his talk. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I have never met anyone who could mix gravity and levity so effortlessly.

But his finest virtue as a teacher was his power for igniting enthusiasm, instilling in us a desire to learn and to emulate. This was not simply a pedagogical gift but a function of the lively and passionate imagination of a poet and a lover of poetry. Whether quoting whole passages from memory or lavishing on us anecdote, he made the poets and their work seem real, even irresistible. A sizeable number of his students decided they were intended by fate to become Dante or at least Baudelaire. Nearly everyone began to write.

Fired with a partly borrowed eagerness, we tended to see our fledgling literary steps as the colossal strides of the divinely anointed. He made us feel chosen, as if we belonged to the circle of the elect, to Wallace Stevens’ poetic sodality’. We felt masonic, revolutionary and indomitable. I sometimes think that I owe my present unenviable condition to Dudek for it was he, in his dual capacity of mentor and editor, who first convinced me that I had the wherewithal and stamina to become a poet. Punning on the name of the great nineteenth-century Italian master Leopardi, to whose work he initially introduced me, he said to me one day in his office after reviewing a manuscript I had submitted for commentary: Welcome to Leo’s party.’

In later years our agendas took us to different places. His deepening involvement with Ezra Pound made his poetry seem derivative and somewhat prosy, at any rate to his newly critical ex-student. Much as I tried, I could never come to accept his long poems, ＂Europe,＂ ＂En M?xico,＂ ＂Atlantis＂ and the ＂Continuations＂ series as anything more than the diary entries of an interesting mind. I found myself agreeing with Irving Layton that Dudek’s true gift as a poet was for the lyric mode he had abandoned many years before and recollected in ＂Continuations I (An Infinite Poem in Progress)＂ as

Putting together lyrics’With sex, talk, contact ...Having lost the dream, I feel no anguishLassitude itself is a dreamStill a happiness between the thighs, an awakeningA pleasure in the morning light

--lines that take us back almost a lifetime to the marvellous Pomegranate’ and its hexagons of honey’ crystallizing into lucent gems, giving off their own interior nuptial light as the world starts to life.’ When Dudek wrote of pomegranates, he was a p