I come to Phyllis for the possibilities of despair, for endurance, for the potentiality that remains in determined resignation (I can’t go on / I will go on). And for her poems on Lenin and Kropotkin and the persistent and potent failures of our revolutionary dreams – which to me always seem less failures than they do as-yet-unrealized potentialities, inviting, waiting just out of reach, lost and wandering somewhere in the labyrinth of the No. If the poem of the revolution remains unwritten, a failure, is it because the revolution itself remains unwritten, unfulfilled, an incomplete series of failed attempts?
Rereading Vancouver poet, editor, critic and troublemaker Stephen Collis’ Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018), I’m once again struck at how remarkable it is that such a book like this exists: a critical memoir on writing, thinking and, as the title suggests, the unwritten – the almost and not written, and the never written. Citing his attraction to Phyllis Webb (1927-2021), her work and her silence, Collis writes: “A certain terror attracts me too: that, as Phyllis Webb says, ‘words abandoned’ her – and I have so thoroughly constructed my identity as ‘poet’ that I know no greater fear than that abandonment – even though I have barely even for a moment been able to stem the flood of words rushing through me for decades now, hypergraphically putting pen to paper each and every day, filling journal after journal. Even though she herself is the embodiment of the ability to survive the loss of words – and still be a poet, almost three decades after this silence descended – still a poet in the very fabric of her nonagenarian being.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to rob mclennan's clever substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.