Abstract
Since not much recent scholarship has been published on Fred Cogswell’s poetic and philosophical connections with China, it is appropriate to cite the blurb on the back cover of Fred Cogswell’s The Kindness of Stars published in 2004 – the year Fred Cogswell passed away:We cite the rather long passage above for two reasons. The first has to do with the dearth of current scholarship on Fred Cogsell. The two authorities – The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (2nd ed. 1997) and Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002) predate this volume of poetry and thus render the information therein slightly out of date, while The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (2004) fails to include Cogswell altogether. Other critics who have come to our attention lag behind in this regard as well (e.g., Hawkes 2004; Besner 2001; Thorpe 2000). Furthermore, no entries or critics have ever made references to Cogswell’s Chinese connection except for the passage cited above, courtesy of Kathlene Forsythe, Cogswell’s only surviving child.
The myriad things shoulder the yin and embrace the yang,
And through the coalescing of these vapours,
They attain a state of harmony.
–the Tao Te Chin g, ch. 42, trans. from Ch’en Ku-ying 207
John Z. Ming Chen and Wei Li have contributed to this chapter, an essay published previously and re-printed here with permission.
We re-use the title from Northrop Frye’s critical study on William Blake’s poetics, “Fearful Symmetry;” Frye in turn, borrows his title from William Blake’s “The Tyger”.
John Z. Ming Chen and Wei Li have contributed to this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Very disproportionate scholarship exists on Cogswell’s poetics. Besides Robert Gibbs’s one-page entry (1983), W. Keith’s two-page general discussion (1986), and Davies’s good piece in Living Winter (1960), there has been no other substantial study. However, John Metcalf’s less than appreciative comments (1982) does serve as an antidote, unwarranted as it is.
- 2.
We wish to thank the poet posthumously for his time and effort in locating them. The poet used the term “Taoism” in his time. Current academic standard use is “Daoism” and its variants such as “Daoist.”
- 3.
Since the author of the Lao Zi (or the Tao Te Ching) reverses the yang/yin opposition in the foundational text, we think it is more appropriate to put the right column on the left, and vice versa. However, we keep the original order intact in order to preserve the original quotation.
- 4.
To present-day readers, some of the terms in the above paradigm may seem simplistic, fatuous, and even blatantly sexist in a long, 5000-word philosophical poem which is the Tao Te Ching; however, readers must make sufficient allowance for both the undeveloped Chinese theoretical discourse and different cultural sensibilities of some 2500 years ago, and for the almost always woeful inadequacy of translation. See Ellen Chen (1989), Michael Duke (1990), and Shaobo Xie (2009) respectively on Chinese-English translation across cultures.
- 5.
See J. Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) for the reversal of binary oppositions between culture and nature, and speech and writing (Part II); Helene Cixous’s “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays” for her challenging of the establishment of a binary system in terms of the couple – man and woman: “action/passivity; sun/moon; culture/nature; day/night; father/mother; head/heart; intelligible/palpable; logos/pathos,” and so on. Cixous’s terms, with some possible exceptions, bear a striking resemblance to those used in the Daoist texts.
- 6.
Timing may not be important in this case. For want of space, we leave interested readers to savour the two poems on monism, one in A Long Apprenticeship (80), another in Meditations: 50 Sestinas (30).
- 7.
Like Baudelaire (whose poems Cogswell translated) working on similar themes or topics (e.g., the cats, the hair) in different poetic forms or genres (the sonnet and prose poems), Cogswell reworks this Christian garden in “The Garden” (A Long Apprenticeship 59) with the same intent of questioning “God’s madmen.” Space restriction does not allow further demonstration.
- 8.
We wish to thank the poet for allowing us the privilege to read the poem before its publication.
- 9.
It is intriguing to note how some Chinese named themselves according to this Daoist principle. Chen Ruoshui (Chen Like Water; literal translation), a former professor in Asian literature studies, is an apt example.
- 10.
See his “Blake the Taoist” in Madly Singing in the Mountains for the Daoist connection.
- 11.
Interested readers may read Cogswell’s poems in When the Right Light Shines and The Trouble with Light, published by Borealis Press in Ottawa.
- 12.
See Rey Chow’s Writing Diaspora on the motif of speed under late capitalism (165–66, 170–79), and Fredric Jameson “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” on the speed of mass media images that changes our aesthetic sensitivities; see also Hugh MacLennan on the industrial society “galloping” to its own destruction.
- 13.
See John Z. Ming Chen’s “Re-Reading Grove” in Canadian Literature, No. 147. Noteworthy are Chen’s thanks to Cogswell and the references to Grove’s life and to The Master of the Mill.
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Chen, J.Z.M., Ji, Y. (2016). Harmony, Beautiful Balance, and “Fearful Symmetry”: Aspects of Fred Cogswell’s Yin/Yang Aesthetics. In: Canadian-Daoist Poetics, Ethics, and Aesthetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47959-9_7
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