M. Travis Lane

Biography
Why Should We Read and Study Lane?
Literature & Analysis
- “Colonial”
- “The Thing Outside”
- “Half Past”
- Analysis of “Colonial,” “The Thing Outside,” and “Half Past”
- “Compost”
- “‘Tract’-able”
- Analysis of “Compost” and “‘Tract’-able”
- “About the Size of It”
- Analysis of “About the Size of It”
Questions and Considerations for Reflection
Strategies for Teachers
Further Reading
Copyright

Biography

M. Travis Lane was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1934. The daughter of a military family, she moved frequently as a child, the constant disruption impressing upon her a diversity of peoples, landscapes, communities, and natural worlds. Lane graduated from Vassar College in 1956, then went on to study at Cornell, where she earned MA and PhD degrees in American literature. Her dissertation subject was Robert Frost. She moved to New Brunswick with her husband in 1960 so he could take a position at UNB. Since her arrival in the province she has been active as a poet, critic, reviewer, part-time instructor, and honorary research associate of the Department of English. Her first collection of poems, An Inch or So of Garden, was published in the New Brunswick Chapbook series in 1969. Since that time, she has published upwards of fifteen collections of poems and has become a major poetic voice both regionally and nationally. Her numerous literary awards and prizes – in 2016 she was nominated for the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award (Poetry) for Crossover – attest to a wide and admiring readership.

For a much more detailed biography of Lane, see her New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia entry.

Why Should We Read and Study Lane?

Travis Lane is somewhat anomalous on the New Brunswick landscape. First, she brings the perspective of an artist born elsewhere, yet an artist that has consciously chosen to set roots in the province she has adopted. With that, she brings the virtues of restlessness and dislocation to a province in which rootedness sometimes limits perspective. Her work, in other words, teems with what is not readily familiar, a quality of art that always enlivens that which surrounds it. Critic Jeanette Lynes has been articulate about this aspect of Lane’s work: “M. Travis Lane is a poet of impressive versatility and breadth. … [S]he is a pluralist in outlook and technique whose work, over the years, has explored civic space, domestic space, wilderness space, and interiorized psychic spaces. I’ve long enjoyed Lane’s openness to idiosyncrasy… as well as her wit and adeptness at drawing from an eclectic range of aesthetic influences” (Introduction ix). Many of Lane’s poems actually explore diversity as a condition of thought, concluding that the fitful mind is the healthy one. “Fall Winter 1990-1991” is such a poem, ending with the lines

We can’t see straight if we don’t blink,
pause, wonder, even hesitate.
Nothing is all that simple.
Nothing is all that straight. (Night Physics 11)

Lane, then, is very much a modernist writer in the fashion of A.G. Bailey and Robert Gibbs, the New Brunswick poets closest to her in breadth of outlook and technique. She is also an intellectual poet, a poet of ideas, her work often considered Metaphysical in tone, form, and intention. We read her work to encounter the restless, searching mind; to meet doubt, self-deprecation, contradiction, and finely tuned irony; and to overhear the private thoughts of an artist who is questioning, reaching, reasoning, and, because of that, never fully settled in time or place.
As a poet of the restless mind – the mind eavesdropping on itself and the universe – Lane’s work is relevant in a world that is shedding its borders and its certainties. In that, she is attuned to the new homelessness, a homelessness not to be confused with poverty of means or vagrancy but with the sense of dislocation that the postmodern condition brings. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud coined the term unheimlich to describe what is uncanny or strangely familiar. Freud further defined the term by naming its opposite: if heimlich is akin to “home” (the familiar and accessible place that offers comfort in its predictability), then unheimlich is akin to “homelessness” (the unfamiliar place that is different but dimly remembered). Contemporary literary critics have used Freud’s terms to explain the feelings of rootlessness and dislocation that people feel in the postmodern world, the world where certainties of belief, power, knowledge, and order have been radically destabilized. In that disrupted world many people feel alienated from place and less at home in their own universe. Lane’s work captures and explores that sense of dislocation: of the current sense of not being completely at home or at ease in a world not as predictable, stable, or responsive as it once was. She is, then, a comrade in arms of people for whom migrancy, contradiction, and disruption is the norm.

Literature & Analysis

“Colonial”

Our little bells ring steadily;
beyond them drones
the deaf Atlantic sponging us,
dot on a dull map, from our sight.
A white mist surges from our dreams
and blocks our harbours,
tamps us down, conceived
in exile, nothingness.

We have our meaning in the clay.
Across it the ground juniper
sends its long fingers, frost
cracking the gravestones, antlers
rotting among the epitaphs –
Nothing is here. But there –
where that far freighter makes its slow
unyielding passage to the sky
climbing as out of a teapot boil
into the lucent calcimine,
there, there, our treasure is –

for home is a place we’ve never been.
We would not be home in it were we there.

“The Thing Outside”

A desperate unhappiness lies hereabouts;
like a house pet wants in, wants out, or
courses the back streets, but
nothing diverts its focus long –
neither the moon
whose laden finger stripes the house
nor the attention of a friend
drowning nearby, but swimming hard.

I close my doors.
Its voice comes in the window,
short of breath,
catching its words as if they hurt.
I leave a bit of chopped food on the step.
Almost enough. It grabs and runs.
It’s crouching under the bushes there.
It would overwhelm me like a sea
in which I do not choose to swim.
Like Noah on his splinter, I’m afloat.
Like Noah’s wife
I tip my glass.
‘Cheers!’ I say
to the dark outside. And the darkness
whispers back.

“Half Past”

This is the place where the map gives out,
worn in its folds, as it long has been.

Your label’s thin (mother/daughter/
sister/wife) and everywhere
an equal sky
fills the unstable woods.

Your shadow lags
as if you could step out of it.
What’s left? The work
you thought your best, like a blazed stump
in a logged pasture, can not call
your footsteps to it.

Half past midlife you find yourself
in a rough barren where no trees
or brambles block your way.
There is no path. Whichever way
you turn will be toward darkness.

Choose. The plot
of your unworded story is your own.
Or have the path
and you run out together,
overgrown, emplaced?

Will the horizon part, or a long stair
come down from those clouds, mountainous,
that pass and pass and never speak?

Write everything. These minutes are your own.
Business-arising has been paid
to each according to her need
(and you need nothing).

No map, no compass, and no plan.
There is, still, light.

Analysis of “Colonial,” “The Thing Outside,” and “Half Past”

M. Travis Lane is known for being resistant to labels, as most artists are, but she has been especially vocal in denouncing classification, thematic and otherwise. Mindful of this, critics have stepped carefully, respecting (and mostly agreeing) with her views of her own work, yet still finding it necessary to offer footholds for readers. Critic Jeanette Lynes has been shrewd about this aspect of Lane’s artistic personality, concluding that “while Lane’s adamant stance against thematic impulses may constitute a red flag waving before the eyes of an aspiring critic, central preoccupations … can be discerned as they evolve through her work” (Introduction xi). Lynes identifies those preoccupations as “aesthetic, ethical/political, and environmental” (xi), and while that classification is useful, it remains general.

Recognizing that a very small sampling of poems is not nearly enough to characterize a poet, the six poems selected here will describe an aspect of Lane’s work that touches on each of the three preoccupations that Lynes has identified.

That aspect is the sense of dislocation described above. Variously presented as the condition of being dwarfed or made insignificant by immensities much larger than the ego, that sense of dislocation is apparent in “Colonial,” which begins by putting us humans in our rightful place. We shake our little bells beside an indifferent (a “deaf”) Atlantic that both mocks and puzzles us, that puzzlement forcing us to seek equivalency “in the clay.” But that association is tenuous, too, for the ever-present forces of growth and decay destroy what we erect. Truth told, “Nothing is here.” We humans are builders who cannot master clay. Home slips constantly away. Yet the idea of home remains: home as Platonic ideal, as the object of our imaginings (Homeric and otherwise), as Atlantis. What grounds and defines us, explains Lane, is the home we yearn for amidst the homelessness of our material and historical conditions. We are a dislocated species that seeks emplacement. That seeking is home. Home is not a physical place but a yearning and a projection. In “Galactic North,” Lane explains it this way:

The searching is
the shape of it:
in that direction:
AM. (Poems 1968-1972 46)

“The Thing Outside” records, perhaps, the register of our collective unhappiness with the illusory nature of that searching. We humans seek home and permanence, and we are generally unsatisfied – despite the wisdom of poets – with the mere yearning for a permanence that is always out of reach. We want the real thing, not the desire for the real thing. That home and stability are ever fleeting, that we are never really where we want to be, breeds the “desperate unhappiness” that pervades our species.

“The Thing Outside” does not clearly state that idea, as “Colonial” does, as much as it simulates our condition, that condition a combination of fright, vulnerability, and the feeling of immanent surrender to the larger forces of uncertainty and instability, variously denoted as “darkness” in the poem. In the absence of the wisdom of the previous poem, a vast darkness surrounds us, “[i]ts voice com[ing] in the window.” The speaking subject in the poem is therefore, like Noah, “afloat” on unsteady seas. She is adrift, unanchored, and overwhelmed. She offers food to the unknown thing, but it is not enough. She toasts it with feeble cheer, but it only “whispers back.” Ravenous and frightening, it forces her inside. Indefinable, it dwarfs her.

The poem challenges us to define the darkness. Is it, indeed, a composite of all the forces that disrupt the human need for stability – the forces that lurk outside our doors to scare us, mock us, injure us, and usurp our feeble mastery – or is it something else? Whatever it is, humans must constantly battle it in Lane’s aesthetic universe. It is not necessarily malicious or even sentient, but it is nevertheless disruptive. It is the hole in the roof, the glass that cuts the dog’s paw, the listeria in the lettuce. It is the drunk driver coming toward us. It is those things that make human happiness an elaborate fiction. Better, Lane implies in “Colonial,” to embrace chaos as a first principal. Better, too, to find joy in the yearning than in the expectation of stability and calm. Not to understand that is to succumb to the “desperate unhappiness [that] lies hereabouts.”

There is, of course, as “Half Past” details, “[n]o map, no compass, and no plan” to instruct and guide us. And, to make matters worse, each of us is outgrowing our labels: “mother/daughter/ [/] sister/wife.” Each of us will have to contend with the darkness. Lane invokes the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy to describe the moment of crisis we will face when “you find yourself / in a rough barren where no trees / or brambles block your way.” When “[t]here is no path,” and “[w]hichever way / you turn will be toward darkness,” “[w]hat’s left?,” she asks. What then? The question must be put in the larger context of Lane’s work: what happens when we surrender to the vicissitudes of uncertainty, when we accept our roles as the unelected, the mere acted upon?

Her advice? “Choose. The plot / of your unworded story is your own.” There is, indeed, much darkness, no map, no compass, and no plan. But “[t]here is, still, light.” The message is clear: the poem’s speaking subject is counselling us to “[w]rite everything,” to seize the “minutes [that] are your own.” The poem is not suggesting resistance as much as speech. Resistance is futile, for the darkness is immense, but speech is eternal. The poem invites us to speak, and the larger context of her work invites us to speak bravely with full knowledge of the pains and contradictions that darkness brings.

“Compost”

There are dinners to make and dinner guests,
salads to bless in nurseries – all
compost in this mildewed feast;
Time picks his teeth.

Why grudge this meal?
Eat, drink, be merry, and work in
peat moss, phosphates, and nitrogen.
Time wounds all heels.

Shovelling under the last year’s chores,
I nourish a grief from spent rock.
On summer’s stove the housewife’s stew
simmers like love and history.
And it’s for real, all mine.
It will have to do.

from “Three Fathers”

3. ‘Tract’-able

But nothing depends
on the next
wheelbarrow.

Art
must come out
of the fridge,

must come out
from the apathetic weeds,
from the pillow’s croft,
the trivial,

bright as it is.

Where the heart is,
there,
that carrion,
your treasure is:

weathered, open,
a little gilt.

Rig up
your ground sense

to it.

Analysis of “Compost” and “‘Tract’-able”

These two poems seem to be linked to the three earlier ones by the same narrative focus: that is, they take up the fate of, and offer advice to, the dislocated, the homeless, and the world-weary (though Lane would likely recoil from the notion that her work offers advice – comfort, perhaps, but not advice). These poems do offer advice, however, the first acknowledging the necessity of care. Though the darkness may be coming through the windows, and discontent enervates the masses, provision must be made for dinner and for guests. “Why grudge this meal?,” the speaker asks; why be troubled that “Time” waits impatiently at the gate? The housewife does what she can. Her “stew / simmers like love and history.” Moreover, “it’s for real,” that notion of the real understood in the larger context of Lane’s work as being stable, immediate, accessible, and whole. It is an anchor in unsteady seas, a light in the darkness, a small goodness. “It will have to do.” The poem gives artistic voice to Lane’s belief in a pervading and inextinguishable light.

That light is found in small things – expressed as husbandry and domesticity in the poem “‘Tract’-able” – not in the grand gestures that our spectacle-obsessed popular culture demands. The third section of the triptych sources where “Art” is to be found, but we can extrapolate from that to locate sources of light, stability, and joy. Art and light, then, issue from “the fridge,” “the apathetic weeds,” “the pillow’s croft,” “the trivial.” In other words, art and light come from indistinct but enlivening things. Things close at hand and our own: “Where the heart is, / there, / that carrion, / your treasure is.” Everything is indeed “compost in [a] mildewed feast,” as the previous poem established, but that natural law of entropy and decay need not extinguish the light. “Rig up / your ground sense / to it,” the poem counsels, go in search of and celebrate the light. That action makes us tract-able (ready to meet an indefinite horizon), not tractable (easy to control). The pun in the title is deliberate.

“About the Size of It”

This man runs into the forest
breaking its red-tipped branches, flails
among the ice-encrusted leaves,
is,
he says,
the poet of himself.

He sees himself, his vividness
of shoulder, his strong arms,
as one with what he fractures. He
contains, he says,
what he has run inside.
Says ‘Woods.’

Better he should go mousely; creep
flat as a dry leaf; write
on snow calligraphy
of his own diary doings; claim

only a single errand run;
report: one nut.

Analysis of “About the Size of It”

The final selection of Lane’s work introduces her environmental ethos. Critics have discussed that ethos as an eco-poetic vision that ruminates on the intersections between aesthetics and environment, between the human and animal worlds. Writ larger, Lane’s eco-poetry admits her to the company of a pioneering group of Canadian poets from Atlantic Canada, namely A.G. Bailey, John Thompson, Don Domanski, and Don McKay. Because she is that group’s first woman, she has been a strong influence on contemporary female writers in the region.

“About the Size of It” reflects that important aspect of her work. Clearly eco-feminist, the poem is as delightful as it is clever, beginning with a pun in the title (a second reading of the poem will alter the meaning of the word “Size”). The poem identifies an Everyman who “fractures” and “flails” his way into the forest, “breaking” the new growth that attracts him. He is the modern-day Elmer Fudd/(Robert Bly?) with binoculars, entering wilderness in an effort to more fully understand himself. The problem is that he is the measure of the wilderness that surrounds him; he is “the poet of himself.”

Lane both scolds and instructs him. “Better,” she says, that “he should go mousely,” not leaving a trace. Better that he “creep / flat” and “write” on melting snow. Better that he crouch down to the level of that which he seeks to understand, and better that his task is made insignificant: “only a single errand run; / report: one nut.”

The double-entendre (or double meaning) in the last line is an absolute delight. Whose report is it? The report of the more attentive woods explorer who sees wilderness as wilderness, claiming nothing more than the observation of the harvest of “one nut,” or is the report that of the poet who, seeing the bumbling Elmer Fudd, concludes “one nut?” Nut is either object or condition.

While this explanation of Lane’s cleverness diminishes the effect of her verbal wit, it is necessary for calling attention to the humorous play that infuses her verse. Lest the analysis of the first five poems suggest that she is a poet of a dour seriousness, this poem illustrates that much of her work is playful, ironic, subversive, and fun. She can and does play the prankster.

Questions and Considerations for Reflection

► Lane’s “Colonial” begs comparison with Fred Cogswell’s earlier poem “Valley-Folk” (see Modernism and the Fredericton Ferment). Lane’s poem even seems to invoke Cogswell’s, especially in focussing on the powers of dream and imagination. Lane’s poetry also appears to address the work of other New Brunswick poets: compare, for example, the tonal complexities of “About the Size of It” to Alden Nowlan’s “These Are the Men Who Live By Killing Trees” (not in this curriculum) and John Thompson’s “January February March Et Cetera” (see The Tantramar Revisited).

► To fully appreciate Lane’s work, one must consider how she presents the human condition: that condition characterized by an unending search for home and meaning, by a studied denial of contradiction, and by an uneasy existence at the nexus of change, disruption, and doubt. French philosopher and sociologist Jean-François Lyotard examines many of the same aspects of “the human” in his important book The Postmodern Condition (La Condition postmoderne), which came out in 1979. In that book he argues that post-war modernism, or postmodernism, is a condition of thought, a state in which humans no longer rely on the master narratives that once grounded and soothed them. The corresponding loss of faith in the grand narratives, foremost among those the notion of an irreducible truth, has destabilized us as a species and introduced unprecedented uncertainty and angst into our world. Reading Lyotard’s short book alongside Lane’s poetry will reward the serious student of the contemporary world.

► Students of modern American poetry will recognize the allusion to William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” in Lane’s “‘Tract’-able.” For Williams, so much depends on the red wheelbarrow; for Lane, “nothing depends / on the … / wheelbarrow.” What stands behind this difference of opinion regarding the importance of the wheelbarrow? See also “Strategy 3: Art and Light” below.

► Like A.G. Bailey, Robert Gibbs, and many other modernists, Lane is a poet of ideas. That identifier bears some further consideration. What is the role of a poet of ideas like Lane in today’s world? As importantly, what is the reception of such a poet? In a world where we are dislocated, wandering and searching for a home, would we rather our artists just sing to us? Do we need lullabies instead of ideas?

► For a good general introduction to eco-poetry, see David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1996). For an Atlantic Canadian perspective on this, see Don McKay’s Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness (2001). For more on female eco-poetics in Canada, see Diana Relke’s Greenwor(l)ds: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women’s Poetry (1999). Finally, it is worth comparing Lane’s recent work with the eco-critical consciousness of A.G. Bailey (see Modernism and the Fredericton Ferment) and the Tantramar poets (see The Tantramar Revisited). Are differences discernable around gender? Do female eco-poets differ from male eco-poets? If so, how?

Strategies for Teachers

Strategy 1: Home (“Colonial”)

Ask students to compare Raymond Fraser’s relationship to home, as expressed in the poem “To Go Back Home to Chatham” (see The Literary Miramichi), with Lane’s relationship to home as expressed in “Colonial.” Do students identify more with Fraser’s embittered restlessness (“the minute I stepped off the train / I’d say, ‘God, my friend, / get me out of here’”) or with Lane’s more intellectual sense of dislocation (“home is a place we’ve never been”)? This contrast will inevitably lead to the larger question: Do young people today feel at home anywhere? If they do, do they aspire to remain at home or to escape it for another home, following a pattern similar to that of their parents? And if they don’t have a sense of home, do they think their rootlessness is something that is related to their age or is it a universal experience of the postmodern condition? Ask them to consider that their sense of home is one that is manufactured. Specifically, that is manufactured to keep them mobile and off balance. If they agree that this in fact is the case, then what might be the motive behind that manufacturing?

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Reading and Viewing: Make informed personal responses to increasingly challenging print and media texts and reflect on their responses

Strategy 2: Playing with Words (“Compost”)

As inspiration for a writing activity, draw students’ attention to how Lane plays with language in poems such as “Compost” and “About the Size of It.”

Present students with a list, or ask them to generate a list, of common sayings. Can they come up with a clever inversion for the sayings, inspired by Lane’s “time wounds all heels”? Present a few examples if required, such as “a piece of the action” to “an action of peace,” or “a leopard can’t change its spots” to “a leopard can’t spot change.” These rewritings could be the end goal or spark an extended writing activity: can students build a poem, story, or essay around their new saying?
Lane is fond of words that can be read as verb or noun. “Wounds” is one example, the dual meaning playfully explored in the switch from “time heals all wounds” to “time wounds all heels.” The homophones heel/heal provide another example. Even the titles of her poems – “Compost” and “About the Size of It” – can be read multiple ways. When first encountered, these titles are read statically, as nouns. However, after reading the poems, actions resonate to transform nouns to verbs – and thus “compost” turns from trash to nourishment. Bearing this process in mind, ask the class to develop a list of words that can be either nouns or verbs. Examples: address, benefit, charge, comfort, jam, lie, park, plant, punch, ring, season, stroke, type, vacuum, value. Then have pairs or groups of students develop misleading story titles that utilize these multiple meanings, along with related synopses. So, for example, a poem titled “Home Address” might be about a rousing speech, a cherished residence, or a combination of the two.

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Writing and Representing: Make effective choices of language and techniques to enhance the impact of imaginative writing and other ways of representing

Strategy 3: Art and Light (“‘Tract’-able”)

Is Lane correct in suggesting that art and light issue from “the fridge,” “the apathetic weeds,” “the pillow’s croft,” “the trivial”? Do art and light come from indistinct but enlivening things, things close at hand and normally considered insignificant? Is she making a larger statement here, perhaps challenging the Romantic inference that inspiration comes from the gods and that the best poetry gives voice to the noblest things? Teachers who are drawn to this notion of the importance of the trivial will want to read about William Carlos Williams’ maxim “no ideas but in things,” a line (and idea) that appears in Williams’ long poem Paterson (Book I, 1927).

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Speaking and Listening: Articulate, advocate, and justify positions on an issue or text in a convincing manner, showing an understanding of a range of viewpoints

Copyright

We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of M. Travis Lane for allowing us to use the poems above for this curriculum. Further use or distribution of these poems, however, is a violation of Canadian copyright law and is strictly prohibited. Under no circumstance may literary material used in the curriculum be reproduced, distributed, or stored without the permission of the copyright holder.

“Colonial” and “‘Tract’-able” (from “Three Fathers”) appear in M. Travis Lane’s Solid Things: Poems New and Selected. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant Books, 1989. “The Thing Outside,” “Half Past,” and “About the Size of It” appear in Lane’s Night Physics. London, ON: Brick Books, 1994. “Compost” appears in Lane’s Poems 1968-1972. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1973.

M. Travis Lane

Contents

Biography

Why Should We Read and Study Lane?

Literature & Analysis

“Colonial”

“The Thing Outside”

“Half Past”

Analysis of “Colonial,” “The Thing Outside,” and “Half Past”

“Compost”

from “Three Fathers”

3. ‘Tract’-able

Analysis of “Compost” and “‘Tract’-able”

“About the Size of It”

Analysis of “About the Size of It”

Questions and Considerations for Reflection

Strategies for Teachers

Further Reading

Copyright