'Silence Like an Overwhelming Noise': Edges and Ethics in Don McKay’s Writing

Throughout his oeuvre, Canadian poet Don McKay represents borders—whether physical, cognitive, or linguistic—as porous, malleable, even fictitious constructions. Reminding readers that naming is a kind of border-making itself (in that it taxonomizes, organizes, classifies), McKay consistently ‘undermines the exactitude of definition and shows that there is a kind of wilderness in everything which resists transmission’ (Dawson, 66). In this paper, which is an excerpt of my MA thesis on 20th- and 21st-century Canadian nature poetry, I analyze how borders, peripheries, and thresholds manifest in McKay’s poetry and poetics. By analyzing representations of interstices, I demonstrate how McKay’s poetry breaks down categorically entrenched dichotomies to reveal a ‘permeable membrane’ or ‘back-flow’ (Bartlett, 172) between dyads often presumed to be mutually exclusive, such as: wilderness/language, holy other/self, supernatural/natural.

By troubling thresholds in an oeuvre that is keenly interested in humanity’s perception of the non-human world, McKay gestures at a cognitive, imagined space called ‘otherwise-than-place’ which I argue represents a space where a contemplative ethics can form. These contemplative ethics—rooted in the edges of the knowing, naming self—help the subjective, perceiving self conceptualize the non-human other in terms that relinquish insidious forms of mastery. These ethics help readers embody a way of thinking and dwelling in relation to wilderness by challenging ‘the unquestioned authority of anthropocentric language and knowledge in order to elevate the standing, in ethical terms, of other-than-human-beings’ (Mason, 41). Therefore by studying the porosity of borders in McKay’s poetry, I show how McKay’s thresholds apophatically signify a non-linguistic space into which a holy other might