The Poetry of Don McKay

Don McKay on metaphor (from Vis-a-Vis 85, quoted in the introduction to the Poetry of Don McKay by Meira Cook, p. xv):
"...they are entry points where wilderness reinvades language, or the place where words put their authority at risk."

Don McKay on art and tool use (afterword, p. 52):
"...tools are so intimatly worked into the fabric of life that it becomes a question of who uses whom. Thinkers as diverse as William Blake, Eric Gill, J.L. Livingstone, and Marshall McLuhan have observed that our dependancy runs so deep that tools may be said to operate us, that we have, as Livingstone puts it, dommesticated ourselves to technology. . . . The brave claim is that we can see art as a subversion of this process, indeed as a counter-flow."

My (at this moment) favorite poem from this collection, or the poem which I feel best embodies what we are discussing in this class. (p. 23)

Some Functions of a Leaf

To whisper. To applaud the wind

and hide the Hermit thrush.

To catch the light

and work the humble spell of photosynthesis

(excuse me sir, if I might have one word)

by which it's changed to wood.

To wait

willing to feed

and be food.

To die with style:

as the tree retreats inside itself,

shutting of the valves at its

extremities

to starve in technicolour, then

having served two hours in a children's leaf pile, slowly

stir its vitamins into the earth.

To be the artist of mortality.