Kenneth White, The Winds of Vancouver

Let’s get this out of the way, before I start my litany of complaints:

• Kenneth White was by most accounts an admired teacher, respected poet, and deeply engaging speaker.

• As the accepted founder of geopoetics, he has left an important legacy.

• I thought Mohammed Hashas’ tribute following White’s death, in which Hashas re-walks some of the intellectual ground trod by White, was a useful and quite moving read.

None of this however, means that I was even the least bit satisfied by Kenneth White’s 2013 book The Winds of Vancouver: A Nomadic Report from the North Pacific Edge.

Admittedly, part of this has to do with the copy-editing, so to some small extent I should be looking askance not at White himself but at the Research Institute of Scottish and Irish Studies. For example, the book’s missing a great many quotation marks: once opened, it’s not uncommon for a quotation not to be closed.

And while I appreciate that “ork” seems to be an archaic term once referring to sea monsters, and in the 16th century sometimes referred to what we now call orcas, I’m not giving White that credit. Simply, I don’t believe that among the Tlingit, one of the clans under the Raven lineage should be called “the Ork clan” (p.32), even if White does refer later to “a pod of orks” (p111). This might be the fault of the press’s copy-editing, but I suspect it’s down to White.

Kenneth White in France, 1968, because how can one resist this picture??

Although the book opens with White spending a few days in Vancouver, from which he travels up-coast by boat from Vancouver (via Bella Coola and other locations), the great majority of The Winds of Vancouver takes place in Alaska. In general I’m happy to read about places other than BC, of course, but it did feel a bit like a bait and switch.

And speaking of “bait and switch”: part of White’s time in Vancouver is said to be spent at the Red Dog Pub, though he also says that he visits the Red Dog Saloon in Juneau, Alaska, and mentions as well the Red Dog Mine in Alaska. This repetition stuck out to me, so I went a-googling, so to speak.

White’s correct in his two Alaska references, presumably, but there’s no Red Dog Pub in Vancouver. Fortunately for me, he mentions that this pub’s motto is “Your day starts here with ice-cold beer” (p2).

In other words, noted poet and scholar Kenneth White spent his first evening in Vancouver at the No.5 Orange.

The Orange was then, and remains now, a “showroom pub.” More precisely, it’s a strip bar that serves food. And the Orange is in a … challenging part of Vancouver, too, the Downtown Eastside. The bar wants to present a somewhat sparkly veneer now, but that’s not its history. When White would’ve visited, well, this is David Look’s description of his 2007 visit, only a few years before White:

“Imagine if you will, your Food and Drink critic seated in Sniffers Row, receiving a massage from a large woman in a short acid wash skirt whilst eating a clubhouse sandwich, because this was the scene that was unfolding at the No.5 Orange Showroom.”

There’s not a hint of this context in White’s book. According to him, the Red Dog No.5 Orange was simply the source of some detailed information he chooses to share about early Vancouver (the Gastown neighbourhood, specifically, named for early settler and barkeep Gassy Jack Deighton). It’s presented as a research trip, basically, Kenneth White’s evening in what was then a distinctly seedy strip club.

When White leaves the Red Dog No.5 Orange that night, he walks back to the Pan Pacific Hotel and settles in to enjoy “a bottle of California merlot from the cellars of The Burrowing Owl” (p3). BC readers might raise an eyebrow at this as well, though, because the thing is, Burrowing Owl is a BC winery, not a California one.

Admittedly, the burrowing owl is a more common species in BC, because BC is right at the northerly edge of its range (though along with many other species, it’s moving north under climate change), but I’m not crediting White with that degree of ornithological expertise. It’s a lazy European assumption about North American wine, period.

If White had bothered fact-checking himself, he might’ve been interested to hear about the winery’s program in support of this endangered species. I don’t know that Sidney Wade’s lovely 2011 poem “Burrowing Owl” counts as geopoetics, but let’s just agree, shall we, that this tiny point represents something of a missed opportunity for White.

But enough minutiae, because I’ll need to escape the book’s first chapter eventually!

My point: I go on at this much length to contextualize the depth of my doubts about (and in some cases my distaste for) how White presents himself in The Winds of Vancouver, and how he presents the people and places that he encounters.

White tends to present at length conversations with individual people that we’re meant to take as especially representative informants, but to present his experiences of place as catalogues. A cab-driver in Vancouver, an immigrant from the Punjab to be precise, gets two pages (pp7-8), while a conspiracist redneck couple in Homer, Alaska, get more than three (pp100-103), and that’s fine.

But here’s how he presents almost his entire first day by boat, leaving Vancouver and heading north:

“The skyline of Vancouver slowly receding.
Then up through the Narrows, under the bridge, and out into the Gulf of Georgia.
To port now, the Vancouver Island Heights that rise up from Nootka Sound. To starboard, the great gleaming peaks of the Pacific range looking over Jervis Inlet, Knight Inlet, Seymour Inlet.
A tug towing a great barge piled with sand.
Smoke rising from a pulp mill at Campbell River.
Islands of floating logs.
A great rumour of waters and a wind rising.
The Three Sisters lighthouse on Texada.
Seymour Narrows.” (p29)

Am I the only one wondering, to be blunt, how in hell the founder of geopoetics can offer up THIS as the sum total of this geological, topographical, biological unicorn of a place?

There’s some lovely geopoetical work out there, by Norman Bissell for example, and by White himself, and I’ve been doing ecocriticism for enough years not to mind the swings and roundabouts of how a person’s work oscillates through time. I’ll read more White, in other words.

But I was just so very, very disappointed by this book. And that’s all I have to say about that.