Writing home in contemporary Canadian long poetry

This dissertation examines representations of the home in the long poems of bpNichol, Don McKay, Louise Halfe, and Dionne Brand. The organizing principle of the dissertation is that representing the home is the long poem’s central intention, especially in the long poem’s adjacent concern with expressing the operations of longing. The home, then, is the genre’s primary object, the object for which it longs, producing unique but overlapping declarations in the following areas in this dissertation’s poems: nostalgia (Greek for “the pain of homecoming”), ecology (Greek for “the study of the house”), kîwêtinohk (Cree for “carrying the bundles home”), and unheimlich (German for “the unhomely”). Collectively, these terms function as etymological foundations on which the works of the dissertation combine the form of the long poem with its inherent preoccupation to thematize the home. Chapter 1 addresses bpNichol’s usage of nostalgia in his long poem The Martyrology; by focussing on his paragrammatic saints of language, I argue that figures like St. And, St. Ranglehold, and (no) St. Algia are representations and embodiments of homelessness, which Nichol uses to evaluate the poem’s generic themes of home and pain, especially as his long poem functions as a purposeful revision of the classical epic and its reliance on themes of national cohesion and homecoming. Chapter 2 examines Don McKay’s The Muskwa Assemblage and argues that an ecologically attuned poetics allows McKay to express the concerns and crises of a natural world in peril; by adopting a perspective of collaboration, in which poet and natural world function in unison, the poem represents home in and on its own terms, eschewing the anthropocentric viewpoints and attitudes of hubris that have led to ecological catastrophe. Chapter 3 evaluates the configuration of the cultural and spiritual home of First Nations women in Louise Halfe’s Bear Bones & Feathers and Blue Marrow; home, as understood in this chapter, is the site where the repatriated women, specifically grandmothers and granddaughters, learn to voice their way out of colonial silence and desecration, relying on a communal and choral cohesion of homemaking. Chapter 4 utilizes themes of uncanniness to describe the operations of Dionne Brand’s poem thirsty; domesticity and urbanity are spaces equally disrupted by the uncanny influence of corporeal violence and traumatic mourning, and this chapter examines the way the architectural and emotional sites of home are disturbed through death and the subsequent haunting by the uncanny’s central figure, the ghost. These poets collectively employ the long poem in order to evaluate the polysemic interpretations of home; respectively, Nichol, McKay, Halfe, and Brand interrogate the role of nostalgia interwoven with nationalism and individualism, the natural state of Canada’s biospheres and the ways that poetry can counter ecological catastrophe, the cultural conditions for First Nations people in a colonized home, and the impressions of uncanniness which accompany the contemporary citizen

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