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Where Have We Been
Lyric poems of tense clarity.
The Life of Words
For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original 'true meaning' asserted in the etymology of 'etymology' declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was 'arbitrary', or 'unmotivated', a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout...
Wisdom & Metaphor
In the foreword to Wisdom & Metaphor, Jan Zwicky observes that “those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly, because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world.” Wisdom & Metaphor explores the ways we come to understand the world through analogical structures, and the relation of this form of knowing to conventional epistemology and ontology. Zwicky uses the nature of the book itself, with its facing pages, to create resonant structures of aphorism and quotation which allow the reader to experience the kind of thinking she describes. The author’s wide-ranging influences, coupled with an understated, largely spatial, style of discourse, make this a remarkably original approach to long-standing questions about meaning and language. It offers a unique and compelling argument for the fundamental importance of metaphor to philosophy.
Robinson's Crossing
The poems in this book arise from Robinson's Crossing--the place where the railway ends and European settlers arriving in northern Alberta had to cross the Pembina River and advance by wagon or on foot. How have we crossed into this country, with what violence and what blind love? Robinson's Crossing enacts the pause at the frontier, where we reflect on the realities of colonial experience, but also on the nature of living here--on historical dwelling itself. In long meditative narratives and shorter probing lyrics, Jan Zwicky shows us-as she has in her celebrated Lyric Philosophy and the Governor General's award-winning Songs for Relinquishing the Earth--how music means and meaning is musical. "My great- grandmother slept in a boxcar on the night before she made the crossing. The steel ended in Sangudo then, there was no trestle on the Pembina, no siding on the other side. They crossed by ferry, and went on by cart through bush, the same eight miles. Another family legend has it that she stood there in the open doorway of the shack and said, "You told me, Ernest, it had windows and a floor." --from "Robinson's Crossing"
Wittgenstein Elegies
None
Chamber Music
Arcing across thirty years and seven volumes, Jan Zwicky’s poetry has always been acutely musical (and sensitive to the silence out of which music comes). In the compositions in Chamber Music, the first anthology of Zwicky’s poems, one may perceive the attunement of her vocations: poet, philosopher, violinist. Her poetry both praises and relinquishes the earth, bearing witness to the fierce skies of the prairies and the freezing rain of the West Coast. Enacting the virtue of clarity prized and defended by her explicitly philosophical work, this poetry is both resonant and integrated. It is also formally diverse, ranging from the singular focus of the lyric ode to suites of variations and...
Lyric Philosophy
In this ground-breaking study on the nature of philosophy, Jan Zwicky demonstrates how much of potential philosophical significance is lost if our notion of meaningful language is constrained by narrow concepts of analytic rigour. Her aim is not to dismiss the role of analysis in philosophy; rather she strives to augment its resources and thereby give to philosophy a voice with greater range and integrity. Two parallel texts, on facing pages, run through the book. The primary one is Zwicky’s, which begins with a critique of existing criteria for defining a work as philosophy, and then develops the notion of lyric in its relation to two other key terms: technology and domesticity. She finis...
Attending
Attending – patient contemplation focused on a particular being – is a central ethical activity that has not been recognized by any of the main moral systems in the European philosophical tradition. That tradition has imagined that the moral agent is primarily a problem solver and world changer when what might be needed most is a witness. Moral theory has been agonized by dualism – motivation is analyzed into beliefs and desires, descriptions of facts and dissatisfactions with them, while action is represented as an effort to lessen dissatisfaction by altering the empirical world. In Attending Warren Heiti traces an alternative genealogy of ethics, drawing from the Platonism recovered ...
Canadian Primal
Over the past few decades, a group of writers we might call the Thinking and Singing poets have stood at the forefront of poetry in Canada. These five poets – Dennis Lee, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn – are major voices in an era of ecological devastation and spiritual unease. Their diverse, questioning work suggests new ways to confront some of the most pressing issues of our time. In vibrant prose, Mark Dickinson explores the relationship between the lives of these poets and their writing, examining their intersecting careers and friendships, and the ways they learned from and challenged one another. Canadian Primal uses an unconventional approach, blending ...
CanLit Across Media
The materials we turn to for the construction of our literary pasts - the texts, performances, and discussions selected for storage and cataloguing in archives - shape what we know and teach about literature today. The ways in which archival materials have been structured into forms of preservation, in turn, impact their transference and transformation into new forms of presentation and re-presentation. Exploring the production of culture through and outside of the archives that preserve and produce CanLit as an entity, CanLit Across Media asserts that CanLit arises from acts of archival, critical, and creative analysis. Each chapter investigates, challenges, and provokes this premise by exa...
