University
of Alberta Press
Published
November 2017
First an apology, or at least an admission. Early in The Larger Conversation, in his discussion of how late capitalism has “worked us down” to “an atomic self,” Governor General’s Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn writes “In reality TV and low-end blogs, the remnant is on view, the bare asserted self, no aides, no add-ons, no net of metaphysics.” Naturally I paused at this point. Who am I to be reviewing this complex high-end book with the intention of publishing the review on this low-end blog? I come to this book, the third of what the cover copy states is a “three-part manifesto on poetics, eros, philosophy, and enviro-politics,” knowing full well that I do not possess the philosophical chops, the necessary scholarship, the depth of reading, or the intelligence to properly grasp the work, but I come anyway, as I always have to Lilburn’s work, as I did to part one and two, as a poet with a sense of adventure, knowing that even if I am lost, I am welcome in these pages, I am welcome to feel my way around.
The cover states this is “a vital text for readers
of environmental philosophy and for anyone interested in building toward conversation
between Indigenous peoples and settlers.” Lilburn’s ideas around conviviality, “another
of the virtues deepened interiority brings,” are elemental to this work, and
his choice of form, as discussed in the introduction, is no accident:
The essay and the
lyric poem are perfect instruments in this psycho-political undertaking of a
contemplative return to being in the form of one’s place because both
essentially refuse as bogus the confidence that underlies a complete account. […]
Both, therefore, are toppling forms, inducing tentativeness and humility and,
inevitably, permeability. They, in their incompleteness, promote conviviality
and conversation—you need to talk to fill in the greater picture—thus both are
heuristics and goads for a larger, a pandemic, conversation.
The seventeen essays and lectures that follow go
back and forth in time, grounding themselves in biographical detail before
plunging with Plato, Iamblichus, Ibn ‘ Arabi, and others to dizzying philosophical
depths. In “Faith and Land,” a lecture delivered at Canadian Mennonite University
in May 2008, Lilburn reflects on the writing of the poems in Moosewood Sandhills in the 1990s:
The book comes from
that time in my life when I first realized, with a shock, that I had no skill
to be where I was. One of the poems in that collection is called “How to Be
Here?” This is a question that has preoccupied me now for almost twenty years.
It seems to be our central political and cultural question, though it is
rarely, if ever, asked.
In “Nothingness,” from the summer of
2010, the final essay before the epilogue, Lilburn is traveling. He has turned sixty. He has been “trying, I suppose, to tie things together in these
peregrinations, to make it all somehow cohere. Some elements, however, resist
any tug toward explanatory shape.” In the following section, he reveals he’s been reading The Mirror of Simple, Annihilated Souls and Those
Who Remain Only in Will and Desire of Love, a book by Marguerite Porete, a beguine who we learn was burned at the stake
in Paris on June 1, 1310, and with it he looks at interiority, reason, and
knowing, the essay a collage, difficult and beguiling, resonating with the essays
that came before.
As a poet, it’s always fascinating to
read about the lives of well-known poets and the paths they’ve taken. Lilburn has
been having conversations “over the last thirty years with a range of poets,
thinkers, liturgists and ceremonialists.” One of these people is the much celebrated
poet Louise Halfe, who appears in these essays more than once. The stories Lilburn
uses to place himself are brief but vividly sketched. His “epic eight-hour
talks” with poets in Beijing, his time in the basement beer parlour of the
Hotel Saskatchewan, his periods of illness, his move to BC from Saskatchewan,
are not simply framing devices, but always integral to the evolution and deepening
of the piece. It’s the human touch toward which we stretch. The Larger Conversation requires much
stretching. That stretching in itself is transformative.
