Margaret Avison

Margaret Avison OC (born April 23, 1918 in Galt , Cambridge , Ontario , † July 31, 2007 in Toronto ) was a Canadian poet , librarian and social worker , who was known and honored for her abundant dense and sophisticated poetry.

Life

Teacher, early poetry and first Governor General's Award

Avison began after studying from 1936 to 1940 at Victoria College of the University of Toronto , which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA). her career as a writer in 1939 with a poem in Canadian Poetry Magazine between 1940 and 1945 for the North American Life Insurance Company , the Gage Press and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs . Her early poetry was also featured in the basic anthology The Book of Canadian Poetry , published by AJM Smith in 1943 .

Avison, who worked as an administrative assistant and librarian in the library of the University of Toronto between 1945 and 1955, authored books on a variety of subjects such as History of Ontario (1951), a middle school textbook on the history of Ontario . After studying creative writing at the University of Indiana and the University of Chicago , she received a Guggenheim scholarship in 1956 .

For her first collection of poems, Winter Sun (1960), she received the Governor General's Award , Canada's most prestigious literary prize. Through this work, she established herself as an uncomfortable and self-observing poet of private images and subtle shades of emotions that challenge and frustrate readers. The complexity in her writing hid a deeply religious and fragile sensibility.

Variety of content in your writing and second Governor General's Award

Her subsequent works included a medical biography and collaboration on The Plow and the Pen: Writings from Hungary 1930-1956 (1963), a translation from the Hungarian language . In 1963 Margaret Avison, who also converted to Christianity that year, took part in a poetry conference organized by Warren Tallman and his wife Ellen King alongside Denise Levertov , Charles Olson , Allen Ginsberg , Robert Duncan and Philip Whalen . In 1964 she earned a Master of Arts (MA) from the University of Toronto with a thesis on The style of Byron's Don Juan in relation to the newspaper of his day .

In 1966, Avison published The Dumbfounding , an accessible account of spiritual discoveries and a revealing account of the unmasked, narrative "I". Between 1967 and 1968 she was a lecturer at Scarborough College, University of Toronto and then worked as a social worker for the Presbyterian Church Mission in Toronto until 1973, before she was then writer in residence for eight months at the University of Western Ontario from 1973 to 1974 . After several different professional activities from 1974 to 1978, she worked between 1978 and 1986 as secretary of the Mustard Seed Mission in Toronto.

The style used in The Dumbfounding was further developed in Sunblue (1978), a marriage of social concerns and moral values ​​backed up by religious beliefs and an ongoing re-imagining of personal beliefs.

In 1990 she received the Governor General's Award for the second time , for No Time . In 1994, A Kind of Perseverance was a collection of her university lectures. In 2003 she received the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize for the Concrete and Wild Carrot collection, published in 2002 .

In addition to her three-volume collected works, which appeared between 2003 and 2005, she brought out a collection of new poems in 2006 under the title Momentary Dark . Margaret Avision, honored with the Officer's Cross of the Order of Canada (OC), Leslie K. Tarr Prize for outstanding contributions to Christian writing and publishing in Canada. In 2006, eight poems such as The World Still Needs appeared in the online literary magazine Jacket .

Publications

• Books about Russia, February, 1943 , 1943
• History of Ontario , 1951
• Winter sun , 1960
• The style of Byron's Don Juan in relation to the newspaper of his day , 1964
• Sunblue , 1978
• The dumbfounding , 1966
• No Time , 1989
• Selected poems , 1991
• A kind of perseverance , 1994
• Not yet but still , 1997
• Concrete and wild carrot , 2002
• Always Now , 2003
• Momentary Dark , 2006

in German language

• Weatherings = weathering , translation by Heinz Wetzel and Peter Nusser , Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-926677-67-9

Background literature

• Ernest Redekop: Margaret Avison , 1970
• Hendrika Williamson: Man and Mandala. The poetry of Margaret Avison , 1970
• David A. Kent: Margaret Avison and her works , 1988
• CD Mazoff: Waiting for the son. Poetics, theology, rhetoric in Margaret Avison's Sunblue , 1989
• JM Kertzer: Margaret Avison: Power, Knowledge and the Language of Poetry

Web links

• Literature by and about Margaret Avison in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Entry in the Poetry Foundation
• Entry in Canadian Poetry Online
• Entry in eNotes
• Entry in Argot Language Center
• Works by Margaret Avison Open Library
• Background literature on Margaret Avison (Open Library)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Description of the Vancouver 1963 Poetry Conference ( memento of the original from September 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ^ The Griffin Poetry Prize
3. ^ Eight Poems in Jacket Magazine , April 2006
4. ↑ JM Kertzer ( Memento of the original from March 12, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Online version)