Poetic Solicitude: Two Languages and the Lyric Voice of Ex Nihilo

Poetic Solicitude: Two Languages and the Lyric Voice of Ex Nihilo Paul D. Morris Canada has frequently struggled in the attempt to accommodate linguistic diversity, despite the country’s defining history of contact between foreign languages and cultures. Dialogue through and across different languages has rarely been easy. The reasons for this long-standing difficulty are undoubtedly many, although a key structural obstacle must certainly derive from the representational powers inherent in language. Language, it seems, inevitably communicates much more than it states au premier degré. In the public sphere of administrative and judicial policy, for instance, linguistic representation is inevitably implicated in the struggle for implicit and explicit forms of sociopolitical power. Even in less overtly ideological contexts, language choice remains fraught due to its defining capacities as a medium of symbolic messaging, most powerfully perhaps as a marker and shaper of identity, whether individual or collective. Irrespective of the content or context of a given utterance, the language in which it is made may itself signify something of the language’s relative position in the social and political order. Canada’s policy of official bilingualism provides the example of a government attempt to attenuate the imbalances of language’s communicative and symbolic power in the public sphere. And while this measure has succeeded in fostering mutual awareness and official recognition of English and French in administrative and judicial settings, it has also inadvertently accentuated awareness of an essential asymmetry between the two languages (Leclerc 495). The very need for the equalizing intervention of a government policy reveals a fundamental difference in the linguistic rapport de force that persists between the two official languages in Canada. In the most pessimistic reading, this asymmetry equals what Sherry Simon, in referring to R-Albert Benoit, once termed a “servilité […] à la fois d’ordre linguistique et politique” (L’inscription sociale 52). Similar difficulties often pertain in the cultural arena as well. To adapt a well-worn [End Page 259] literary reference evoked by Margaret Atwood and Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, despite their proximity English and French are as frequently the sources of solitude as solicitude in Canada. The linguistic and cultural divide that offered a title to MacLennan’s famous novel and gave metaphoric expression to what is for some the Canadian national condition is rarely bridged. This is despite MacLennan’s implicit counter-intention in quoting Rilke in the epigraph to his novel: “der Liebe, die darin besteht, dass zwei Einsamkeiten einander schützen, grenzen und grüssen.”1 The transformation of differences into a source of solicitude is no simple matter. Nonetheless, although rare, bridgings of the solitudes are not unknown. The 2021 bilingual collection of poetry by E.D. Blodgett and J.R. Léveillé, Ex Nihilo, is one such example of poetic solicitude, a work of art that transcends the ideological and identitarian perils of bilingualism to become the expression of a poetic vision greater than that attainable in either language or by either poet individually.2 In this article, I wish to investigate the nature of this joint, bilingual poetic dialogue through discussion of the conditions that made it possible. Ex Nihilo, I will suggest, transcends the language-based sectarianism latent in bilingualism to allow the two languages to “protect, touch and greet each other” in the expression of a poetic voice that is more than the English of Blodgett and the French of Léveillé. This poetic transcendence is made possible due to the confluence of three essential factors: the complementary poetics of the two poets, the formal potential inherent in the modified renga that structured their exchange, and the self-abnegating capacity of Blodgett and Léveillé to both lead and follow the compositional example of the other in the elaboration of poetic images and stylistic devices that, together, bend and synthesize into a shared arc of thematic expression. The differences between the two poets-their poetic identities and separate national languages-are essential to Ex Nihilo, but only to the extent that they are expressed and then synthesized into something greater. Paradoxically, it is only in acknowledging and accommodating the différence posed by the two languages-including the two poetic identities shaped by...

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