Willows Revisited

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1POEM OF THE MONTH A CENTENNIAL PROJECTIt may be an exaggeration to say that everybody in Canadawrites poetry but it is certainly true to say that at leastninety-five per cent of Canadians have at one time oranother in their lives courted the poetic muse. Statisticsalways lend themselves to different interpretations butresearches show that with the possible exception of the Finns, no more bardic a people than the Canadians have appeared inhistory. Yet it is also a strange paradox that in no country of the world is poetry less read or less published. The ingrained reluctance of each poet to regard as worth reading anything written by somebody else naturally accounts in a large measure for the lack of published work; obviously the more poets the less demand for poetry. It would appear that the very richness of the Canadian endowment tends to defeat the first requirement of any national art that it at least be articulate. But there is more to it than that. What Canada suffers from is a too great geographical diversity. In the last analysis all poetry has its roots in the soil. Though it may be the rocks and rivers of the harsh northland or the lush orchards and tobacco fields of Ontario, the wide wheatfields of the prairie west, the sugar groves of Quebec,
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Page 2or even for that matter the mines and industries that spring out of the soil, in the end the poet, like Antaeus, must touch Mother Earth from time to time to renew his inspiration and his strength. For he is of its substance and of its spirit, and even those struggles and tensions and defeats which mark his life and which as a poet he attempts to express today in forms of poetic cordwood thrown together into meaningless heaps have their origin in that very soil which is his present environment and his final destiny. But alas, the soil is all so different. The trouble with Canada, poetically no less than politically,lies in the wide variations of the geographical scene. TheFinns at least have a homogeneous country. Napoleon's famous "Whenyou have seen one square mile you have seen it all" concerningFinland is still echoed by many travellers to that country, but thesame, unfortunately, cannot be said of Canada. When you haveseen one square mile you have by no means seen it alienor,for that matter, when you have seen a hundred square miles or endasheven a thousand square miles. True, soil is soil literally acommon ground to the poet of east or west, nevertheless, theminnesinger of Ontario establishes no spiritual rapport withthe poet of the prairies or the maritimes, and certainly notwith the poet ox French Canada. So, also, the poet of Saskatchewanhymning the joy of the western wind or trilling with thecrickets on "their moonlit dancing floor," arouses nothingfurther in the way of understanding than that expressed by
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Page 3the literary editor of the Toronto Bay Leaf ''one wonders what in hell it is all about." A poem written in eastern Canada about the joys of "sugaring off" in spring/ or the red of the maples in autumn can suggest nothing more to the tiller of the land in Alberta or Manitoba than the temptation to beat his honest debts, or the advance of communism eroding his political creeds. It is true that Sarah Binks reaching beyond the wide gumbo stretches and alkali flats of her homeland to- wards._the larger Canada could write Son; of the Sea and Storm at Sea^but they have never been acknowledged as truly Canadian(y*H wost certainly not in the Maritimes) Despite the fact that they have been characterized as "the finest sea songs ever to come out of the drv belthJ they are still being relegated to a comparatively small segment of the country lacking the wide appeal which should characterize a national poetry.It is just this segmentation, this provincialism, one might almost say this parochialism, which, in the vis^ion of the Saskatchewan poets must now be overcome if Canadian literature is to come into its own. Moreover^ as^the members of the Special committee of the Saskatchewan School of poets who were appointed to go into the matter and to make suggestions in connection 'with the Centennial, the Canadian Centennial itself could not have come at a better time. For the Saskatchewan poets, especially the original School of Seven, are above all Centennial-conscious. For themany anniversary, whether, of a
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Page 4half or of a whole century, or even of the twenty-five years since they first gathered to celebrate the death of Sarah Binks,is more than a specific date. It is a state of mind, it is alinking of the past with the present, a ploughing and a harrowing and a general stirring up of the soil of history so that something good may cone of it. This an anniversary celebration is also an opportunity, and keeping in mind the last tine they joined in an anniversary celebration in which they as well as Saskatchewan profited, they see in Canada's one hundredth birthday an opportunity not only for Canada to achieve literary renown but also for those individual writers and poets who participate to acquire their own share of recognition and renown. After all, Saskatchewan's own semi-centennial celebration led to the publication of their collected Willows Revisited and also to the individual awards of the Saskatchewan Order of Merit for those writers who gave their support and their talents to the government when it stood in need of another chapter in its own anniversary booklet.It is thus not surprising that the Centennial drive toward a larger national literature and away from the otherwise restricted locale of their own writings should come from thepoets of Saskatchewan. For twelve long years they have stoodin public acclaim as part of the natural and cultural resources of that province. In some respects it has been a lonesome grandeur. "Let no one think," declared the Premier of Saskatchewan
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Page 5at the opening of the Natural History Museum in Regina at the time of the semi-centennial, "that we here are unaware of our great cultural heritage, and that in declaring this museum open, all we are interested in is Indian bead-work and stuffed ducks. In this great country of ours>stretching as it does from the midnight sun where there is ptarmigan and musk ox(-^f-and we hope to have some of them mounted here before long all the way down to our four thousand miles of undefended frontier, there is a cultural heritage. And the poets are as much of our cultural heritage as anything else. I know they tend to stand alone off by themselves. But don't get the idea that we, the government, are overlooking them. These men and women who have written such fine poems and have brought honor and publicity to this province deserve recognition and the government is going to do something about it as you know. Now the Order of Merit which we are going to mail to them may not in your opinion be as big a thing as this here museum but it's in the same class, because literature is as much a part of our natural resources as wheat and cattle and so te day we hope to discover oil on a large scale."The twelve years from 1955, the semi-centennial of the province of Saskatchewan, to 1967, the one hundredth anniversary of Canadian Confederation, may be no great span in the life of a nation, but in those twelve years much has happened both provincially and nationally. In Saskatchewan the hoped for oil has been discovered "on a large scale" and on the national
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Page 6scene a new flag has been devised to draw all Canada together in peace and amity. As a rule the true poet, unless like Jones-Jones he is a civil servant and something of an unofficial laureate, is unaffected by great events. certainly the poets of Saskatchewan have been unaffected by the discovery of oil. But the first suggestion of the new flag seems to have been the occasion for the poets of Saskatchewan, especially those of the School of Seven, to be aroused to their sense of national and social responsibility. 'Since their aclaim by the government of Saskatchewan in 1955 and the award of the Order of Merit, the School of Seven has produced little in the way of literature, being perhaps content to rest upon their laurels. The exception, of course is Bessie Udderton whose Vestal Verses IV dealing with the newer frozen foods and their preparation, is about to appear, although this treatment of the newer products is not generally regarded as a contribution to literature. (Bessie herself regards it merely as a social duty.) Nevertheless it is just this sudden consciousness of social obligation, of which Vestal Verses IV is merely an example, which seems suddenly to have seized upon the School of Seven and has led then to propose the, Poem of the Month as a project for the whole of Canada.Actually this sense of social participation has its roots in that now famous quarter-centennial occasion when the group of six poets, later to become the School of Seven, met in
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Page 7Willowview Cemetery to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Sarah Binks complete proceedings of thismeeting transcribed from the tape-recording of Osiris Jones-Jonesfootnote is given in Appendix I). In its original conception thismeeting was to be a somewhat exclusive affair and in spite of the notices which had been sent out, confined to the poeticallyelite, a fact clearly indicated by the unwillingness of some ofthose present to admit Purge Potiatok to the gathering. Indeedit is quite possible that if the lunch which Potatok had broughtthat day had been less acceptable to the members the group wouldnever have become known, as at present, as The School of Seven.But the Saskatchewan government, quick to perceive an opportunityto equal Ontario in the matter of artistic schools, and even inthe hope of going Ontario one better by making it a School ofEight, offered to publish the seven poems written for thatoccasion in its own booklet, Fifty Years of Progress. So farSaskatchewan has never reached its hoped for goal of a School ofEight,' indeed the most it has been able to accomplish by takinginto account the voice of the unknown and so far, unidentifiedMuse on Jones-Jones's tape-recorder is a School of Seven-and-ahalf. But this numerical shortcoming has not discouraged thegroup since through the publication of their work they have been lifted into prominence and awakened into awareness of socialresponsibility.One can never say of them hat they had had no sense of social
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Page 8orpolitical responsibility, but that it was merely latent. Infact it was at this first meeting in Willowview that Jones-Jones first presented "Saskatchewan, Thou Golden," which has since been adopted as the provincial song. Moreover at this meeting (See Appendix I again) the Saskatchewan crest, later to be proposed as a symbol to be incorporated into the new national flag, was first mooted. And there is no doubt that it was the success of Saskatchewan, Thou Golden that led Jones-Jones to write a new National Anthem, and later the Bilingual Anthem forall Canada. These have not yet been adopted, nor for that matter, have the proposals of the School for the design for another new Canadian flag which seems to have arisen out of the Saskatchewan crest already mentioned. The design of the Saskatchewan crest that of a snearth laying an egg in a nest composed of maple leaves and fleur--de-lis, was not a new idea In itself having come originally from the Premier of Saskatchewan on his return from one of the conferences of provincial premiers at Ottawa,' but it was seized upon and elaborated and finally presented as the decahedral flag, or, as it became better known, the Canadian Decahedron.The basic idea of the decahedral flag as finally presented by the special committee of the School of Seven was that instead of the usual oblong flag of other nations, Canada should adopta ten-sided flag having ten, corners or angles in which the provincial insignia or crests could be placed. The
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Page 9advantage of such a flag, it was pointed out, was that since it could not be flown upside down it could be flown in each province with the local crest on top. No province would thus have any advantage over any other province and no accusation of favoritism could be directed against the Federal government when adopted. Another advantage, would be international. A decahedral flag among the oblong ones of all the other nations would undoubtedly attract considerable attention and might even promote tourism,since visitors to places where flags were being displayed (the United Nations in Hew York for example) would probably wonder what kind of a nation this could possibly be.The choice of the crests or provincial symbols themselveswas to be left to the choice of the provinces, but it was suggestedthat Saskatchewan employ the one already devised by the premier,that of the snearth laying an egg on the nest of maple leavesand fleur<de-lis. This was regarded as all the more appropriate since it was assumedthat Ontario and Quebec would retain their present crests until the next centennial or so or until, possibly, in an outpouring of goodwill from Ontario, they merge their present insignia into a"single one", a fleur-de-lis shaped like a maple leaf. It was suggested that Nova Scotia adopt as its provincial crest the sign from the zodiac, a pair of crossed herrings, whereas for New Brunswick a can of Canadian sardines was proposed as being in keeping with the maritime tradition. Prince Edward Island
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Page 10could adopt a potato as its crest and it was taken for grantedthat Newfoundland wo aid fill its corner of the decahedral flagwith a picture of Premier Smallwood. If these suggestions werecarried out, then the province of Alberta, taking its cue fromSaskatchewan, would also use a snearth as its symbol, but to beshown as having a meal of fish and chips. This left onlyManitoba and British Columbia to be decided and here unfortunatelysince the provinces themselves were taking up the idea, some argument occurred and a certain amount of ill will developed which in the end was largely the cause of the proposed decahedral flag being rejected at Ottawa.In the case of British Columbia the right of that province to use the Grey Cup for their crest which they had chosen as a mark of hope and continuous aspiration was denied by the other provinces who claimed that British Columbia had no more right to it than they had, in faceless. Of more serious nature however was the dispute between Manitoba and Saskatchewan concerning the use of the snearth. Manitoba, anxious to seize the opportunity to get rid of its buffalo crest because of the extreme sadness and depression of that animal's features, proposed using a crest whose design was a snearth couchant upon the Grey Cup argent and to this Saskatchewan objected holding that snearths were the exclusive right of Saskatchewan and Alberta to which they were indigenous. To this Manitoba in turn replied that the snearth, together with the magpie was finding its way east from the
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Page 11Saskatchewan border and that if Saskatchewan would first under-take to keep their dawn magpies where they belong, hen they would have the right to talk, and in the meantime who in hell did they think they were anyway. This dispute was finally settled by the appointment of a Royal Commission of Heraldry in Manitoba with instructions to investigate the whole matter of flags, crests, and symbols to ether with the ancestry of some of the members of the opposition. In its report, part of which is still confidential, this Commission conceded the exclusive right of the more western provinces to the snearth but did however recommend that the buffalo of Manitoba could be much improved by removing one of its horns to bring it more into the heraldic symbolism of the unicorn, and that if, except around the eyes and nose, some white paint were applied to its face it would begin to resemble that of the pandabear and thus. in the opinion of the chairman of the commission "look a little less like a symbol of the thirties."Alas, the Decahedron as the national flag of Canada, has not been adopted though it may yet he revived. "It's just that the time is not ripe for it," declared the Prime Minister of Canada. "Perhaps in another Centennial or so we may cone to it. As it is, we can't so easily break with our past. Traditions .cannot be altogether ignored. We have the memory of Wolfe and Montcalm to think of not to mention people like Sir John A. Macdonald and Edward Blake and Daniel Webster and Mackenzie King. They helped build up this country."
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' Page 12SiTheir failure to have the decahedral flag adopted for allCanada has, however, not discouraged the Saskatchewan poets.John Swivel and Osiris Jones-Jones , the two members of theSchool of Seven who were appointed by the Premier of Saskatchewanto "try and think of something in connection with thisCentennial," have come up with more than the design for a newflag. It is no less than a new national anthem. "We have tohave a national anthem," declared John Swivel, "and can't getalong without one. A nice mess things would be in in thiscountry if people started putting on their coats and rubbersat the end of a meeting unless it were really over. But whatwith all this bilingualism and bicuituralism and not wantingany reference to the Queen or the crown, it's time we composeda new one. And if we here in the west can't do it for themI'd like to know who can! Those eastern poets just hack their prose into pieces and call it poetry. I can write stuff like that standing on my head. Out here at least we still have some respect for rhyme."The reference to bilingualism and bicuituralism and to Quebec not wanting any song linking it to the British crown, led, as a first attempt on the part of the joint efforts of John Swivel and Jones-Jones, to the substitution of the Governor General for the Queen in God Save the Queen, It began,God save our gracious Governor General Even though his appointment is just protemoral God save him just the same.

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