A Kind of Perseverance - Softcover

Avison, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889843260 ISBN 13: 9780889843264

Publisher: Porcupine's Quill, 2010

Synopsis

In A Kind of Perseverance Margaret Avison shares with readers two lectures she gave at the University of Waterloo in 1993 -- `Misunderstanding is Damaging' and `Understanding is Costly'. Thoughtfully and with precision she tells of her journey, often unfocussed, that led finally to the Christian conversion that is central to an understanding of her poetry.

About this title

About the Author:

One of Canada's most respected poets, Margaret Avison was born in Galt, Ontario, lived in Western Canada in her childhood, and then in Toronto. In a productive career that stretched back to the 1940s, she produced seven books of poems, including her first collection, Winter Sun (1960), which she assembled in Chicago while she was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and which won the Governor General's Award. No Time (Lancelot Press), a work that focussed on her interest in spiritual discovery and moral and religious values, also won the Governor General's Award for 1990. Avison's published poetry up to 2002 was gathered into Always Now: the Collected Poems (Porcupine's Quill, 2003), including Concrete and Wild Carrot which won the 2003 Griffin Prize. Her most recent book, Listening, Last Poems, was published in 2009 by McClelland & Stewart.

Margaret Avison was the recipient of many awards including the Order of Canada and three honorary doctorates.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction to the First (1984) Edition

This little book contains the two lectures delivered as the annual Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in February 1993. Blaise Pascal (1623-62), the seventeenth-century French academic and Christian, is remembered today as a forerunner of Newton in his establishment of the calculus, and as author of his Christian meditations, Les Pensées. Members of the University of Waterloo, wishing to establish a forum for the presentation of Christian issues in an academic environment, have chosen to commemorate the life of Pascal by this annual event.

The Pascal Lectures bring to the University of Waterloo outstanding individuals of international repute who have distinguished themselves in both scholarly endeavour and Christian thought or life. These individuals discourse with the university community on some aspect of its own world, its theories, its research, its leadership role in our society, challenging the university to search for truth through personal faith and intellectual inquiry which focus on Jesus Christ.

Margaret Avison has twice been honoured with the Governor General of Canada's award for poetry. The first award was for Winter Sun, published in 1960; the second, for No Time, published in 1989. Betweentimes she testifies to having become a Christian on January 4th, 1963. Although she was brought up in a minister's family, she describes herself as having been a rebel on `a long wilful journey into darkness,' preferring her own idea of Jesus as an ethical person to `the priority, Christ's pervasive presence.' One year earlier in January of 1962, she had written to Cid Corman, `There is some corner I have to turn yet, some confronting I have to do -- as you would instantly agree, I think, it must come about at the deepest levels in order to find free singing voice.' Then she added, `Somewhere in this effort, a wrong self-effacement has taken place in me. I can feel the blindfold, the straitjacket -- but cannot so far discover where the knots and hooks are to undo them.'

A few months later, she says, someone came and untied the straitjacket's hooks and knots for her, took off the blindfold, and turned on the light. Or as she says in poetry,

We didn't know you Jesus,
You came out in the night
And poked around the side streets
To give us your light.

The impact on Margaret is everywhere evident in her poetry, as for example in the title poem of the volume The Dumbfounding (1966). Of the encounter she says, `I would not want to have missed what he gave then: the astounding delight of his making himself known at last, sovereign, forgiving, forceful of life.' Her poetry at this point reminds us of so many recording a similar encounter: Francis Thompson in `The Hound of Heaven,' T. S. Eliot in `Journey of the Magi,' S. T. Coleridge in `The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' e. e. cummings in `i thank You God for most this amazing,' even Shakespeare's character Bottom, the ass who, discovering himself beloved by Titania, Queen of the air, and singing of `his most rare vision,' is marvelled at by his fellows as `a very paramour for a sweet voice.'

That same year, Margaret says, `it became centrally important to me to see that nothing, nothing at all, could be excluded from the total relevance of the person, Jesus.' So in the autumn of 1963 she returned to graduate school at the University of Toronto. There, twenty-three years after having obtained her B.A., she began to write her M.A. thesis on Lord Byron, finding the conversational style of his poetry refreshing. (We see echoes of Byron's style in her own poetry now). Yet she soon developed a growing malaise in moving between the church and the secular (especially the university) world.

Much of these two lectures is an exploration of that malaise, leading to the conclusion that it may have begun by her `rushing too much' in testing undigested truths, such as the truth that `anywhere with Jesus I can safely go,' but was also caused by the counter-Christian assumptions and standards of the university, as well as by the temptations of her traffic with secular society. One instance she offered, in answer to a student's question at the end of her first lecture, was when a close friend said to her one day in tears, `But Margaret, that is a lie!' Seeing the cost of this confronting of her by her friend, Miss Avison said, she faced afresh the Truth, the Word, who confronts us to bless. One result of this kind of facing was that she left the university and began to work at the Queen Street at Portland inner city mission. Many of her poems are her records of her experiences -- her malaise -- there.

The malaise never ends, she says: i (John North, University of Waterloo)

About this edition

• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0889843260
• ISBN 13: 9780889843264
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 56