`I want to push my mind and imagination as far as I can, because that`s where the discoveries are` WEN PHYLLIS WEBB was invited to a feminist conference at York University in 1983, she stayed with her long-time friend Timothy Findley in Cannington, Ontario. In the evening they drove to York, where Webb read a new poem to the audience called "Leaning." This moment is described in Timothy Findley`s memoir, Inside Memory. Listening along with the audience, Findley felt "as if I had been struck in the solar plexus" At the time he was struggling with the draft of a new work about a farm wife, a blind cat, an abusive husband, and a blizzard. In his memoir Findley quotes the last lines of "Leaning": And you, are you still here tilting in this stranded ark blind and seeing in the dark. "In that moment," Findley writes, "the whole of Not Wanted on the Voyage fell into place. All of it" Phyllis Webb chuckles when asked if she knew of the effect that the poem had on her friend. She is passing through Toronto on a reading tour for her new collection of poems, Hanging Fire, published by Coach House Press. "No," she says flatly. "I read at York and then we drove back to Cannington. Tiff asked me for a copy of the poem. He said he was going to frame it. He probably said something but it didn`t strike me as earth-shaking, and I didn`t find out until the book was published. I didn`t realize how profoundly it had shaken the whole model of his novel. Everything apparently clicked into place. Well, you never know." Between Webb and Findley inspiration has been a stream flowing in both directions. She credits his novel Famous Last Words for being one of the origins of her poem sequence "I Daniel," published in Water and Light (1984). "My interaction with Timothy Findley has been very fruitful," she adds. "Our friendship or our psychic connection has fed our work" This country`s literary community is more supportive than readers may realize, and while the Findley-Webb friendship is an especially creative one, Webb has taken from and given to many writers. Hanging Fire is dedicated to the memory of three poets whose deaths have had a profound effect on this community: Gwendolyn MacEwen, bpNichol, and Bronwen Wallace. Many other poets - Sharon Thesen, Barry McKinnon, bill bissett, Dorothy Livesay - are named in the new book. "I have always felt very much a part of the community," Webb says. "I think were on the whole a fairly benign literary community compared to, say, the British. Of course I don`t live in Toronto where perhaps things are bitchier. I don`t feel terribly competitive. I do feel a lot of support out there. And I also want to be supportive. It makes it easier to be a poet if you have a sense that there are others doing this, which doesn`t get much attention in the `real` world" Webb has the reputation of being a difficult, intellectual poet, and some might see the literary name-dropping in Hanging Fire as cutting off her work even more from general readers. But Webb has no such intention. "In some ways it isn`t necessary that people do know who they are," she says. "I have tried to keep names out of my poems, unsuccessfully as you can see. A few years ago I swore off it publicly at Harbourfront and yet I`m still doing it. I think it`s partly a dramatic device. Also, using a name imports a lot into the poem free of charge. It`s a kind of shorthand; you get a lot of resonance with a name. And if anyone happens to know who Bronwen Wallace is then the poem means a great deal more. Perhaps the poem dedicated to Sharon Thesen is a little too personal. I remember phoning her immediately after I wrote it to read to her. But I kept it in the book because it does explain a little bit about the way I write, and because I actually quite like the poem" THE MONTREAL SCENE of the `50s was Webb`s first entree into the literary community. Born in Victoria in 1927, she attended the University of British Columbia and at the age of 22 expressed her political views by running as a CCF candidate in the provincial election. For a time Webb considered signing on as a communist, but a friend convinced her to turn socialist at the last moment. But politics is one of Webb`s well-known disillusionments, and in time she came to reject all party lines. The Montreal poets - F. R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Eli Mandel, Irving Layton, A. J. M. Smith, John Sutherland, and Leonard Cohen -showed Webb that there were others who cared as deeply about language as she did, and Dudek`s Contact Press published her first poems in a book called Trio in 1954 (along with the work of Mandel and Gael Turnbull) - The formal elegance, dry wit, intensity, and erudition would begin to create for her a formidable reputation as a thinking poet with a rather bleak world view and, in the words of Peter Stevens, an "acceptance of despair as an ambiance of existence." Indeed, Webb`s obvious intelligence would continue to intimidate some critics into underestimating the intuitive and creative side of her work. Webb won a government travel award that allowed her to spend several years in London and Paris, reading philosophy and poetry and slowly - very slowly - producing her own work. In a country where the best-known poets are also the most prolific (Layton, Purdy, Atwood), Webb developed an almost mythical reputation for the sparseness of her output - slim volumes appear every few years. The minimalist work in Naked Poems (1965) made it appear as if she might even be slipping towards absolute silence, and so it seemed until 15 years later when the surprisingly expansive Wilson`s Bowl appeared. That book significantly increased her reputation, even though it contained what Webb called her "Poems of Failure" - the remains of an abandoned attempt to write an ambitious cycle based on the life of Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist. It was about this time that George Woodcock wrote of her poems: "They show at once such concern for craft and such intensity of vision that her career seems almost exemplary, the way in our age of the true poet." In 1982 a selected edition of her work appeared under the title of The Vision Tree and received the Governor General`s Award. Webb`s inability to write more was caused in part by her return to Canada to work for CBC Radio in Toronto. She cocreated the "Ideas" program ("much more rigorous in our day," she says), eventually becoming its executive producer. But the work was exhausting and in 1969 Webb quit to move to the relative isolation of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. "I seem to be able to write these absolutely pure books Naked Poems and Water and Light," Webb says as she ponders the arc of her work. The poems in the former have been compared to haiku in their brevity and emotional precision, while the latter showed a freer, more lyrical Webb, able to flow from philosophic idea to images of the everyday with a new ease. She credits Robert Bly, the American poet, and his book Leaping Poetry. "He tends to favour the surrealists and that leaping brain," she says. "I decided that I wanted to leap a little more." In Hanging Fire Webb takes more ambitious leaps yet, and it will be interesting to see whether readers of poetry will be willing to leap along with her. It is a deliberately less appealing book than Water and Light or Wilson`s Bowl, dense and often antilyrical. These fragmentary visions of a restless intelligence are packed closely together, making it a challenge for the reader to find a way in. "Hanging Fire is riskier than Water and Light, where I was working with a form, or more accurately against a form," Webb says. "In this book I`m trying all kinds of things technically. I thought, `These are the ugly poems and not many people are going to like them."` Webb pauses to consider the demands she makes on the reader. "Well, if that is the level of intelligence that I write at, I don`t think that I can limit it. I do try to make my poems as accessible as I can. I don`t want them to be arcane puzzles. I guess a few of them are, and sometimes there is a pleasure in the mystery of a poem. But I would feet dishonest if I tried to simplify or restrain my imagination. I want to push my mind and imagination as far as I can, because that`s where the discoveries are." She adds, "I really enjoyed writing the prose poems, the short paragraphs and little meditations. I had a lot of fun with them." Fun? Certainly there is a playful side to these poems, but the actual experience of writing can be excruciating for Webb. The poem "`Temporal Lobe` " describes one of her migraine headaches, out of which will often come a poem: Migraine, on the sinistral, right brain hammering left. Bad science. Bad faith. It`s been a long time, one outgrows them, they say. But today. Writhings, rage clenches my fist. The poem describes the taking of pills to ease the pain and then a moment of "higher consciousness!` And then this tortured physical experience translates into language: My face? It too articulates each muscle into word-spasms, syllable kicks. Three poems in one day. Breathing fire. Swallowing hard. Arrogant sentence fragments. Can`t get out. "I don`t know which comes first," Webb says, "whether the migraine comes first and then I write the poem, or whether the poem is there and all that psychic pressure causes the migraine. It`s such a confessional poem. It`s Phyllis totally uncontrolled. It really displays the side of me that hardly anyone has seen. Throwing things around!" Fortunately, she doesn`t get migraines very often now, and the poems come anyway. But "right brain hammering left" can be taken as a description of the two sides that Webb sees in her own poetic process - the creative-irrational and the intellectualanalytic - and how the struggle between the two continues. THE TITLES OF THE POEMS in Hanging Fire are in quotation marks to note their special nature. Webb calls them "`given! 11 words because they arrive "unbidden" to her mind. The use of these messages from the subconscious was a deliberate neo-surrealist project that Webb set for herself "It does require a special kind of listening, you kind of catch them on the wing," she says. "Sometimes they hang around and insist on being heard. But they were not as random as I thought and this is probably because I`ve had a certain number of preoccupations for most of my adult life. Russia is one. Art and poetry. Animal suffering. Art and science as politics. Politics as delusional systems. Revolution and passive resistance. These are things I`ve been thinking about for a long time" The politics in Hanging Fire are never delivered as a straightforward or simple message, but is more an opportunity for language play and personal revelation. "`The Salt Tax,`" about Gandhi`s 1930 revolt against British law in India, is also a delightful sound poem. And the three poems about Lenin - two concrete poems composed on a typewriter and a prose poem - are at least as much about Webb`s attitude to Lenin as about Lenin himself. "The idea of revolution is very attractive to me, but I`ve never done very much about it," she says. "I`m a real liberal coward. And I always feel this argument going on inside myself between revolution and passive resistance. That is why I cannot be a propagandist. So I just live with these possibilities. But Im so disillusioned about political ideology. There`s very little left except the Green movement. My fascination with Russia ties in with my fascination with Lenin and the revolution and the failure of that dream. Which, when I was young, was a dream" The prose poem about Lenin, "`To the Finland Station,` 11 may be the highlight of the book for its seamless blend of the personal and the historical. It describes a trip Webb took to Helsinki and Leningrad, and reads as if it were an excerpt from a passionate and rapidly composed journal. In fact, Webb did not write the poem until eight months later, after doing considerable research on Lenin and the revolution. The title of the poem may have been "given," but the poem itself was the result of effort and applied inspiration. SOCRATES, DOSTOEVSKY, Pound, Rilke, Hopkins, Marx, Heidegger, Blake, Aeschylus, Marvell - the philosophers and writers of our recorded history have been until recently almost exclusively male. All of them have appeared in Phyllis Webb`s poems. The first literary community she met in Montreal was virtually all male too. But after Webb came back from Europe she began to meet more women writers. The introduction to Wilson`s Bowl showed a new realization that her honorary membership in an intellectual men`s club was of dubious value; and she apologized for all her portraits of male figures. "They signify- the domination of male power culture in my educational and emotional formation," she wrote. Her real failure was not the collapsed Kropotkin cycle but the unwritten poems about women. Water and Light showed a deepening awareness of women artists, resulting in this quiet homage: "The women writers, their heads bent under the light, work late at their kitchen tables." In Hanging Fire Webb makes further amends. Not by writing poems about Joan of Arc or Virginia Woolf, but with three poems about writer friends - Sharon Thesen, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Bronwen Wallace. Their lives are shown as both troubled and transcendent, mundane and beautiful. "I`m on the whole very grateful for them," Webb says of the younger feminist poets she has befriended. "Because I do feel people like Libby Scheier and Mary Melfi - there are so many - have kind of liberated me. Not necessarily in the way I write. But you`ll notice that Hanging Fire is a more overtly feminist book towards the end. After Wilson`s Bowl I think I really did try to raise my consciousness." This new awareness means that a contribution by Webb can comfortably fit in the recent anthology of essays by women writers, Language in Her Eye. It has also helped her to ease some of the despondency so evident in her early work. "In Hanging Fire there is a lot more outright anger," she says. "It`s not masked as despair - I think that`s the emotional difference. I think I`ve found some of the sources of my despair and brought them into the light. That`s what depression is for me, in-turned rage. It`s a special technique of women who tend to turn self-destructive. Maybe I`ve learned from the younger and wiser poets" Webb points to the book`s last poem, "The Making of a Japanese Print." In it a male artist`s portrait of a woman is given a voice by Webb so that she might reject her designated role as a beautiful servant: A woman emerges at last on the finest paper, cursing his quest for the fine line and M damned delicate fan carved in her hand to keep her forever cool factitious, apparently pleasing. At the moment Webb isn`t writing, having fallen into one of her silent periods. "I`m not sure where I`ll go from here, if anywhere," she shrugs. "I say it every time: this is my last book. It becomes a little more meaningful at this stage in my life." But what if another title for a poem should come unbidden into her head? "Like on the plane? The phrase was `sauve qui peut.` And then all the lights in the plane went out!"