Читать книгу The Myth Alive - Don Gutteridge - Страница 1

This little book is a collection of some of the essays and review articles (and ordinary reviews that got out-of-hand) that I started writing some 40 years ago. While each of them was incited by a specific event, a timely request, or an urgent question in my ongoing literary life, they do attain--collectively--a certain focus and coherence. This is probably due to the simple fact that they deal with the commonplace, but irresolvable, issues which beset most writers of fiction and poetry in any age. Questions about how poems get made soon get re-cast, in a neophyte nation like Canada, to include why they get made. Such questions are timeless. The matter of the relationship between writer and reader gets further complicated by regional-centralist tensions with their eccentric, bi-focal, ironic character. Hence, questions of poetics and of the politics of interpretation intersect easily, and take on--from the writer's perspective--a continuing and jarring urgency. It is in this light and from this angle that these occasional pieces ought to be read.

The selections have been arranged in chronological order of their first publication, in part to give the reader a chance to see these urgencies and my corresponding enthusiasms played out over time--with all the resultant inconsistency and unevenness of development.

While tempted to expunge all infelicities and other blemishes, I have left the selections pretty much as they originally appeared. Only the piece on "Riel" has been edited, as it was originally a dramatized talk. Minor errors of fact have been corrected;; and aspects of formatting and referencing have been altered for the sake of consistency. .

I would like to thank the editors of the journals who published these essays and otherwise encouraged me to continue writing them; in particular, Denis Smith, Dennis Cooley, the late Geoffrey Milburn and Fred Cogswell, Stan Dragland, and W.H. New. My gratitude is also extended to those colleagues who over the years and often unwittingly have helped me shape and sharpen my arguments: R D Gidney, Robin Barrow, Robin Mathews, Colm O'Sullivan and Ian Underhill. And, as always, my thanks to Dianne Nemcek for typing the manuscript through its several metamorphoses, and to Laurie Stevenson for additional typing.