We are busy picking over basalt rocks on the riverbed when McKay silently alerts me to the arrival of an American dipper upstream. It’s the only other living being we have seen all morning, and, as we watch, it leaps from the top of a rock into the current, where McKay informs me it will walk along the river bottom to forage for tiny insects. It pops up several seconds later, gives itself a shake, and flies off.

A poem of his from Strike/Slip, “Dipper at Parkinson Creek,” describes an identical encounter, and it reads like an alternative to the field guide, giving us an accurate account of the bird’s movements and feeding habits. Yet it’s more than an iteration of ornithological details. McKay’s technique is two-track: we see the dipper as it flies into view, and hear the speaker’s own train of thought as he greets it, the poem amounting to a tiny snapshot of a mind stirred to life by the world. Standing there with McKay as we watch the dipper dart upstream, it is as though we’ve not only stepped into his poem, but into a broader definition of artistic biography.

Robert Bringhurst lives on Quadra Island, off the BC coast, a zigzag of a ferry ride out of Campbell River. If you visit, park your vehicle on the other side of his forest property, under an impressive, pagoda-like carport hewn from Douglas fir logs. A gravel trail winds around towering firs and hemlocks, over a pair of Japanese footbridges, and past a devil’s club. Stepping out of the forest and into waist-high grass, you’ll feel as though you’ve arrived at a hermitage in the wilderness: on your right, there’s a kidney-shaped frog pond; on your left, a two-storey writing studio and library designed in the manner of a zendo, or meditation hall.

Bringhurst, sixty-two, is one of Canada’s overlooked literary geniuses. He is a poet, translator, typographer, and book designer, the kind of person who could go into the forest with a knife and a pencil, and come out three weeks later with a book.

We’re standing on the stoop of the zendo, enjoying some mid-morning sunshine. It’s early August, and the trees around us are buzzing with goldfinches, pileated woodpeckers, and northern flickers. Earlier, three black-tailed deer, regular visitors, browsed their way around the frog pond. This is a good place to talk about polyphony, Bringhurst’s practice of composing poems for two or more voices that literally speak at the same time, his way of writing the forest — or the crowded bus or café — as we experience it in our ears, as an all-at-once bandwidth of sound. Yet doing this is no easy task. It requires rethinking the very logic of the medium of print, which has evolved to showcase one voice at a time, sequentially.

With “The Blue Roofs of Japan” (1986), Bringhurst began breaking away from this logic by copying the poem’s two speaking parts on acetate transparencies, and then layering the sheets on top of each other. As his musical apprenticeship continued, his experiments grew more complex: New World Suite no. 3, first performed in 1990, is composed for three voices, while Ursa Major (2003) features six speakers and four languages. You can find many of these pieces in his Selected Poems, published this spring. Yet however exquisite Bringhurst’s typographic renderings may be, we must remember that they are written first for the voice and the ear, not the eye; they exist most fully in articulated performance.

If we hear a vocal ecology in Bringhurst’s polyphonies, a web of overlapping sounds, Jan Zwicky gives us an ecology of insights — intellectual, aesthetic, intuitive, and emotional — in her two groundbreaking books of collage philosophy, Lyric Philosophy (1992) and Wisdom and Metaphor (2003). She uses the left-hand pages of these books’ openings for her own writing — short, aphoristic statements — while reserving the right-hand side for block quotations from her influences and interlocutors. Zwicky — a professor of philosophy at the University of Victoria whose volume of poetry Songs for Relinquishing the Earth won a Governor General’s Award in 1999 — is also a professional musician, and here she conducts a symphony of thought, asking readers to move back and forth between the two sets of writings to work out for themselves the connections and contradictions between them. These books are designed like spiderwebs, dazzling in how they resonate at the level of individual page openings, sections, and whole movements. Their shape reflects one of her central concerns: living honestly and with integrity requires a form of thought that echoes the way the world hangs together.

In an exchange of emails, Dennis Lee writes, “If the planet is re-greenable, words are one place it has to happen. Not as a substitute for action, science, laws…but as one of the many dimensions in which we have to re-fashion our dwelling on earth. And as it happens, this is the one medium which poets inhabit simply by virtue of their calling.”

Lee’s vocation has involved orienting the English language to local currents of energy that animate and sculpt the land, for him a matter of cultural survival. In Civil Elegies (1972), one of Canada’s best and most overlooked long poems, this primordial energy bursts up through Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto, disorienting the poem’s beleaguered seeker; in Yesno (2007), his most recent collection, it bubbles up inside of individual words and melts them into strange shapes, forewarning the reader of the immense pressure human civilization is placing on the earth.

Readers familiar with Lee’s celebrated children’s verse are often unaware that the poet who wrote Alligator Pie is also, as McKay puts it, responsible for introducing into Canadian literature “a new ontological understanding of the natural world.” While the thinking and singing poets have no ideologue, Lee serves as something of an older brother figure. We can look to Civil Elegies and his other poems and essays for whole segments of the grammar of thought through which this group articulates itself: challenging ideas of “being,” “non-being,” “polyphony,” “what is,” attention to particularity, and an awareness of the sheer difficulties involved in extricating one’s thinking from the logic of modernity.