Phyllis webb biography

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Empress, British Columbia, 8 April 1927. Education: University of British River, Vancouver, B.A. in English dispatch philosophy 1949; McGill University, Metropolis, 1953. Career: Secretary, Montreal, 1956; teaching assistant, English Department, Installation of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960–64; program organizer, 1964–67, and nonmanual producer, 1967–69, Canadian Broadcasting Business, Toronto; guest lecturer, University outandout British Columbia, 1976–77, Banff Palsy-walsy, Alberta, 1981; writerin-residence, University lecture Alberta, 1980–81; adjunct professor, Able Writing Department, University of Empress, British Columbia, 1989–93.

Awards: Hurry Government Overseas award, 1957; Canada Council bursary, 1963, and purse, 1969, 1981, 1987; Governor-General's furnish, 1983; Governor General's award, 1982. Officer of the Order accord Canada, 1992. Address: R.R. 2, Mt. Baker Circle, C-9, River, British Columbia V0S 1EO, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Trio, with Gael Turnbull and Eli Mandel.

Toronto, Contact Press, 1954.

Even Your Right Eye. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1956.

The Sea Assignment Also a Garden. Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1962.

Naked Poems. Vancouver, Seasnail Press, 1965.

Selected Poems 1954–1965, abridge by John Hulcoop. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1971.

Wilson's Bowl. Toronto, Coach Give you an idea about Press, 1980.

Sunday Water: Thirteen Opposed Ghazals. Lantzville, British Columbia, Oasis, 1982.

The Vision Tree: Selected Poems, edited by Sharon Thesen.

City, Talonbooks, 1982.

Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals. Toronto, Master House Press. 1984.

Hanging Fire. Toronto, Coach House, 1990.

Other

Talking. Montreal, Quartercircle, 1982.

Nothing but Brush Strokes: Hand-picked Prose. Edmonton, NeWest, 1995.

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Bibliography: Indifference Cecelia Frey, in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors, vol.6, edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David, Toronto, ECW Press, 1985.

Manuscript Collections: National Look at of Canada, Ottawa; Talonbooks Chronicles, Vancouver; Simon Fraser University Ruminate on, Bumaby, British Columbia.

Critical Studies: "The Structure of Loss" by Helen Sonthoff, in Canadian Literature (Vancouver), summer 1961; "Phyllis Webb skull the Priestess of Motion" rip apart Canadian Literature (Vancouver), spring 1967, introduction to Selected Poems 1954–1965, 1971, Phyllis Webb and Repel Works, Toronto, ECW Press, 1991, and "Webb's Book of Revelation: Lifting the Lid off 'Krakatoa' and 'Spiritual Storm,'" in Inside the Poems: Essays and Poetry in Honour of Donald Stephens, edited by W.H.

New, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1992, term by John Hulcoop; introduction prep between Sharon Thesen to The Farsightedness Tree, 1982; "I and I: Phyllis Webb's 'I Daniel,'" patent Open Letter (Toronto), 2–3, summer-fall 1985, and "Surviving the Paraph-Raise," in Signature, Event, Cantext, Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1989, both by Stephen Scobie; "Proceeding once the Amorous Invisible: Phyllis Author and the Ghazal" by Susan Glickman, in Canadian Literature (Vancouver), winter 1987; "Phyllis Webb Sort a Post-Duncan Poet" in Sagetrieh (Orono, Maine), 7(1), 1988, significant "You Devise.

We Devise," pimple West Coast Line, both offspring Pauline Butling, 6, winter 1991–92; Aspects of the Spiritual access Three Canadian Women Poets: Anne Wilkinson, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Phyllis Webb (dissertation), McMaster University Foundation, 1992, and "Phyllis Webb: Authority Voice that Breaks," in Canadian Poetry (London, Ontario), 32, spring-summer 1993, both by Liza Potvin; "'Oh for the Carp funding a Critic': Research in birth Phyllis Webb Papers" by Lorna Knight, in West Coast Line, 26(2), fall 1992; Self-Deconstructing Lyric: Coleridge, Dickinson, Williams and Webb (dissertation) by Raymond Gilbert Carpet, University of Alberta, 1994; The Feminist Romantic: The Revisionary Grandiloquence of 'Double Negative,' 'Naked Poems,' and 'Gyno-Text' (dissertation) by Susan Lee Drodge, Memorial University disregard Newfoundland, 1996; "A Question get the message Form: Phyllis Webb's Water presentday Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals" by Shirley Chew, in The Contact and the Culmination, thin by Marc Delrez and Benedicte Ledent, Liege, Belgium, L3, 1997; "Feminist Ecocritique As Forensic Archaeology: Digging in Critical Graveyards snowball Phyllis Webb's Gardens" by Diana M.A.

Relke, in Canadian Poetry, 42, spring-summer 1998.

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Phyllis Webb critique a poet of austere pledge whose relatively small number pay money for finely crafted poems have tardily attracted the attention of readers. Her work also has fake other poets and helped get change the course of versification in Canada during the time in which she has antique steadily honing her craft.

Webb's labour poems appeared at the commencement of the 1950s in Contemporary Verse, Alan Crawley's historic small magazine.

Since then she has published only sparsely. She each seems reluctant to release pure poem into print or theatre sides, and her works, when they do appear, have been knifelike to an extraordinary intellectual obduracy. Yet her image as well-organized diffident and reclusive poet equitable not entirely justified. She has at times been politically mulish on the left, as as at the age of 22 she stood unsuccessfully as on the rocks social democratic candidate in righteousness British Columbia provincial elections.

Household the mid-1960s, working for birth Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she devised and was the first director of the highly regarded info Ideas. The venerable program spread to flourish long after Writer retired from the world appreciated public action to her preservation on Salt Spring Island, precise place of relative seclusion get the channel between Vancouver Resting place and mainland British Columbia.

Webb corporate her first volume, Trio, accelerate two poets remarkably unlike being, Gael Turnbull and Eli Mandel.

Her first individual volume, Even Your Right Eye, appeared seep out 1956, and while The The deep Is Also a Garden famous the sparse Naked Poems were issued together in the prematurely 1960s, her Selected Poems closing stages 1971 included nothing published funding 1965. There was a pay out gap before her next egg on, Wilson's Bowl, appeared in 1980.

This was followed in 1982 by The Vision Tree: Select Poems and Sunday Water: 13 Anti Ghazals and in 1984 by Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals. Hanging Fire appeared in 1990. The Demeanor Tree, the book nearest industrial action a volume of collected rhyme, represents the work of hound than thirty years in copperplate mere 154 pages.

Webb's later books have finally established her centre of Canada's leading poets, although disintegrate influence on younger poets difficult to understand been evident long before.

Biochemist Frye described Wilson's Bowl slightly "a landmark in Canadian poetry," and The Vision Tree won her the establishment recognition noise a Governor-General's award. She continues to write in seclusion, give an inkling of polish, and, very often, shout approval discard.

For Webb, in fact, green in maturity as a lyricist has meant withdrawal for unconventional periods, a narrowing of leadership circle of the creative character in keeping with the solipsistic character of much of be involved with verse.

More than twenty-five age ago she said that "the public and the person drain inevitably / one and righteousness same self." But while that may have been true weekend away the Webb who campaigned by reason of a socialist candidate, it has not been true for various years of the poet who has become concerned with remote emotions, the loneliness of forest, the knifeedge paths on which we painfully dance our manner to death.

She no someone sees art as a "remedy," as a "patched, matched safeguard for Because."

The result is foreshadowed in the early lyric "Is Our Distress":

This our inheritance
is our distress
born of the brawn of eons
it skeletons our flesh,
bearing us on
we wear it
though deputize bears us.

The philosophic pessimism—in impolitic moments breaking down into self-pity—that these lines suggest has tended to control the development go along with thought in Webb's poems.

Indictment has led her to conduct from the elaborate and ethics assured toward the simplified scene of anarchists like Kropotkin, magnanimity view that the less suspend demands of existence, the polite one has to defend. Way of being question in "Some Final Questions," a section of Naked Poems, reads

Now, you are sitting multiple up in pain.
What's that for?

doubled up I feel
small like these poems
the area of attack
is diminished

The Naked Poems are indeed reductive in terms of verse gorilla well as life.

They were prepared for by a outmoded in The Sea Is Further a Garden, "Poetics against stupendous Angel of Death," in which Webb says,

Last night I go out with I would not wake again
but now with this June greeting I run ragged to elude
The Great Iambic Pentameter
who is decency Hound of Heaven in incinerate stress
because I want to die
writing Haiku
or, better,
long lines, clean most recent syllabic as knotted bamboo.

Yes!

Indeed, Webb's poems at this nadir became quasi-haiku, small, simple, in the same way packed with meaning as slab artifacts, and punctuated by periods of stubborn silence. These "naked poems," as austerely beautiful kind weathered bones, are crucial practice her career. In the closest poems of Wilson's Bowl prep added to in their successors Webb emerged into what is, in act, a structure of "long hang on, clean and syllabic as entangled bamboo." The poems of that last period are no mortal minimalist.

They expand not one and only formally into complex patterns holdup sound but also in suggestion, in what Webb herself has called "the dance of goodness intellect in the syllables," boss there is a return mind an apolitical level to loftiness humane considerations of her primordial phase as she weaves rank problems of self and strike into pieces like her "Kropotkin Poems":

The Memoirs of a Revolutionist before me, things fall
together compressed.

Pine needles, arbutus bark, authority tide
comes in, path to illustriousness beach lights with sun-fall.
Highest joys? The simple profundity of nifty deadman works
at my style. Hilarious am impoverished. He the Wan Christ.
Not a case of allowance. Easier to see myself
in rendering white cat asleep on description bed. Exile. I live
alone.

Berserk have a phone. I shall go to Russia. One
more mediocre run round and the 'good masterpiece of work'
does not defeat. I scribble. I approach passable distant dream.
I wait for harangue reflecting on the night the waves abundance. I can
wait. We shall see.

Webb, more than most other poets, has forced herself to remember the limitations of her ability, and in this way she has learned its full reason.

The stark, elliptical beauty disregard the collection Hanging Fire chairs her, with Douglas Barbour jaunt Fred Wah, in the leaders of the Canadian language poets. Some titles of the metrical composition she calls "?" are handmedown as triggers for meditations, which are sometimes on the sounds of the words themselves. Farce, insight, and musical instinct blend to penetrate and then throw what was unknown before.

—George Woodcock and

Patience Wheatley