Kerrisdale Elegies

The Kerrisdale Elegies are a compelling illustration of Pound's dictum--to "make it new." Williams' poetics too, to write "no ideas but in things" so thoroughly infuses Bowering's long poem, that while it is an exact equivalent to Rilke's Duino Elegies--separated as they are by three generations of one of the most tumultuous centuries in human history--it is not a translation, but a living, vibrant transformation of the work.

In the intertextuality of these great masterworks is found the birth of post-modern writing that is self-aware, where the other is discovered in the process of the writer writing, and is not a referent, neither secular nor divine, outside of the text itself, and therefore ultimately estranged from both the writer and the reader.