Breathing Earth

As Bringhurst suggests, “[w]‌hen you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears” (“Poetry and Thinking” 143). In his chorus, Sophocles is speaking poetry – which nevertheless preexists Antigone, the chorus and its audience – and now, 25 centuries later, it gets in our ears. Sophocles’ words appear to encapsulate the central preoccupation of Bringhurst’s entire work, not because it is anthropocentric, but rather because it situates homo sapiens within the vitality of a breathing cosmos and interrogates how we as a species relate to the more-than-human world. Contrary to classicists’ interpretation of the Antigone chorus as a hymn of “praise to human ingenuity and accomplishment, encomiums to anthropological dominion” (McNeilly 57), Bringhurst’s translation uncovers an ecological dimension to the ancient text and becomes “a critique of the violence of anthropocentrism rather than praise of human technocracy” (McNeilly 58). Confronted with “the all-too-human potential to exert reduction and atrocious dominion over the world in the face of recalcitrant cultural and ontological differences” (McNeilly 54), Bringhurst’s emphasis is on “human estrangement not only from each other but, more significantly for him, from earth, the god or goddess whom we have too often taken for granted as a font of infinitely renewable resources” (McNeilly 58). Restoring the deep, ecological bond with a world of which we are inevitably participant on account of our very earthly constitution is central to Bringhurst’s work of a lifetime. Hence, he gently invites readers to breathe through their feet, which is to say to pay attention to “the patterned resonance” (Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor L7) implicit in the world.

On the Canadian scene, Bringhurst belongs among a group of poet-philosophers – Jan Zwicky, Don McKay, Dennis Lee, and Tim Lilburn – concerned with exploring a new form of poetry that is in love with philosophy and the more-than-human world. On a different level, Bringhurst is one of the last heirs to High Modernist poetry as represented by such authors as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, as well as a poet with clear Romantic affiliations, including the Transcendentalists R. W. Emerson and H. D. Thoreau. For all of them, poetry was a form of knowing and resonating with the world, and also an art form that demanded a deep sense of vocation for the pursuit of truth, beauty and integrity. On yet another level, Bringhurst belongs among the best representatives of world poetry, composed in very diverse human languages over time, and so he is part of a tradition that places Homer next to Herakleitos, Parmenides, Empedokles, Sophocles, Pindar, Saraha, Dogen, Hakuin, François Villon, Leopardi, Ghandl, Skaay, Valéry, Rilke, Federico García Lorca, and Pablo Neruda. This is universal poetry, one capable of going beyond spatio-temporal constraints to talk to readers from different cultures and thought-worlds. A place in tradition is not easily won, though. Bringhurst found his voice through hard intellectual labour, listening closely to the great minds of the past, from a wide range of cultures and languages, “by surrounding himself with sacred texts; by leaning on, and apprenticing himself to, the voices of other human beings from different times and places” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 19).

“I think it is not the world’s task to entertain us, but ours to take an interest in the world” (“Poetry and Thinking” 158), Bringhurst maintains, and so his omnivorous intelligence renders the world into an inexhaustible place of wonder rich in complex fascinations for him and for his readers. His intensely penetrating mind has led him to think deeply about reality, to embrace a “distinctive, erudite, cross-cultural poetics” (Higgins, “Salvage” 62) and to produce an ambitious body of work over the last 50 years. Possibly the most fascinating paradox at the heart of his work resides in the fact that he is a consummate typographer, a lover of letterforms and books as true art objects, and yet he thinks of the poems that constitute his living repertory as being more the product of oral composition than of writing. In other words, his interest in the material, solid form of language does not prevent him from embracing a poetics of listening in which he claims the privileged position of speech over the written word. Books are only caches where poems – made of mouthfuls of live air – are temporarily stored for a while, in search of their perfect material incarnation. This, in turn, partly accounts for his own composition habits: his poems and essays form a work in progress of gigantic proportions that is revisited and refined over the years, as real writing involves a lot of revision.