FITZGERALD, Judith (Adriana)

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Toronto, 11 November 1952. Education: York University, Toronto, 1972–77, B.A. (honors) 1976, M.A. 1977; University of Toronto, Toronto, 1978–83, Ph.D./ABD 1983. Career: Poetry acquisitions editor, Black Moss Press, Windsor, Ontario, 1980–86; assistant professor, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, 1981–83; entertainment critic and literary journalist, The Globe and Mail, 1983–84; poetry critic and literary journalist, Toronto Star, 1984–88; editor, General Publishing, Toronto, 1985; columnist for Windsor Star and Innings, 1985–86; literary correspondent and columnist, Ottawa Citizen, 1985–87; senior writer and contributing editor, Country, 1990–91; syndicated columnist, Toronto Star, 1992–93; creator and features editor and writer, Today's Country, 1992–98; professor and on-campus counselor, Universite Canadienne en France, Villefranche-sur-mer, France, 1994–95; editor, Country Wave, 1995–96; poetry columnist, Toronto Star, 1997–99. Senior lecturer, Glendon College, York University, Toronto, fall 1983, and Algoma University College, Ontario, spring 1984; writerin-residence, Algoma University College, spring 1984, Hamilton Public Library, fall 1984, Laurentian University, fall 1992, and University of Windsor, 1993–94. Awards: Fiona Mee award, 1983; Writers' Choice award, 1986, for Given Names: New and Selected Poems 1972–1985.

Publications

Poetry

Victory. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1975.

Lacerating Heartwood. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1977.

Easy Over. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1981.

Split/Levels. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1983.

Beneath the Skin of Paradise: The Piaf Poems. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1984.

My Orange Gorange. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1985.

Given Names: New and Selected Poems, 1972–1985. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1985.

Whale Waddleby. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1986.

Diary of Desire. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1987.

Rapturous Chronicles. Stratford, Ontario, Mercury, 1991.

Ultimate Midnight. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1992.

walkin' wounded. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1993.

River. Toronto, ECW, 1995.

Twenty-Six Ways out of This World. Ottawa, Ontario, Oberon, 1999.

Other

Rapturous Chronicles II: Habit of Blues. Stratford, Ontario, Mercury, 1993.

Building a Mystery: The Story of Sarah McLachlan and Lilith Fair. Kingston, Ontario, Quarry Music, 1997.

Sarah McLachlan: Building a Mystery. Kingston, Ontario, Quarry Music, 2000.

Editor, Un Dozen: Thirteen Canadian Poets. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1982.

Editor, SP/ELLES: Poetry by Canadian Women. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1986.

Editor, First Person Plural. Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1987.

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Manuscript Collection: McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Critical Studies: "Casting SP/Elles" by Lorraine York, in Essays on Canadian Writing (Toronto), 1991; "Dinysus between Windsor and Detroit" by A.F. Moritz, in Books in Canada (Toronto), 1996; "Finding the Perfect Seamless" by Rob McLennan, in Missing Jacket (Ottawa, Ontario), 1996; "Beyond the Blue Neon: The Lyric Authority of Judith Fitzgerald" by M. Travis Lane, in Fiddlehead (Fredericton, New Brunswick), 1993; interview with Wanda Campbell, in Windsor Review (Windsor, Ontario), 1993.

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Judith Fitzgerald is a poet, songwriter, and journalist who writes intensely personal poems. The reader is invited to come face-to-face with the emotional existence of the author. Her poems speak from the heart and of the heart. They craft narratives with the beauty and complexity of language to tell stories of love, loss, and longing.

Fitzgerald is clearly in possession of her own intense and individual voice, and hence her poems convey ardent emotion. Her concerns run from the domestic to the anecdotal. Rapturous Chronicles is a long prose poem written as a tribute to the novelist Juan Butler, who committed suicide. In "Women, Language Made Me," the prefatory section of Rapturous Chronicles, Fitzgerald gives a biographical account: "Where I come from, I learn myself into existence by reading words in newspapers. We own no books … Names and origins and etymology all add up to the same thing for me… I believe in the power of language, of names, of etymology, of origin." Her technique of layered and resonating lyric is a move away from lyric to the narrative and a move away from the depersonalization of Olson's poetry.

In Rapturous Chronicles II: Habit of Blues, a prose poem novella, Fitzgerald completes her narrative of love and loss through a passionate engagement with language. She is concerned with the state of contemporary language and is fearful of the damage that the deconstruction theories of Jacques Derrida have on literature. She says in "indigo" that "Derrida crushes the right hand" and claims that "I find my self / fracture, splintered," yet in a paradoxical mode she uses every deconstructionist technique: "reaches through all sill and sash / ill and ash to untie logical progressions."

Given Names is an autobiographical work in which Fitzgerald disperses her drama, fiction, verse, polemic, and history in the form of a subversive genre ranging from one-word lines to sequences. Her unorthodox philosophical independence defamiliarizes words like "person," "names," and "syntax" and makes them come to life unaffected by gender and tradition. Her nongeneric texts play hand in hand with her lyric and emotional expressiveness, as in this sequence from "The Syntax of Things":

   heresy
   you say
   hersay
   I say
   here there

   hear there
   hersy
   see hear
   see here
   hearsay
   you say
   heresy
   heretic
   come quick
   you say
   daresay
   heresy
   you say
   hearsay
   I say

The collection offers us a personal history of the author through the features of her life, yet these features develop into symbols of every woman's life. In the introduction Frank Davey brings to our attention the central fact of Fitzgerald's writing, the absent father. Fitzgerald's struggle has been to identify herself in the unspoken and nonpatriarchal system by claiming a new alphabet after "burning, vowels turning towards, into. / In. I. But not me. Not language, not / the combustion of self."

In Victory and Beneath the Skin of Paradise Fitzgerald has exposed her struggle with the lyric. The protagonists of both works are women who took on the lyric role in order to win acknowledgment in a male-dominated culture. The woman in Victory, Hazel, is a burlesque dancer who "wanted / to bring the perfect / poem home." Fitzgerald also shares this lyric dependency with Hazel: "both of us / grovel / in words we choose / worms / on fishing lines / of parasites." Beneath the Skin of Paradise is a tribute to the French singer Edith Piaf, who fought for everything she achieved by surmounting her struggles and proclaiming herself into public fame. Fitzgerald engages in an impressionistic treatment of aspects of Piaf's life and death and of her music. Fitzgerald's theme of an ever absent father echoes through Piaf's lyric "I can't stand / being alone / being abandoned / being suckered / being betrayed / just the sweet / love words / love …."

Ultimate Midnight is a stylistically different book composed of thirteen shorter poems and the title poem, a longer piece in twelve sections, or "hours." It is a serious and powerful book in which Fitzgerald, in an elegiac tone, explores a postapocalyptic world from the perspective of the victim and survivor. She places demands on the reader by using references such as imago mundi and by using parentheses for puns in words like "mor(t)al." In the narrative there are many colloquial twists and literary and scientific allusions that echo the chaos of contemporary urban life. The work is postmodern in an architectural sense, for it alludes to various genres, exotic language, and satire and displaces them with a reinvented structure. Fitzgerald's complex layering uses concepts and phrases of a world in which culture, information, and artificial surroundings are the annihilation of the self and also the unavoidable traits of being human.

In reading Fitzgerald's poetry, one cannot ignore the biographical details of her past that resonate through the works. Fitzgerald's individuality and strength have developed in the works, which are efforts to come to terms with her father's absence, a fact that forced her to face a childhood of uncertainty. The anxiety about her own worth and the search for a patriarchal figure have produced in her a parallel struggle to transcend the lyric poem by discovering a new language of selfhood. The "I" of Fitzgerald's poetry can be seen as the preserver of the true voice of women through years of repression. Her poetry is passionate, and her linguistic virtuosity is free-flowing. Structural innovation is her forte.

—Renu Barrett