Hearing Anne Szumigalski
The 2004 Summer Experience
Keynote Talk
Delivered July 28, 2004by George Elliott Clarke
Sistren and brethren scribes, gentlewomen and gentlemen, it is an honour to be asked to address you on the subject of the Canadian poet, our late sister, bard, "poetess," Anne Szumigalski. However, the word "lecture" is fearsome at the best of times, when one's presentation is typed, sugared by learned allusions to five-star theorists and gold-star academics, and frosted with a glaze of erudition that's almost impenetrable because it is so profound. In my case, this evening, the term "lecture" would be even more preposterous than it is pretentious, because, while I relish this opportunity to discuss ideas sparked by my reading of Szumigalski's poetry, this essay will be best received as an informal talk, a digressive chat, than as a full-fledged, fact-armoured, and fact-armed "lecture."
Another reason for my deliberate relinquishing of any great claims for what you are about to hear is the presence here of one of English Canada's most formidable intellectuals, widely quoted teacher, and world-class — and classy writer — Robert Kroetsch. To be utterly honest, I wish he were giving this talk, not me, for his insights would be, I'm sure, unquestionably correct and just as assuredly compelling. However, I must meet this occasion as best I can, although my knowledge of Ms. Szumigalski's biography is skimpy, and my acquaintance with her corpus has expanded by 300% — three whole books — in only the past three days.
Enough of my excuses and equivocations, ruses and reservations. The talk begins now, but still with the observation, or defense, that my informality may be appropriate given my general positioning of Szumigalski as a Holy Fool, another Ginsberg-esque, Late Beat Blakean. Indeed, her overarching air of whimsy, along with her bold declaration of mystic beliefs and tendencies, connects her intellectually to the Beat and beatific interests of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, but, because she is Canadian, and, more specifically, an English-born, European-married, immigrant, Western Canadian poet, her immediate God is not the disciple, Ginsberg (though her prose poems may owe him a tiny debt), but the chief deity himself, William Blake, whose poems, like hers, are either fairytale wispy or brooding, Hebraic-prophetic thunderclouds.
I will say more about the consequences of Szumigalski's born-again Blakeanism later, but, for now, I want to venture a few tentative rationales for her palpable importance as a late twentieth-century voice in our letters. I undertake this exercise in appreciation, for I believe, privately, the greatest gesture of respect one poet may grant another is the tending, so to speak, of his or her grave after the decease. I will remark that we English-Canadians too easily bury our dead poets and move on, not realizing that our literature is dessicated when living writers refuse adequate consideration of those deceased. In fact, a roll-call of poets who have died only since the 1980s — Milton Acorn, Alden Nowlan, Ralph Gustafson, Libby Scheier, Al Purdy, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Miriam Waddington, John Newlove, Fred Cogswell, Eli Mandel, and Dorothy Livesay, Douglas LePan, Louis Dudek, R.A.D. Ford, Ron Everson, Earle Birney, Al Pittman, reveals many whose metaphorical graves are already neglected, if not forgotten. Such a fate must be resisted by surviving poets, for, in a culture of mass amnesia, poetry cannot survive unharmed if poets do not remember poets, a need especially acute in Canada. Only poets keep dead poets alive. (In Moose Jaw, this past weekend, a senior and celebrated, elder statesman of a poet, supported by a "Young Turk" and lionized writer, commented, with apparent glee, that the reputation of Irving Layton is already in eclipse. I did and do respectfully disagree. Layton's poems are as electrical as lust, and so long as human beings, even in Canada, continue to desire each other physically, so will Layton's work continue to be sounded.) My informal talk is, then, a down-payment on an unpayable debt, for it is the poets of our past as well as of all the other pasts, who constructed the art that practices us, so by seeking to address the art of Anne Szumigalski in her adopted land, I not only give due homage to her but to the art itself. Furthermore, I did meet her once, in a bookstore on Broadway, one sunny Saturday in Saskatoon, not far from the University where, in May 1993, she brought a group of friends to hear me read. I remember distinctly her spectacularly spectacle-dominated face, and her exclamation, as my reading ended, that I was doing "narrative poems featuring women's voices." The excitement in her tone suggested to me that her statement was one of surprise, not censure, and I suspect it's because much of her own work consists of prose poems and parables of a fantasy or mystical bias, but often exploring a socio-political conundrum.
Her interest in telling stores is an attribute of Szumigalski that distinguishes her at once in a poetic culture that may be said to be tyrannized by the subjective lyric. The Prairies — explicitly Saskatchewan — is where the British poet Richard Aldington, on a cross-Canada tour in the19-teens, conceived of the word "imagism," and then brought it back to London for Ezra Pound to pounce on, pontificate about, and propagandize for, with the happy result that, for almost 100 years now, and especially in Canada, poets have been taught to value the image above all else, making sound and story secondary. In Szumigalski, as in Alden Nowlan, the image is important, but it is not more important than the story her poems almost inevitably unfold. Suitably, in Anglo-Canadian poetry's current Age of Annes, Szumigalski as the unsung third, unlike Anne Carson and Anne Simpson, heroically and insistently, without intellectual remoteness or posturing, bothers to compose poems that are stories, not just constellations of semi-surrealistic, if sophisticated images. Moreover, Szumigalski's narrative lyrics arrive swaddled in a passionate, if idiosyncratic mysticism, that also serves to render them as unique (as they may also be opaque). Generally, in the context of a poetry — ours — that revels in academic abstraction and highly elaborate literacy — Szumigalski stands out as one alternative — not unlike Joe Rosenblatt and his Bumblebee Dithyrambs — of arguing for a more spiritually intuitive and ecstatic poetry (again, Beat-like) as opposed to the university verse so many of us tend to practice. (In English Canada, we love to praise the working-class style of Milton Acorn, but it's the much more abstractly intellectual Christian Bök we buy.)
In any event, Szumigalski's love of spiritually-infused, demi-religiously enthused, narrative verse owes something to her childhood, which was especially English because it was eccentric. If we trust Szumigalski's sparse and terse accounts of her maturation, it appears that her mother would frequently "witwalk" — compose spontaneous, magic stories and unfathomably surreal sentences, such as "The green spell of the amphitheatre . . . perfect doubling tree . . .why treasure arachnid ribbons?" Says Szumigalski, "these and other [phrases] like them might be my mother's words, the first words of a conversation, which would soon become a lucid argument."
"Tricks of the column. A hairsbreadth of a meadow, she might begin. Something about spaces and it's going to be a story, we children would guess. But none of us would interrupt, for in the end things would sort themselves out and her narrative, having learned the necessity of linear sequences, would unravel to all our delights . . . " (57-58, Word). In other words, Szumigalski grew up with an oracular mother, one whose constant invention of strange stories convinced her second daughter, Anne, that (A) women could author tales and (B) that women should write them. Perhaps, too, the example of her mother's unbounded creativity encouraged Szumigalski to craft implicitly feminist poems, whose politics are not strident, but complicated, in an Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath manner, borrowing heavily from the medieval feminism of English fairytales, with their tales of sleeping beauties, trapped princesses, endangered girls in forests, and ill-favoured daughters succeeding in winning love plus class advancement, which is still, dare I say it, what many of us hope for our daughters. Examples of the Szumigalski narrative poem cum fairytale are numerous, but here's one, "The Elect" (192, Glassy). Effectively, Szumigalski drafts a commentary on the necessity of innocence to venture, to flower (like seeds bursting into bloom above the once protective earth), but, by doing so, to become vulnerable to victimization, and worse, by that violence known as adoration, that violence remarkable as appreciation, that must destroy the flower to worship it, and worse still, that this inevitable violation is ordained by God.
One can trace an entire feminist genealogy of the fairytale-like or adapted fairytale poem in [Also, a bit of Katharine Mansfield in her sense of the strange, the magical, the bizarre, the childish, and the unusual.] English-Canadian literature, and it will look something like this: [Isabella Valancy Crawford], Jay Macpherson (The Boatman), Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and then Stephanie Bolster among current poets, with Szumigalski preceding Bolster. However, unlike Macpherson and Atwood (both cool, Frygian ironists) and Bolster (more explicitly post-feminist), but somewhat more like MacEwen (mystical and elemental), Szumigalski's use of the prose-poem fairytale is intuitive, not programmatic. However, she is unique in comparison to her predecessors and her heirs for insisting implicitly, but implacably, that the prose-poem IS a poem, and not some in-between hybrid.
The authority for her position belongs neither to our time nor to this world, but rather to the spirit of Blake and several of his angels. In fact, all of Szumigalski's work, save for her political fable Z (1995), a play, is based on forms derived from Blake: (1) the lyric about beautiful but malevolent spirits/angels, or about their malicious but divine counterparts, written along the lines of the Songs of Innocence and Experience; (2) the prose-poem/Biblical stanza-shaped narrative about allegorical, psychological or autobiographical events (responding to the style of Blakes "Prophetic" books, such as "America" and "Urizen"; and (3) the proverb-like couplet, as Blake uses in his "Proverbs of Hell," but also ghazal-influenced. Szumigalski, we know, related to Blake's work as a child. In The Word, The Voice, The Text (1990), she writes:
Since first I heard his poems, long before I could read. Since first I saw his extraordinary drawings and paintings. Since first he told me
"Man has no body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses."
As long ago as that, I realized that I was (and am) a happy disciple of Blake.
This love affair has lasted for most of my life. (101)
The virtue — power — of this "love affair" is what Szumigalski herself recognizes, again in Word: " . . . every time I am tempted to believe that poetry may be an intellectual pursuit, that it may somehow be explained, reasoned with, or dissected into its various parts, I am reminded of what Blake has to say about energy, imagination and desire: 'This is shewn in the Gospels where he [the Messiah] prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire . . . '" (101-2). Being a disciple of Blake, Szumigalski was no doubt aware of Blake's claim that he once saw an angel in a tree watching him or looking at him. Thus, Szumigalski is also visited by angels, telling us that when, as a girl, "angels entered into the words and became part of the poem I was writing," that is, when "I had begun to think of poetry as my life's work — angels became themselves, fiery messengers, glowing transcendent beings, and in this guise they have remained with me ever since" (53, Voice). Szumigalski also claims that angels are "jellyfish of the air, floating in their translucent grace all around us" (23). Taking her Blakean angelism seriously means accepting her oppositional, implicit anti-intellectualism, and I do, as a healthy corrective to English Canada's overly intellectual verse. I will note here that while both Lorna Crozier and Szumigalski speak out of Saskatchewan, Szumigalski is closer to MacEwen, specifically because MacEwen, the daughter of British immigrants, and herself a mystic intrigued by Middle Eastern and Mediterranean codes and cultures, was also an aotodidact. Intriguingly, the blakean poets — Ginsberg, MacEwen, Szumigalski — tend not to have university educations; instead, they have visions, and speak from the holy license that angels and spirits and deities allow. Likewise, these self-taught oracles tend to author biblically-styled books: see Ginsberg's Hebraic-prophetic verse-structures, or the Kabbala-like cover of MacEwen's Magic Animals (or the Qu'ranic structure of The T. E. Laurence Poems). In Szumigalski's case, she states categorically that the gods "leave it to us to write their holy books for them. True some of their words are written on tablets of stone, but there's never any clear indication of who did the actual carving" (22). She also argues that "liturgical versions of our languages are old ones. They are elevated by time and change. They have become in some spiritual way not only sacred but secret" (23). This Blakean interest in language as divine and in the poet as holy MAKER of new spiritual books is manifest in Szumigalski's creation of her own illuminated text when she was roughly 8 years of age in 1930. She returns to the idea in her longer prose poem, "On the Nature and History of Angels":
One day long past, or one day soon, God opens his hand and there on his enormous palm lies that elegant codex, the Bible of the Angels. Not at all like our Holy Books which we have been forced through the ages to write ourselves, tears falling and sweat rising. Haven't we the ink-stained fingers to prove it?
How surprising then that contents of these writings is so much like those of our own books. How familiar to us are these tales of conflict and revenge, these lists of wailings and recriminations. (204)
While Szumigalski, as a self-taught, Brit mystic, writing more-or-less feminist prose poems, may be connected strongly to MacEwen, she also has a brother Celtic counterpart in the excellent but underrated art of the Labrador-born, Newfoundland songwriter, musician, calligrapher, artist, and poet, Boyd Warren Chubbs, all of whose own Blakean and Yeatsian verse collections come along heartily illustrated, often with images of angels. Too, Chubbs also lacks the usual B.A., M.A., Ph.D., and is a beautiful, drunkard mystic. (The only Blakean poet in English Canadian letters who is also a professor of English is Kathy Mac or Kathleen McConnell.) The beauty of Szumigalski is that she reminds us of the power of the Angel of Unaided Imagination; that one can compose a universe, a cosmos, based not on intellect, but on sheer intuition. [see also her Yeatsian side in "Nettles," p. 68]
I've not said much about Szumigalski's biography, but that's because all such information is deliberately skimpy in her books. She was born in England in 1922, which means she was born between the Great War, whose memory would have been fresh when she was a girl, and experienced the horrors of the Second World War, including the Blitz and as a Red Cross worker in liberated Nazi concentration camps. (I will pause to note here her reversal in some ways of the trajectory of Mavis Gallant, who spent the war years in Montreal, but went to Paris in 1948, where she became a journalist responsible for writing the captions for the first mass publication of photos of Nazi death-camp atrocities.) At some point, she [Szumigalski] married, for her birth surname is David. Her ex-husband is essentially never discussed, and her own children, if any, are merely vague presences. Via immigration to Canada in 1951, perhaps a so-called War Bride (or perhaps as a separated or divorced or single woman), Szumigalski was able to throw a veil over her childhood years; it is interesting, in any event, that while she comments on her childhood and elder years, and includes photographs from her childhood in The Word, her adolescence, early adulthood, and middle-age are evacuated from the poems. Instead, we reconnoiter a hermetically sealed off world of visionary poetry, with diurnal, everyday reality transcended.
Of course, the major consequence of her immigration to Canada is that she became not an English poet, not a Saskatchewan poet (although she lived here), but a British-Canadian poet, whose direction, dreams, insights, and imagination hearken to her land of birth. In a sense, this memory of England that remains present in her poems is yet further homage to Blake, whose poem "Jerusalem," is not about that Holy City>, but about England. Szumigalski — like MacEwen, like Chubbs — creates a "new" Jerusalem, of English style, but set down in her own part of Canada. (Like the tomb of the Doukhobor patriarch in Castlegar.) She points out that "If I had stayed in Britain, or indeed any part of Europe, I would certainly have written poetry all my life, but it would have been much more cramped and circumscribed, more conventional and less absurd" (212). After a year in Saskatchewan, while living in "the Big Muddy wilderness, not far from the US border," she had a vision: a burst of lightning from a single cloud. To her, it seemed "I could almost see the hand of [Blake's] Old Nobodaddy throwing down his fiery spear." (212). "I took this to be a command to get on writing my poetry . . . " (212). While she found her voice in Saskatchewan, Szumigalski was, like other immigrant writers, always recycling the lost homeland in her writings, even if under a new guise.
But one way in which Szumigalski was intensely Saskatchewanese was her adoption of the poet-as-mystic persona, which has been impossible for any British poet to pull off since Yeats or, arguably, Dylan Thomas. The greatest living British poet, arguably Derek Walcott, is many things, but he is not a mystic. On the Canadian Prairies, and specifically in Saskatchewan, however, there is a tradition of the oracular poet, and, if we omit several millennia of First Nations shamans and chanted poetry, we can name no less an authority than Louis Riel himself as one of the first post-European contact mystical poets of these environs, these Great Plains. After Riel, I would nominate Aboriginal or Metis poets like Marie Annharte Baker, but also, dispite his education, the late, great Eli Mandel, whose first book is very Blakean. The mystical poet is rare in Canadian letters, but certainly contemporary figures like Boyd Warren Chubbs, Leonard Cohen, bill bisset, Pier Giorgio di Cicco, and Don Domanski can be included in the category. Fascinatingly though, it is Szumigalski who is almost unique as such because she is a Prairie-based woman. (Notice that most mystics are men; and men who are sponsored by powerful institutions such as organized religions, or universities, or, in the case of Chubbs, a very dedicated wife.) She succeeds as a poet in the Canadian Prairie mystical tradition completely — it seems — on her own terms and with her own resources. Thus, while her orientation remains British, borrowing from Blake, Yeats, and the Mother Goose, Brothers Grimm, Beatrix Potter, child-story and rhyme canon, her oracular eye is dedicated to her local landscape. See "On Loneliness," p. 81.
The consequence of this examination is the recognition that words, while angelic and holy, are also physical beings, invested with magic, both positive and negative, and sometimes effectively both, simultaneously, as in poems by Blake. The amoral physicality of words, language, is another theme — original — that charges Szumigalski's work: "the language of poetry has something to do / with the open mouth the tongue that jumps / up and down like a child on a shed roof calling / ha ha and who's the dirty rascal now." These lines from her fine poem, "Our Sullen Art" (note the echo of Dylan Thomas), informs us unhesitantly that poetry is a matter of tongue and mouth, heart and lungs, the organs of speech, capable of seduction and traduction (betrayal/translation), reason and irrationality, prayer and cussin', song and lecture. The poem concludes, "the day's first traffic travels carefully past the windows and doors of the shut house / so as not to awaken in the child / those savage cries our violent / our pathetic language of poems" (7). In The Word, The Voice, The Text, Szumigalski recalls that her Aunt Kate gave her a book to read during her convalescence from an illness at age 9. The book, titled Alphabets of Mankind, offered "Cyrillic, Greek, Turkic, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese writing, even runes and ancient Egyptian pictographs" (138). Experimenting with attempting to read aloud these exotic writing systems, Szumigalski decided that "any language I invented would have to be spoken only" (139). One immediate observation here is the obvious connection again to her British-Canadian sistah, Gwendolyn MacEwen, who also had a lifelong fetish for codes and alphabets. More importantly perhaps, Szumigalski's analysis of language forced her abruptly to address the exasperating and critical divides among song, spoken word/performance, and print poetry. As you are aware, these divisions continue into the current pseudo-millennium, with the Poet Laureate of Canada, George Bowering, critiquing Spoken Word poets as being "not really poets," a controversial comment that made 2002 an interesting year. But here is Szumigalski's read on the matter:
Could anything be more explicit than the voice that spoke the poem? There was the permanence of script. The passing of the poem down through ages of time. The amazing look of the written page, exciting and beautiful as any other drawing. [Note connection here to medieval manuscripts, Blake's books, and children's books: the illuminated manuscript.] I was almost converted but not quite. Nothing, not even this revelation of text could change my conviction of the primacy of voice, of sound in poetry. It comes first and it is first, but second comes the written word and it's only a hairsbreadth behind. (140)
Thus, Szumigalski reminds us that the poem is both written and spoken: spoken for its immediate, vivid, and visceral life, but written for its eternity. The printed poem is dry bones; the spoken poem is the life and the resurrection. Her extraordinary poem, "Fennec," emphasizes the physical property of poetry: [p.10] We must never forget: The 10 Commandments and other biblical or religious documents are dictated — spoken — by divinity, but are also set down by mortals in ink or stone. God — and the gods — never send letters, but always visions, messengers, angels, prophets, and, from time to time, thunderclouds. The divine word is poetry because it exists simultaneously in two dimensions. In this sense, too, poetry is related to dance, an art that can never transcend or abandon the body, but an art that also drives the body into sculptural and geometric possibilities that seem free of flesh. In his "Byzantium," Yeats asks famously, "How can you tell the dancer from the dance?" Szumigalski replies to her famous Celtic male mystic brother, in a poem titled "videotape," which comments on the videotape of the sensual, erotic dance of a Russian woman, Kakky, and makes the point that the dancer is expendable:
After a year or two years or ten years who will remember Kakky's buckteeth? or the kink of her coarse dark hair? (17)
Instead, Kakky lives on as a symbol of all the other Russian "girls / glad to be / wet / warm and / willing / . . . demanding devotion with the strong beat of their hot bare / feet and the slap / of their breasts / on their chests / and the sting of the sweat that runs into their eyes" (18). Although the male "Lecturer" or "Lecher," as Szumigalski posits, may regard Kakky lustfully, even though, too, she may be forgotten as soon as the videotape ends, she survives as an ikon of all womanly — and especially Russian — dance. The reply to Yeats seems to be that the dancer is perishable, but the impulse of the dance is imperishable. Similarly, the poet dies, but the voice lives. In The Word, The Voice, The Text, Szumigalski states, " . . . I still believe, in the poet as iconoclast. Yelling, stamping, and suggestive dancing is our fate and our duty" (149). I stress her use of the term "suggestive" because it underlines her fundamental vision of poetry as "Inspired wickedness" (107). She also maintains that "The voice is heard and the response is a dance" (72). In addition, the dance-like wickedness of poetry makes her "free to do my undisciplined jumps and leaps and skips whenever the opportunity comes about" (76, Word). Again, the artist is less important than the art, she tells us: "and a collection of poems, a chapter in the history of the imagination, how much more that will tell the reader than the bumbling life and deeds and death of the poet" (128, Word). Here is yet another reason for Szumigalski to offer an invisible autobiography in her work.
Z: A Meditation on Oppression, Desire and Freedom, Szumigalski's only play, staged successfully in Saskatoon in Spring 1994, published by Coteau Books in 1995, and winner of the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award for 1995, is an imagination of the Holocaust and its aftermath by a woman who, you will recall, visited the liberated death camps as a Red Cross worker. Yet, though it could easily have been a Spielberg-style cinematic glamourization of impossible and unspeakable evils, her subject is not Death, but life, the struggle of a Jewish Kapo to survive, the sexual relief and release offered their fellow inmates by women whoare not prostitutes, but, rather, ironic high priestesses of the life drive, and who dance, yes, in cages, but whose dances subvert their supposed physical confinement, and, lastly, it portrays the meaningless and self-destructive violence of the German guards, as well as the struggle of Z to survive anti-Gypsy racism directed at him from all sides. Perhaps most impressively, this play conjoins poetry, music, and dance, not to render us a realist treatment of untreatable crime, but rather a redemptive spiritual about life-love-lust and art eclipsing guns, starvation, brutality, and gas chambers. It is a significant piece of theatre that is also, in print form, an excellent introduction to the basics of Szumigalski's poetics, politics, and philosophy. Indeed, an oft-repeated line in the work, "I'll tell you again and again the same story" — that humanity is always making itself new death camps from which it must escape — will remind us all of one more British poet, namely, Robert Graves, and his much-anthologized poem, "To Juan, at the Winter Solstice," and its great line, "There is one story, and one story only." Like Graves, Szumigalski holds that literature is a repetition of mythologies, but where he recycles "The White Goddess," she gives us a feminist or feminized Blake. Szumigalski's debt to Graves is also sounded in her poem, "Your Child Looks Up," where her lines, "Ah but hasn't she caught you / in your own web of speculation"(46) echo Grave's other famous poem "The Cool Web," where language is pictured as a web into which children mature until they are caught up within it, thus losing innocence. Szumigalski arrives at a similar finding, suggesting that the subject child is hiding in a closed fist, not some marvelous object, but rather "her desire for the death of her brother / conceived in your bed last night" (46). In a sense, just as sexual knowledge is a matter of flesh encountering flesh, so is, for Szumigalski, the acquisition of language and literacy, wisdom and corruption, a physical "fall" — or ascension. Her understanding is that all art, including poetry, is a product of the physical, the body. In fact, the word, whether read, heard, or spoken, can only be apprehended and interpreted by way of eyes, ears, and a mouth; or, if Braille literate, by fingers. Language can only be encountered by the body, as the example of Helen Keller demonstrates.
I think that Anne Szumigalski deserves to be heard, sounded, because she represents the highest achievement of the English-Canadian mystical oracular poet, perhaps equaled only by Gwendolyn MacEwen. Too, her defence of spoken word aligns her with the only poetic movement in Canada that is fully of the people, by the people, for the people. As a poet of mystical bent, she is a bridge between the Blake mode and its strongest Anglo-Canadian practitioners, helping again to reinforce the non-academic side of our mainly academically-oriented verse. Her fascination with print and art highlights the possibility for other "illuminated books" in our culture, while her passionate religious philosophy connects her to such epochal figures as Louis Riel. As well, her union of dance and poetry may reinvigorate our drama, while her status as immigrant aligns her with that strong proportion of Canadian literature created by foreign-born writers. Finally, as a woman whose feminism is both complex and natural, she opens up understandings of relationships beyond gender clichés. She is a woman British Prairie oracular poet who belongs transformatively to the entire English-speaking world. Poets, read her.
I close with this poem: "Third Trimester" (p. 42, Glassy).
Thanks for the chocolate bar left at my door.
Bibliography
Szumigalski, Anne. On Glassy Wings: Poems New & Selected. Regina: Coteau Books, 1997.
___The Word, The Voice, The Text: The Life of a Writer. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1990.
___Z: A Meditation on Oppression, Desire and Freedom. Regina: Coteau Books, 1995.