A Dynamic Poetic Micro-Environment
A review of Joe M. Ruggier’s CD "From Door-to-Door to CD-ROM" by Esther Cameron

One of the speculations of recent evolutionary theory is that significant innovations often take place amid small populations, in marginal environments. Joe M. Ruggier’s CD From Door- to-Door to CD-ROM admits us to a dynamic poetic micro-environment. As a minor collaborator, I cannot quite “impartially” review this production; still I would like to give an idea of the riches to be found in this interim summation of Ruggier’s unique, rambunctious, often beautiful oeuvre as poet, critic, translator, editor and publisher.

First, some background. Ruggier was born in 1956 on the island of Malta – “In the Suburbs of Europe,” as he titles his survey of Maltese culture, included on the disc. Located between Sicily and the northern coast of Africa, Malta was for many centuries, as Ruggier puts it, a “traffic center.” Its native tongue is Arabic in structure, with a large number of borrowings from Italian vocabulary. In 1813, however, it became part of the British empire, and from then on English as well as Maltese was taught in the schools. At the same time, in accordance with the nationalist trend of the nineteenth century, a Maltese literature developed. Ruggier gives us a sampling of translated voices (including a whole collection by George Borg) which evoke the landscape of Malta as well as its literary atmosphere. Before immigrating to Canada in 1981, Ruggier taught English language and poetry. This teaching activity is reflected in a textbook, Poetry by Theme, which is both a primer of criticism and an anthology. Auden, I think it was, said that every poet should compile his own anthology, and Ruggier has done so. Poetry by Theme may serve as a guide to the standards Ruggier has set for himself and for those whose work he has published.

These standards are “conservative” standards, as those of “outsider” groups often tend to be. Jonathan Rosen, in The Intellectual History of the British Working Classes, makes the point that the tastes of workers seeking to educate themselves were always a generation or two “behind the times.” This is not necessarily a disadvantage. The belief that change means progress is nowhere more questionable than in literature; we still read Tennyson and Longfellow with pleasure, even while telling ourselves that we can’t write that way any more.

Thus, the poetry of “outsiders” – and not only Ruggier but his associates, Higson, Hudson, Harrison, and Laycock, of whom more below, are outsiders – may preserve values of which mainstream culture has temporarily lost sight. In the case of Ruggier and his cohorts, one might call these values: sincerity, musicality, religious orientation, a direct and trustful approach to the reader.

Another effect of Ruggier’s background is that his verse has, undeniably, a slight foreign accent. But although some believe that true poetry can be written only in one’s native language, I would differ with this opinion. A foreign accent can, like a quirkily original poetic gift, lift us out of the routine of the language; sometimes, indeed, the unique qualities of a language are perceived by an outsider with peculiar clarity. I can’t help recalling that Paul Celan, who for reasons of his own espoused the “native language only" theory, in fact grew up in a multilingual milieu, so that his true native language was Polyglot; and his German is precisely the speech of an outsider who can take nothing about the language for granted. At any rate, Ruggier’s linguistic sensitivity is beyond doubt; with justified pride, I think, he includes the following lines of his own among his textbook examples of how to establish a mood by the use of sound:

Across the bald and bowed and lengthening gaze of the moon
Drifts a long miasma, now broadening, now blotting out,
Now drawing a veil.

However, Ruggier does not confine himself to classical styles and modes of writing. Along with blank verse, sonnets, and other stanza forms, a good deal of free verse is included in his six collections of poems (The Voice of the Millions, This Eternal Hubbub, regrets hopes regards and prayers, Lady Vancouver, A Richer Blessing, Songs of Gentlest Reflection), reproduced in their entirety here. Like the title of his magazine, The Eclectic Muse, Ruggier’s poetic oeuvre refuses to declare one poetic mode valid to the exclusion of others. The poems are, moreover, not workshop productions cobbled to conform to current editorial preferences; they are documents of the struggle of a soul between faith and doubt, between form and chaos, with the inevitable repercussions in social and domestic life. Financial struggles, marital shipwreck, mental illness, contention with the literary elite on the one hand and the philistine faithful of the Church on the other: in the furnace of those trials, Ruggier can bellow with the best of them. Mingled with the poetry is prose, now semi-coherent, now rising to inspired heights, and often provocative: “Salvation is in the Good Life, not in Art; but the Good Life is not to be found in this world, but in Art. To go to Heaven one must, in a sense, become an Artist because, to go there, one must express his Love by showing, not by saying, and that is how the great artists expressed their own, by showing, not by telling.” As you can hear, it is often an old-fashioned prose, fashioned in a nineteenth-century school but often torn up by the stresses of the present.

As noted, Ruggier suffers from “mental illness.” I’m no expert on mental illness, and don’t know what kind the experts say he has. In the makeup of many poets, mental stability, like abstemiousness, seems to have been sacrificed to that openness to the world which is the prerequisite of any genuine poetry. But I think of the time he spoke with me, over the phone, about hearing “the terrible nuclear boom of the twentieth century.” Those of us who aren’t crazy from it probably should be.

One of the saving graces in Ruggier’s world is friendship, and this CD would be worth purchasing if only as a stunning document of literary friendship. Over the years, Ruggier’s correspondents have included: the late Rex Hudson, a critical study of whose poetry is included here; Roy Harrison, whose correspondence with Ruggier is reproduced, along with a collection of Harrison’s poems and a novel by him; Philip Higson, represented here by an ample “selected poems”; John Laycock, whose "selected poems" are likewise included; and of late yours truly, with whom he has been exchanging blank verse letters since 1999. Besides the initial, Hudson, Harrison and Higson have certain things in common. They are classicists, more consistently so than Ruggier; they combine spiritual sincerity with chiseled perfection of form (though Higson too has his excursions into free verse). It is a religious poetry that has been unjustly overlooked amid the studied irreligion of the present literary world. Ruggier’s merit in securing this poetry a modicum of attention is considerable.

It is in a spirit of literary friendship, too, that Ruggier has edited (and is still editing) his magazine, The Eclectic Muse, the “Best of” which is reproduced here in 270-page anthology. The spirit of the magazine is well represented by two lines from Michael Axtell’s poem, “Epistle to a Fellow-Laborer”:

Though far apart and never face to face
The heart beholds the heart within the sign[.]

The styles represented here are indeed eclectic. But they are marked, by and large, by the instinctive or deliberate refusal to deny the heart, to assume the modern irony which claims intellectual superiority but is really a form of self-protection in a world where self-interest too often seems to be the sole generally-acknowledged principle. This is a poetry which could conceivably aid in the rebuilding of trust and community. I am not saying every poem in this anthology, or for that matter in Ruggier’s own work, is “good”; I am occasionally “embarrassed”; but I never come from it with the abysmal shame I feel on closing so many magazine issues where everything is colloquial, ironical, godless, studiedly “original,” and untrue.

Among the offerings in the Eclectic Muse anthology is my own verse playlet, “The Editor,” one of the works of which I am proudest. In the form of a morality play, it looks into the selection process whereby passionate and well-written work is oftentimes rejected in terms of what is slick and self-protective. Whenever we undertake to judge one another’s work, we are subjected to formidable and often unacknowledged temptations. There is envy, which often makes us see as bad what is best; there is fear, which makes us not want to identify with the vulnerability which, as hinted earlier, is an indispensable concomitant of that openness which makes genuine poetry possible; and there is that passion for controlling one another, the source of so much misery on this earth, which so often mars our delight in the joyful play of another intelligence. Ruggier’s willingness to publish this expose in the form of a verse play testifies to his magnanimity, that quality which is probably inseparable from some form of religious faith, and which is in such short supply in the literary world today.

Magnanimity is closely allied to humility. And over the years, Ruggier has promoted his own and others’ poetry in the humblest possible manner: by going door to door. Since 1985 he has, he tells us, sold over 20,000 poetry publications in this manner. In this way he has gained readers for himself and his colleagues, dramatized the current situation of poetry, and supplemented his wretchedly meager income.

Speaking of which, Ruggier has set a price on the CD which, after all that has been said here, I hope you will agree with me in finding mockingly low. The price is $350 Canadian to libraries, $150 to individuals. In US dollars this works out to $270 and $114.95, respectively. Not much to pay for someone’s life-work; consider the price of a single painting by the graduate of any art school. I understand that it is possible to bargain with Ruggier over this price, and would encourage you to do so if necessary, only saying: don’t bargain too hard. This is an enterprise that deserves your support.

Joe Ruggier’s CD "From Door-to-Door to CD-ROM" can be ordered by calling Joe Ruggier at 604-277-3864 or by e-mailing him at jrmbooks@hotmail.com.