The thinking and singing poets may be defined as orphans of the technology-versus-being debate that flourished briefly in the ’50s and ’60s, which had as its spokesmen in continental European philosophy Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul, and, in Canadian letters, George Grant, whose book of essays Technology and Empire (1969) Lee edited for House of Anansi Press. What would become of nature, these thinkers asked, if it were claimed as nothing more than natural resources, “a giant gasoline station,” as Heidegger memorably wrote? What would become of human nature if our values were separated from the actual world we live in and reduced to mere subjective preference? The technology-versus-being debate, however relevant to our present circumstances, was drowned in the wave of critical theory that swept through the universities after the events in Paris in May of 1968, and in the university system’s own increasingly indentured relationship to technological civilization. Talk of “being” in academia today is largely dismissed as an anachronism.

Grant once argued that the foundational experience for non-native Canada — our “primal,” as he called it — lay not in any inheritance from Athens or Jerusalem, but in the historic encounter between settlers and “the alien and yet conquerable land.” Because that land is always changing, each generation needs to renegotiate this encounter for its time. A previous generation of Canadian writers approached this encounter, not in terms of “being” or “polyphony,” but through the concerns of that era: the nationalism that arose in opposition to the Vietnam War, the euphoria around the country’s centennial celebrations. It is the thinking and singing poets who are answering the call of the primal in our time.

While Lee may be the group’s elder statesman, Tim Lilburn is its catalyst. He met McKay at a poetry reading at the Princess Theatre in Kitchener in the late ’80s, and through him became aware of pockets of conversation taking place across the country among poets with similar concerns. Lee and Bringhurst, for example, have enjoyed a lengthy correspondence since the ’70s. These conversations began to coalesce in a couple of gatherings in the mid-’90s, the largest taking place at Trent University in Peterborough in 1996. “Nowhere else do you find a conversation like this among poets, expressed in essays, poems, and letters, not even in the powerhouse of twentieth-century American poetry,” Lilburn says. “I thought there was something historic and important that I was witnessing in these conversations, and I wanted to take a snapshot of it.”

In Going Home, a book of essays published last year, Lilburn suggests that what we need to undertake as a civilization is a “land apprenticeship.” It’s an intriguing idea that gets close to the core of the thinking and singing project. He writes, “Some tasks are generational, and this one is so freshly started most of us are not even aware we have begun it, the work of making a home where we are.” If we are willing to do the hard work of paying attention to what actually surrounds us, there is less need to look elsewhere for a meaningful existence. Such imaginative work is restorative: the industrial forest I visited with McKay felt as if it had been redeemed in some small way through his poetry. Reading and listening to Bringhurst’s polyphonies, it isn’t hard to find your ears tuning to the bandwidth of sound around and within you. What these poets offer are five different bridges back into the land itself, five ways of better inhabiting the places we live in. A whole set of landscapes awaits rediscovery. And the circle of this conversation is ever widening, as Lilburn writes in Thinking and Singing: “You are welcome to join in; pull up a chair, lean back from the table. Where were we?”