SOURCE: “Rooting the Borrowed Word: Appropriation and Voice in Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue,” in Inside the Poem: Essays and Poems in Honour of Donald Stephens, 1992, pp. 113-22.

In the following essay, Jones discusses the problem of finding an authentic Canadian voice in “Seed Catalogue.”

“Once upon a time he was a gardener of the possible fruition.”

(Kroetsch, Completed Field Notes, 255)

Lyre, Lyre, Pants on Fire

Robert Kroetsch’s essay “Unhiding the Hidden” begins with an expression of the desire for—and the impossibility of producing—genuinely “original” writing in Canada, that is, writing rooted entirely in its place of origin, writing that speaks with a singular Canadian voice. “The particular predicament” of the Canadian writer, as Kroetsch describes it, is that he¹ doesn’t really live in a new world, but inherits a pre-existent linguistic and experiential grounding from elsewhere: “he works with a language, within a literature...