“Honeyed Epoché”: Thinking and Singing in Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht

Abstract

Ken Babstock was awarded the 2012 Griffin Canadian Poetry Prize and is one of Canada’s finest early career poets. And yet his work has not received the critical attention it deserves. This article argues that Babstock intends poetry in his third collection, Airstream Land Yacht (2006), as a method of thinking, a way of doing philosophy. Simply enough, but in considerable complexity, he is thinking through the problems of consciousness in this book. These are often playful, apparently lighthearted, but also deceptively serious poems. As discussed herein, Babstock is a poet in dialogue with a range of traditions who pays careful attention to music and craft in order to articulate moments in which a “honeyed epoché”—a calm lucidity, a penetrating stillness—might be grasped.