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Articles

Volume 35, Number 2 (2010)

How to Know Now: "Zen" Poetics in Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems and Water and Light

  • Rob Winger
Submitted
January 31, 2011
Published
2010-06-01

Abstract

Because she engages the presence of the past in the moment of writing, Phyllis Webb’s perspective in her poetry collections Naked Poems (1965) and Water and Light (1984) is analogous to Zen Buddhism, which stresses the complexity of ordinary experience without requiring special, theoretical, or scriptural knowledge. Webb’s “Zen” poetics can be located on a spectrum between haiku and ghazal sensibilities.  With these poetics, Webb uncannily anticipates the style of post-1960s Canadian lyrics, including John Thompson’s celebrated Stilt Jack (1978). Webb’s “intra-poetics” (Zen tenets, haiku sensibilities, and a-chronology) and her theory of the “Influence of Anxiety” both concentrate on the present while acknowledging the influence of the past, thereby realizing the Zen goal of impermanence.