Camber

By Don McKay
 Nature’s own writing

• Did you notice any examples of nature’s own writing after our class on Tuesday?
Copyright page
Do you know how to read a title page and copyright page in order to obtain the necessary details for an
entry in a Works Cited?

Title page: Note that you must use the full title in a Works Cited, as well as the first time you mention
the book in an essay. Subsequent references to the book’s title can just be the first part, Camber.

The copyright page. See the @ symbol followed by the date. That is the year the book was published.
At the bottom of the page, you see the name (and address, which you don’t need) of the publisher.

Note the correct spelling is McClelland & Stewart. (cC, not cL)
Works Cited vs. Bibliography

• A works cited lists ONLY the research sources quoted or paraphrased in the
essay. That is what “cited” means.
• A bibliography would list all of the works consulted whether or not they
were used within the body of a paper.
• A bibliography could also stand alone as a possible list of research or
teaching resources w/o any essay.
• E.g., an Animal Studies Bibliography:
https://animalstudies.msu.edu/bibliography.php
Who is this poet?
• McKay is pronounced McKii, not McKaa.
• Note that Don McKay is a pretty common name so if/when you are researching his
work, be attentive to make sure your sources are about Canadian poet Don McKay.
• He is probably Canada’s best and best-known contemporary nature poet.
• Here are some of his other books:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/authors/20001/don-mckay
• McKay has also published several books, including essays, with the artisan press,
Gaspereau in Wolfville, NS:
http://www.gaspereau.com/bookInfo.php?AID=68&AISBN=0
A poetics of attention or attentiveness

• See D2L “Poetry and Poetic Attention,” by Don McKay – go there now
• Poetry then as a method of attentiveness and not ONLY a means of
recollecting thoughts and feelings following the experience.
• Try to ”attend” (ha, readers have to be attentive too) to the PROCESS of
attentiveness in his lyrics.
Big reveal

• Poetry is prose with line breaks!!

• That is, many people (not English students) struggle
to read poetry because they think it is some unique
and incomprehensible language, but it’s just prose,
compressed to exert pressure on words and rhythms
and images, with line breaks. Line breaks are
pressure devices.
 See Dennis Cooley’s essay on
linebreaks in the book Trace:
Prairie Writers on Writing
Resource on
line breaks:
Our library should have a copy of
this book.
 To follow grammatical units OR to play against grammar

Breath units

Examples of To create deliberate ambiguity or double the meaning, and to amplify significance of an

purposes for image or statement

line breaks in To prolong a perception or process of attention

poetry
To induce rhyme, both internal and end rhyme

To play with the space of the page; to create a sense of openness or its opposite
“Big Alberta Clouds,” p. 118
• Snyder’s essay about “Tawny Grammar” is about nature’s own
writing. Here we have a poem about nature’s sky writing.
 “Poplar,” p. 99

• The poem as kind of poetic field guide.

• A field guide is a kind of scientific manual for identifying different plants, birds, other animals,
geographies, etc.
E.g. of the language of a common field guide:
• Aspen poplar, trembling (or quaking) aspend, white poplarTREE:
• Slender with a long straight trunk and rounded crown. Bark smooth, greenish-white on
• young trees becoming somewhat blackened and furrowed near base on older trees. Branches
• restricted to tops on mature trees. SIZE: Averages 20 m high. Trunk 25 cm in diameter. Under
• favorable conditions 30 m high; trunk 61 cm in diameter. LEAVES: Alternate, simple, oval to
• ovate, 4-6 cm wide; fine, irregular, rounded teeth on margin; slender, flattened petiole, usually
• longer than the leaf-blade; deep green upper surface, paler underside. FLOWERS: Small,
• hairy, drooping catkins appear before the leaves. FRUIT: Small, green capsules splitting when
• ripe to form a cotton mass. DISTRIBUTION: Very common and widespread throughout for-
• ested regions, but grows best in well drained soils. NOTES: Leaves tremble with slight breezes
• because of flattened leaf petioles. This tree suckers freely when cut or damaged. Root sucker-ing is the primary method of
propagation.
 “Some Functions of a Leaf,” p. 56
• Note the language of functionality, utilitarianism, resourceism
• subverted by the poem.
• These functions are still, shall we say, functional but they are different functions from how we normally
think of trees, wood, leaves via scientific or commercial capitalist language.
• It seems, at least at first, that McKay anthropomorphizes or personifies the tree/leaf/leaves.
• But DOES he?
“Field Marks,” p. 3

Field marks are the distinguishing marks of a particular species. The field marks
of a magpie might be its white, black and blue colouration.

In this poem, it is the birder, not the bird, whose field marks are the focus.

A dog’s nose of receptiveness: the consummate sensor. Attentiveness. The poetics

of attention, and birding.
Is scientific dry fact or does it have poetic
potential?

• The scientific details about birds that conclude the poem. These are FACTS but look too at how poetic
they are.
“Field Marks (2),” p. 27

• Another take on the birder, as opposed to the bird, the watcher/looker, not
the object of the gaze.
• Note the book from which both “Field Marks” poems are excerpted,
namely, Birding, or Desire.
“Dusk,” p. 6 and “Another Theory of
Dusk,” p. 105
On your own, compare these two ‘takes’ on dusk.
Note the “nocturnal creatures” referred to at the bottom of the second poem.
Now turn to the poem “Nocturnal Animals,” p. 9
“Nocturnal Animals,” p. 9
“August,” p. 33

• Do you hear or see echoes (allusions) to John Keats’s poem

”To Autumn”?
• ”To Autumn”:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44484/to-autumn
• The Keats poem is an INTERTEXT of McKay’s poem.
• Allusions are one kind of intertext with which you are
almost certainly familiar from your high school career.
“Twinflower,” p. 110
• https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=libo3
• Note that twinflowers grow here too in undisturbed places such as the
mountains. Watch for them as you hike next spring/summer.
• Poem as field guide again, poem as a short history of its nomenclature
(naming).
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carolus_Linnaeus_by_Hendrik_Hollande
r_1853.jpg
A portrait of
Carolus Linnaeus,
with twinflower