Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1983
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 1983, pp. 109-119.
Abstract
McAlmon's Chinese Opera, the most significant prairie poem from Canada since Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue and Eli Mandel's Out of Place, concerns "understand[ ing) modern writing" more than it does "the Mid-West." Indeed, it is only by the most expansive definition a prairie poem at all. Yet it is an appropriate source of epigraph, not only because it touches on metaphor, space, and poetry, but because its emphasis is characteristic of a shift in plains poetry and in its criticism, which prompts this essay. Furthermore, as a Canadian poet's tribute to a neglected American modernist, Scobie's poem might also remind us of the recent acceleration of comparative studies of Great Plains literature. Although most of us still talk out of a long immersion in one literature or the other, and have to stretch at the intersections (as in my dependence on anthologies for some sense of the breadth of poetry in the Midwest), the 49th parallel is not quite the barrier it once seemed.
"Prairie hides its surprises / in the open-" writes one young Saskatchewan poet. Readers of prairie poetry are familiar with this sense of something utterly obvious, yet completely elusive. "How do we . . . find the astounding here?" Robert Kroetsch asks. "And the first answer, the one that must be resisted, is the attraction of the landscape itself." The assumption that prairie poetry is a meaningful category, having something to do with a sense of place, may similarly be so obvious it needs resisting. Arthur Adamson, one of the few critics who has grappled with the theory of literary regionalism, notes that "it is not description of prairie scenery ... that makes a regional writer, but the ability to translate descriptive elements into metaphor." Metaphor is the crucial subject, because it is the most profound human means of making connections, of relating to space, of finding intersections. fu Paul Ricoeur puts it, "metaphor is the rhetorical process by which discourse unleases the power that certain fictions have to redescribe reality."
"Some people call their scenery flat," William Stafford marvels; "I think around them rise a riches and a loss." The fullest discovery of the riches and the loss, the prairie's "surprises," is certainly made through metaphor. "As figure, metaphor constitutes a displacement and an extension of the meaning of words." The definition suggests my intention: not to espouse a simple determinism-a particular landscape causes a particular perceptionbut to discuss, by consideration of some persistent metaphors in plains poetry, the displacement and extension of the meaning of words, especially such words as space, place, plains, and prairie. Such a broad definition of metaphor is appropriate to the overview attempted in the first half of this essay; a different enquiry might distinguish more particularly among various kinds of metaphor.
Comments
Copyright 1983 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln