While Louis Dudek celebrated and promoted Canadian poetry through teaching, public lectures, personal letters, active involvement in the publication of other poets' work, and the publication of an incessant fusillade of his own poems, epigrams, essays, and newspaper articles, few critics have commented at length on Dudek's late poetry. This article addresses that gap by discussing the significance of Dudek's late meta-poetry in relation to his final long poem, Continuation (1961-2001)—an experimental multi-volume work whose self-reflexive narration of the poet's struggle to negotiate the boundary between the real and the transcendental, the visible and the invisible, and the known and the unknowable demonstrates a clear continuity between his early and late poetry.

Original publication information:

Jensen, Graham H. “An ‘Architecture of Contradictions’: Continuation and the Late Meta-Poetry of Louis Dudek.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 74 (2014): 30-59.