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Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets

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I don't know how much titling this collection SEMINAL is going to help sales of the book, it is the sort of title you might think twice about applying to a book people are going to be holding in both hands. I'm still feeling sort of sticky after many, repeated, complusive readings of SEMINAL, one of the best anthologies of poetry I've read in quite a while. Editors John Barton and Billeh Nickerson are to be commended for going in wide and pulling out deep, and their research is a marvel of compression and understanding. I learned more facts from SEMINAL than I've learned otherwise in the whole month of February. I had no idea, for example, that Clint Burnham was even gay, so that this book serves as a sort of "coming out" ceremony for (I assume) many of its contributors, sort of the way its American equivalent, WORD OF MOUTH edited by Timothy Liu, effectively outed one of the great US poets, William Bronk, by including him among the contributors.

SEMINAL has an enormous sweep, and you can trace the rocky path of Canadian modernism through its hills and valleys, and the occasional barbarisms which attend the birth of something huge and inhuman. Modernism, like homosexuality, was viewed by the Canadian poetry establishment as something of a foreign taint, and if you had it, you had been infected by a grave outside spectre. The spectacle of John Sutherland "reviewing" Patrick Anderson's poetry in 1943, in a "little magazine" called PREVIEW, was itself a preview for another half century of witch hunting and homophobia; suddenly the terms were on the table, "cosmopolitan" (bad) versus "native" (straight), and to a certain extent their meanings continue to proliferate, in politics and inside the poem itself, the Canadian poem. The editors give us some interesting poets here, and some who aren't so good somehow redeem themselves by the interestingness of their lives and legends. And the good ones are brilliant, from Emile Nelligan through R. M. Vaughan and beyond to the present day.

I was glad to see John Barton and Billeh Nickerson have included their own work in the anthology, up against the likes of Robin Blaser, bill bissett, Brion Gysin. Too many editors just sit in the background, making shadows out of their own light; claiming a false modesty that is somehow very Canadian. The truth is, Barton and Nickerson should be encouraged to publish more and more of their work. I cannot agree with the other reviewer who said there were too many Canadians in this book.