Reading Pat Lowther’s Poetry Against the Archive

I’ve spent much of the past several days reading and re-reading The Collected Works of Pat Lowther, edited by Christine Wiesenthal. Lowther died, in 1975, at age 40. Too often, her violent death has been considered with closer attention and care than her work. Part of this is the inevitable sensationalism, and voyeurism, linked to any murder. Especially the murders of younger white women, the fodder for today’s true crime podcasts and countless Dateline episodes.

Then there’s the shock of reading Lowther’s work and finding pieces like “Kitchen Murder”, which I cited in passing in a piece on Munro and Pratt (food, sex, and violence in the kitchen), and a few other eerie works. This handful of poems seems to anticipate a violent end for the author, but of course they don’t, not really. These poems about violence against women instead express Lowther’s social consciousness, exceptionally attuned to injustice, and–though I’m more tentative about this–perhaps the circumstances of her own life and marriage.

Last night I watched Anne Henderson’s documentary Water Marks. It follows Beth and Chris Lowther, the poet’s two youngest daughters, as they grapple with the loss of their mother and her personal and poetic legacies. We hear from Pat Lowther’s daughter from her first marriage, who describes the violence of her stepfather, the man who became a killer. To the end of his life in prison, he refused to admit culpability. His own oldest daughter, from a previous marriage, confronted him while he was dying and asked if he had any remorse. No, he said. What did he have to feel guilty about?

This is a heavy, difficult family and personal story. Too many of us, writing about Lowther, get stuck in the story and don’t focus on the poems.

Pat Lowther is a poet of the Canadian Pacific Northwest, of its mountain ranges and waterways, its changing moods and seasons, its rocks and forests. Canadian eco-poetics is very far from my area of specialization; in fact, I am uncertain about that hyphen. But in environmental/ecological literary criticism, Pat Lowther is central to what was happening on the west coast in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet her work has been oddly overshadowed by the groupings and schools that are more storied, like the TISH poets. Lowther didn’t go to UBC, and in fact dropped out of high school to work. From early in her writing career, she was positioned as a working-class outsider to the shaking-up of poetry by the new radical voices, who in addition were mostly male.

Lowther is more closely aligned to the work of Dorothy Livesay, and they seem to have had an affinity. Moving east, there is her connection to Margaret Atwood, with whom she did a reading tour. Throughout her career, Atwood has paid tribute to Lowther in various ways. Most recently, that’s taken the form of the poems she provided as the libretto for Songs for Murdered Sisters. This is exceptionally important art, a call to action to end male violence against women and, more specifically, intimate partner violence. And it’s dedicated “to the memory of Nathalie Warmerdam, Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk, Pat Lowther, and Debbie Rottman.”

But I would like to move beyond the image of Lowther as murder victim, and I don’t know how we do that when there are two opposing forces. First, the very real and often respectful desire to commemorate her life, and connect her to the broader social issue of femicide. Second, what appears to be the current critical neglect of 1960s/70s Canadian poetry.

I hadn’t realized, until I started looking for Lowther scholars for an event, how little current work there is on the poets of this generation. The fiction writers are faring much better. There are a handful of excellent M.A. and doctoral theses, but none of them seem to have produced publications, so they remain siloed. The occasional mentions of Lowther also feel oddly decontextualized.

Here is what I mean. Lowther was not connected to TISH or, it appears, very many Vancouver-area poets. That would have made Roy Lowther’s poetic reputation and aspirations appealing, perhaps, as Wiesenthal assesses. However, she can easily be fit into other key traditions, especially eco-poetry and feminist poetry. So I need to do some work in this area and figure out where and how critics are connecting Lowther’s poems to, say, those of Don McKay or Karen Solie. This is an interesting take, for example, and Lowther would fit well in the company of fellow Vancouverites Rachel Rose and Elise Partridge.

A confession: I’ve written poetry off and on since I was a teenager. I published a few poems early, but decided it would be the most private part of my life and writing. That other people are willing to share their poetry, in print and in public readings, is a marvel. A gesture of generosity and trust. But for me there were models of women poets, media and literary culture creations, that were rather terrifying. Sylvia Plath, of course, on whom I spent far too much time. The imitative villanelles that were already, for Plath, an approximation of Thomas and others. Anne Sexton, Canada’s Susan Musgrave and Evelyn Lau. Even Margaret Atwood, and this is harder to imagine now that she is an august figure in her eighties, the consummate Canadian Woman of Letters.

During my late teens and 20s, it appeared that these happen-to-be-women poets were subject to gossip, misinterpretation by critics, and heavy dollops of sexist and patronizing attention. A very fun example is the NFB documentary Once in August. Atwood’s family joins in on the fun, defeating the filmmaker’s hope of a revealing portrait of the writer. Rubio’s out of his depth, surrounded by the members of a brainy family whose ironies he seems fully unable to comprehend. He labels Atwood “elusive”, possibly a synonym for “difficult”, and concludes that her essence cannot be grasped.

So Atwood, of all of these poets, could control the narrative to some extent. Other “poetesses” (the number of times the term is used well into the 80s appalls) could not. That seemed dangerous to my younger self, even if you were Elizabeth Bishop, even if you were Adrienne Rich. The boldness of having a poetic voice brought attention to that personal, lyric “I”, which is a construct, but for female poets is so often equated with the actual “I” of selfhood.

Then it is judged as lacking. Bad daughter, bad mother, bad friend . . . In Plath’s case, where everyone from her short-term neighbours to her disliked sister-in-law have weighed in, the judgements multiply. And still, the poetry (which should be the thing) is read biographically.

Similarly, there’s some not-so-subtle judgement of Lowther in the posthumous criticism. I came across a piece that took my breath away, in its feminist condemnation of her failure to leave her husband before he killed her. Alas, what I’m not finding as much of is really good, engaged criticism of her poetry. The exceptions are as follows.

Chris Wiesenthal’s innovative critical biography The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther and her introduction to The Collected Works of Pat Lowther. Models of sensitive analysis, and a huge improvement on earlier biographical work on Lowther. Thoughtful reviews of the book, by Magdalene Redekop and Susanna Egan, are also helpful.

In the more ephemeral literature, hard for folks without university library privileges to ever locate, there is the work by W.H. New and Dona Sturmanis for Final Instructions: Early and Uncollected Poems.

Iain Higgins’s characteristically perceptive review of Time Capsule in Canadian Literature.

Not yet located, but I’m on a quest to find The League of Canadian Poets’s The Pat Lowther Benefit: Celebration of Her Work. It may or may not be held at UBC’s Archives and Rare Book Room, as the library record is weirdly ambiguous, so I’ll check on that next month.

And there’s Carol Shields’s Swann: A Mystery, which I’ve been thinking about these past few days. It’s understood to be based on Lowther in a way, although Shields’s character is a farm wife with homespun, relatively crude writing. She is a world away from Lowther’s urban activist life and carefully constructed works, written in dialogue with the poets of her day, and most significantly the example of Pablo Neruda. But Shields’s novel is about the apparatus of literary criticism in the academy, the scrambling for poetic remains of dead authors. That theme is seen in everything from Henry James’s The Aspern Papers to A.S. Byatt’s satiric academic romp Possession, which has one of the most disappointing film adaptations one can imagine.

What Shields grasped about Pat Lowther’s legacy was that the poems were in danger of being lost. I’m so grateful that instead, thanks to the work of Lowther’s daughters and Chris Wiesenthal, we have an extraordinarily durable object of analysis and admiration in the Collected Poems. Now we need to figure out how to assess them in the 21st century, and appreciate the craft and care of Lowther’s unique poetic voice.