Don’t Give Me No More of Your Lip; or, the Prairie Horizon as Allowed Mouth (2001)

By Robert Kroetsch

References

Robert Kroetsch is a novelist, poet and essayist who was born in central Alberta, did graduate work and taught in the USA, then came to Winnipeg to teach at the University of Manitoba. His novel, The Studhorse Man, received the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1969. He has published nine novels and numerous volumes of poetry, his most recent volume being The Snowbird Poems (2004). He is retired and lives in Winnipeg.

A Graduate student who grew up in Pamela Banting country near Birch River, Manitoba, came to interview me in Victoria.  She was doing her graduate work in Kingston, Ontario, and had been advised by her advisor that she’d find me silent, reluctant to communicate, and hard to get started talking.  After the interview that same advisor began the debriefing by saying, “Kind of a strange bird, isn’t he?”  The graduate student replied, “There’s nothing strange about him.  He’s just prairie.”

My mind has been boggled for some months now by that simple sentence.  I heard the story from the advisor, a belligerent, colonizing Easterner, so I have no idea of what the student’s tone might have been.  Already, a problem in the complex dialects of place.

He’s just prairie.

Does that mean that I’m silent, or does it mean that I talk?  Granted, I do spend a few months now and then without speaking.  But I spoke to the student for almost an hour.  Did her cryptic naming act imply a kind of erotic transcendentalism?  Or was she being abrupt rather than cryptic, and did her too brief summary imply that I might be one brick short of a load? 

Whatever the case, the student was obviously suggesting that prairie is people.  Prairie is actual, identifiable, and describable (though that modifier raises new questions) people.

I began to cast a cool and objective eye at some of my friends.  I considered, for instance, the faculty and staff of St. John’s College, their many students, their many associates.  I had, before the occasion of the interview, late one night, when awakened from sleep in Trier, Germany, and just to placate Dennis Cooley so that I might get back to sleep, agreed to say a few words at a meeting in St. John’s College on a subject he announced as prairie.  “What do you mean?” I asked him.  “Ah, you know,” he said.  And hung up.

Back in my narrow bed in Wolfgang Klooss’s subterranean guest room, contrived especially for claustrophobic visiting prairie people, I had a dream of David Arnason.  I saw and perhaps remembered Arnason trying to get wet in Lake Winnipeg.  I saw him, large and luminous, wading towards a far and vague prairie horizon, ever trying to find deep water.  In my dream he spoke as he waded.  Just as he moved beyond earshot, he began to tell me what Cooley would have said if Cooley had answered my question.  What do you mean?

Prairie, then, is as much performance as it is either place or answer.

Or to put it another way, it is possible that to become “just prairie” is to recognizes and even celebrate the predict whereby one can either gain utterance by enacting the impossibility of arrival (and the speculations of Gerry Friesen loom large here), or one can be rendered silent (and here looms the spectre of the unnameable) by the merest cognitive acknowledgement of a real prairie horizon.

I thought of Robert Enright, speaking without surcease to the round horizon.  I thought of Meeka Walsh, the writer, the prairie editor, seeking out the reassurance and consolation of the acute and quite often naked image, carefully framing it onto a rectangular page.  What, then, is the mathematics of prairie?  The curved straight line?  I thought of Nicole Markotic, her novel Yellow Pages, her Alexander Graham Bell reversing the physic of prairie, imagining the immediate as silence, the distant as sound.  I dial, and I cannot hear the phone where it rings.  The inventor of the telephone named bell.  This is a Dennis Cooley joke.  On the prairies, one is always presently deaf.  I thought of Charlene Diehl-Jones, that quintessential St. John’s prairie person, inside her stone house in Ontario, speaking and speaking against a forest that blurs all possibility of horizon.  Always, an heuristic vision.  (And I can’t remember what heuristic means.  I’ve looked it up four times.)  Always, on brick short of a load.

I turned (and the verb, to run, here, is basic) to the writings of that somewhat silent theorist and writer, Mark Libin.  Libin offers that a prairie text might be “propelled by means of circumlocution.”  Already the horizon at once recedes and looms, all around us.

For Libin prairie is motion.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

He says, and he is speaking either of himself or of me, it isn’t clear: “The Alberta that Kroetsch performs for us—the Alberta I perform in tandem and tangent, an alibi for my extrapolations—is always already a replica, a catafalque, a diptych in which map and legend are folded into each other seamlessly, full of inconvenient seams. . ..”1

Libin is just prairie.

The folds of which Libin speaks become, in the work of that fast-talking prairie poet, Dennis Cooley, puns.  Cooley believes that the prairies are, both figuratively and literally, a sequence of puns—a consequence of punning.  Consider the abundant prairies that are not there.  What patch of earth is more cultivated garden than the prairies?  And yet the prairies tease us with origins, with traces and hints of what was or might still be wild.

If we consider the machinations and fate of Bloody Jack, we realize that we are at once and always escaping and ever able to escape.  Surely the book and yet it might be said to contain hardly a word of truth.  Cooley, by the replica that enables him to fast-talk his alibis right past us.  We are seduced by our own criminal longings for a just world.

If we read in the issue of Prairie Fire devoted to the writings of Dennis Cooley, we quickly discover that we do not in fact have a reliable or complete text of the poem, Bloody Jack.  The shape-shifter says, in reply to an honest but interrupted question from Rob Budde: “When Arnason assembled the pieces shortly before publication, he grabbed most of the narrative things and stuck them in.  On the sly, I took out some of those things and re-inserted some love poems.”2

Re-inserted a love poem.  Again, the mind boggles.  And is this, too, to be “just prairie”?

The idea of flirtation is essential to any definition of pun, and to any definition of prairie.  To flirt is to tease with possibility.  Surely that is a prairie condition.  We live with possibility and yet that possibility is at once and always invited and frustrated by the gaps in the narrative.  That gap might be anything from a ten-minute hailstorm to a ten-year drought.  Cooley proposes a love poem as remedy.  He names it Bloody Jack.

Here on the prairies we are always trying to name or generalize about an incomplete or fractured text.  Facing the riddle of self, and community and horizon; we carefully mumble our answers.

Dawne McCance, more than nay writer I have read, sees the prairie as construct.  Prairie, for her, is architectural and archival.  I see the adjectival forms, because McCance applies the terms, architectural, archival, to a non-existent noun.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Dawne McCance is the woman in the prairie city, reading that city, living that city.  She is fascinated by the cartouche.  A cartouche is, for instance, the ornamental frame at the bottom of a map that contains the map’s name.  Again, it is an oval or oblong figure (as on ancient Egyptian monuments) enclosing a sovereign’s name.  The cartouche, then, is both architectural and archival.

The cartouche is the frame, the container, the architectural device that presents the name, and keeps us from it.  it is one of the paradoxes of the archive that we place in that public space—our personal lives.

Dawne McCance has written brilliantly on the obscure works of that prairie poet, Rita Kleinhart.  I quote McCance, who begins by quoting Rita:

In Hornbook #48, … “Rita stands at her back door, guessing where she might put a new birdhouse” (p. 187).  The ways in which her house defies modernity’s spatial logic will be given, I want to suggest, by the back door.  Rather than issuing her poetry from a detached centric point available only to the male holder of vision, Rita writes on back doors.  For her, autobiography does not deliver deposit of self-referential content to be hermeneutically unsealed, but inscribes the process itself, the play of the frame, an insistent crossing of inside and out.  I read the back door in “The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart” as figure of what architect Peter Eisenman calls “a text of between: writing that dislocates authorical and natural value, and that does not symbolize use, shelter or vertical structure.”3

She’s just prairie.

Aha, you say to yourself—so much for prairie as motion.  But let me quote again from McCane—and this time from her review, in Prairie Fire, of a book by Robert Enright called Peregrinations: Conversations with Contemporary Artists.  “For Lyotard, the word [peregrinations] suggests something about what he calls the ‘event’ of writing—or for that matter, of thinking, speaking and art-making.  Far from proceeding along a fixed linear course from beginning through middle to end, the even . . . is more of roaming across overlapping boundaries, more of a wandering among clouds.  What fascinates me about peregrinations, the word and the even, is not just the responsive, seeking movement, but also the shapes it creates.”4

The vindication of Libin and Cooley—the prairies as event and as shape—the prairies as boundaries, as crossings, as border crossings.

And again, where Dawne McCance would build, Birk Sproxton burrows. 

Where she acknowledges light and air, the birdhouse impulse, he acknowledges the underpinning of the Precambrian Shield; that is, even as we stand or sit here, only a few yards beneath our feet.  For Sproxton, hi his tellingly named book Headframe:, prairie is a clutch of addled eggs, contained in a basket of rock.  And again, where Sproxton betray his concealment by laughter, Doug Reimer speaks soberly a prairie dialogue of forgetfulness and ecstatic memory.  As the country & westerns song has it; “remember to forget me.”  I am silence itself, and . . . now let me tell you . . ..

Consider the predicament made eloquent by Gerry Friesen.  Consider two of the titles he offers to us, his avid and grateful readers.  For our larger consolations, The Canadian Prairie: A History.  And for this collection, “Why the Prairies Don’t Exist.”

Maybe he’s just prairie.

If McCance’s cartouche contains everything I have been trying to say, Friesen’s history anticipates it.  My belatedness, always, or at least sometimes, appals me.  When am I ever, in this new country, going to be young?

Friesen’s A History is the epic predicament, not originally but, rather, continuously, in the natural world that preceded both white and native arrivals.

With reference to the buffalo herds that reached to the round horizon, he quotes from an early traveller—and with that traveller Friesen looks not but, but down: “Every drop of water on our way was foul and yellow with their wallowings and excretions.”5

One recognizes immediately that Friesen finds our epic and the communality of that epic not in what rises but, rather, in what falls. And falling is sometimes a violence.

Friesen goes on to say:

The sound of the bisons’ roaring could be heard for miles and the path upon which the animals travelled resembled a war zone. . . . Bison dung was sufficient to fuel camp-fires for generations, and bison bones sustained a small fertilizer industry into the modern pioneer ear.  Bison trails criss-crossed the plains like highways.  Where the herds encountered bluffs, the tress would become rubbing posts and the barks of stronger specimens would be torn off to a height of six feet; the small brush would simply be beaten to death by the cyclonic force of the bisons’ passage.  The buffalo landscape had a character all its own.6

The buffalo landscape performs itself. This is a landscape not as something fixed and static, but as motion, as gesture, as event, as turmoil.  Consider Mark Libin on his imaginary horse, really riding out of Calgary, and always and never returning.  Consider David Arnason, yearning across the dreamed lake toward the real horizon—or is it the other way round?  Consider Bloody Jack, as if he might be Cooley himself, in his jail cell, forever fashioning his bed sheets not into a bed but, rather, into a rope.

Here is our buffalo landscape, we enter into elaborate mimicry.

I remember from my childhood a bird we called the slough-pumper—a strange bird.  The American Bittern, I learned to call it, once I went to school and looked at pictures in books.  In the slough across the road from our farm, the slough-pumper was a bird that made a sound like that of an old-fashioned, long-handed, back-busting water pump.  As simple as that.  Except that one ornithologist renders the sounds as pum-er-lunk, pump-er-lunk, while another renders it as oong-ka’-choonk, oong-ka’-choonk.  Once again, the difficulties of transmission, the awkward shape of archival longing.

I was a few years into my childhood before I actually saw the actual bird.  I saw it quite by accident.

The woman who lived in the old homestead house near the slough across the road from our farm had been widowed by a battle somewhere in France during the First World War.  Mrs. Beddoes, that was the only name I ever knew her by.  She had one child, a son who was considered to be “not quite all there.”  Leroy’s prized—and I could even say only—possession was a saddle horse.  He rode that horse for hours, for days, along or beside the dirt roads, even in farmers’ carefully tended fields of heat, and he never, as my mother put it, “helped out” at home, so she now and then sent me across the road to do chores—such as pumping water with a pump that I can still hear—for Mrs. Beddoes who one spring day asked me to go to the foot of her very messy garden and look for an abandoned rhubarb patch.

That’s when I chanced to notice the slough-pumper.  You see, the slough-pumper is so well disguised that it’s almost impossible to recognize, standing as it sometimes does, in a rather unbirdlike way, rigidly still, its beak pointed upward in what seems a slightly demented manner, its striped body all the while perfectly matching the reeds and grasses at the edge of a slough.

What if the slough-pumper, in trying to look like its surroundings, actually looked like its surroundings?  Or—what if the slough-pumper, in trying to look like its surroundings, didn’t succeed in looking like its surroundings?  Hmmm.

Kroetsch, Robert. "Don't Give Me No More of Your Lip; or, the Prairie Horizon as Allowed Mouth". Previously published in Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History, ed. Robert Wardhaugh. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2001. 209-16.