Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Phil Jenkins
Article 31 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the June 1, 2005 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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What the Hell is Going On?
Phil Jenkins, local singer, songwriter and author, believes that we set aside certain people from our tribe to ask the big question, "What the hell is going on?" and report back. Some creative, curious people turn out to be better than others at answering the big question, but regardless most devote their lives to articulating its dimensions. Phil is one of their number - plugged into the universe, scanning the big picture, asking the tricky questions over a lifetime in his songs and his writing.
"It's odd, you find yourself arriving where you are already supposed to be. You think your life decisions along the way are merely arbitrary, but you look back and realize the imprint was there all along."
Phil's father was an electronic engineer who came to Canada from England in 1951, when Phil was just six months old, to help install the DEW Line. Although he died ten years later, he had a tremendous impact on his young son. "All men are engineers or frustrated engineers. I was obsessed with reading - so I became an engineer of words - they are my tools, as well as my favourite toys. But if you want to tell the world what's going on, you have to rewrite yourself first. You have to manufacture the person who can engineer the words."
The tracks were laid down as his father's wish to die at home took the family back to England. Phil arrived in Liverpool on the cusp of the Beatles. "The whole town played guitar. No-one played tennis. People were out in the streets reciting poetry. There were outbreaks of word culture everywhere. Those were golden, formative years."
Steeped in the lyrical, he was drawn back to Canada in his late twenties to fulfill an inner imperative. "If your father dies when you're young, you feel compelled to live out his life for him. You take on thatI role - of explorer, of builder, of understanding history. You can't shake those patterns. Given such a young death - he was only 32 - you have to ask yourself: what the hell is going on?"
Phil has spent the rest of his life engineering the words to find out. "In literature, if you rub two things together, the heat becomes the book - where I choose to study how that works is the land." From his 1991 Fields of Vision: A Journey to Canada's Family Farms to An Acre of Time: The Enduring Value of Place (1996) to River Song: Sailing the History of the St. Lawrence River, (2001) Phil has come to see Canada as the Great Experiment: will it be greed or compassion that wins out? "I came back to Canada, I now realize, because its myth is that it is an egalitarian, not a class society. The land compassion movement is the environmental movement - how we treat our stock of land is indicative of how we treat each other."
With his latest book, a ghostwritten memoir of George Mercer Dawson entitled Beneath my Feet, Phil Jenkins continues his exploration of the Canadian landscape, this time in the person of one of it's greatest investigators. As he says, "Once upon a time, all Canada was land, and one day it will be real estate. I am witness to that."