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    In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton
    In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton
    In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton
    Ebook183 pages1 hour

    In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton

    By Robin Skelton

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    In a country in which poetry has been largely private and apologetic, Robin Skelton played the part of poet with grand style: flowing beard, mane of white hair, rings on every finger, huge amulet around his neck, all topped off with a black hat that looked as if it came from a Venetian gondolier but was really picked up at the re-enactment of a Cariboo Gold Rush-era general store in Barkerville, B.C.

    In this selection of his best verse there are poems of "high" and "low" art, spells and prayers, meditations, shemanic maps, and, in the centre of the book, "messages," those strange, inspired "gifts" at the core of Skelton’s art. In making the selection for this volume, editor Harold Rhenisch, himself an accomplished poet, has held to the image that Skelton’s themes repeat like the ripples of water spreading out from a pebble dropped into a pool, and has attempted to bring together the best ripple from each dropped pebble.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateOct 30, 2007
    ISBN9781459721227
    In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton
    Author

    Robin Skelton

    Poet, anthologist, editor, teacher, biographer, art and literary critic, historical writer, initiated witch and occultist, Robin Skelton came to Canada in 1963, the author of five collections of poetry and nine other books. He taught at the University of Victoria for almost thirty years, teaching in the Department of English and then in the Department of Creative Writing, of which he was the founding Chairman in 1973. In 1967, together with John Peter, he founded The Malahat Review.

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      Book preview

      In This Poem I Am - Robin Skelton

      PERMISSIONS

      A PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS A BOOK: AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD RHENISCH

      In a country in which poetry has been largely a private and apologetic pursuit, Robin Skelton played the part of the poet with grand style: flowing beard, a mane of white hair, rings on every finger, a huge amulet around his neck, all topped off with a black hat that looked as if it came from a gondolier in Venice but really was picked up at the re-enactment of a Cariboo Gold Rush–era general store in Barkerville in the British Columbia Interior. Robin Skelton looked as if he was onstage. He was.

      Skelton’s intellectual reputation was equally eclectic: scholar of the Irish Renaissance, artist, witch, art collector, novelist, storyteller, spellmaker, surrealist, anthologist, poet, editor, husband, translator, father, exorcist, lover, reviewer, shaman, friend, chain-smoking rescuer of drowning bottles of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey, scryer, teacher. It would all be dauntingly incongruous, except that Robin Skelton came from an age in the world when scholars were conversationalists, able through their familiarity with the tradition to see patterns where others did not and, above all, to bring ideas and people together. Skelton’s first act as a poet and an intellectual was to make the man we knew as Robin Skelton. That man was the delivery vehicle — the human equivalent of a book — for an entire world.

      The book, Robin Skelton, however, was a man of contradictions. He lived for the innovative, the philosophical, and the new — after all, his poetic roots were in surrealism — but he did so as a nineteenth-century man of letters, not a twentieth-century one. He let his hair and beard grow for twenty-five years, too, untrimmed, like a Welsh Samson — not as a countercultural protest, but because, without any McLuhanesque the-medium is the message fuss, he believed in embodying, not discussing, his ideas and beliefs. And he was generous about it.

      In the same way the alchemist John Dee fled the political intrigues of the sixteenth-century London court to set up the greatest library in England in the seclusion of goosey, rural Margate, Robin Skelton left the funereal academic world of Manchester to live in a big old house in Oak Bay, British Columbia, which he turned into a shrine to poetry and art. Actually, it was more an alchemical diagram of the human heart than a house in any recognizable sense, with mystery novels stacked up in the kitchen, ghost stories in the haunted back bedroom, sagging shelves of humour in the loo, goddesses (rescued from flea markets) spilling off the mantel and encroaching on the living room, modernist paintings covering every conceivable inch of wall space, and one of the world’s best collections of Irish poetry on the somewhat spiralling stairs leading to the second storey where oak and apple trees knocked at the windows. Within this magical chamber and propelled by it into the world, Robin Skelton was larger than life, a man who read his poetry to all comers in a sonorous voice honed with the British Broadcasting Corporation and who opened his house weekly to ply an entire city with wine in celebration of art. He was a university.

      More privately, Robin Skelton was a healer of broken bones, a revenant releasing ghosts from the pain that kept them on this earth, and a celebrant who brought children to the world by the touch of his hands. In short, in a provincial world too small for his horizons, he played the alchemist, like John Dee to Queen Elizabeth I, promising through his dedication to bring all human pursuits into one unified vision — a vision, ironically, almost completely lost through the vicissitudes of a changing world that eventually left him on the margins of his art. In the end, much like John Dee, who died in penury and obscurity, or even like the homunculus Shakespeare made of him, Prospero himself, Robin Skelton, who spoke for the entirety of the English tradition, the direct heir of David Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, and the occasional tradition of A.E. Housman and John Masefield, compatriot of Ted Hughes, John Montague, Tony Connor, and W.S. Graham, died quietly and frustrated in a small Canadian city isolated even from Canada — his books increasingly unread and his passions increasingly out of fashion, lost to both his English and his Canadian readers by his firm insistence on uniting both traditions in a world which had other, more angular interests.

      It was not, however, the end. At his death Robin Skelton left (not unexpectedly) ten unpublished manuscripts, ranging from poetry to fiction, from ghost stories to journals and histories. This bridger of worlds, to whom every act could be apprehended through words, also left a legacy of attention to the musicality of words, one that appears to be becoming more contemporary again as mainstream poetry’s infatuation with Marxism increasingly wanes and a new generation of Canadian and American poets turns to classical models. There is much for them in Skelton’s quixotic attempts to heal poetry’s civil war, to renew a still-living tradition by merging it with anti-metrical modernism. Even though growing insularity dogged Skelton through his three and a half decades in Canada, after two generations of intensified specialization, many Canadian poets are now returning to the gregariousness of classicism — yet they are doing so largely without the benefit of either Skelton’s eclectic imagination or his experience at adapting those forms to the Canadian experience. Sadly, Robin Skelton’s life eclipsed his art.

      To help right this wrong, I have assembled here a sampling of Skelton’s poetry. In the following pages, you will find some of his signature effects: iambic pentameters broken in half, and sometimes in half again, to invigorate the short-line free-verse forms of the 1970s; resurrected verse forms; newly minted verse forms modelled after the intricacies of Welsh prosody; long experience of rhyme and repetitive verse structures

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