Pacific Doors: Earle Birney, Allen Curnow, and Pacific Modernisms

t's only by our lack of ghosts / we're haunted": few lines feel as familiar, and also as dissonant and as wrong, as Earle Birney's often-quoted conclusion to "Can.Lit."(One 58).What are Canadian literature and culture currently, after all, but a succession of hauntings?From stories of survival and resistance in residential schools to narratives of the internment of Japanese Canadians in wartime Vancouver through to ongoing journalistic narratives of the murder of Indigenous women and the neglect of them and their families by police investigators in recent times, Canada's stories are full of ghosts, revenants, spectres, unsettled histories, and conflicts.1 Has Birney himself become a ghost figure, part of what David Damrosch calls the "shadow canon" (45), those writers caught between the "hyper canon" of often-cited authors dominating the literary ecosystem and the "counter canon" of resistant, Indigenous, and alternative voices supplementing and challenging the mainstream?The "shadow canon," for Damrosch, exists in a strange kind of literary half-death, circulating in culture but not quite haunting it, acknowledged as having been a presence without ever registering in ongoing scholarly discussion, teaching, or debate.Birney's (troubled) nationalism, his unreflective misogyny, his lack of interest in ongoing Indigenous experience in lands where, for his writing, the "Chehaylis are gone / & the salmon with them" ("What's So Big About Green?"One 60): all of this pushes Birney's books to the back of the cultural rummaging-drawer, unlikely tools to come to hand for our given moment.Scholarly trails take us away from these tracks through "the welling and wildness of Canada the fling of a nation" ("North Star West," Selected 106) towards global and border-crossing themes and interests, from Jahan Ramazani's arguments for a "transnational poetics" (23) to Susan Stanford Friedman's recent proposal that we read "planetary modernisms" (1) in place of the old nation-bound canons Birney and his contemporaries did so much to construct and contest.In

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