Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, and Pat Lowther’s Life and Poetry

I’m working on an event to celebrate the brilliant poetry that Pat Lowther wrote before she was murdered when she was 40. This is a legacy that many others before me have contemplated, and it belongs most properly to her family members. Literary critics have limited emotional stakes in our work; we move on to other projects. Pat Lowther’s surviving children have a very different relationship to her life, death, and poems, and I’ve been thinking about how to ensure this is honoured and respected appropriately. Not because events to celebrate poets should turn into hagiography, but because I’m uneasy about the various ways that Canadian literary culture has used Pat Lowther’s memory.

Here’s a bit of a round-up.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award, named in 1980 (five years after the poet’s death), is given each year by the League of Canadian Poets for which Lowther did important work. It is awarded in “memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. As a women’s prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award is inclusive of cis women, trans women, and non-binary writers who feel comfortable being recognized by a women’s prize.”

There’s some unpacking to do there because, over the years, self-described “Women’s literature awards” have been contentious. Certain authors who identify as female don’t want to be consigned to a literary alleyway of gendered writing. They want to be on Main Street. That stance troubles me because it feels like a denigration of women, tout court, and specifically of what it means to be a woman writer in a patriarchal context. But there is evidence that “books about women don’t win big awards.” And The Guardian weighed in.

For several years in Canada, CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) thrived. I’ve been sorry to see their inactivity since 2019, but volunteer-driven efforts are challenging to sustain.

So a Pat Lowther Award for women poets: that seems important, and worthy of her legacy. I would hope that the League would also be engaged with other efforts related to her work. Then there’s the legacy in fiction, most notably Carol Shields’s Swann: A Mystery, a book I love and am perplexed by. It’s about the literary remains (this is very literal in the novel) of one Mary Swann, farm housewife and folk poet. Her writing is resurrected from a slim volume of poems found by a graduate student, Sarah, and it becomes the foundation of Sarah’s thriving academic career in the U.S.

I was in undergrad when I first read the novel. The early chapters, featuring Sarah as she dashes about teaching and researching and interviewing and writing, were a pleasure. But Sarah’s volume of Mary Swann’s poems goes missing, and she needs it to prepare her Symposium presentation. And it turns out–as we shift perspectives to other Swann-adjacent figures, mainly literary critics–that all the copies of her work have been disappearing, filched by a mysterious figure.

To my mind, the novel falls apart a bit in the section written as a screenplay, at the Symposium itself. Too much surface-level farce. But I should re-read it, because this assessment is based on distant memory. The part I do remember most clearly? We eventually learn that Mary Swann’s poems’ publication was more complex than critics realize. The publisher’s wife inadvertently used them to wrap fish, I think. The damp, dissolving fragments have to be reconstructed, which means that right from the beginning, Mary Swann’s poems were assemblages of text that likely don’t fully represent her own intentions.

Shields is having fun with academic theories like “Death of the Author.” These had some currency at the time, although it’s been a while since I’ve heard that particular one cited. And she’s interested in literary remains, what a relatively elusive, mysterious figure who was invisible during her life time leaves behind. There’s a wonderful bit about the displays at the Swann Museum. They are a fiction, I’m sorry to tell you, a reconstruction of the kind of things that Mary Swann might have owned.

Before she was bludgeoned to death by her husband. This is the tricky bit, because this is where CanLit critics have perceived an overlap with Lowther’s story. As far as I can tell, there are few commonalities between the lives and work of Lowther and Shields’s fictional character. In Atwood’s tribute to Shields she writes about the parallel, suggesting that Shields (whose early work received little attention) depicted that aspect of her own life in the novel, alongside using the Lowther allusion.

More recently, Atwood has provided eight poems to be the libretto for a musical project about femicide, Jake Heggie’s Songs for Murdered Sisters. This is a really interesting and important work, but I’ve been worrying about how it “. . . is dedicated to the memory of Nathalie Warmerdam, Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk, Pat Lowther, and Debbie Rottman.”

The inclusion of Lowther is due, I’m sure, to Atwood’s role in the project. On the homepage she’s quoted as saying “I have known two women who were murdered, both by jealous former romantic partners, so the killing of Joshua’s sister resonated with me. But I could not promise anything: with songs and poems, they either arrive or they don’t. I then wrote the sequence in one session. I made the ‘sisters’ plural because they are indeed–unhappily–very plural. Sisters, daughters, mothers. So many.”

I’m reminded of two things. I’m pretty sure there’s an Atwood story where characters discuss a friend who is experiencing domestic violence, or who has been murdered. I’ve been googling, trying to find the elusive reference. And of course there’s Atwood’s brilliant Penelopiad which, more than any take on The Odyssey that I’ve read, pays tribute to the murdered maids. I’m making note of this article about them to read later.

I’m glad to see these tributes by Canadian women writers to Lowther, on the one hand, but I also want more and different engagement with her poems. Because Lowther’s death was tragic, but she left behind two crucial legacies. Dozens of gorgeous poems, and her children.