All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek [Paperback]

A passionate believer in the power of artand especially poetryto influence and critique contemporary culture, Louis Dudek devoted much of his life to shaping the Canadian literary scene through his meditative and experimental poems as well as his work in publishing and teaching.All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudekbrings together thirty-five of Dudeks poems written over the course of his sixty-year career.

Much of Dudeks poetry is about the practice of art, with comment on the way the craft of poetry is mediated by such factors as university classes, public readings, reviews, commercial presses, and academic conferences. The poems in this selectionwitty satires, short lyrics, and long sequencesreflect self-consciously on the relationship between art and life and will draw readers into the dramatic mid-century literary and cultural debates in which Dudek was an important participant.

Karis Shearers introduction provides an overview of Dudeks prolific career as poet, professor, editor, publisher, and critic, and considers the ways in which Dudeks functional poems help, both formally and thematically, to carry out the tasks associated with those roles. Comparing Dudeks reception to that of NourbeSe Philip, Marilyn Dumont, and Roy Miki, Frank Daveys afterword locates Dudek in a pre-1980s version of multiculturalism that is more complex than many critics would have it. According to Davey, Dudek broadened the limits on the possible range and type of poetry for subsequent generations of Canadian writers.

For William Carlos Williamsby Louis Dudek

You want your truths told of you

those wavery lines!

Each pencil mark's a fiddlehead

unfolding to an island of wild fern,

O hell, did you have to do it

now, Bill

when we were just getting

the whiplash of your New Measure, crack

of the words in the sun, over the woman eating

plums, over the burning greens?

When we welƒ]