Thesen, Sharon 1946-

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THESEN, Sharon 1946-

PERSONAL: Born October 1, 1946, in Tisdale, Saskatchewan, Canada; daughter of Kelly and Dawn (Martin) Thesen; married Brian Fawcett, 1966 (divorced); married Peter Thompson (divorced); married Paul Mier; children: (first marriage) Jesse. Ethnicity: "Irish and Norwegian." Education: Simon Fraser University, B.A., 1970, M.A., 1974. Politics: "Left Libertarian." Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Books and writing, art, fashion, design, architecture, ecology, theology.

ADDRESSES: Home—755 South Crest Drive, Kelowna, British Columbia V1W4W7, Canada. Office—Department of English, Capilano College, 2055 Purcell, North Vancouver, British Columbia V7J 3H5, Canada. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER: Educator and poet. Worked variously as a dental assistant, stenographer, cab driver, and record librarian in Canada, c. 1960s-70s; Capilano College, Vancouver, British Columbia, English instructor, 1975—.

MEMBER: Writers Union of Canada.

AWARDS, HONORS: Governor General's Literary Award, poetry, 1982, for Selected Poems: The Vision Tree, and nominee, 1984, 1987; BC 2000 Book Award, for News and Smoke: Selected Poems; Pat Lowther Memorial Award, 2001, for A Pair of Scissors: Poems.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Artemis Hates Romance, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1980.

Holding the Pose, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1983.

Confabulations: Poems for Malcolm Lowry, Oolichan (Lantzville, British Columbia, Canada), 1984.

The Beginning of the Long Dash, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1987.

The Pangs of Sunday, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

Aurora, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995.

News and Smoke: Selected Poems, Talonbooks (Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada), 1999.

A Pair of Scissors: Poems, Anansi (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2000.

EDITOR

(And author of introduction) Selected Poems: The Vision Tree, by Phyllis Webb, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1982.

The New Long Poem Anthology, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1991, 2nd edition, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2001.

(With Ralph Maud) Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: a Modern Correspondence, University Press of New England (Lebanon, NH), 1999.

Contributor of poems to anthologies, including Writing Right: Poetry by Canadian Women, edited by Douglas Barbour and Marni L. Stanley, Longspoon Press (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), 1982; The Maple Laugh Forever: An Anthology of Comic Canadian Poetry, edited by Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie, Hurtig, 1981; The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse; Twenty Poets of the Eighties; Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, 4th edition, edited by Gary Geddes; and A Matter of Spirit, edited by Susan McCaslin. Editor, Iron, 1966-71, and Capilano Review, 2002—.

SIDELIGHTS: In a critical review of The New Long Poem Anthology, edited by poet Sharon Thesen, Ann Diamond remarked in Books in Canada that she "was struck (again) by the Canadian preoccupation with 'emptiness,' 'uneventfulness,' and 'aloneness,' and by a certain earnest longwindedness in lyrically describing these states ad infinitum." In the case of the poetry of Thesen, however, though there may be emptiness and aloneness, her world is hardly uneventful—nor is it dreary. "When I am writing and pause to think," Thesen once said, as quoted by Bruce Whitman in Essays on Canadian Writing, "the words I have already written have no history. . . . They are merely what went before, like the tracks of someone. They are signs, and they float, as it were, in an absolute present—a hall of mirrors in which I search for a true reflection or am amazed at the inventiveness of the distortions." Critics note that Thesen's poetry, which she has presented in a series of volumes beginning in the 1980s, has a similarly weightless and ineffable quality, mobile in its images and language, but far from insubstantial.

Thesen started out at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where she earned her M.A. with a thesis on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She edited several literary publications, helped transcribe the works of other writers, and worked variously as a cab driver, record librarian, and dental assistant. Then, in 1980, she published Artemis Hates Romance, in which she complained (in "Usage") that "It's all been / said before, everyone knows that. / There are 31 stories, or 29, or 42, / everything is the same old story." Her line "31 . . . or 29 . . . or 42" stories seems to reflect on the universality of certain themes, and in "Jack and Jill" she explores some of the themes of failed and dysfunctional relationships, using as her vehicle two characters familiar to people in the English-speaking world from their earliest memories: "Jack fell down the hill / breaking his head on the stones of the earth / The stones of the earth / are the petrified heads of women / mouths agape." Judy Robinson, reviewing the collection for Quill & Quire, wrote that the poet's "gutsy approach to language is a challenge to experience the unexpected and frightening roles that may well be the future of man's interpersonal relations."

Clearly Thesen herself has plenty of stories in her, regardless of what she may have said in "Usage." She would later characterize her first three books as "mad," "sad," and "bad" in the Malahat Review, and Artemis Hates Romance certainly has anger in it, such as when she lashes at an ex-husband figure she refers to as "you slimy hogstool." Her emotions mellow into sadness in Holding the Pose, a quieter work; in Confabulations: Poems for Malcolm Lowry, "bad" might refer to the hell-scorched vision of her subject. Lowry, the troubled author of Under the Volcano and other works, spent his last days during the 1950s in Thesen's hometown of Vancouver, sometimes staring across the bay at a sign for Shell Oil with an S that on occasion did not get lighted—thus, he said, telling him where he was headed.

The implication of the title of Confabulations was that Thesen was trying to establish psychic identity with Lowry—something one reviewer pointed out might be a dangerous step to take. Further difficulty presents itself in the fact that, as Sherrill Grace observed in Essays on Canadian Writing, Thesen was far from the first to pay tribute to Lowry: before her there have been a string of writers beginning with Conrad Aiken (Ushant), as well as the filmmaker Donald Brittain, the visual artist Alberto Gironella, the actor Albert Finney (who starred in John Huston's 1986 film of Under the Volcano), the musician Graham Collier, and many others. Kathleen Moore in Books in Canada held that Thesen had given it a good try without succeeding; but this book is not so much about Lowry as it is for him, as indicated in the title, and thus it was more difficult for critics to judge whether the author has achieved her objective. Through these poems, which—consistent with Thesen's underlying penchant to tell stories—together form a sort of biography of Lowry's soul, Thesen places the reader uncomfortably close to his pained reality. Using the Spanish word for "peeled," which Lowry had used in Under the Volcano, she writes: "Language the mask—/pelado — peeled—/ now it takes me / up to a whole afternoon / to find the word / I need." With that mask of language pulled away, there is nothing but the solitary man in his haunted loneliness: "where I am it is dark."

With her next book, The Beginning of the Long Dash, Thesen turned to less heavy-hearted subjects. This time, in her words, she was "glad," and the title seems to indicate the anticipation preceding a race—though in fact it refers to the sound of the National Research Council Official Time Signal at the top of the hour on the radio in Vancouver. Nonetheless, the volume is full of a sense of anticipation—not necessarily all positive—of the future. In a witty indictment of modern life she writes, in the title poem, that "the five most compelling words / are sex, free, cure, money, and baldness, / a chain of conditions ranging from heaven to hell." Her poems critique the consumer culture—"there's nothing to eat / but images to hunger for"—but not in the usual well-worn and easy ways. In "Being Adults," for instance, there is "The doctor's BMW / etherized in the alley." Nor is she above having a little off-color fun, as in "The Landlord's Flower Beds," where a dog "gilds the landlord's tiger lilies" with a golden stream of urine.

Books in Canada reviewer Rosemary Sullivan noted Thesen's ability to create compelling titles, citing for example The Pangs of Sunday; another example is the title Thesen gave to her series of poems chronicling her time spent far away from home in Montreal: "Radio New France Radio." The meaning of the title The Pangs of Sunday comes from a line in Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: after reminding the reader that she has already described the events of the preceding week in her characters' lives, Austen announces that "the pangs of Sunday only now remain to be described." As to why Thesen chose that title, few reviewers had much to say, but it seems to display her theme of moving toward the future, combined with a self-deprecating joke about what that future might hold for her and her work. Sullivan concluded a positive review of The Pangs of Sunday by citing Thesen's ability to retain readers' attention by (to use Sullivan's pun) keeping them "at-tension," looking inward, looking outward, looking forward and backward, but never allowing them to remain so complacent they do not see.

Among the other things about Thesen's career that The Pangs of Sunday shows is a sense of humor: in a poem from Artemis Hates Romance she notices that "Even the sky / looks like a 1955 social studies textbook / old & Atlantic / carrying bits of Nova Scotian / lake, the dust of Acadia." The persona in "Chicken in a Pensive Shell," preoccupied by matters other than this evening's dinner, finds herself confused: "I rest my case / on the kitchen counter where books / outnumber saucers & adjacent recipes / clash by night in pineapple shell / rowboats."

Susan Rudy Dorscht, reviewing Thesen's book alongside those of two others in Essays on Canadian Writing, found in The Pangs of Sunday the qualities that the other two works had promised but not delivered: "a self-consciously politicized poetry and a compositional strategy like that of jazz." As an example of an improvisational "jazz riff" in a Thesen poem, Dorscht quoted these lines: "The turning leaves / turn in a wind that rises / as if something warm, / invisible, and female just got up / from a nap and, half-dreaming, / walked to the kitchen / to make a cup of tea."

Five years after The Pangs of Sunday came Aurora, in 1995. Thesen proved in the title poem that, once again, she had a finger squarely on the pulse of modernity: "Everyone tied to phone or link. The risen cities / Of human splendor, cozy lounge, agencies, / Dog obedience school where two fall in love but there / Are complications not insurmountable. . . . " Jennifer Keene, in Quill & Quire, concluded that Thesen's "work is abidingly subtle and very moving." In contrast, Erin Moore, in Books in Canada, was ecstatic in her praise of the poet: "Reading Aurora reminds me fully of that first 'Thesen' experience," Moore wrote. "It is a book of gorgeous beauty, and it gives me those two things I crave: the familiar style of the beloved author, in this case the Thesen of wry whimsy and sadness . . . and, at the same time, a shift into new, sudden territory."

Thesen took a different literary path with the 1999 publication of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence. As coeditor with Ralph Maud, Thesen presented the three-year exchange of views between Boldereff, a typesetter, and Olson, author of Call Me Ishmael, a commentary on Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Boldereff had stumbled upon Olson's book while browsing the Melville section of her library, and was impressed enough to initiate correspondence with the writer who would go on to publish such classics as The Kingfisher. From 1947 to 1950, the letters between the two explored, among other topics, their mutual interest in poetry. The passages "include rehearsals of ideas and phrasing that later appear in [Olson's] essays and poems, as well as full drafts of essays and poems," according to Mississippi Quarterly reviewer Eleanor Berry. "They are copious and passionate, far-ranging in their concerns and references to readings, associative and sometime abrupt in their movements of thought, emphatically expressive their style, open . . . unconventional in syntax and punctuation—anticipating the characteristic prose style of [Olson's] essays."

Berry went on to say that one of the recurring themes of the letters was the state of American literature. Indeed, in the opening letter of the volume Boldereff praises Call me Ishmael as a "perfect book." "From the first," noted Berry, "Boldereff sees Olson as a writer with the capacity to redeem an America that has betrayed its promise. In an early letter she asks him to 'tell me about America—tell me how it is for you.'"

A Seminary Co-Op Bookstore reviewer called Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff "fascinating reading. . . . Here is Olson at the threshold of his career, still tentative, still feeling his way into his poetics . . . with someone equipped to understand him, sometimes better than he understood himself." The two maintained, through their letters and occasional face-to-face meetings, an intimate and complex bond, though both were married to others at the time. The two, according to Berry, "struggled to define the nature of their relationship, including the extent to which it depends on physical presence and sexual union. Immediately after their second meting, Olson writes her, 'The sense we are creating acts for men & women to come is very alive in me at the moment.'" Berry concluded that the correspondence makes "vivid the terrific difficulty faced by creative people in the United States of the mid-twentieth-century. . . . and will be of great value to those interested in matters of gender in postmodern American poetry."

Reviews of Thesen's works have generally been positive, except for occasional criticisms that she sometimes adopts a flippant tone in her first-person work. Overall, however, critics have found that her writing displays a deft precision of word and image. "Thesen moves through all our ordinary days making unusual, even startling connections," wrote Susan Schenk in Contemporary Poets. "Here is a poetry of careful observation, of precise statement; it challenges the way we see ourselves and see the world and ourselves in the world."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 56, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Contemporary Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Books in Canada, March, 1985, p. 25; March, 1988, pp. 36-37; June-July, 1990, Rosemary Sullivan, review of The Pangs of Sunday, pp. 32-33; February, 1992, Ann Diamond, review of The New Long Poem Anthology, p. 53; September, 1995, Erin Moore, review of Aurora, pp. 31-32.

Canadian Book Review Annual, Volume 25, 2000, review of News and Smoke: Selected Poems, p. 214.

Canadian Forum, February, 1982, pp. 37-39; February, 1985, pp. 39-40.

Canadian Literature, spring, 2003, Ted Byrne, "The Genial Disconnects," pp. 191-192.

CM: A Reviewing Journal of Canadian Materials for Young People, July, 1990, p. 193.

Essays on Canadian Writing, summer, 1986, pp. 114-21; spring, 1987, pp. 18-23; spring, 1991, pp. 54-66; winter, 1992-93, pp. 48-54.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), February 24, 2001, review of News and Smoke, p. D14.

Hungry Mind Review, spring, 1990, p. 44.

Mississippi Quarterly, spring, 2000, Eleanor Berry, review of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence, p. 307.

Publishers Weekly, November 22, 1991, p. 48.

Quill & Quire, December, 1980, Judy Robinson, review of Artemis Hates Romance, p. 34; July, 1995, Jennifer Keene, review of Aurora, p. 52.

Resource Links, October, 2001, Ingrid Johnston, review of A Pair of Scissors: Poems, p. 58.

Sagetrieb, spring, 1988.