WEBB, Phyllis

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Victoria, British Columbia, 8 April 1927. Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.A. in English and philosophy 1949; McGill University, Montreal, 1953. Career: Secretary, Montreal, 1956; teaching assistant, English Department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960–64; program organizer, 1964–67, and executive producer, 1967–69, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Toronto; guest lecturer, University of British Columbia, 1976–77, Banff Centre, Alberta, 1981; writerin-residence, University of Alberta, 1980–81; adjunct professor, Creative Writing Department, University of Victoria, British Columbia, 1989–93. Awards: Canadian Government Overseas award, 1957; Canada Council bursary, 1963, and award, 1969, 1981, 1987; Governor-General's award, 1983; Governor General's award, 1982. Officer of the Order of Canada, 1992. Address: R.R. 2, Mt. Baker Circle, C-9, Ganges, British Columbia V0S 1EO, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Trio, with Gael Turnbull and Eli Mandel. Toronto, Contact Press, 1954.

Even Your Right Eye. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1956.

The Sea Is Also a Garden. Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1962.

Naked Poems. Vancouver, Periwinkle Press, 1965.

Selected Poems 1954–1965, edited by John Hulcoop. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1971.

Wilson's Bowl. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1980.

Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti Ghazals. Lantzville, British Columbia, Island, 1982.

The Vision Tree: Selected Poems, edited by Sharon Thesen. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1982.

Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals. Toronto, Coach House Press. 1984.

Hanging Fire. Toronto, Coach House, 1990.

Other

Talking. Montreal, Quadrant, 1982.

Nothing but Brush Strokes: Selected Prose. Edmonton, NeWest, 1995.

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Bibliography: By Cecelia Frey, in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors, vol.6, edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David, Toronto, ECW Press, 1985.

Manuscript Collections: National Library of Canada, Ottawa; Talonbooks Archives, Vancouver; Simon Fraser University Library, Bumaby, British Columbia.

Critical Studies: "The Structure of Loss" by Helen Sonthoff, in Canadian Literature (Vancouver), summer 1961; "Phyllis Webb and the Priestess of Motion" in Canadian Literature (Vancouver), spring 1967, introduction to Selected Poems 1954–1965, 1971, Phyllis Webb and Her Works, Toronto, ECW Press, 1991, and "Webb's Book of Revelation: Lifting the Lid off 'Krakatoa' and 'Spiritual Storm,'" in Inside the Poems: Essays and Poems in Honour of Donald Stephens, edited by W.H. New, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1992, all by John Hulcoop; introduction by Sharon Thesen to The Vision Tree, 1982; "I and I: Phyllis Webb's 'I Daniel,'" in Open Letter (Toronto), 2–3, summer-fall 1985, and "Surviving the Paraph-Raise," in Signature, Event, Cantext, Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1989, both by Stephen Scobie; "Proceeding before the Amorous Invisible: Phyllis Webb and the Ghazal" by Susan Glickman, in Canadian Literature (Vancouver), winter 1987; "Phyllis Webb As a Post-Duncan Poet" in Sagetrieh (Orono, Maine), 7(1), 1988, and "You Devise. We Devise," in West Coast Line, both by Pauline Butling, 6, winter 1991–92; Aspects of the Spiritual in Three Canadian Women Poets: Anne Wilkinson, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Phyllis Webb (dissertation), McMaster University University, 1992, and "Phyllis Webb: The Voice that Breaks," in Canadian Poetry (London, Ontario), 32, spring-summer 1993, both by Liza Potvin; "'Oh for the Carp of a Critic': Research in the Phyllis Webb Papers" by Lorna Knight, in West Coast Line, 26(2), fall 1992; Self-Deconstructing Lyric: Coleridge, Dickinson, Williams and Webb (dissertation) by Raymond Gilbert Wilton, University of Alberta, 1994; The Feminist Romantic: The Revisionary Rhetoric of 'Double Negative,' 'Naked Poems,' and 'Gyno-Text' (dissertation) by Susan Lee Drodge, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1996; "A Question of Form: Phyllis Webb's Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals" by Shirley Chew, in The Contact and the Culmination, edited by Marc Delrez and Benedicte Ledent, Liege, Belgium, L3, 1997; "Feminist Ecocritique As Forensic Archaeology: Digging in Critical Graveyards and Phyllis Webb's Gardens" by Diana M.A. Relke, in Canadian Poetry, 42, spring-summer 1998.

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Phyllis Webb is a poet of austere dedication whose relatively small number of finely crafted poems have slowly attracted the attention of readers. Her work also has influenced other poets and helped to change the course of poetry in Canada during the years in which she has been steadily honing her craft.

Webb's first poems appeared at the beginning of the 1950s in Contemporary Verse, Alan Crawley's historic little magazine. Since then she has published only sparsely. She always seems reluctant to release a poem into print or speech, and her works, when they do appear, have been honed to an extraordinary intellectual spareness. Yet her image as a diffident and reclusive poet is not entirely justified. She has at times been politically active on the left, as when at the age of twenty-two she stood unsuccessfully as a social democratic candidate in the British Columbia provincial elections. In the mid-1960s, working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she devised and was the first producer of the highly regarded program Ideas. The venerable program continued to flourish long after Webb retired from the world of public action to her retreat on Salt Spring Island, a place of relative seclusion in the channel between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia.

Webb shared her first volume, Trio, with two poets remarkably unlike herself, Gael Turnbull and Eli Mandel. Her first individual volume, Even Your Right Eye, appeared in 1956, and while The Sea Is Also a Garden and the sparse Naked Poems were issued together in the early 1960s, her Selected Poems of 1971 included nothing published after 1965. There was a long gap before her next collection, Wilson's Bowl, appeared in 1980. This was followed in 1982 by The Vision Tree: Selected Poems and Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti Ghazals and in 1984 by Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals. Hanging Fire appeared in 1990. The Vision Tree, the book nearest to a volume of collected poems, represents the work of more than thirty years in a mere 154 pages.

Webb's later books have finally established her among Canada's leading poets, although her influence on younger poets had been evident long before. Northrop Frye described Wilson's Bowl as "a landmark in Canadian poetry," and The Vision Tree won her the establishment recognition of a Governor-General's award. She continues to write in seclusion, to polish, and, very often, to discard.

For Webb, in fact, growing in maturity as a poet has meant withdrawal for long periods, a narrowing of the circle of the creative self in keeping with the solipsistic character of much of her verse. More than twenty-five years ago she said that "the public and the person are inevitably / one and the same self." But while this may have been true of the Webb who campaigned as a socialist candidate, it has not been true for many years of the poet who has become concerned with personal emotions, the loneliness of living, the knifeedge paths on which we painfully dance our way to death. She no longer sees art as a "remedy," as a "patched, matched protection for Because."

The result is perhaps foreshadowed in the early poem "Is Our Distress":

This our inheritance
is our distress

born of the weight of eons
it skeletons our flesh,
bearing us on
we wear it
though it bears us.

The philosophic pessimism—in unguarded moments breaking down into self-pity—that these lines suggest has tended to control the development of thought in Webb's poems. It has led her to move from the elaborate and the assured toward the simplified view of anarchists like Kropotkin, the view that the less one demands of existence, the less one has to defend. One question in "Some Final Questions," a section of Naked Poems, reads

Now, you are sitting doubled up in pain.
What's that for?
 
doubled up I feel
small like these poems
the area of attack
is diminished

The Naked Poems are indeed reductive in terms of verse as well as life. They were prepared for by a work in The Sea Is Also a Garden, "Poetics against an Angel of Death," in which Webb says,

Last night I thought I would not wake again
but now with this June morning I run ragged to elude
The Great Iambic Pentameter
who is the Hound of Heaven in our stress
because I want to die
writing Haiku
or, better,
long lines, clean and syllabic as knotted bamboo. Yes!

Indeed, Webb's poems at this point became quasi-haiku, small, simple, as packed with meaning as stone artifacts, and punctuated by periods of stubborn silence. These "naked poems," as austerely beautiful as weathered bones, are crucial to her career. In the later poems of Wilson's Bowl and in their successors Webb emerged into what is, in fact, a structure of "long lines, clean and syllabic as knotted bamboo." The poems of this last period are no longer minimalist. They expand not only formally into complex patterns of sound but also in thought, in what Webb herself has called "the dance of the intellect in the syllables," and there is a return on an apolitical level to the humane considerations of her earliest phase as she weaves the problems of self and other into pieces like her "Kropotkin Poems":

The Memoirs of a Revolutionist before me, things fall
together now. Pine needles, arbutus bark, the tide
comes in, path to the beach lights with sun-fall.
Highest joys? The simple profundity of a deadman works
at my style. I am impoverished. He the White Christ.
Not a case of identification. Easier to see myself
in the white cat asleep on the bed. Exile. I live
alone. I have a phone. I shall go to Russia. One
more day run round and the 'good masterpiece of work'
does not come. I scribble. I approach some distant dream.
I wait for moonlight reflecting on the night sea. I can
wait. We shall see.

Webb, more than most other poets, has forced herself to know the limitations of her talent, and in this way she has learned its full powers. The stark, elliptical beauty of the collection Hanging Fire places her, with Douglas Barbour and Fred Wah, in the forefront of the Canadian language poets. Some titles of the poems she calls "?" are used as triggers for meditations, which are sometimes on the sounds of the words themselves. Wit, insight, and musical instinct combine to penetrate and then illuminate what was unknown before.

—George Woodcock and

Patience Wheatley