Speaking of Poems

2012-02-12T15:37:00.000-08:00

Far too many poetry books in this country get far too little ink, but what can you legitimately expect of someone who reviews your book? A broad understanding of your past work or the tradition out of which you write? Rigorous, uncompromising standards minus the critical take down? And how technical should a review be? This week I talked to six editors from St. John's to Victoria about what they’re looking for in a poetry reviewer. Their answers might surprise you.

It’s unquestionably the most exciting moment of a poet’s life: tearing open the package or box from the publisher and glimpsing for the first time the cover of their latest collection of poems. A close second is opening up the literary journal that has set space aside for a careful evaluation of that collection, after which that mild trembling in your hands as you begin to read transforms into quiet, satisfied calm or white knuckled fury. How could the reviewer get it so wrong? you ask yourself. Or what a wonderfully smart and insightful human being.

“I really enjoy a reviewer who’s intelligently engaged,” says Arc editor Shane Rhodes, "even if they’re not agreeing with what you’re doing.” “I expect a reviewer to read a book with an open mind,” says The Malahat Review’s John Barton, “using all their experiences as readers to engage with the book and in a sense give a transcription of their impressions.” Clarise Foster at CV2 looks for “something that opens the work up. If it shuts down a less experienced reader then I’m not necessarily interested in it.” The poet’s sensitivities, adds Barton, are not the first consideration.

“My first job is to serve the needs of the reader before anything else. (The reviewer) should give a fair impression of what the book is about and how well the author has achieved his or her objectives in writing the book.”

All of which presupposes a fair attempt by the reviewer to understand what those objectives are. It means reading all the poems in a book, not just the few carefully positioned blockbusters at the front, and asking if the poems are of a consistent quality. It also means asking if the book has an overarching thrust or perspective? Does it gain steam and generate interest as you move from poem to poem or do awkward shifts in tone or point of view slow its momentum and deflate your interest?

OH TO BE INSANELY INTELLIGENT

British critic Ian Hamilton once wrote that reviews are “mostly written by people who think they are easy to do.” Plainly they’re not and not just because converting one’s subjective responses into readable prose can be a strain on heart and brain. Sometimes sheer labour is required as one trundles off to the library to read the poet’s past work or provide context for the book by re-visiting the tradition out of which that poet writes. Reading the book under scrutiny is not always enough for the reviewer who wants to do a good job.

“More and more I’m gravitating towards reviews that are actually idea-engaged or looking more broadly at a poet’s production or something a little bit larger than an individual book,” says Rhodes.

Heidi Harms at Prairie Fire says seasoned writers often help readers understand the history and poetics underpinning a new book of poems, but reminds us context is good “only as long as it doesn’t take up half the review. If that takes up a quarter of the review then I’ll really pare that back.” Adds Clarise Foster “Sometimes you get people who are all about context because it shows how smart they are. You have people who provide so much context that there’s no review,” she chuckles. Sometimes there’s not enough room to discuss the context, but Arc’s Katia Grubisic says even this needn’t be an issue. She cites one reviewer who in 500 words did “a tremendous job” on a book by John Steffler “providing background and explaining Steffler’s approach by citing a few poems.”

“And so you read something like that and you lose patience with the rest of the crap. You think `This can be done, it should be done, what is wrong with the rest of you?”

The central challenge, says Mark Callanan at Canadian Notes & Queries, is to find reviewers knowledgeable about the various traditions of poetry and who bring a broad cultural perspective to the book at hand.

“Poetry doesn’t just draw on poetry, it draws on the entire realm of human experience, including philosophy and history and science. And so your ideal critic is someone who is insanely intelligent and also indiscriminately interested in not even just reading but popular culture. Their frame of reference has to be as wide as you can imagine.”

A SENSE OF STYLE

“Stylistically speaking, reviewing is not just an exercise in spewing facts or disjointed observations,” says Callanan. “It’s an exercise in writing. I don’t know that I’d call it an art form, but it is certainly artful.”

We all can remember a favourite teacher at school, but some of us will recall a critic who opened us up to the brilliance of other writers and did it while writing extraordinary well themselves, with dash and colour, unfolding idea after idea despite the sometimes limited space available. Good writers hold up great writers as models for their own style, occasionally heart broken knowing that something more than endless hours spent in the library is necessary before it can be acquired. And so it is with reviewing.

Developing a style all one’s own sometimes runs up against an opposite impulse, to borrow from another’s style, or worse, fall back on culturally sanctioned tropes or clichés that are seldom more than vague approximations of the truth about a book of poems. In a recent issue of a Canadian literary magazine, for example, three successive poetry reviews used “meditative” to describe the poem or poet. And while we can only hope this particular word is soon consigned to the literary dustbin, editors routinely encounter their own cringe inducing “mal mots”. For Katia Grubisic it’s “readable”, a word she suspects is code for “accessible”, (a perfectly good word that has fallen on hard times recently). “For a while `nuanced’ or `edgy’ seemed to be everywhere,” says Heidi Harms. Ditto the word “accomplished”, says John Barton.

“I’m not too fond of qualifying adjectives. I want the proof. Sometime I think people write reviews almost as if they’re anticipating them as pull quotes.”

IS THERE A PLACE FOR THE CRITICAL TAKE DOWN?

Some of the most memorable styles are synonymous with extraordinary negativity. Dorothy Parker’s dismissal of a young Kate Hepburn performance as “running the gamut of emotions from A to B” stands out for both its concision and flourish. Francis Jeffrey’s response to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads “This will never do” and Martin Amis’s skewering of Robert Bly’s Iron John (“in he comes, preceded by a gust of testosterone and a few tumbleweeds of pubic hair”) are great examples of condensed hostility and derision enlisted in the service of the reading public. Selling the negative requires that the reviewer or critic do so with both panache and unerring accuracy. Even a negative review of a book or poet you love can be rescued through force of style and an unflinching regard for the truth.

But a full force critical take down - executed to salve a personal wound or to burnish one’s own reputation at the expense of an icon – is just not on for most editors, including Heidi Harms. “Certainly not. Certainly not…critical yes, but not a trashing.” “Not at Event,” says Sue Wasserman. ““I say to reviewers if there isn’t something about it that you want to say that would be positive and nurturing then let’s give you a different book.” These editors argue that by going too negative you draw attention away from the work under review and risk losing your readers’ attention for future reviews. Simply put, you’re no longer taken seriously.

But are there no circumstances under which a thoroughly bad book of poems calls out for a thorough thrashing? Mark Callanan and John Barton believe there are, but even these come with caveats. “If someone wants to take issue with an author’s skills and they can do it in a plausible way I’m fine with it," says Barton. "But I don’t want them mixing in word flourishes to somehow underscore their point or come up with some dry witticism that has a little extra sting in it, I don’t believe in that.” Callanan is more open to the critical take down of poetic reputations inflated beyond their merits.

“There are poets who have enjoyed great success critically; they’ve been widely acclaimed for little or no reason. Canada and Canadian poetry have progressed to a point that we can take a long sober look at ourselves and say `You know what? We don’t have to applaud every little effort that’s made on behalf of poetry. We can actually be selective.’”

Such selectivity might extend to reviews, particularly those written by the reviewer who never met a book of poetry he didn’t like. A more immediate question facing editors is how to address these kinds of reviews when they cross their desks. How do you say “This will never do.” Because between the time you’ve allocated space for the review and have it in hand it may be too late to ask for significant changes - or find another reviewer. Barton’s hope is that “some of that can be removed at the outset in how we match reviewers with books or how books are passed on to reviewers.”

A sure sign that a reviewer really doesn’t like a book of poetry – despite their protestations to the contrary – is their refusal to discuss it. The poet being reviewed may settle for the broadest generalities about their work but the reader shouldn’t. Instead we look for a generous sampling from the poems themselves and some effort to unpack the effect which these have on the reader. If the poem leaves the reader cold then the reviewer should try to explain why this might be the case - by closely examining the thematic shape of the poem, the juxtaposition of images, how rhythm and line endings support or fail to support a poem's meaning. Understanding how these work helps us to better understand and appreciate others poems we come across.

Of course there’s always a chance reviewers will demonstrate their ignorance outright by discussing a book too closely, but that’s their problem, not ours. At some point the veracity of the review rises or falls on the evidence it supplies. Susan Wasserman says we’re not about to return to the close read which characterized the New Criticism of the 50s and 60s. We are, however, obliged to attend to things like end-rhyme and image, parsing syntax and rhythm a little to show why something works or does not work. “I don’t think the whole review should do that, but absolutely, look at the language and the way things are laid out on the page.”

Shane Rhodes says a close read is useful if it supports a larger argument about the poet’s style “giving some good examples of that or looking at something that seems to be tearing a book apart.” But problems also occur when a review is too focused on the technical.

“It can get a little too detailed, whereas a review often requires much broader strokes and a reviewer who looks at some of the general ideas that the book might be investigating.”

Review: Bruce Taylor's "No End in Strangeness"

2012-02-03T12:20:00.001-08:00

Ear-catching rhythms, wonderful acoustic properties and images are all there as Mathew Henderson and I team up in this review of Bruce Taylor's latest...

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"The Ugly"

2011-08-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

A beautiful poem, by John Glenday.

Layers

2011-06-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

Yes, we’re back, and for a second week. For sympathetic readers mildly curious about what deep dark hole we disappeared into, it will come as no surprise to hear that poetry blogs are as vulnerable to the exigencies of time and cash as magazines and small presses. We pick up where we left off, with a few changes which I’ll describe below.

Last week, I introduced a great poem by Dutch poet Hester Knibbe entitled “Last Night”. I love how Knibbe handles colour and tone in that poem. My neighbour and poet George Payerle was struck by the lyric poem, too (reminding him, he said, of the German poet Gottfried Benn). Here’s a second offering by Hester, followed by our interview.

Thetis’ Heel

Even gods, though they were born

in our own heads, died out to myth.

Just as no one can point to the source

of the spring or later at sea can say: this

is the water from deep in the earth, that

flowed from the mountaintops, so

is the stream of mortals and gods.

About my origins I know

nothing. I married the earth, a child

grew in me, fell

out of me at last, and I

babbled: little mutt of mine, I’ll

name you, dunk you in invulnerability.

He smiled at me, held me tightly

by the heel and said mama.

Translated By Jacquelyn Pope

DG: What I take from this poem is that our preoccupation with origins is undercut by the impermanence of history and the shift in how we comprehend reality. Is that what you intended? Does it not also address concerns about male and female knowledge, e.g. Thetis’ “knowing nothing” and that sly inversion by Achilles when he dips his mother Thetis into the River Styx?

HK: In the old ‘story’ Achilles’ mother Thetis married Peleus, a mortal, and as a result her son also becomes mortal. So that Achilles, the fighting boy and hero, can become immortal Thetis dips him into the Styx. Why is Thetis doing this? Because her kid is her vulnerability, I think. And so I also read in that story the vulnerability of all mothers. No, Achilles didn’t dip her into the Styx, he only touched her and said ‘mamma’. And with that ‘mamma’ she was doomed to live in fear for him.

I like it to see old stories and myths from other positions. In the original story Thetis has only a sort of small supporting role; in this poem I give her the leading part.

As for your questions about origins the gods exist by the grace of the existence of human beings. And we don’t know or have memories about where we were before life on earth and where we will be after life, if we were or will be.

DG: In poems such as “The Archaeologist” and "Light Years” you seem to invest hope in our capacity to grasp meaning and beauty from the things of the past and the stars overhead, only to have this undercut by an abiding skepticism.

HK: It’s more an observation of patterns. Things are what they are, neither more nor less. There is a strong order in nature and that order is disturbed by chaos. In my poems I try to restore the order, to discover a certain pattern, even in chaos. There is no good or evil in nature, no justice or injustice. These are only good tools for the livability of a community.

As for skepticism, that’s not my intention. I am always astonished that the feelings of people nowadays are so much like those of the people who lived more than two thousand years ago. That is the reason we can understand the old plays: it’s all about emotions that we still have and can see in our own environments, feel in our own body. I am curious about those things, about what people have in common, not bound by place or time.

DG: Am I wrong in seeing some influence of Philip Larkin in your poetry? Who are your favourite American and British poets?

HK: My (deceased) colleague, Jan Eijkelboom, a marvelous translator from English into Dutch, has translated a lot of the beautiful poems of Philip Larkin. But my favorites are T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. I used two lines from Eliot’s Four Quartets for my poetry: “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where/And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time”. And:

“The end is where we start from”. These are also themes in ‘Thetis’ heel’.

For my new collection, ‘Het hebben van schaduw’ (Having shadow’), I use a sentence from Auden in his poem ‘For the time being’: ‘We who must die demand a miracle.’

DG: How much confidence do you have in language to convey fixed or inviolable meaning? I ask because of what I perceive to be the “doubleness” in your use of words and syntax, e.g. the opening line in “The Archaeologist”, which can be read two or three different ways: “In one who doesn’t speak the story petrifies/gets stumbled over, causes hurt. Then/says the man who should know about the past, then/is a word you need to learn now…”

Are you not in some sense using the variability or instability of language to deconstruct meaning, if only in a playful way?

HK: One of the things that makes poetry is what I call “layer-language”, i.e. language with different meanings, like layers in a layer-cake. Every layer has its own taste. Without that, poetry becomes a simple announcement. It’s what accounts for the ‘doubleness’ in my syntax and use of words. In Dutch there are a lot of ways to ’play’ or ‘work’ in language, to give several meanings to a word and make a sentence interpretable in different ways. In “The Archaeologist”, for example, the last word is ‘vanishing point’. In painting it is the point at which all lines come together. But it is of course also the point at which everyone will vanish. In the poem it is the altar that must save us from vanishing forever.

Sometimes I suddenly see the old beauty of a word. In the last sentence of the poem ‘Persephone’ the Dutch word is ‘verbruid’. It comes from the verb ‘verbruien’ which means ‘to be through with’, but in it is also the word ‘bruid’ which means ‘bride’. In the context of the poem it is a marvelous extra.

In another of my poems I use the words ‘huidige tijd’ which means ‘now’ or ‘this time’. But in Dutch we have the word ‘huid’ which means ‘skin’. So you can say the time now is our skin time. That is the beauty of language, which I am afraid can also lead to difficulty in translation. Of course you can say it is a sort of deconstruction of meanings. But it is also a way to build new meanings and a way of restoring language to its original.

DG: Your language is also spare and rather compressed. Is this a conscious choice or is something more unconscious and serendipitous at work here?

HK: This is often considered to be my idiom. When writing I use language both consciously and unconsciously. It has to do with rhythm, the music of the poem. I often sense that the poem selects its own construction and music. So when I write, I am listening to what the poem wants. After years of practice I have tended more and more to write down what I hear. Afterwards I make the necessary corrections.

DG: That’s an interesting word to use: “corrections”. Are you saying that the unconscious has made an error in some fashion that must be fixed?

HK: When a carpenter has made a chair, he will sand and polish it to make it a good and useful one. A poet has to do the same.

DG: What I love about your work is your ability, sometimes in the same poem, to shift from enormous delicacy (as in “Glasswork”) to a kind of abrasive roughness (e.g. “Hungerpots”). Do you see reality or the world in this way, i.e. as a place where beauty and ugliness collide and sometimes even cooperate?

HK: Yes, I do. It’s also a matter of listening, of conscious and unconscious. I let it happen.

DG: You write about romantic love in your poems, but again without a sense of love’s reality or its capacity to endure (a perennial theme, to be sure, in classical poetry). Is romantic love, as we understand it in the classical tradition, possible in contemporary poetry? Or has our experience and understanding of love changed too dramatically for this to occur?

HK: In the classical tradition poets have also written about love to die for, physical love and all kinds of love sorrow. In the Middle Ages there was courtly poetry and burlesque poetry. In that sense it is the same as in contemporary poetry. I don’t think that our understanding of love really has changed. As in the past we have the ‘eternal’ love, the one-night stand and all that is between the two. That is the reason that we can understand so completely the classic plays, the old myths. Good poetry is timeless. Nowadays, too, we can say and write things with universal and timeless value.

DG: One of the best poems I’ve read in a long while is one we featured last week “Last Night” in which the speaker “saves” two children. Readers may differ over whether the crisis in the poem is set within a dream or the imagination, but what is more intriguing to me is the emotional pitch of the poem (i.e. matter-of-fact, detached) and what it seems to say about consciousness (i.e. that we have choices in how we view and interpret the world). Are you speaking to a larger responsibility here than simply executing a well-wrought poem?

HK: It’s only rarely that I write a poem only to create something that is ‘well-wrought’ or what we call “l’art pour l’art”. When I write I am trying to express something. But it’s striking that you should mention this poem! The theme of it is also the mother’s fear about losing her children, an attempt to save them from death. I wrote the poem years before “Thetis’ heel” and a lot has happened meantime. But there it is again: the vulnerability of a mother.

DG: A technical question: many poets enjamb their lines, but not always very successfully. Your enjambments, by contrast, really do seem to contribute to the sense of the line and to the rationale underpinning your stanza breaks. Any tips here for other poets on how you approach lineation and enjambment?

HK: It’s to the credit of my translator Jacquelyn Pope, who has saved many of them. I try to say something extra with an enjambment, for example, that a hesitation between yes and no in the 8th and 9th lines of "Thetis' Heel":

About my origins I know

nothing. I married the earth, a child

With that enjambment I express my doubt and say: ‘yes, I know about my origins’ and ‘no, I know nothing about my origins’. I advise every poet to explore those sorts of possibilities in the arrangement of their words and look for others. In that way you can give more depth to a poem.

DG: I understand you’re working on a book of poems to be published in English. Can you tell us a little about that project?

HK: I should like to have a selection in English and I hope to realize it in cooperation with Jacquelyn Pope, who translates my poems so well. My favorite translation of my work by her is an edition in two languages with the Dutch version on one page and on the opposite page the translation in English. That way the reader can see the original text, and have an idea of the sound, the length, the enjambments, etc.

Until now it was up to Jacquelyn Pope to choose the poems, but perhaps we’ll agree later about which poems she will translate. For me it is difficult to assess the problems she has to address within a translation.

DG: Finally, a question for translator Jacquelyn Pope. Any translation will suffer from the limitations that naturally arise when words from different languages attempt to describe the same or similar experience, a difficulty compounded by the idiomatic nature of language. What are some of the things you tried to keep in mind while translating Hester Knibbe’s poetry?

JP: Translation always involves compromise, and sometimes the nature of the compromise changes as you are working on a particular piece. Dutch is a much more compressed language than English, and that poses challenges to begin with. Hester’s work has lots of echoes for Dutch readers, even between single words, that can’t be replicated in English because, for example, a particular similarity in sound or spelling simply doesn’t exist. On the other hand, English allows pretty generous syntactical freedom, and that is tremendously important in translating poems. In virtually any translation there are always words, phrases or references that are difficult to convey out of their particular cultural context, but I try to put my awareness of these aside, since what I want to concentrate on are the parts of the poem that can come in to their own in English, and after several rounds of revision it usually becomes clear whether or not a particular poem is going to be viable.

In translating Hester’s work I try to pay particular attention to the architecture of the poem and to reflecting its sounds, colors and echoes, as these are the factors that establish that elusive quality of tone, the thing that really draws me to a poem in the first place, and certainly the thing that first drew me to her work.

Hester Knibbe made her literary debut in 1982 with "Tussen gebaren en woorden", which was followed by another ten collection of poems. Her work has been awarded inter alia the Herman Gorter Prize, the Anna Blaman Prize and the A. Roland Holst Prize. Hester Knibbe has appeared at various poetry festivals, with her work appearing in several literary magazines. Her poems have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Turkish and Hebrew. Between 2008 and 2010 she was the chair of PEN Nederland..

Recent publications:

De buigzaamheid van steen (The Flexibility of Stone), 2005

Bedrieglijke dagen (Deceitful Days), 2008

Oogsteen (Eye Stone), (selected poems 1982-2008), 2009

Het hebben van schaduw (Having Shadow), 2011

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I hope you’re going to see something a little different at Speaking of Poems from now on. First, less commentary and a stronger commitment to reviewing, if for no other reason than reviews are in short supply in this country. That means one full length review on the last Saturday of each month, i.e. twelve reviews each year, with the occasional poet interview. Second, some blogs will be devoted to poets from countries besides Canada. Convinced that we all fare better, and our national literature grows stronger when we drink in more of the world around us I’ll introduce poets you might not be familiar with, but who I think you’ll really enjoy.

First up in late June: a review of Don Coles’ Where We Might Have Been - short-listed for The Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry (winner TBA June 23^rd).

Casting our net wide....

2011-05-27T16:34:00.001-07:00

Hester Knibbe has enjoyed increasing attention from European and American readers as the author of two books of poems in her native Dutch: Oogsteen (2009) and Bedrieglijke dagen (2008), both from De Arbeiderspers. Rather than wait for her first book of poems in English, I thought I’d offer a taste in the translated poem below, a wonderful achievement in 12 lines. Next week, I’ll follow up with an interview with Hester and her translator, Jacquelyn Pope.

Last Night

Saved two children last night.

They lay under thin black ice

one gone blue, the other grey.

I laid them out on grass

that snapped under my step

wrung their bodies warm and dry

gave them the gust of my breath.

Then I looked out at the morning

that lay lukewarm on the water

put on a tank top

arranged some grasses in a vase

fished two children out of sleep.

Hester Knibbe

(Translated by Jacquelyn Pope)

Lifelines

2010-11-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

The conventional take on poets is that their principal enterprise is to trade in personal feeling, something that took on a deeper, some would say too close and lugubrious cast in the poetry that followed Lowell and Bishop. This week I asked Toronto poet Catherine Graham about the personal pitch she strikes in a poem about her father.

The Watch

Six foot three, basking in tawny heat,
sunk in his lounger, spring to September.
His face bakes like earth.
Chest hairs slice the sweat beads.
The black leather watch (he never forgot
to unstrap) ticks beside his ghetto blaster.
Cobalt eyes, silver thick hair, dentured smile,
arms folded under the crest of his chest,
he poses for fall's final mould.

Later, after the black skid, spin and deep
tip of the freshly polished blue Caddy;
after the crunch of skull on the dashboard;
even after the front page photo and headline:
my father's watch, still ticking,
unzipped from the O.P.P.'s plastic.
No cracks, glass smooth to touch.
Dry mud flakes sprinkle like ashes
on to my opening hand.

The poem is obviously a very personal poem, which raises the question: How personal should our poems be? Can you talk a little about what the process was like for you writing this poem?

“The Watch” was originally two poems about my father. I was living in Northern Ireland at the time, completing an MA in creative writing in poetry, when I realized the two poems were stronger as one: “watch” as verb and “watch” as noun. The “I” in the poem, the daughter, is watching her father sunbathe. The pose of a sunbather is the pose of death, the coffin stance, arms folded under the crest of his chest, / he poses for fall’s final mould. And his face bakes like earth is the body, the flesh and blood, returning to earth, the elements. And yet this body is very much alive, producing water –sweat –as opposed to a dead body, a stiff dry corpse. I wanted certain details to bring this resting image to life— chest hairs slice the sweat beads— a somewhat violent image (though understated) to hint/connect to the poem’s foreboding nature.

My father loved to suntan and worked hard to get the “George Hamilton” look. He was virtually guaranteed this look as he used QT (Quick Tan) to become a bronze Adonis. Yet my father wasn’t six foot three. He was six foot six. But in my mind six foot three, basking in tawny heat made for a stronger lyrical line than six foot six, basking in tawny heat so sound overruled fact.

The detail “dentured smile” is based on fact. I’ve since discovered this particular word often leads readers to believe that the father in “The Watch” is a much older man, more like a grandfather. My father was fifty seven when he died. He didn’t have his teeth anymore and hadn’t since his mid-twenties. Not until I shared this poem with high school students in Northern Ireland did I realize how this would affect the reading of the poem, connecting the image to a much older man.

The asterisk works as a bridge between then and now, before and after –what death does—and like the chest hairs slicing the sweat beads there’s no going back.
My father died in a late night car accident the last year of my undergraduate degree at McMaster University. His “polished blue Caddy” swerved and tipped and landed in the ditch while I was in bed fast asleep, home for the weekend. A three a.m. knock on my bedroom door became the sound that would change my life. I opened that door and the police officer standing there told me what had happened.

A few days later that same police officer returned to our house with a Ziploc bag. It contained my father’s watch. I couldn’t believe it was still ticking. I remember thinking of that Timex commercial – it takes a licking but keeps on ticking – so I guess my grieving mind had room for black humour.

How personal should poems be? I don’t think “should” has to come into it. Every poet has their own unique journey – what they write, why they write, how they write. In my case, death served as a catalyst to the creative life. I’d recently lost my mother. She died of cancer on Christmas Day during my first year as an undergraduate at McMaster University, so my grieving doubled when my father died.

I was not a child who grew up knowing she wanted to be a writer. A therapist I was seeing after my father’s death suggested I keep a journal to help me deal with the overwhelming grief. I started to write about my life, my parents’ lives, my feelings, and this journal writing gradually turned into little poems. After making this profound connection –yes, you are writing poems – I haven’t stopped writing poetry, reading poetry, teaching poetry. Poetry is my lifeline.

As mentioned earlier, this poem was written in Northern Ireland. Writing about loss and grief in another country, one far away from the familiars of home, helped free my creativity. Time away in a new place distilled memory and emotion enabling me to craft personal poems like “The Watch” which ends: Dry mud-flakes sprinkle like ashes / onto my opening hand, that “opening hand” the small hope of promise.

This poem, like others you’ve written, unfolds in a spare, almost perfunctory or phlegmatic manner. Is this a deliberate strategy on your part, i.e. as a way of withholding information from the reader? If that is so, why?

Many years ago I took a writing course with Barbara Gowdy at the University Of Toronto School Of Continuing Studies where I now teach. One of the things Barbara said that has stuck with me through the years was that your subject matter chooses you. I think this is also true of style. Your style chooses you—your word rhythms and word choices and line lengths. What feels right? What doesn’t feel right? All choices, intuitive or deliberate, help a writer find and connect with their unique voice.

I’m quiet by nature like my mother (my father was the talker in the family) and like my mother I enjoy listening. I’m comfortable with silence and love to spend time on my own. Perhaps this is the result of growing up as an only child. Using spare language doesn’t feel like a deliberate strategy, it feels like home to me.

The “almost perfunctory or phlegmatic manner” you make note of in my work is, upon reflection, a way of avoiding sentimentality. I don’t think I realized this at the time of writing these first poems— poems about a daughter’s attempts to come to terms with the deaths of both parents – which then became the poems in my first collection The Watch (published in Northern Ireland) and Pupa here in Canada. Incidentally Pupa is also the beginning of a trilogy. In addition to Pupa there’s The Red Element and most recently Winterkill, all published with Insomniac Press.

I remember reading a great quote by Chekhov: The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make. By giving the cold hard facts you let the reader decide how to “feel”. A bit like the classic creative-writing nugget “show, don’t tell”. There’s great power in this advice, I think, especially when the subject matter – death/grief– is so loaded with emotion.

You mention withholding information. Again I believe less is more. As a reader I’m comfortable with filling in the spaces left by the writer, becoming involved with the white space of the text, so I guess it makes sense that I would do this as a writer. I enjoy ambiguity and playing around with “what if”.

Who are your principal influences? Am I wrong in hearing Emily Dickinson’s influence on your poems, in particular your selection of images, rhythm etc.?

I’m wary of the word “influences”. I think the best way to answer this question is to share some of my reading journey while I was living in Northern Ireland and writing my first poems. Such poets included Northern Irish poets like Heaney, MacNeice and Muldoon and Irish poets like Yeats and Kavanagh. UK poets too –Hughes, Duffy and Selima Hill, plus European poets living in America like Brodsky and Milosz. American poets included Frost, Plath, Stevens, Bishop and yes, Dickinson. I love the miniature aspect of her work for I loved miniatures as a child – tiny dolls and doll houses, little figurines. For awhile I even collected miniature furniture. Tiny things appeal to me so I guess that’s part of my poetic aesthetic which is why Dickinson also appeals. And her love of nature, for I too love the outdoors and grew up beside a water-filled limestone quarry, kind of like a big blue secret as most of the locals didn’t even know it was there, a little lake hidden from view in the woods.

I lost the quarry when I lost my parents, but like an underground spring the quarry has fed my imagination. It’s part of each book in the Insomniac trilogy.

Now the quarry is my imagination. Paul Vermeersch, poetry editor of Insomniac Press, recently pointed this out to me. A comforting thought that the quarry lives inside me. I thank Paul for this healing insight.

Catherine Graham is the author of four poetry collections: The Watch, Pupa, The Red Element and Winterkill. Vice President of Project Bookmark Canada and Marketing Coordinator for the Rowers Pub Reading Series, she teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her work has appeared in such literary journals as The New Quarterly, Descant, The Fiddlehead, The Literary Review of Canada, Web del Sol, Poetry Ireland Review, anthologized in The White Page / An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets and showcased in Poetry is Public is Poetry and Nuit Blanche Words Travel Fast. www.catherinegraham.com

Review

2010-10-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

This Way Out, Carmine Starnino, Gaspereau Press, 2009, $18.95, paper.

In a recent interview Carmine Starnino said early on in his career he worried he was writing the kinds of poems he “hated reading”. Better to write what you like to read than to write what merely gains ready acceptance or comes easily. This may partly explain the shift over time from the simpler, conversational style of his earliest book The New World, published in 1997, to Credo, Starnino’s first attempt to move towards “new registers” and a more “lexically alert” style of poetry. Eventually, those efforts would culminate in a wonderful collection of poems, With English Subtitles, and his more recent book This Way Out, both winners of the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (the latter also nominated for a 2009 GG) and both a kind of self-imposed test of the tough criteria by which Starnino has measured other people’s poems: meaningful audio effects, vivid, adventurous imagery enriched by rhythmic play and syntactic variety. Witness the opening of his oft-cited “Our Butcher”:

I could bone up, be the right man for that one-man job,
hang by its hocks a rabbit shucked from the jacket
of its black-bristled fur and still talking in twitches.
As well, I might grasp the particular way he swings

a cleaver, brings it down on a neck like a primitive.
More to the point, I’d learn to move the beak of my blade
into the fragrance of a flank, or browse apart a chest’s
cardiac leafage, my apron a blotchwork of blood.

The colloquial diction makes a good beginning, as do the strong verb choices and predicate shapes, e.g. “bone up”, “hang by its hocks”, and in particular that wonderfully kinaesthetic phrase “talking in twitches”. I like, too, the clever way the word “swings” performs a kind of linguistic double duty at the end of line 4 – suggesting the swing of the rabbit hanging from its hook, while re-enacting the downward motion of the butcher’s arm through the imaginary air of the stanza break. To a virtuoso balance of mono and polysyllabics (“Striated and plush/crewelworked with fat”) and hard Anglo Saxon “screw lids/on sheep tripe and calf brain” Starnino adds an inventive, self-mocking playfulness. Not content merely to “browse apart a chest’s cardiac leafage”, he would “love to break back the pages of a shank and read all day.”

It is a remarkable performance. It is a performance that also gives me pause. Setting aside its minor faults (the alliteration is a little over done it seems to me and tends to clunk up the rhythm) the poem’s principal strength, its tight, coherent construction, is also its final weakness. I wanted to feel the rhythm and syntax eventually open up, become a bit freer; instead the poem feels boxed in, constricted as it tumbles forward on its uninterrupted path to the finish. As a result, the poem and others have the feel of a writing exercise, suggesting a writer looking for ways to end his poem rather than to complete it.

Head and Heart

Starnino makes a more interesting personal appeal in “Nine from Rome”, nine well-crafted sonnets containing some of his most open and expressive poetry. Through these poems we also begin to discover that our great satisfaction with Starnino’s book rests less upon his near unimpeachable ear for language than it does upon resolution of the tension between the book’s technical virtuosity and its feeling.

A skyline, half-hazed, of aerials and satellite dishes
gratifies me, a clock-free, in situ serenity
born from harder days, which aren’t these days,
these are days of no forwarding address and no one to meet,
days of bearings not taken and heels dug in,
days of unpoemed emotions I’m too tranquil to recollect-
days off, in other words, less said, more meant... (30)

Here, the poem’s steadiness, achieved in part through repetition and mid-line and end-of-line pauses, allows it and the reader to breathe a little more. As a result we pay closer attention to the sentiments being expressed and gain a stronger appreciation for Starnino’s feelings about life in a foreign capital. His excitement for Rome is distinct from the excitement of other travellers who, “randy for antique” as Larkin once put it, plunder church architecture. Starnino will have none of that:

Honestly? This rubble-gawking feels like duty,
and ancient history an abstraction sleeping off
its particulars. I like food markets better: awnings
with their two cultures, sun and shade; grocers
who give fresh evidence for everything... (25)

Disinclined to stare down ancient Rome for its secrets, the poet and his partner instead “wallow in the wasteful happiness of travel misspent.” Here, great views are not something you point a camera at, but “something to walk toward until we get there”, the rich detail of an Italian market “too minor for epics”, low-slung Italian shoes “a thrill too quick for art”:

Here oblivion is driven out by cheap editions
and good knock-offs, lo-fi gewgaws and ziggurats of baubles,
down at hem skirts and misdemeanoured hats,
ribbon-tied letters complete with old bureau.
Centuries are turned on like a tap, then caught in dusty bottles,
ink-dark, shelved beside potted cuttings two for a euro. (27)

Look again at lines 2 and 3 in “Dear David” and see how Starnino uses the full range of vowel sounds and consonants to capture that topsy-turvy feel of a Roman market place. No-one, in my view, does it better.

Whither the elusive self?

The steady vocal pitch and control that we see in “Our Butcher” is a characteristic of Starnino's poetry and is never far from most of the poems in this book. Gradually, though, a different voice from the one we’re used to emerges, a slightly more self-conscious, fitful voice that will reach its nadir in Section 3 of the book. There, Starnino fleshes out the frustrations and emotional crisis of a speaker that contrasts markedly with the measured, contemplative mind we were introduced to early on. It’s a troubled presence, fractious, needy. “Look at me when I talk to you”, the speaker abruptly barks at the end of one poem. “You know full well” what I want, he replies to his interlocutor at the end of another. “Phony that’s how I feel”:

I’m a nuisance even to myself
who once felt unexpressed,
and now wish
I could think about something else
besides how I give myself away
as I grow old...(71)

At the risk of offering too psychological an interpretation the speaker seems to be articulating an act of healing here, torn between re-asserting his ego and stripping away things peripheral to his true self. “Lie low/Shed everything/ for the lesson/ of seeing it go. And so/and so.” At the same time, self-loathing, easily overdone in the wake of Robert Lowell, is leavened in these later poems by lighter, sardonic observations about the way the poet’s mind and the minds of others seem to work, supported by an undercurrent of regret and sorrow.

So, a very good book of poems. But here's the problem. If we’re honest about what we’re really looking for in a new book of poems we realize it’s something most poets are hard pressed to give us. The miraculous by its very nature is in short supply after all. Even a single poem, one that just for a moment stills the heart, or conjoins an image and thought for us to ponder long after we’ve put the poem down, will rescue a book from oblivion and, in admittedly rare instances, place the poet’s lasting iconic signature on the air. That's our hope anyway.

Starnino has yet to perform the miraculous. This Way Out is a book of poems in search of the larger “identifying presence” the poet places such store by in the work of others. Conspicuous in the absence of a complete and coherent self to provide vision or direction it is impossible for it to be anything more than a very good book of poems. What’s encouraging, though, is its development from the technical virtuosity of its early poems into something more fully and deliberately human by the end, what Starnino calls in the book’s final poem “a work-in progress”. Whatever its limitations, ultimately this is what defines its success. Cast in a tone of edgy, unsettling self-denigration, the “work” remains emotionally compelling and open ended in a way that Starnino’s earlier works are not - all of which should have readers looking forward to, and anticipating more from, his next iteration of poems.
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My apologies to those who've looked forward to weekly offerings of the blog. A change of location and vocation (yesterday, speeches; today, magazines) has log-jammed my day. As a result, Speaking of Poems will now appear twice monthly, with the occasional, unscheduled interjection. dk

Where I am...

2010-10-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

If you've wondered where I am, my apologies: Gael and I have been up to our ears in a major move from Victoria to B.C.'s Sunshine Coast. We now live in Roberts Creek, a beautiful little community next door to Gibson's Landing of Beachcombers fame, a mixed community of artists, musicians and writers that ripples with energy - by way of example, poet and novelist George Payerle, who put us on to the property and is our neighbour across the street. Thank-you, George.

I gather that to be "a Creeker" is some distinction, though what initiation rites await us remain unclear (running naked through the coniferous woods, covered in spruce gum, long howls below a midnight moon?). As a result, I've barely had a chance to crack any of the books of poems that have materialized on my desk in the past few months. An oversight to be rectified shortly for anyone who cares; so bare with us, please, as we attempt to recover our lives from beneath all these boxes.

David

Getting it right...

2010-09-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

Not long ago our friends at Lemon Hound posted an amusing and instructive take on “Bright Star”, a film by Jane Campion - all very pretty and rather insubstantial from someone who should have known better and been moved more.

A wonderful antidote is this reading by British actor Douglas Hodge of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”, surely one of the finest lyric poems ever written. Listen.

Closing down the sepulchers…

2010-09-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

Browsing - or more aptly, given this post - grazing the Internet this week I came across a question attached to one of those literary study guides that populate well-meaning high school libraries and, more recently, pedagogic websites. The subject: Irving Layton’s poem “The Bull Calf” from the book of the same name published by Toronto’s Contact Press in 1956. I should say straight away that the questions posed by these study guides always seem to me to eviscerate with a dull blade the poem at hand, but nevertheless I pressed on and read the following:

11. What similarities and differences do you perceive between animals in Layton’s poems (“The Bull Calf”… “A Tall Man Executes a Jig”… “Cat Dying in Autumn”… and in the poems of, say, Rilke (“The Panther”), D.H. Lawrence (“The Snake”), Elizabeth Bishop (“The Fish”), Margaret Atwood (“The Animals in that Country”), or Michael Ondaatje (“Loop”)?

“The Bull Calf", as many will know, was one of Layton’s earliest poems and sufficiently well regarded to find its way into A.J.M. Smith’s The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, which is where I first encountered it. Now normally, I wouldn’t have found the citation of a famous poem in a teacherly forum particularly remarkable, but for the fact that I recently did something similar to the writer of Question 11; that is, I found myself comparing Layton’s calf poem with another poem about a calf, this one by Ted Hughes contained in Moortown Diaries (Faber and Faber, 1979) entitled “Struggle.” Yes, I know it’s not always fair or judicious to make comparisons, especially when our favourite poets are involved. But how a celebrated Canadian poem by a celebrated Canadian poet stands up against a lesser known poem by a more celebrated poet, frankly, was too much to resist.

Do I have an opinion about which poem is the better poem? Sure. In sum, the difference between the two is the difference between telling and showing, between declamation and revelation - and more besides. But perhaps you can guess.

Layton’s poem is first, immediately followed by the Hughes’ poem:

The Bull Calf

The thing could barely stand. Yet taken
from his mother and the barn smells
he still impressed with his pride,
with the promise of sovereignty in the way
his head moved to take us in.
The fierce sunlight tugging the maize from the ground
licked at his shapely flanks.
He was too young for all that pride.
I thought of the deposed Richard II.

“No money in bull calves,” Freeman had said.
The visiting clergyman rubbed the nostrils
now snuffing pathetically at the windless day.
“A pity,” he sighed.
My gaze slipped off his hat toward the empty sky
that circled over the black knot of men,
over us and the calf waiting for the first blow.

Struck,
the bull calf drew in his thin forelegs
as if gathering strength for a mad rush .
tottered… raised his darkening eyes to us,
and I saw we were at the far end
of his frightened look, growing smaller and smaller
till we were only the ponderous mallet
that flicked his bleeding ear
and pushed him over on his side, stiffly,
like a block of wood.

Below the hill’s crest
the river snuffled on the improvised beach.
We dug a deep pit and threw the dead calf into it.
It made a wet sound, a sepulchral gurgle,
as the warm sides bulged and flattened.
Settled, the bull calf lay as if asleep,
one foreleg over the other,
bereft of pride and so beautiful now,
without movement, perfectly still in the cool pit,
I turned away and wept.
by Irving Layton

Struggle

We had been expecting her to calve
And there she was, just after dawn, down.
Private, behind bushed hedge-cuttings, in a low rough
corner.
The walk towards her was like a walk into danger.
Caught by her first calf, the small-boned black and
white heifer.
Having a bad time. She lifted her head,
She reached for us with a wild, flinging look
And flopped flat again. There was the calf,
White-faced, lion-coloured, enormous, trapped
Round the waist by his mother’s purpled elastic
His heavy long forelegs limply bent in a not-yet-
inherited gallop.
His head curving up and back, pushing for the udder
Which had not yet appeared, his nose scratched and
reddened
By an ill-placed clump of bitten off rushes,
His fur dried as if he had been
Half-born for hours, as he probably had.
Then we heaved on his forelegs,
And on his neck, and the half-born he mooed
Protesting about everything. Then bending him down,
Between her legs, and sliding a hand
into the hot tunnel, trying to ease
His sharp hip-bones past her pelvis,
Then twisting him down, so you expected
His spine to slip its sockets,
And one hauling his legs, and one embracing his wet
waist
Like pulling somebody anyhow from a bog,
And one with hands easing his hips past the corners
Of his tunnel mother, till something gave.
The cow flung her head and lifted her upper hind leg
With every heave, and something gave
Almost a click –
And his scrubbed wet enormous flanks came sliding
out,
Coloured ready for the light his incredibly long hind
legs
From the loose red flapping sack-mouth
Followed by a gush of colours, a mess
Of puddled tissues and jellies.
He mooed feebly and lay like a pieta Christ
In the cold easterly daylight. We dragged him
Under his mother’s nose, her stretched-out exhausted
head,
So she could get to know him with lickings.
They lay face to face like two mortally wounded
duelists.
We stood back, letting the strength flow towards
them.
We gave her a drink, we gave her hay. The calf
Started his convalescence
From the grueling journey. All day he lay
Overpowered by limpness and weight.
We poured his mother’s milk into him
But he had not strength to swallow.
He made a few clumsy throat gulps, then lay
Mastering just breathing.
We took him inside. We tucked him up
In front of a stove, and tried to pour
Warm milk and whisky down his throat and not into
his lungs.
But his eye just lay suffering the monstrous weight of
his head,
The impossible job of his marvelous huge limbs.
He could not make it. He died called Struggle.
Son of Patience.

by Ted Hughes

Cool water secret...

2010-09-03T06:27:00.000-07:00

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too…
- John Keats
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Yes, the high days of summer are done. We mourn a little the passing season…but then look forward with hope to what lies ahead and to the words that await us. This week, a review of some wonderful words in Toronto poet Jeff Latosik's book Tiny, Frantic, Stronger.
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You’re going to like this book of poems, let’s get that out of the way first. Jeff Latosik is an intelligent poet with an interesting, wry presence and an understated style that plays well against the underachieving earnestness that infects so much poetry these days. These are strong, artful poems - all the more startling in a debut collection - and make a legitimate claim on our interest in any subsequent work.

Not that there isn’t a little tough sledding along the way. Latosik’s is also a disparately associative, oblique style as evident by the title of his book where the first two terms “tiny” and “frantic” collide semantically with that third word “stronger’. Later we’ll learn that he’s referring to cockroaches and how they’ll survive us all, but this initial incongruence in the title signals Latosik’s determination to do something different with language and challenge his readers to make connections where none is immediately apparent. Here’s part of the poem from which the title is drawn, “Cockroach Elegy”. Again, notice the range of associations assembled around civilization’s lowly, persistent bug:

Whose mind was an old-time music box,
whose hunger was fifty children playing soccer
on an unmarked field.

Who gave birth like a machine gun firing,
whose lineage took the long train from Cretaceous,
who continue scurrying away from us, tiny, frantic, stronger. (57)

What, the reader asks, does “an old-time music box” have to do with “fifty children playing soccer”? Or “a machine gun firing” with “a long train” from anywhere, let alone the Cretaceous period? What does it all signify? Not much at first blush. Once you read beyond the odd associations and the metaphoric connection with cockroaches, however, you discover that Latosik wants our first pleasure here to be our kinetic experience of the poem during the actual reading. He achieves this partly by varying his syntax and the length of his lines and punching the ending with those three little words. But understanding what it all presumes to say about life, love and death, while important to our appreciation of the poem, remains secondary to the poem’s movement.

That commitment to the rhythm of the poem is even more apparent in the opening lines of “On Appreciating Space Exploration”:

Press your hands against the ceiling,
Notice how hot they become there on the border
of home and a sky that rolls like water
pushing its way through a hairline crack.

Step down slowly. Break a window
Or, unravel a roll of film
then try to stuff it all back in the roll. Develop. (71)

The first two stanzas have the measured, slightly eerie visual presentation and feel of a carefully staged performance installation. Like a performance piece it also quickly descends from the rational into the absurd. I find the moment immensely compelling, but what is just as interesting is how Latosik extends the wonderfully weird and disparate associations between words early on in the book to the disparity in this poem between ideas and the existential choices humans make between ideas. “Spend a moment pondering this statement”, he says: “that the road should be built in this direction/or that direction is an equally preposterous notion.” Latosik asks – quite legitimately, I think - how rational are the statements we construct about reality? and then answers the question by saying Not very rational at all; in fact much of what we say and the choices we make end in absurdity.

The paradox is that this in itself is a statement, a poetic statement about the accidental quality and futility of human action. The associative disparity and perfunctory, double-spaced structure of the final three lines shore up the truth contained in the statement:

Throw a fistful of marbles across a field.

Try to get inside a shoebox.

Fall off something.

Like much of Latosik’s poetry, this poem answers a demand for the strange, for the surreal. In this regard, his poems put me in mind of the painters Magritte and Dali as much as they do André Breton by their close juxtaposition of normally unrelated objects and ideas so that we see the larger picture – our life - in a new light or fresher perspective. Again, statement, if it’s required at all, merely rounds out our experience, so that the confluence between what we experience and what we understand, between sensuality and sense, makes a well crafted poem a memorable poem.

I stress this point because of what Jeff Latosik had to say recently about the secondary role of meaning in poetry – an assertion severely undercut by two competing strains in this book of poems, i.e. the surreal and a desire (all too rare among poets) to say something of lasting meaning to readers. Readers may have to suspend their expectations around sense or meaning to the end of the poem and often for a second reading of the poem, but the fact remains Tiny, Frantic, Stronger also tries to achieve the unity and understanding Eliot tells us even the most disjunctive verse seeks.

That effort reaches its apex in one of the book’s best poem’s “Cactus Love”, and worth citing here in its entirety:

The cactus keeping its cool water secret
is simple to love: as if all that is hard in us,
closed up tight as a fist in a pocket
can still be loved, need not be relieved.

To prick your thumb, to call that conversation,
in a quiet room when you’re tired of speaking
and someone you’ve kissed all light from
is curled under a blanket in her own wrinkled mood.

The cactus, which thrives in irascible sunlight,
cracked earth and stone. Calm as a soldier’s
silent sleeves. The cactus knows there is
even a war in the cracks between stones.

The cactus leaning into February sun:
a long green tongue that never tells us
yes or no. To have brushed the webs from
its tiny perfect spikes and considered forgiveness.

One blue flower that closes like a door
when Spring curves to Summer. To smell it and find
your way back to the morning. To find your way
back to the light on the bed.

The cactus keeping its cool water secret
with a stillness you had once, long ago,
in a place where you laid down, but had to get up from,
to go on into your armourless life. (67)

Latosik’s poems are not without their weaknesses, notably his overuse of the "to infinitive” (e.g. “To go all in”… “To lift the latch. To let contentment/hitch up its trailer”…“To hold a coup d’état” etc.). It’s an all too familiar trope in prose and poetry, which tends to make several of Latosik’s poems a little too solemn for my taste. Still, the device works well here in this poem, and more importantly supports a poetic thought that is rounded out, complete, and touching in its final effects.

There’s also a decidedly moral thrust behind Latosik's poetry that I like very much (moral not in any religious sense, but in the respect and nurture we owe each other as fellow creatures). His teasing, playful manner and a thoughtful, slightly more metaphysical approach to poetry than we’re used to makes this book well worth picking up and Latosik’s poetic career well worth following.

Jeff Latosik’s award-winning poems have appeared in magazines and journals across the country. He won the P.K. Page Founders’ Award from The Malahat Review in 2007, placed first in THIS Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt in 2008, and was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for 2008. He teaches at Humber College in Toronto. Tiny, Frantic, Stronger (Insomniac Press, 2010) is his first book.
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Next week, Catherine Graham reflects upon her time in Northern Ireland and her encounter with Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.

In Praise of Tough Criticism

2010-07-23T01:25:00.000-07:00

Vigilantes run amok, amateur sociologists, phantoms rising out of our national impulse for self-assertiveness and our imaginings of a national literature, the names assigned to this country’s critics in private and public comments that followed my June 26 post pretty much ran the gamut. Still, the fracturing debate among critics is not what to call ourselves, but how to approach the next book of poems we read and assess: Do we gently massage the poet’s ears and proffer deft cutwork from the safety of the poet’s corner or issue thunderous body blows at the centre of the ring? Some may not like Jeffrey R. Di Leo’s answer, but there’s no doubt he’s answered the bell. Here’s his article entitled “In Praise of Tough Criticism": http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Tough-Criticism/65831.

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Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is editor and publisher of the American Book Review, founder of the journal Symploke,which was awarded the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement (2000) by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ), and editor ofthe book series Class in American published by the University of Nebraska Press. He is also president of the Southern Comparative Literature Association and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange.

Di Leo's publications include Morality Matters: Race, Class, and Gender in Applied Ethics (2002), Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture (2003), If Classrooms Matter: Progressive Visions of Educational Environments (2004; with Walter Jacobs), On Anthologies: Politics and Pedagogy (2004), From Socrates to Cinema: An Introduction to Philosophy (2005), and Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (2007; with R. M.Berry). Forthcoming this fall from him are Federman's Fictions: Innovation,Theory, and the Holocaust (SUNY), and Academe Degree Zero: Reconsidering the Politics of Higher Education (Paradigm).

Going to Ground

2010-07-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Ever read a really great poem and want to ask the poet questions about it? This week, I asked Halifax poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn about her poem “You think of Meister Eckhart," winner of The Malahat Review’s 2010 Open Season Award for Poetry. First, here’s the poem:

You think of Meister Eckhart

as the wind rises in the eucalyptus, follows tunnels of light
the queltehue have shaped in the air, tunnels that disappear inside

their own creation. Breath is to story as running is to horses, all wild eyes
and urgency, dust and dream flank, rush of imagination. And you wonder:

how does she find her way with those invisible hands? But when she whispers
at night as you try to steer stars, you wake with only the taste of the answer

in your mouth. And you think of Jesus, of the Buddha, of St. Teresa,
of the poet who drank wine from blue goblets, wrote

green lines on driftwood, slept with women he kept mistaking for the sea.
Can you learn to be as empty as a clay pot, to be that simple.

that lavish?
-and you walk on seashells among angels and devils,

from lanzas and pirates whose treasures won’t last, and you tap
your small crystal heart with the lightstick of the world, and listen:

you know music cannot be as sharply drawn as the eyes of a captive hawk, nor
pinned down to staves with clefs and a rest. It is bird shriek at dawn, chug-

churning engines hot with promise, murmuring cows that trail swollen udders,
generous whispers of the fig tree summer-heavy with fruit you break open

in your palm and lay on your tongue. It is what you have already known
and tasted, mystery that grows in tears and bone, in death and rock and ocean,

the space on the stairs between this step and the next, in the red muscle
of mercy. It longs and it is longing and it wants you as virgin, wants you

as wife, lover, child, over cloud, under water, wants your throb
and blood-thirst, buried tears, and more. It shows you that soft is stronger

than hard, that you – rapt listener, ripening soul – always knew how to dance
this river, this winter, to compose out of the distant cry of stars.

(From Lost Gospels , Brick Books, 2010).

Many people may not be familiar with Meister Eckhart. Who was he and how does he figure into your poem?

Meister Eckhart was a German theologian and mystic, a Dominican who was condemned after his death as a heretic by John XXII, the Pope at the time. Eckhart’s beliefs about unity with God, the need for the soul to become empty, clear, uncluttered, and the importance of our learning to go to ground---all these made him a fly in the Church ointment. He incorporated the teachings of female theologians and mystics in his writing as well. In fact, now that I think about it, he was a bit of a trickster and a bit of the Buddha rolled in one, and that didn’t go over well with the Avignon Papacy.

His work is one of many I’ve been reading over the last several years – Merton, St. Teresa, Simone Weil, Marguerite Porete, the Desert Fathers – as well as several versions of the Tao. Chuang Tzu was also of interest to me, as were contemporary takes on all of these. Philosophers—Heidegger, Heraclitus. The list is endless. It’s not uncommon at any age, but especially later in life, to want to explore the nature of being and of belief. I had already started the reading when I entered into what would become a five-year period of continuous and often difficult losses. I don’t call that prescience, just good timing.

During that period I found myself in South America in a workshop outside Santiago. I couldn’t sleep; I went for walks. I felt untethered and upside down and even the sky was unfamiliar. I searched for the Southern Cross for some small measure of comfort; of footing, I guess. Combine loss, middle age, and an antipodean landscape and sky, and you can’t help but go to ground. Be emptied out.

This poem is part of my most recent book, Lost Gospels, which, in some ways, is a record of my exploration into matters of being. What songs do we create, what songs are worth singing, which ones do we leave behind? And, of course, the big one: What on earth am I doing here? These are old and universal themes, I know, but each of us must come to them on our own.

Who is the “You” in the title?

Using ‘you’ seemed right; it was right immediately in my body as much as my head. The ‘you’ both speaks for me, and speaks to me I suppose. I’m talking out loud to this person who is wondering where and who she is. In my relatively short life as a poet – I started at age 50 – I’ve learned to let the poetry come first and the analysis later. Believe me: as an ethnographer well-schooled in discursive and analytical thought, it’s a delight to let go and fall into composing in that way.

I love the rich fecundity of images in this poem. Do they reflect some kind of spiritual awakening for you or different spiritual perspective on the world?

Thank you. It’s not an awakening, certainly not yet. It’s a long process. And my sense of the notion of perspective is that it suggests separateness, a particular lens. You know when you have your gender glasses on, or your class or New Canadian or musician ‘glasses’ on, you see through those lenses. I’m not sure that I see through a spiritual lens that’s discrete from other lenses. It’s more a landscape I live inside, or air I breathe or water I swim in--less about knowing and more about being. In that sense, it’s ontological and it’s ongoing. I’m never going to get there – wherever there is--- but I don’t want to die not having lived inside the questions. I recall reading something by Jane Hirshfield – and I’m paraphrasing here – that it’s tough going to embrace mortality, truly embrace it, and as a poet it’s harder still in contemporary culture to write about concepts such as ‘heart’ or ‘soul.’ Those discussions are too squishy for some people; they make the cynical squeamish and dismissive. I think that’s a certain kind of fear that’s talking, and I’ve felt that fear. Increasingly, I find that cynicism and ironic stances – or masks, I suppose --are no comfort or retreat; in fact, they sadden me when I see them in myself and in others.

Your use of couplets seems to provide a measure of control in the poem not always found in freer forms. Is that their principal use here or did it just come out that way? Did you contemplate other ways of structuring the poem?

Again, any analyzing I do about perspective or approach comes after initial drafts, when I put my editing head on—and sometimes never. Years ago, I began to read widely to explore various forms, and some combination of Bronwen Wallace’s steady propulsive voice and C.K. Williams’ and others’ rhythmic lines seemed to strike a chord, seemed to echo how I spoke or aspired to speak. It sounds as though I ‘tried on’ various voices, and that may be true – yet I think all poets do that initially, just as children learning to speak do. They ‘try on’ what they hear from their family and their culture so they can become both a part of that community of speakers, and a member who is distinct in his or her own way. It’s an old process, this induction into community.

As a beginning poet, I found discovering the sound of my own voice in a community was exhilarating. It was like wandering a busy market with music coming from many sources. You’re drawn to certain tunes and approaches, sometimes many at once, but you have to have heard (or in this case, read) well and deeply enough to feel as though you can join in the chorus, sing your own words in that key, that tone. But it has to be your song in your voice that you develop, regardless of your influences. And it has to be in tune with the material you approach or has found you. At some level, I think the couplets in this poem worked as staves for me – they were the right containers for rhythm. I play around with form often; this poem morphed over several revisions from short lines, to prose, to couplets and back again. And then, once a poem is near its last draft, there can be publishing constraints (page width, for example). In fact, I think the version of this poem published in Lost Gospels is different from what appears in The Malahat Review. That’s a whole other discussion.

But to try another response to your questions, David, this poem, like most, began with an image or a germ of curiosity or a shadow or a twinge of discomfort. And when I begin a draft I am often somewhere ‘out there,’ in a flow state, a meditative otherworld– where words and images come and I simply have to ride them out, struggle inside the emerging language, nudge it, abandon it, nurse it along, turn my back on it or look at it sideways, keep it going, carry it with me when I refill my coffee cup or check for mail at the door, return to it, and allow it to run its course for the hour or two or three I have in a day to write. It’s not calculated, this process. During all this time, all the resources I have are standing by, grinding their gears or elbowing me as necessary. By resources I mean what we all draw upon as writers: our histories, linguistic and metaphorical abilities, cognition, courage--the whole cupboard. And we use them in a complex, recursive, and mysterious process that I continue to find astonishing. When the bubble breaks and my head comes back to the here and now and the phone rings or the cat needs feeding, I see I have a draft –something often as messy as an overheated three-year-old with ice cream, or feral and loose-limbed as the Big Lebowski—but it’s a draft, and I’m happy to have that. It’s not until the next draft – after I’ve let the poem calm down a bit that I go in as an editor and look at structure, approach, that sort of thing. That’s an over-simplification, I know – I think we all edit as we write, regardless of the draft -- but my point is that the initial draft, particularly for this poem, wasn’t contemplated or planned. In subsequent drafts I worked on rhythm and movement; the poem wanted to move.

Lorri Neilsen Glenn is the author and editor of eleven books of non-fiction and poetry including Lost Gospels (2010). Former Poet Laureate of Halifax, she has led workshops in Australia, Ireland, Chile and most provinces of Canada. Currently, she is completing a collection of essays on grief and loss, an anthology of writing about mothers, and a memoir. She teaches writing and research at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. Learn more about Lorri at http://www.writers.ns.ca/ and http://www.brickbooks.ca/.

Soundings

2010-06-26T10:54:00.000-07:00

A few years ago an assignment for Scientific American took me “up island” as we say here in Victoria to Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s research centre near Nanaimo. My task: to explain to a general audience why they should get excited about underwater sonar detection of pink and chinook salmon. Not an easy task for someone with no formal scientific training, but the material seemed moderately accessible, the money was good and so taking my courage into both my hands I interviewed Dr. Tim Mulligan, one of the DFO's top experts on piscine behaviour.

The result: enough detail to sink a flotilla of salmon catchers: the intricacies of echo pulse soundings, transducer correlates, returning echo kurtosis as it relates to the movements of the indomitable Sockeye; somehow I had to understand it all before I could even think of putting anything to paper. Nearly as daunting was the mind numbing attention to detail of Scientific American editor Phillip Yam. Over two weeks Phil returned no fewer than six drafts, punctuating the margins of each with interminable questions about fish finders and morphology, each one an implicit challenge to my capacity for comprehending the dense material I’d begun with and my ability to turn it into readable prose.

There's an object lesson here for someone who writes about poetry. The depth of our work as we try to discover things about poetry that are fresh and interesting and true ultimately determines whether anyone reads us and takes us seriously. It may even, as some have argued, speak to the survival of poetry criticism and its importance to the health of poetry itself, a perpetual concern that gains added traction as an entire literary industry – and those who defend it - struggle to convince government funding agencies of poetry’s indispensability in the face of mounting public debt. No less august a body than NASA has to periodically fire up the public imagination to justify its existence, too. Science writers support them in this, just as we hope Canadian critics continue to lend support to the nation’s poets.

How they do this is another matter altogether. We have good critics in this country who recognize that poetry criticism lives or dies on investigative skill and clear writing and who demonstrate these qualities in their reviews. Chris Jennings’ analysis of bp Nichol’s “Doors 1” and his subsequent defence of that treatment in the face of Zachariah Wells’ objections come immediately to mind. Though I quarrelled with Wells’ own reassessment of Don McKay in May 2006 his appreciation of John Smith in last month’s CNQ Magazine rights the balance in his favour it seems to me. Despite the remaining phantom pain friends of mine feel who’ve been stung by him, I confess (if it weren’t already obvious) to being an admirer of Carmine Starnino’s general style and rigor as a critical essayist, even when I demur on his closer readings of some poems. A discussion of Canadian criticism is impossible without him, as it is without Jay Ruzesky, Anita Lahey, and Sina Queyras, each good in his or her own way despite or, some might argue, because of the absence of an easily locatable or definable Canadian critical tradition.

How well we talk about poems, though, obviously has a bearing on how well we understand them and communicate what we understand to the reader. It’s a judicious juggling act which, if you’re good, will see you wind milling several balls in midair at a single time. Too often, though, reviewers are content with only two or three. Those who focus all their energies on thematic considerations, for example, we may suspect of having little more to offer. Too hard a focus on technique, parsing associational logic, praising or quarrelling with syntactic loops and disjunctions, flooding your prose with terms like "hypotaxis", "phanopetics" and, "homolochos" are also anathema to the reader who simply wishes to cut through to the poem’s core. (Admittedly, the dangers here are few as most critics routinely shy away from close readings, in part because these aren’t as fashionable as they once were, but more likely because of the time and effort required to fully educate themselves in technique, and in past or current aesthetics.)

More prevalent among our critics and reviewers are generalized comments on technique and an enormous amount of cherry picking, i.e. reviewers who seize on some small but easily identifiable particular in a poem, such as the assonance and dissonance contained in a line or stanza, and exaggerate its significance to the whole poem or to the book in which that poem appears. This failure to cast a wider technical net and talk about other pertinent matters such as the poet’s past work and the poet’s influences, but more importantly what’s actually happening on the page, are a function of ignorance and sloth, it seems to me. Spread across our cottage industry they're oversights that enervate us all.

This critical deficit likely stems from another, more long standing one: insufficient appreciation for the roots of good Canadian poetry, in turn hobbling our capacity to talk about poetry by discouraging us from developing a critical vocabulary which discourse on tradition naturally provides us. The outcome seems inevitable: a mere handful of knowledgeable critics willing to talk clearly and boldly about the poems they read; and a remaindered population of lower level reviewers who look on with awe or horror at those few with the capacity and the cojones to declare this book good, that book lousy.

The reasons for this are many: Training in critical thinking in the universities has long since been abandoned as tenured profs consign higher level instruction to struggling, almost uniformly unprepared and unseasoned sessional workers. The race to the bottom is accelerated by an almost universal unwillingness of poets to fill the breach by studying and sharing their own traditions, an anathema only deepened by generalized contempt for poetry as a cerebral and emotional activity.

Meantime, poetry workshops on the pantoum, ghazal and glosa abound; formal or even informal critical discussion about the tools poets have at their disposal (if they would only use them) or the historical drive to overthrow or modify a particular technical practice are seldom explored in colloquia or criticism. Thus, ignorance groping around in the dark accidentally seizes upon the hand of timidity. Short of someone turning on the light, the two are wedded together forever.

The solution? Well, I’d like to imagine whole schools devoted to critical tradition and practice. Short of this, the occasional course or three-day conference on literary journalism might be helpful. Before any of this can occur, though, perhaps we need to better understand the value that readers place on criticism. Sure, a perpetual, somewhat outworn cry, but asking the question continues to present pragmatic possibilities. Because assuming we can agree that criticism has the value we believe it has the next step might be to determine if we also can agree on some basic principles or standards in poetry criticism - not just for the sake of self-examination and to see how well we measure up, but to guide us in becoming better at what we do.

Words Made Flesh

2010-06-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

What’s the next best thing to reading a great poem? Asking the poet what s/he meant by it. This week, a wonderful poem in tribute to fathers by John Pass, winner of the 2006 Governor General's Award for English Poetry. Among other things I wanted to know what inspired the poem “Done With Begetting, Done” and how Pass uses form to reveal content. First, here’s the poem:

Done With Begetting, Done

Breathless, molten, motionless, pressed
so close

so hard upon the surety

she would be pregnant.
And she would be, knowing
within hours, be getting

named ones
for the cooling earth, its oxygen.
He wants his wife back however obtuse

to his specific
appetite, recipe, body part
of the week

diffuse in her at it again and again
pulled back and holding and
rolling the condom on that way into

essence, impossible licks simultaneous
of underarm, tongue-tip, pearl
of clitoris, exquisite bumping

at it all in bloom, pink cloud, his world
on auto-pilot, prime mover a fiend
for eccentric recreation, words
made flesh. Hers

crash through the house in guises
human, hot for cartoons, pancakes
sweetness in the usual places, approaches

consoling echoes
in the shadowy doorway:
“Don’t be afraid. Same place
as always. Snakes? Nooo. Sleep now

or come to bed with me
and Dad awhile. But no squirming.”

(from Radical Innocence, Harbour Publishing, Madeira Park, BC, 1994)
---
This poem is a lovely, honest description of a man’s feelings around his wife’s pregnancy. It’s also a little unsettling in its attitude towards her and the kids. Talk a little about how the poem came about.

The poem’s subject is of a man’s feelings around fatherhood generally, and around the adjustments parenthood impels within marriage. The book from which this poem is taken, Radical Innocence, is constructed upon a motif poem acting as table of contents which offers, line by line, titles for each of the poems within the book-length sequence. Here are three stanzas from that fifteen stanza motif poem, their lines (i.e. the titles of adjacent poems) leading in and out of “Done With Begetting, Done”:
…
of the human to the last word
of the least and loneliest---father

done with begetting, done
with all but the power

of the pregnant ether, refuge
of a world once various and fluid

...
The book is a personal engagement of Christian cosmology by a non-Christian, without the directives of faith, but still respectful of Christianity’s profound cultural influences. This accounts for the biblical vocabulary, most significantly the “begetting” of the Old Testament, those lists that are emblematic of patriarchy---about lineage, not life.

The wife in the poem turns the tables on that perspective, possessing the essential generative force that is the poem’s movement, too. The husband is disoriented, peripheral, a little desperate, a little pathetic, somewhat comic, and, by not too much of a stretch I think, implicates the father/deity notion (the absent, abstract, theoretically all powerful sky-god) in the unbalanced absurdity of his desire, his downshift from Creation to recreation, from impregnator (prime mover!) to a guy obsessed with compensatory sexual impossibilities, clever with words . ..

Meanwhile, here on earth, the named/nameless real kids are hungry for pancakes, cartoons and the usual parental attentions/consolations, accommodated mostly by their mother.

You’ve written elsewhere that you learned early as a poet to be patient, to allow images and ideas to cohere gradually. Part of this, you said, “was mistrust of the excitement of inspiration”. Is some of that mistrust at work here?

My mistrust of the excitement of inspiration developed in the 1980’s when I began to feel that I wanted to move beyond lyric occasional verse and the lyric sequences I’d been writing up to that point. It didn’t develop with Radical Innocence and is not really a factor in “Done With Begetting, Done” except insofar as the larger framework of the At Large quartet of books (of which Radical Innocence is the second) employed formal ways of governing and enhancing the lyric impulse, of adding complexity, nuance and depth to the inspirational rush.

In “Done With Begetting, Done” the excitement of inspiration is evident for me in the lyric quickness, the breathlessness, the urgency and demands of male desire and female nurture. If the poem also possesses the depth I hope it has that was accomplished in the extended, meditative process of the book’s construction alluded to above, in the formal, somewhat arbitrary element of the motif poem guiding the whole, disciplining and focusing the individual poems. Also, the time between the writing of that motif “template” and the writing of the individual poems in the book made space for puzzlement and contemplation of ideas and processes the lyric instances of inspiration were calling up. Lyric is the dominant form of contemporary verse. I didn’t want to lose its energy and attractiveness to readers, but I wanted to build something more from it than lyric alone can usually accomplish.

You use irregular lines, hard indents and fragments more than most poets I know. Here, that approach is a little more restrained, and helps, I believe, to support the lovely denouement by poem’s end. Am I right about that? Do you marry your style or structure to a particular effect?

Yes, form dances with content tirelessly, though not always intentionally. The phrasing of this poem’s title, for example, the bracketing “Done”, emphasizes the finality (and exasperation) of the transition couples make when deciding they’ve had the children they intended to have, while simultaneously emphasizing the astonishing, world-altering accomplishment, the remarkable “doneness” of having a family. I couldn’t have known the word would have that dual emphasis when I wrote the motif poem, but having the title phrased that way no doubt pushed “Done With Begetting, Done” down both those sign-posted paths. This sort of happy accident is what I love about poetry, as poet and reader, especially as a reader of my own poems years later. They can still surprise me!

The most striking formal effect for me within this poem, the one that pleases me the most reading it today, is the use and placement of the possessive pronoun “Hers”. It’s the only capitalized pronoun or noun except for “He”, “Snakes” and “Dad”. Those help to give away the poem’s sad/playful aside on Christian patriarchy. But the “Hers” is central, pivotal. Firstly it plays to the line it’s on; the flesh “He” most wants made from words (from the words of the poem, for example . . .) is “Hers”. (By the way, despite their insistence upon this tenet of faith Judeo/Christian religions most emphatically perform the antithetical transformation: the flesh made word).

Secondly, as the first word and subject of the sentence opening the following stanza (“Hers// crash through the house in guises/human . . “) the “Hers” points to her possession of the literal words (the “named ones”) made flesh; the kids racing around the house way too early on a weekend morning are the realization of her prophetic knowledge, her surety re pregnancy from the poem’s beginning. This last play on the word/flesh dichotomy has a dimension for me not explicitly available to readers but familiar enough; the woman in the poem is modeled upon one who gave up, at least temporarily, her writing to the demands of motherhood: her words made flesh. She has the last say anyway, dispelling (with a just to be sure disciplinary afterthought directed at Dad as much as to the kids) that dark dream about snakes.

2010-06-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

There’s a moment in Canadian poet John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse when Ford Maddox Ford recounts an earlier discussion with W.B. Yeats. Why, they asked, is joyfulness so seldom communicated in modern poetry? Joy can be found in prose. Why not in modern verse?

Ford thought he had the answer: “(If) poetry expresses the reality of existence - as I believe, along with Willie Yeats, it does...it follows that the experience of joy is in the nature of a fever, of hysteria, and not a well-founded natural human experience or condition.”

"The poet," Ford concluded, “is more at home in sorrow.”

So that got me thinking: When was the last time I read a poem that could be described as joyful? Do poems have any business expressing joy? Judging by most of the baleful, low grade depressive stuff that crosses my desk the answer would seem obvious: But for that moment when Wordsworth leaps about with the lambs in "Ode: On the Intimations of Immortality" or Earle Birney pivots happily, if precariously, on the ledge of a mountain peak in “David” joy seems all but verboten.

Undeterred, I went on the hunt and found this poem by American poet Gerald Stern. By Stern's own admission joyfulness has an important place in his poetry, but what we discover is that it’s not inimical to other emotions, in fact it springs from things like sadness, feelings of loss, even the tragic. Here it is. Enjoy.

Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye

Every city in America is approached
through a work of art, usually a bridge
but sometimes a road that curves underneath
or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel—

you don’t know it—that takes you through the rivers
and under the burning hills. I went there to cry
in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle
through fire and flood. Some have little parks—

San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque
is beautiful from a distance; it is purple
at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,
especially from the little rise on the hill

at 14-C; it has twelve entrances
like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,
has two small floating bridges in front of it
that brought me in and out. I said good-bye

to them both when I was 57. I’m reading
Joseph Wood Krutch again—the second time.
I love how he lived in the desert. I’m looking at the skull
of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye.

He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city
in every sense of the word; he wore a library
across his chest; he had a church on his knees.
I’m kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,

the last true city; after him there were
only overpasses and shopping centers,
little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper
with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf

where whores couldn’t even walk, where nobody sits,
where nobody either lies or runs; either that
or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,
a flower sucking the water out of a rock.

What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores
lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick
turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,
dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left

with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.
I put it in my leather pockets next
to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,
my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there

beside his famous number; there is smoke
and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter
is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting
is taking down his words. I’m kissing Stieglitz

good-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos
are making me cry; we’re walking down Fifth Avenue;
we’re looking for a pencil; there is a girl
standing against the wall—I’m shaking now

when I think of her; there are two buildings, one
is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;
there is a light on the meadow; there is a man
on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

(This Time: New and Selected Poems, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999)

2010-05-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

Ubiquitous, multivalent, ambitious: is there any space the poetry anthology has not occupied, any group left unchampioned? This week, the third instalment in “Scriblerus Club 2010” featuring poet-editors Todd Swift, Marilyn Bowering and rob mclennan on the joys and challenges of anthologies.

Todd Swift’s interest in poetry began when his mother introduced him as a child to Dickinson, Frost, Whitman, Eliot, Williams, Yeats, Kenneth Fearing and many others. She also gave him his first college anthology of modern poetry so that by the age of fourteen, says Swift, “it was my dream to become an anthologist."

Today, the British-Canadian poet is one of Canada’s leading poet-editors under the age of 45, travelling in 1987 to Belfast to research his first anthology, Map-Maker’s Colours: New Poets of Northern Ireland (1988), co-edited with Martin Mooney. Ever present in his consciousness: a list of “classic poetry anthologies” that reads like a movie credit roll: Lehman, Hoover, Donald M. Allen, Al Alvarez's The New Poetry, The Oxford Book of English Verse.

“My desert island would want Hayden Carruth's The Voice That Is Great Within Us and The Faber Book of Modern Verse by Michael Roberts. Oscar Williams did some fine anthologizing as well. And of course, Other Men's Flowers is the ultimate. AJM Smith did a good job for Canadian poetry. Geddes’ anthologies are on every shelf of people who care about Canadian poetry.”

So anthologies are everywhere to be found, catering to just about every taste and aesthetic. But why the impulse to assemble them and what are they good for? As an academic tool? To broaden the audience for poetry? Or do they merely serve to launch work that might not be published otherwise?

“Anthologies do so many different things, and are aimed at various audiences. Brian Trehearne's new scholarly Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960 is good for what it is, and adds some new obscure poets to the canon. More canonically daring are the ones by Starnino and Queyras, for instance. And sometimes, they are just for fun, or for a good cause - or allow poems to be rescued from the emphemerality of the small press and little magazine.”

Along with the anthologies come the controversies: Who’s in? Who’s out? And is this really the “best of” Canadian, American, British or Irish poetry? Swift calls complaints about the decisions anthology editors make de rigueur, like complaining about the weather, a “national habit”’ in Britain where he now resides.

“However, anthologies are not "poetry" or "literature" - they aren't the tradition or the canon, just a means of allowing readers to glimpse what those might be. It is therefore simplistic to complain that anthologies often shape or represent or mediate poetry in ways that vary from the reader’s own needs or beliefs.”

“It is always possible to edit your own anthology if one feels strongly enough. Few anthologies are powerful enough to influence the debate truly. But they do have weight, and it is good to keep an eye on them, of course.”

Still, one reader last week lamented that too often anthologies purport to speak for the whole and end up "a tag-team of lyric, narrative and formal poets offering up a very narrow serving" of poetry that ignores the long poem, ignores the avant garde, while simultaneously posturing as a “national” poetry. Swift doesn’t buy this complaint either:

“Your reader who bemoans "lyric, narrative and formal" work is one of the reasons that Canadian poetry is so indifferently received around the world - the Geddes generation over-stresses a tendency for Canadian poetry to valorize the long poem, the avant-garde, and free verse.”

The result, says Swift, is that an important link is broken to the Irish-British mainstream traditions, including much of High Modernism, from Yeats to Auden.
---
Like Swift, rob mclennan believes anthologies can serve many functions, often at the same time. At bottom, his instinct as an anthology editor has been to “enrich the conversation of literature as opposed to replace anything.”

“I adhere to Kroetsch's idea that literature is a conversation. But if the same voices are constantly talking, how far can the conversation go?”

mclennan says his Side/lines: A New Canadian Poetics (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2002) came about as a direct result of a new edition of Margaret Atwood's Survival published in the mid-1990s, without, he says, “even an update of `books by the same author.’" The book was considered “skewered” when it originally appeared, says mclennan, was reissued “for the sake of the foreign market” and is “still littering Canadian used bookstores across the country”. mclennan wanted “another point of view” on “what Canadian writing could be”. What might that “conversation” look like, he asked, what “other considerations”, what “other voices?”

In his subsequent essay "The Trouble with Normal", mclennan took particular issue with the two Breathing Fire anthologies by Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier. His main concern: their claim that the poems they selected were "representative" of the "best Canadian poetry", poems mclennan describes as “metaphor-driven lyric narrative poems”, written by Canadian poets under the age of thirty and most of them, he hastens to add, Lane and Crozier’s former writing students.

“It wasn't (representative), and to claim such is divisive, and offensive to those who happen to have interests that don't coincide with theirs. Had they not said that, the writing within might have been read with less rancour, but again, they might not have received as much attention. When I've done the "decalogue" anthologies, I've tried to balance ten voices of writers I think are doing interesting work, not claiming "best" or anything like that. It's only the “best” based on my interest, my knowledge, etc.”

mclennan makes similar comments about A.F. Moritz’s The Best Canadian Poetry in English in 2009 (see Speaking of Poems, May 15). “Riddled with problems”, that anthology, he maintains, should have been called Best Canadian metaphor-driven lyric narrative Poetry. “To say otherwise is completely misunderstanding the art as a whole,” he adds.

By the same token, mclennan acknowledges that Lane, Crozier and other anthologists face the always difficult, inevitable task of leaving someone out. “I can't claim that my point of view is the only one there is. Here are ten writers doing work really worth reading. Readers are allowed to disagree.”

Todd Swift concurs, but with an important caveat.

“I always regret what has been excluded, but enjoy what has been included. When you invite friends to dinner, it would be perverse to dwell on the Chinese meal you have not served - better to enjoy the steak and potatoes on offer.’
---
Back in 1977 Marilyn Bowering hoped readers would agree with her that at least one group of poets badly needed including in our “national” literature: Canada’s Aboriginal poets. Hence her and David Day’s decision to compile Many Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Indian Poetry (J. J. Douglas, 1977). It was her belief that a rich oral tradition of Aboriginal poetry was in danger of disappearing altogether and that an anthology would fill an important gap.

“At the time there was nothing published. I mean Buffy Sainte-Marie’s songs were poems and there were one or two (Aboriginal) people who had published a few things, but there didn’t seem to be any gathering place or real consciousness of it. So it was important to get those voices out, even as a first step, so that Aboriginal people who were writing would connect with each other.”

Something that irritates Bowering are Canadian schools of poetry that spring up with an orientation very much outside the country and that won’t look at their own roots and history. The US continues to be a preponderant influence in her view, much as it was upon the Tish Movement, which she acknowledges produced “some wonderful poets”, but failed to provide “a real sense of Canadian literature.”

“While working on my anthology at the time, it was my own sense that there has to be recognition of the ground that you stand on if you’re to get anywhere… For me it was very much land and place based, very much centred on the discoveries made by oral poets from the indigenous culture or later poets.”

Anthologies based upon a theme, gender, region or culture have their advocates and detractors, usually centred around the question of criteria and the quality of poetry unearthed. rob mclennan is a fan of regional anthologies such as one produced in Chicago a few years back and one published by Hagios Press on Saskatchewan. He has more difficulty with women-centred anthologies “because the same generation's male writers don't seem to be given the same attention.”

“There was a magnificent anthology recently of women's poetry and poetics with Coach House Books that is essential reading, but part of me wondered, why can't Stan Rogal be treated this well? Or Stephen Cain?”

Swift is cautious about theme, gender or culturally based anthologies, too, a circumspection shared by Laura Riding and Robert Graves who went so far as to oppose anthologies altogether, and by Bishop who felt anathema for specific anthologies. Anthologies, Swift repeats, “have different roles to play.”

“I do feel that, if one is going to do a "national" anthology the editor needs to be alert to the complex issues surrounding identity, belonging, citizenship, and so on - poets don't always fit neatly into the boxes we might want for them.”

Marilyn Bowering’s biggest concern is a lack of community among Canadian poets overall “because we don’t have things that tell us what’s going on except in a very limited area.” One of her favourite anthologies is the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology but even this is not the “way to find out what’s going on.” What’s needed is a “sense of continuity that you are connected to a tradition…I think that’s really really important.” Anthologies can provide that, says Bowering, but she’s unsure about how they get into people's hands now: Outside of a few university courses, schools don’t use them much, she contends, and not very many people “just pick up an anthology and leaf through it.”

Something Bowering, Swift and mclennan agree on is that editors are obliged to “know the field”, to learn as much as they can about the traditions of poetry and various aesthetics out there - and to do the legwork when their education or tastes fail them. It often takes a special person willing to do that, says Bowering, such as the late Charles Lillard.

“One of the truly lamentable things about his early death is that Lillard was one of the few people who could have kept anthologizing and incorporating the eye that he brought to the selection and a sense of the continuity and history of British Columbia. Someone who has a grasp of that is really important.”

“Knowing the field is different from liking, approving of, or wanting to represent, the field,” says Todd Swift. His own selections, for example, have been very eclectic, very open. 100 Poets Against The War was not first and foremost an aesthetic enterprise. Poetry Nation showcased what Swift called “B-poetry - trashy fun stuff, like those 50s movies, that, subversive in its way, is often marginalized by the mainstream but has its charms.”

“However, when one is doing a canonical anthology, like the Carcanet one, the editors should know their history, and their tradition, before making too many moves. Anthologies are a genre, and, while secondary to the most creative act, are, like curating an exhibition or editing a film, also aesthetic; skill too is required.”

Nor can editors get out of their obligations by citing overwork. Yes, there are an enormous number of poems and poets out there. And at the end of the day anthologies such as the Best American and Best Canadian and Best Irish may only partially capture all that’s extant. But even these, Swift contends, “keep an eye on the annual yield.”

Still, the task, even for one with as voracious an appetite for editing as Swift, is sometimes overwhelming:

“My most daunting (anthology) has been the most recent, the forthcoming Modern Canadian Poets from Carcanet, edited with Evan Jones. It required us to reconsider the entirety of 20th century Canadian poetry, with new eyes and ears.”
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Another common complaint about anthologies: overreaching, underachieving claims about the scope of the poetry selected. Like most hubris it’s an in-built folly easily exposed not by those who’ve been excluded, but by anyone with a rudimentary eye for detail. A.F. Moritz, for example, cited as guiding principles for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009 his placing of Canadian poetry “within the context of contemporary world poetry and within the English tradition”. However, the context he provides is neither very surprising (What are we if not influenced by English tradition?) nor very contemporary, relying upon world poets who are dead or nearly so, including Octavio Paz, Jorge Guillen, 87-year old French poet Yves Bonnerfoy, Czeslaw Milosz, Emerson and long ago Chinese poets.

But why include a statement of poetics at all? Bowering went so far as to exclude one at the front end of her anthology she says “to get out of the way” of the poems. Many individual collections don’t see the need. The answer, Gary Geddes told us at the beginning of this series, is that it helps teachers and students understand more of the poetic process and the kind of aesthetic issues that poets find important.

But mclennan and Swift demure slightly on the necessity and impact of poetic or aesthetic statements.

“Well, Geddes has been decades deliberately building mass market poetry anthologies for university courses, so his comments are fair, but not all books are made for those purposes,” says mclennan. “Does the reader or writer inside the industry, inside books, for decades, really go through those `teaching aides’ with the same fine-tooth? Perhaps not.”

“I believe it is important,” says Swift, “for the editors to discuss, or at least imply, their poetic or critical bias. This need not include an ars poetica or poetics, though. The difference between North American and British poetry now is that the one cannot move without a poetics, the other barely admits poetics exists.
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Anthologies are viewed by many poets as the ultimate validation of their careers, and some poets, especially well established ones, agonize when they’re ignored. How seriously should they take this? Do poets ever solicit editors to be included in an upcoming anthology? And should they?

“Sometimes poets do approach an editor of an anthology," says Swift. “It likely doesn't make much of an impact. Anthologists usually already know the field they are surveying, as it were, by the time they begin to compile the contributors list.”

rob mclennan knows the feeling of being left out, including from the two Breathing Fires to the myriad of follow-ups. But writing, he reminds us, is a lonely business, with few acknowledgements. Writers need to “find their own footings, their own confidence, and not rely on outside forces to arbitrarily give purpose to what it is that they do”. Otherwise, you drive yourself mad waiting. Or if you need to complain, he says, reserve it “to a small parcel of friends”.

“Books are books. Some very important writers have never set foot in an anthology, and some forever-minor poets can run off lists of books they’ve been in until the cows come home. Poets agonize, writers agonize.”
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So what drives the inveterate anthologist? Many things: Omnivorous taste. A sense of outrage for the misplaced or the ignored. Sheer love of the genre.

“I loved my first, co-edited with Martin Mooney, Map-Maker's Colours: New Poets of Northern Ireland,” says Swift. “It was launched before my 21st birthday. It allowed me to meet Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian, and it was a thrill to hand a review copy over to Terry Eagleton in person, at the launch.”

Sometimes an anthology is driven by curiosity or even by the market place, as when Sina Queyras compiled her anthology of Canadian poetry for a New York publisher. mclennan calls it a “sampler” of Canadian poetry for an American audience, after years of Queyras being asked “What's worth reading in Canadian poetry?”

“Hers had no agenda apart from simply different writers, different voices, she thought worth reading; and hopefully, the book was a starting point for many readers to further explore.”
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Will the anthology survive? Gary Geddess seems to think so, though not in the same numbers. Costs are high. Teachers make course-packs of their dozen favourite poets, saving students money, but also the trouble of seeking out other poets. “And the –isms make their own demand on classroom time”. For his part, Swift acknowledges costs for rights for the best (or best-known) poems are high, even prohibitive. But at the same time “many publishers and poets are understanding and cooperative. I suspect more and more such works will be digitally available, and less in print form.”

In the end, all three poet editors agree it’s the “conversation” that counts and if anthologies help to broaden that conversation, well, so much the better. The stakes might be even higher, though. Swift believes Canadian poetry requires a reintroduction to readers in the UK, where it is almost entirely ignored, a point underscored by the omission of PK Page’s death from the UK’s national newspapers.

“Some Canadian poets blithely imply it no longer matters what the Irish and British think of them. Well, if Heaney and Motion don't read or know your work, it is indicative that one is not part of the world conversation in poetry, it seems to me. How else to explain a situation where we know them, but they don't know us? That's not an equal relationship.

Another, broader role for a great Canadian anthology? Perhaps.
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Todd Swift’s poetry has been collected in six collections, Budavox (1999), Café Alibi (2002), Rue du Regard (2004), Winter Tennis (2007), Seaway: New and Selected Poems (2008) and Mainstream Love Hotel (2009). In addition to numerous journals and magazines, Swift’s poetry has appeared in many anthologies, including Radio Waves (Enitharmon, UK, 2004), Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea Books, New York, 2005) and The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Véhicule, Montreal, 2005), as well as The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope, Toronto, 2008).

Swift is currently completing his phD and preparing to have a few poetry books out in a few years. He also hopes to write a novel before he turns 50. He’d also like to do an anthology of British Poets some day and write a study of contemporary and Forties poets. “I'll settle for what I can cram in with the time left me.”
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rob mclennan is currently preparing a number of projects for Chaudiere Books, including a selected poems by prairie poet Andrew Suknaski, a first trade collection by Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, and an anthology of non-fiction pieces by writers on Glengarry County. He is now polishing up a poetry collection or two, and trying to finish two major writing projects by the end of this year--a third novel, and his creative non-fiction work, Sleeping in Toronto.
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In addition to editing Many Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Indian Poetry (J. J. Douglas, 1977), Marilyn Bowering is one of Canada’s most cherished poets. She is also an accomplished novelist and is currently working as librettist on an opera with Gavin Bryars and is about to leave for an opera residency in Banff in June. For more background visit www.marilynbowering.com.

Scriblerus Club 2010

2010-05-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

The second in a three-part series on anthologies. Canadian poet, anthologist and translator Gary Geddes is author of numerous anthologies, notably his widely read Fifteen Canadian Poets and 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics. Geddes took some time this week to talk about his experience as an anthologist.

DK: What are anthologies good for anyway? as an academic tool? a tool for broadening poetry's audience?

GG: It’s always worth asking why an anthology has been produced. The reasons can be many: celebration, education, vanity, reminding the public at large that poetry is still our first language, self-promotion, cultural programming, money, smashing the canon, bringing in new voices, or all of the above.

DK: Is it quality alone that determines your selection? What are some of the challenges?

GG: I have produced a couple of international anthologies, a Canadian anthology (e.g. Fifteen Canadian Poets), a BC anthology (Skookum Wawa), a Vancouver anthology (Vancouver: Soul of A City), an anthology of writings about Latin-America (Compañeros), an anthology of new young writers (The Inner Ear), and a collection of travel writings (Chinada; Memoirs of the Gang of Seven). In some of these region, place, theme and other considerations, rather than just quality, were involved in the choice of materials.

The thematic or regional anthologies posed many challenges: in Skookum Wawa, for example, I had to consider the situation of BC writers who write about anything but British Columbia and to ask myself: am I celebrating the region here or, simply, its writers?? If the former, there’s a strong case for including non-Canadians who write tellingly about the province or region.

DK: Do American and British anthologies differ markedly from Canadian anthologies?

GG: I have not made a study of recent US and UK anthologies, so I can’t really answer this question. In the US, the big blockbusters like the Norton anthology still dominate the teaching of poetry. To tap into the Canadian market, which was fairly committed to my anthology, Norton included a few token Canadians with very modest representation. In the UK, Bloodaxe and Carcanet have used anthologies to advance the careers of their own stable of writers by including most of them in collections with a dozen or more famous names, which I think makes good sense given greater possibility of media attention for anthologies and the unlikelihood that the individual volumes are going to be found in most bookstores.

DK: Are we doing our best to capture the really good poets and good poetry in this country?

GG: Books, magazines, blogs, performances are certainly helping to give exposure to poetry, though the paucity of reviews and the dumbing down of the CBC in terms of the literary arts are not helpful. I think poetry should be at the centre of all literary studies, but that is definitely not the case at universities or in schools.

As for locating and promoting the best poets, that will always be a problem, given the size of the pack and the solitary nature of the activity. As the editor of a magazine, blog and non-commercial anthology, it’s often possible to include a few great poets, but not always possible to get their best poems, especially if you're not able to pay when asking for new or previously unpublished work. Most poets, even the best, do not hit a home-run every time at bat.

DK: A related question readers had last week was how much we can or should expect of anthology editors in terms of "knowing the field." Based upon your experience editing 20th-Century Poetry & Poetics how far should an editor go in trying to represent the array of tastes that are out there?

GG: When I proposed and was given the opportunity to edit 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics, it was in response to my awareness that there were no serious modern anthologies in print that represented (in good measure) the poetries (in English) of Canada, the UK and the US. We were still in colonial mode, reading British and American writers, but not our own. So, my aim was to produce a teaching anthology that would cover the major figures and movements, as I saw them, placing Canadian poets alongside their contemporaries.

The two other aims were to make the selections for each poet substantial enough to give a clear sense of the poet’s development; and to provide statements on poetics that would help teachers and students understand more of the poetic process and the kind of aesthetic issues that poets find important.

It must have seemed to friends that I was hoping for a miracle to be born from the marriage of my ignorance and arrogance. However, I made it my task to study the field, consider a wide range of critical opinions, and play those opinions off against my own subjective responses as a reader. It was a big gamble for Oxford University Press to take me on; and it was a leap of faith for me to think (and assure Oxford) that I could handle such a project.

The book was time-sensitive, of course, as are all anthologies, products of their moment and geo-historical situation. This means that as the various revised editions were pondered, debated, then produced, the scene had changed radically and often; and so had I, along with my taste. Because the anthology had become successful both pedagogically and commercially, what started as a pioneering venture inspired by passion and hope was now being transformed into a re-tooling compromised by market considerations.

In the case of each new edition, various users of the anthology were consulted, asked what had been left out, what should be added, and what might be removed. The responses to these questions, some of them very helpful, were given serious consideration, but in the end all were filtered through my own impressions of the developing poetry scene and my own slowly emerging personal aesthetic, which involved a gradual shift of emphasis from the lyric to the longer forms and to more engaged writing.

The problem here—one among many—was that every decade brought so many new poets into print, in Canada and abroad, that it was impossible for me to have read and considered them all. And this problem has increased exponentially in the intervening years. As Yeats said in his address to the Scriblerus Club (in the chauvinism of the time): “Gentlemen, there are too many of us.” What once seemed, in my ignorance and naivety, a wonderful gesture of inclusion and celebration has come to feel like an unfortunate and inescapable act of exclusion.

In short, I’ve come to believe that anthologies are probably still a necessary evil, but most definitely only a temporary good.

DK: Will we see as many anthologies as are published today?

GG: Given the conflicting and, at times, contradictory impulses governing the production of anthologies, not to mention the cost of permissions, I am amazed that anthologies still continue to be produced at all. So I suspect in the next decade or two there will be fewer and fewer major teaching anthologies produced in Canada. And those that are produced will include only new or unpublished poems. Costs are too high; broad course adoptions are no longer possible. Individual teachers are making course-packs of their dozen or more favourite poets or poems, saving students a few dollars but depriving them of exposure to a much wider selection of work than can usually be covered in the course. All the various –isms, too, are making their demands on classroom time.

DK: What are you working on now?

GG: I am working on a non-fiction book about justice and healing in sub-Saharan Africa that took me to Rwanda, Uganda, DR Congo, Ethiopia and Somaliland twice last year. I am about to do the proofing of a new book of poems called Swimming Ginger and a reprint of The Terracotta Army and, as always, tinkering with new poems. No more anthologies, though I am putting some thoughts together on the subject in an essay called "Confessions of An Unrepentant Anthologist."

DK: Why “unrepentant”? And do you have any suggestions for someone planning their first anthology?

GG: I think you can see from what I've written above that there is always struggle and guilt involved in selecting; thus the word 'confession.' If you're planning an anthology, make sure you have deep pockets and wear a bullet-proof vest; or, to change the metaphor, have very good line-backers.

Gary Geddes recently published a small book of essays entitled Out of the Ordinary: Politics, Poetry & Narrative (Kalamalka Press, Okanagan College, Vernon, 2009). The Terracotta Army is a reprint of a book that won the Americas Region award for the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and was dramatized and broadcast by both CBC and BBC radio. The publications coincide with the arrival in Canada of the terracotta warriors exhibit, which will go to the ROM in Toronto, Glenbow in Calgary, Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal, and the Royal BC Museum in Victoria.
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Next week: Part Three of Scriblerus Club 2010 featuring, among others, British-Canadian poet and anthologist Todd Swift.
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The response to my request for a poem to be read aloud at the beginning of Victoria’s city hall council meeting May 13 was tremendous. Ultimately, I selected a poem by Victorian Dave Cavanaugh. Here it is. Enjoy:

Sorry We Are

In Victoria, city of lights and ancient flora,
huge buses with the broad faces of totems
crawl by flashing digitized confession:
“SORRY I AM”

Giant Yodas of urban transit they are,
lost apologetic mammoths. Queenly
city, hungry we are for your destinations,
and sorry for your buses’ sorrow.
Our own it is.

The next flash: “NOT IN SERVICE.” Sad
but fair enough. We understand your woe. So
much history to traverse, so much paved over
that may not be unearthed, time there is
not enough.

The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009 - a Review

2010-05-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

We’ve all encountered them: anthologies that ascribe to their poets the broadest thematic or artistic scope possible, or assume for their selection a cultural importance wildly out of proportion to the merits. At most, I can think of two or three anthologies that can make plausible claims to aesthetic omniscience, notably The New American Poetry 1945-60. Edited by Donald Allen, that tome did American poetry the inestimable favour of pulling together largely unknown and disparate materials from across the country by poets such as Ginsberg, Levertov, and Ashberry whose reputations had languished unfairly beneath the shadow of Bishop and Lowell. The same importance has been attached to Gary Geddes’ and Phyllis Bruce’s Fifteen Canadian Poets which in 1970 established three generations of poets as the extant canon of Canadian poetry for the next quarter century. But for the fact that few took notice, The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse also did a good job at representing poets from the previous era and for accelerating Canada’s claim to “a national literature.”

The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009 is no less ambitious, managing to dust off a few shibboleths about Canadian poetry that have the unfortunate effect of distracting us from the essential qualities of the poems themselves. Among the bromides: the inevitable “heart-wrenching” decision about whom to exclude, the desire that Canadian poetry take its rightful place among world literature, and the usual injunction that readers take note of the striking “unity” of the book they’re about to enter. Editors of anthologies routinely outdo each other trying to identify a “grand unified theory” into which twenty-five poets or more conveniently fit and Molly Peacock and A.F. Moritz are no exceptions. “Each one of the poems” in this volume, Moritz asserts, “gives a descent into reality and then a lift…a release from the customary. Every one of them (my italics) remembers at all times that the motive of the journey is to enlighten and to deepen our lives,” the latter sentiment being what you’d expect, I suppose, given this is art we’re talking about. Still, how committed these poets are to “enlightening” us I suspect is a matter of degree rather than of kind.

But Moritz continues: Each poet in this anthology is a “nature poet” understood in the way Jan Zwicky understands a nature poet, as “someone who would resist the suggestion that the world is a human construct, a thing that depends upon a human speaking or knowing to exist.” Yet humans constructing the world in their own image seems to be at least part of the point of several poems here, including the first poem by Atwood “Ice Palace”. Far from insisting upon the universe as a wholly objective entity outside the realm of the subjective, Atwood suggests the world is largely dependent, rightly or wrongly, upon the shaping power of human language:

Another ice palace. Another demiparadise
where all desires
are named and thus created,
and then almost satisfied. Hotel
might be an accurate label.

A preferred strategy might have been to talk about the virtuosity and intelligence of the poems themselves rather than tie them together thematically or aesthetically. Because whatever hyperbolic statements Moritz is pleased to make about Canadian poetry his principal strength is a good eye for very good poetry, assembling a collection of poems that depart significantly in quality from the previous year’s batch. Where the inaugural 2008 edition of The Best Canadian Poetry contained poems that were, with few exceptions, unrelievedly dull and unrepresentative of the very best those poets could do, the poems in this anthology are consistently interesting, most of them thoughtful and lively and some, like the poems I discuss below, edging close to the extraordinary.

Ken Babstock continues to set the pace in Canada for writing striking individual poems. A case in point is “Autumn News from the Donkey Sanctuary”, a serious poem that’s also a lot of fun as Babstock projects his thoughts onto the activities of donkeys and mules ensconced behind a UNCHR animal enclosure, e.g. “Cargo”, a donkey who has “let down/her hair a little and stopped pushing/Pliny the Elder on//the volunteer labour” and Odin who “has made friends with a crow//who perches between/his trumpet-lily ears like bad language he’s not/meant to hear”. The first clue to where Babstock is taking us can be felt in the poem’s structure: Unrhymed, periodically enjambed tercets that provide a measured cadence to lightly sardonic observations about animals and humans. For Babstock, it’s the contrasts between humans and donkeys that count:

…These things done

for stateless donkeys,
mules, and hinnies – done in love, in lieu of claims
to purpose or rights –

are done with your
generous help. In your names. Enjoy the photo.
Have a safe winter

outside the enclosure.

The poem is not, as Moritz puts it, about the “horrors of routine”, but about the extraordinary need we humans have for personal safety and even safer abstractions, contrasted with the simpler needs of animals: love, birth, the warmth of proximity, a good feed on “scotch thistle” and “stale Cheerios.” It’s a paean to love and freedom, remarkable both for its tenderness and insight.

For Lorna Crozier, animals – or for that matter nature in its entirety – have always been the joyful, troubling Other against which human beings endeavour to locate themselves. In “Mercy”, Crozier again demonstrates her enviable capacity for capturing immediate, palpable experience, in this instance the force of a hurricane wind descending upon her town: “It batters the town/slams a sheet of plywood against the curling rink/shoves me down the alley in my slippery shoes.” Not content with mirroring nature’s ferocity in horrific images of coyotes hanging from clothesline poles, Crozier transforms these images into a compelling question about the ambiguity of our relationship with nature:

Beauty graces them, even now, death graces them.
Is it a curse to love the world too much,
to praise its paws and hooves,
its thick-furred creatures, each life a fear in me?
The wind saves nothing on this earth.
The coyotes hang like coyotes from an ugly tree.
Their throats don’t make a sound.

Carmine Starnino is easily one of the best poets in the country, with enormous formal skills, though often a little impersonal, sometimes cold. Great technical choices are made, but too often they’re only choices, not impulses flowing upward from the poem’s centre or out of any internal pressure from within the poet himself. “Pugnax Gives Notice” is different, as organically perfect a poem as I’ve read in some time.

He’s done with it, the tridents and tigers,
the manager’s greed, the sumptuous beds
of noble women who please their own moods.
He’s done with dogging it for the crowds,
the stabbing, the slashing, the strangling,
the poor pay, the chintzy palm branch prizes.
Make no mistake. Pugnax is a real fierceosaurus.
Winner of 26 matches, a forum favourite.
Yet his yob genes have, it seems, gone quiet.
Fatigue has called his soul back to his body.
Circles under his eyes; he sleeps badly.
Late night cigs lit from the dog-end of the last,
cutwork of the clock nibbling him small.
In the barracks around him his friends snore,
lucky returnees of the last hard hacking,
dead to the world, free of a weapon in the fist.
Priscus face-down in the crook of his arm.
Triumphus flung open, caught on a bad turn.
Verus collapsed, whacked, against the cot.
Flamma, doomed by down-thumbing shadows,
lies in a stain of his final shape and size.
Pugnax loves them all, chasers and net-fighters,
fish-men and javelin-throwers, carefree
despite punishing practices, screaming orders,
despite limbs trained to turn lethal for mobs
unable to bear the thought of two men
clinging to life, but here it’s only the thock
of wooden sword against wooden sword,
the racket as they fall on each other’s shields
in joy. Pugnax’s heart breaks for them.
Understand, he has inflicted pain and felt pain,
but now wants to go native, move into a flat,
experiment with fashionable clothes,
dawdle at the baths, tame his nights with tea,
be spellbound by the smell of soap, find a wife.
Our boy dreams of joining the crowd,
shouting himself hoarse as some bonehead
gets knocked down and the blade pushed
though his chest, stapling him to the ground.
At intermission, he’ll watch as the blood
is raked over with sand, thinking chore thoughts:
yard work, paint jobs, weekend projects.

Like most of the poems in this anthology Starnino’s poem is restrained typographically, preferring formal stanzas of varying lengths over heavily indented lines or fragments. He also shares with the other poets in this book a desire that the reader walk away with something by poem’s end, a thought bathed in irony, a tragic image or a resonating feeling, something to spark the intellect or roil the gut. Most believe these to be the sine qua non of good poetry and they’re right, but not, as I suggested above, easily apparent in the 2008 anthology or of a great many other books of poetry.

Something else lacking in most poetry today are poems that are mindful of their traditions. Robyn Sarah’s “Echoes in November” breaks a virtual taboo by post-shadowing the “corresponding breeze” that flows through Wordsworth’s The Prelude and echoing the implicit question about “essences” that permeate and arise out of Pound and Williams:

Correspondences are everywhere,
things that shadow things,
that breathe or borrow
essence not their own;
and so the yellow leaves
that, singly, streak
in silence past a black
uncurtained pane…
have the elusiveness
of shooting stars…

The images are well drawn and the pauses at the turns arrest our attention lending weight to each successive line. But more interesting is what Sarah does with metaphor, not just positing the similarity between “streaking leaves” and “shooting stars”, but transforming our act of reading, in particular our overdependence upon visual similes, to produce an extraordinarily haunting effect:

and so it sometimes happens
that you pause
in kitchen ministrations,
knife in hand
above the chopping board,
savouring, raw, a stub
of vegetable not destined
for the pot,
and faintly tasting
at the back of the palate
the ghost of a rose
in the core of the carrot.

These poets are well known to us. Others are less familiar (to me at least), but judging by their contributions here are equally compelling. A poem noteworthy for its compression and precision is Michael Johnson’s ode to metalworking “The Church of Steel”: “Shavings have scissored/my palms, worked straight through/my hands, made my skin a bloody bloom.” Prose poems are not easily done and tend to leave me cold, but Eric Miller’s “Portrait of Hans Jaegger ll (1943)” is different, delivering a personally felt portrayal of the late 19th century bohemian and anarchist Hans Jaeger as seen through the eyes of an ambivalent Edvard Munch: “But Jaeger conceived in the artist what was most central to him, what belonged at last to him. And we see our helpers in just this light, as when sun mollifies fallen pine needles and illuminates, as with final looks of mercy, the flanks of birches.” Readers will really love Cora Siré’s “Before Leaving Hué” a narrative about people in this Vietnamese city who repeatedly enjoin the poet to “visit Thúy’ before you leave Hue’”. Siré is currently working on a novel, which is not wholly surprising: she has a novelist’s genius for detail and strong predicates:

Under the hammer of Hué’s morning sun
my xich lo driver pedals the labyrinth
of streets and alleys, past shadowy shops
where raw silks hang inert, dazed by the heat.
We skid on the puddles and pebbled ruts
and I gesture, “Let me walk the rest” but
he cycles on, eyes glazed, body bent by
psychic will that I visit Thúy today.

I could have easily selected any one of a half dozen more poets to talk about. Karen Solie’s “Tractor” I mentioned in last week’s post. She’s joined here by other exceptional poets: Sharon Thesen, Jan Zwicky, Peter Norman, Dave Margoshes and Steven Heighton. Tim Bowling, one of the few poets in last year’s edition whose poem I really liked, I liked again this year. In summary, a really fine anthology, distinguished not by any over arching Canadian Zeitgeist, but by accomplished, eminently readable poetry.

Deus Ex Machina

2010-05-07T09:14:00.001-07:00

If toppling oil rigs and failed terrorist explosions tell us anything it's that our world is still largely mechanical, buffeted by gods both daemonic and heavenly. W.H. Auden, son of an engineer, understood this perfectly, though he deplored the effects. This week: seven poems that explore the phenomena of machines, three of my own selection and two each from John Pass and Zachariah Wells.

First, George Oppen, self described “passionate mechanic” and one of the leading Objectivist poets in the 1930s, spoke about his poem “Image of the Engine” as “the image of man as a machine, with a ghost.” For him, the poem explores how we see objects differently depending upon their changing states, in this instance an ordinary “lump of steel” that comes to life as a motor. This, in turn, calls into question our need for belief - driven by our capacity for belief, and our need to know and imagine the world.

Image of the Machine

Likely as not a ruined head gasket
Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft
Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a pile-driver:
A machine involved with itself, a concentrated
Hot lump of a machine
Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the valves jumping
And the heavy frenzy of the pistons. When the thing stops,
Is stopped, with the last slow cough
In the manifold, the flywheel blundering
Against compression, stopping, finally
Stopped, compression leaking
From the idle cylinders will one imagine
Then because he can imagine
That squeezed from the cooling steel
There hovers in that moment, wraith-like and like a plume of steam, an aftermath,
A still and quiet angel of knowledge and of comprehension.

From The Materials (New Directions, 1962)

Completely at ease in the world of machines, Karen Solie recalls how her parents bought a giant tractor, the Buhler Versatile 2360. It was so big they had to construct another building in which to house it. For this year’s Canadian Griffin prize nominee, though, seeing ordinary objects through a different lens seems to be the main point of her poem “Tractor.” The “weirdness of the normal, “she says, “is constantly fascinating to me.”

Tractor

More than a storey high and twice that long,
it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,
possessed of the ecology of some hellacious
minor island on which options
are now standard. Cresting the sections
in a corona part dirt, part heat, it appears
risen full blown from our deeper needs,
aspirating its turbo-cooled air, articulated
and fully compatible. What used to take a week
it does in a day on approximately
a half mile to the gallon. It cost one hundred
fifty grand. We hope to own it outright by 2017.
Few things wrought by human hands
are more sublime than the Buhler Versatile 2360.

Across the road, a crew erects the floodlit
derricks of a Texan outfit whose presumptions
are consistently vindicated.
The ancient seabed will be fractured to 1,000 feet
by pressuring through a pipe literal tons
of a fluid — the constituents of which
are best left out of this —
to tap the sweet gas where it lies like the side
our bread is buttered on. The earth shakes
terribly then, dear Houston, dear parent
corporation, with its rebroken dead and freshly
killed, the air concussive, cardiac, irregular.
It silences the arguments of every living thing
and our minds in that time are not entirely elsewhere.

But I was speaking of the Buhler Versatile 2360,
Phase D! And how well recognized it is
among the classics: Wagner,
Steiger, International Harvester, John Deere, Case,
Minneapolis-Moline, Oliver, White, Allis-Chalmers,
Massey Ferguson, Ford, Rite, Rome.
One could say it manifests fate, cast
like a pearl around the grit of centuries. That,
in a sense, it’s always been with us,
the diesel smell of a foregone conclusion.
In times of doubt, we cast our eyes
upon the Buhler Versatile 2360
and are comforted. And when it breaks down, or thinks
itself in gear and won’t, for our own good, start,
it takes a guy out from the city at 60 bucks an hour,
plus travel and parts, to fix it.

From Pigeon (House of Anansi Press, 2010)

"The Way Things Work" is the first poem in Jorie Graham’s Pulitzer Prize winning book The Dream of the Unified Field. Like Oppen, Graham’s preoccupation here is with our capacity for belief. What makes her poem even more interesting, though, is its resistance to the phenomenological perspective on objects, preferring to treat them as real rather than mere appearances to the mind.

The Way Things Work

is by admitting
or opening away.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
moving through blue;
blue through purple;
the objects of desire
opening upon themselves
without us; the objects of faith.
The way things work
is by solution,
resistance lessened or
increased and taken
advantage of.
The way things work
is that we finally believe
they are there,
common and able
to illustrate themselves.
Wheel, kinetic flow,
rising and falling water,
ingots, levers and keys,
I believe in you,
cylinder lock, pully,
lifting tackle and
crane lift your small head--
I believe in you--
your head is the horizon to
my hand. I believe
forever in the hooks.
The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.

From The Dream of the Unified Field (Ecco Press, 1995)
---
John Pass has two lovely poems (one his own) about machines:

Great poems David. And so important, the machines in our lives and in the imaginations of our poets. Poetry’s hands-on mastery of language signals a keen affinity with tools and machinery of all sorts, too little acknowledged and honoured. A favourite of mine in the genre is Snyder’s "Axe Handles":

One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in the stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
“When making an axe handle

the pattern is not far off.”

And I say this to Kai
“Look: We’ll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—“
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It’s in Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, fourth century
A.D. “Essay on Literature”—in the
Preface: “In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand.”
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.

(from Axe Handles, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983)

And I offer a poem of my own, a section of "Twinned Towers", for the grounding and lift serviceable machinery returns to us under duress:

Crane

Growl and rumble in the skyline’s hole
in flat light over the Hudson
of a world on hold, in waiting . . .

Not for survivors in their imminent tombs.
Not for the shamming Imam in his mountain.
Not for the CEO on his smug plush. (Not shovel
nor smart bomb nor markets collapsing can flush them . . .)

but for the rest of us

trapped in the dark of our devolution, in the dark
rain and stutter of the bombs on the other
side of the world, in the inarticulate
annihilation, retribution – for us

this heavy lifting, trucking, kneel and bow
of the earth-mover, shape-shifter, spirit
of the mass, and the derricks’ swinging benediction above

the work’s ascent by an anchored increment, just clear
of the girdered rubble. These durable materialists

(true fundamentalists)
are reaching for us in the subterrain, the unseen

where invisible trains link in their tunnels
and ground-water presses the dry-socket membranes
and millions of conversations sprint in the micro-filaments.
Where the gold is hidden, where the 18th century anchor unearthed
for the towers’ first foundation (at loose ends
in dry-dock three decades in the basement)
is newly burdened, embedded again

in more than bombast and stale air . . .
in ballast beneath our delusions
they grapple and winch and pray for us, our trusted
machines, our first-born prehensile mentalities.

(from Stumbling in The Bloom, Oolichan Books, Lantzville, 2005
John Pass)

---
Finally, here's Zachariah Wells:

Hi David. Very interesting post. In the spirit of John Pass's offering, I thought I'd send you two poems in which the poet is the "ghost in the machine." The first is Peter Trower's "Overhead Crane:

The second is one of my own, from my first book, dedicated to Trower:

FORKLIFT OPERATOR WANTED;
RECREATIONAL FACILITIES PROVIDED
for Peter Trower

At odd intervals when it’s all once
       Again come to be too much—the cold
Endless dark hours, the neglect, the fuckups—
       & I’m at the humming hydraulics

Of a sixteen tonne jouncing whore of a truck,
       Keeping ‘er reined with steady sure-
Handed turns round untold millions of dollars
       In planes—a lunatic flash on the verge

Of nervous crash, that diesel-burning urge
       To plow full-tilt through the thin tin
skin
Of a Boeing or Hawker, just to see once
       How deep her steel forks would sink!

Management must have guessed this, must
       Have planned it when the ’48
overshot the strip
Last December & they hauled its scrapped hull
       Back to the ramp for me to punch holes in.

---

It’s Mother’s Day this Sunday. Share the video of Daisy Zamora reading her poem about mothers in "Great Poems" in the right hand column.

Pure Play

2010-04-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

He is one of the most interesting poets to emerge in Canada in years. Winner of Poetry Magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize and Poetry's 2009 Editors Prize for Reviewing, Toronto’s Jason Guriel is author of two books of poetry, Technicolored (Exile Editions, 2006) and Pure Product (Signal, 2009). This week I asked him what he tries to achieve in his poems, who he writes for and about his feelings around “negative” reviewing.

DK: Pure Product is a very short book of poems, which suggests you were being very selective in your choice of poems. Is that so, and what prompted the book?

JG: I would like to be able to say I was “very selective” in my “choice of poems.” But, really, I just don’t write a lot of poems. So I have to work with what I come up with. Even now, a year after Pure Product, I’m still tinkering with leftover scraps that predate Pure Product, some of which were considered for the book and rejected. The one new poem I have forthcoming is a reject which stuck around and, because the cupboard is bare, got sent out to a magazine and, lucky for it, got accepted; got a shot at a second life. In other words, Pure Product had no choice but to be, as you say, “very short.” But a lack of productivity isn’t ultimately a bad thing. Most new books of poems are way too long.

What prompted Pure Product was Signal Editions’ offering to publish it. The book didn’t quite exist when the offer was made; it was just some poems lying around, unbeknownst to Signal. Signal liked what it’d seen of my work in magazines and was generous enough to reach out. I gathered together what I had on-hand and then wrote some more poems. When it came time to assemble the ms, I spread out the poems on the living room floor. Over the course of an hour or two, I figured out a sensible order – on the off-chance someone ever decides to read the book front to back.

DK: I know you’ve said you had no agenda for Pure Product as a whole, but poems like “Shopping Cart, Abandoned on Front Lawn” suggest a connection to Williams and the preoccupation with “getting things right” through sharp hard images. Does that link exist for you in the book?

JG: Well, the book takes its title from Williams’ lines “The pure products of America / go crazy,”which very nearly provided an epigraph for the book. There’s also a poem in Pure Product called “Thinginess.” So yes, Williams is definitely in there, lurking around the edges. But I had no planned design, and had the book been called Money Is Also a Kind of Music, which it very nearly was, you would probably be asking me about Wallace Stevens! Frost is another important, if less obvious, influence on Pure Product. He might even be more important to the book than Williams.

I want to add that I’m not rabidly anti-agenda – or arc, or concept – as some might think. But I have grown tired of books that are overly determined by some novel subject matter or structuring principle. My tiredness, of course, doesn’t preclude the possibility that worthwhile books of poetry, structured by predetermined arcs, are being written. I’m tired of a trend is all. But I do think that most poets would be better off focusing on getting individual poems right.

DK: A related notion is that poems can or should be self-contained, autonomous wholes, separate from biography, history or culture. Is that something you believe and work towards?

JG: When I’m composing a poem, I like to believe in the Romantic tableau of the authorial genius who transcends – placid and unchanging – the churning forces of history, biology, and economics; the authorial genius who brings off “self-contained, autonomous wholes.” But when I’m not writing a poem, I’m pretty sympathetic to Barthes’ thing about how “it is language which speaks, not the author.”

DK: I’m struck by how playful and fun your poems are, but outside of a brief reference to your father you don’t reveal much about yourself. Is that deliberate? Do you imagine yourself writing more personally in the future?

JG: Thanks. I do want the poems to be playful and fun. And it is deliberate, the not revealing much about myself. I don’t imagine writing more personally in the future. This would be fun for no one.

DK: What do you like and don’t like about Canadian poetry? Are there things Canadian poets might pay attention to in British or American poetry?

JG: Some small, surly part of me, slouching at the back of the seminar, wants to raise its hand and ask, “So, like, what is Canadian poetry?” But the other, more adult part of myself, which accepts the premise of your reasonable question, just doesn’t know how to answer it. I will say that it’s probably true that most Canadian poets used to pay too little attention to what was going on beyond the border. But fortunately this seems to have changed a bit. Canada’s best poets, like Eric Ormsby, appear to pay more than enough attention to a larger literary tradition.

DK: The formalist poet Tim Steele told me when he writes a poem he has in mind his wife, his extended family, his friends, and “a community of fellow poets I particularly admire.” Who do you write for? For readers? For yourself? Other poets?

JG: Well, let me answer your question with a sports metaphor. The first duty of a professional baseball player is not to hit homerun balls – or even to hit balls at all. It’s to field his position, a task which is neither sexy nor easy but absolutely integral to the success of a team. I like to think that my first duty as a writer – one which is self-imposed, of course – is to do the unsexy work of addressing and entertaining the intelligent general reader. I’m not talking about being ‘accessible’ in the sneered-at meaning of the word; nor is it as easy as it might sound, piquing the interest of this mythic figure I have in mind. It certainly doesn’t matter that the mythic figure is mythic; I write in the futile hope that she will one day turn up and want to read a poem. And if I can capture the attention of this reader, then I can capture the attention of anyone. One doesn’t really need to address other poets who will all too easily know what one is up to and give one the benefit of the doubt and maybe even buy one’s book at a launch out of professional courtesy; I think one is better served pretending to address and entertain the intelligent general reader, as John Updike seemed to do. She’s a harder sell, harder than any poet. And she’s certainly no pushover. So to win her attention would really mean something, would really say something about one’s work.

DK: Who do you read? Who's influenced you the most in poetic style and use of language?

JG: In terms of daily reading, I’m a devotee of Slate. I especially admire Stephen Metcalf’s recent pieces on A Separate Peace and the band The Replacements. Troy Patterson, Slate’s television critic, is so brilliant one wants to dim one’s screen or, at least, turn away in despair of ever writing sentences as witty as his. Dana Stevens, Slate’s film critic, is always worth at least a skim and usually more.

I like Hendrik Hertzberg on politics and the tag team of Anthony Lane and David Denby on movies. The other critics, who round out the back pages of The New Yorker, comprise a pretty sturdy phalanx, too.

Lately, in terms of reviewers of books, I’ve enjoyed Michael Hofmann (His book Behind the Lines, Faber and Faber, 2001 is terrific), Clive James and William Logan. I’m learning to love William Bronk’s essays. Ange Mlinko is interesting, too. I have no all-time favourite, though. My desert island’s a crowded, raucous bit of turf. Randall Jarrell mans the conch shell – though lately I’ve been thinking of giving the job to the late great Tom Disch.

In terms of poets, I’m pumped to read Christian Wiman’s forthcoming book Every Riven Thing (FSG 2010). If his recent poems in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New Criterion are any indication, this book is going to be something. I’ve also been admiring the poems of Don Coles and John Updike. I rather like Robyn Sarah’s Pause for Breath (Biblioasis 2009), which seems to have been ignored. Zach Wells’ book, Track and Trace (Biblioasis 2009), was pretty good, too.

In terms of recent influences, Kay Ryan has meant a lot. I would say, in the awful parlance of our times, that her example has given me permission to try to be the sort of poet I’ve always wanted to be: a specialist in short, sharp poems that never absolve themselves of the hard, maybe even paradoxical work of being both challenging and clear; poems that kowtow to no arc. She would hate to hear this, I’m sure.

DK: Is there a single poem, either yours or someone else’s, that you would consider to be a complete poem?

JG: Sure. Here’s one by the lovely New York poet Samuel Menashe:

Forever and a Day

No more than that
Dead cat shall I
Escape the corpse
I kept in shape
For the day off
Immortals take

This poem strikes me as complete. Here’s great another one, same poet:

Leavetaking

Dusk of the year
Nightfalling leaves
More than we knew
Abounded on trees
We now see through

DK: These days poets have many more opportunities to publish their work, apply for grants, submit their poems for awards etc than in the past. I think these things pose an enormous distraction from the writing of actual poetry. Is this unfair? How important are these things for you?

JG: Well, I’m not aggressively anti-grant; it’s good money if you can get it. But I’m lazy when it comes to the getting of it (which isn’t to say I couldn’t use it). And yet I do think my laziness is probably a blessing. That is, I do think a poet’s time is better served writing a poem or a review as opposed to filling out some pdf. (In fact, her time is probably best served reading – and not necessarily a poem.) So I think what you say is fair enough. In an age of excesses, it’s good to be a bit sluggish.

DK: You were criticized by Poetry Magazine readers for your stance on “negative” reviews. Are there limits to writing negatively about the work of other poets? Does it ever worry you that you’re opening yourself up for unwarranted negative reviews of your own poetry?

JG: Okay, the small, surly part of me, at the back of the seminar, wants to raise its hand and take gentle issue with the wording of your question. The piece to which I assume you’re referring, “Going Negative,” doesn’t ultimately champion something called a ‘negative review’ or some process of “writing negatively,” as so many seem to think. I’m not saying one should wear a brambly crown of scribbled lines, like a sour character in a comic strip. Rather, the piece defends the sort of necessarily sceptical review which should be the norm but which comes to find itself damned when some other person, however well-meaning, decides to describe it as ‘negative.’ Some readers of “Going Negative” appear to have gotten hung up on the title of the piece and the bit where I suggest that “negativity…needs to be the poetry reviewer’s natural posture.” But the piece – it’s just a preface to some reviews, really – actually goes on to question the usefulness of the adjective ‘negative’ and to elaborate a slightly more nuanced – and even optimistic! – position than the one which has been assigned to me in blogs and, of all places, the introduction to The Best American Poetry 2009.

So let me rephrase your otherwise fine question ever so slightly: what are the limits to writing with necessary scepticism about the work of other poets? Well, one might make an enemy of a person in a position of power – a judge of some prize, say. But one wasn’t likely going to win the prize, anyway. One will find, at the end of a life of cautious kowtowing, with little to show for, that one was better off being honest. Now, one doesn’t want to be destructive for its own sake; but burning bridges, if they’re the right bridges, can generate heat, even light. And they can build new connections, drawing by their very glow the sort of lovely, independent-minded reader who has been lost at sea, desperate for someone, anyone, to send a signal and confirm his or her gut-level suspicion about an overly-laurelled poet. When I was younger, it was a great relief to come across certain critics who were – and are! – frequently stuck with the label ‘negative’ reviewer. They made me feel a little less alone, these critics; and they made me feel a little less crazy for, say, not appreciating some awful Canadian poet whom I suspected others were overvaluing.

I’ll add that in rare cases one might be too hard on a deserving book and later come to regret one’s review of it. So that’s another limit to writing with a certain scepticism. But I’m pretty sure this is as mythic a phenomenon as the yeti. If I regret any of my reviews, they’re the ones in which I was too generous.

As for your other question, I’m not too worried about my work drawing “unwarranted negative reviews.” A person who’s moved to review my poetry because he’s misread a position of mine (or thinks I’ve gone out of my way to wound one of his friends) is a person who leapfrogs to troubling conclusions. He’s the sort of reviewer who wouldn’t have had much of worth to say about my poetry had he been presented with it blind. He’s loyal to poets, but not to poetry, and certainly not to readers. Anyway, as Kay Ryan has said, poems need to get used to surviving on their own. If mine are any good, they’ll eventually find a readership, no matter how hard I’ve made it for them. If they aren’t, they won’t.

DK: Are you working on a third book of poems? Any poems coming out in magazines that we should watch for?

JG: Not really. As I’ve said, I’ve mostly been tinkering with scraps. I’ve got the one poem forthcoming in Parnassus. I’ve also got a review-essay coming in Parnassus and another one coming in Poetry.
---
For my review of Jason Guriel's Pure Product see "Interviews and Reviews" in the right hand column.
---
Just a reminder, folks, that I have agreed to stand up in front of Victoria City Council on May 13 to read a poem. The object is not to read a poem about cities necessarily, but about life. So that’s where you come in. Suggest a poem that reminds us about life, in whatever form it takes, the ground of our being or of our landscape, and I’ll read it May 13.

D.C. Reid's "What It Means to be Human" - a review

2010-04-23T12:02:00.001-07:00

The question was one that D.C. Reid, encouraged by poets such as Patrick Lane, took to heart: As poets make very little money, why not write what you want to write? What otherwise might be a counsel of despair has the beneficial effect of liberating the poet from the uncertain or overwhelming expectations of his audience. But it also presents a danger: that your writing becomes so particular to your own needs, so indifferent to the interests of the prospective reader you rob yourself of the capacity to cultivate an audience.

All of which is not to say that D.C. Reid’s latest book of poems What It Means to be Human is unworthy of an audience. Far from it. His book is at least as deserving as other “difficult” books of poetry on store shelves these days. The degree of difficulty is another matter. Not only is Reid’s book obliquely associative and imagistic, eschewing direct metaphor in favour of symbols, it’s all wrapped within the loose frame of a novel. The reader is constrained both to pierce Reid’s fragmented poetic language and piece together the strands of plot and character: Mary, unhappy in her relationship with her husband has an affair with his brother, Avie, who in turn has an incestuous relationship with their daughter Chloe.

The night, the spill of it

from tree to tree almost gently,

the touching of sea anemone,

their fat sex mouths

The metronome irritation of the clock and its penguin sense of time

Eyes swim from eyelids to ask the question, what?, and o?, and,
yes, I am here, familiar

The ceiling then seen in double sight

so the veins of its making

jump, and moving the eye so it sees

one way valleys other way hills

The press of Cleo into Avie’s head and he thinking: You must go
for I am trapped by my head too full of your hair,

the small of your back. My hand so close and…pointless, for you
belong to yourself

and me, too, though I don’t want me

too.

Landscape her shoulder, heave of mountain ranges of blanket
across the bent up knees, the valley, the flat beyond

Only the black iron keeping watch at the end of the bed, the
curlicue lion-head on the post around which night conspires

Do clothes lose their lives when thrown off? Do they gag on hooks?

“The dumbness of male embrace” illustrates Reid’s effort in each new work to do something different than the work before, in this case, he says, to be less lyrical and “go after the image at the expense of rhythm”. A “constant struggle throughout the book”, Reid adds, was to achieve that new move while simultaneously employing the fore shadowing and post shadowing techniques of the novel. This leads to a bigger problem in my view: how to secure the illumination these shadowing techniques provide while subverting conventional narrative structure i.e. filtering the story through the disparate, fragmented consciousness of five different characters.

For the reader willing to painstakingly assemble the clues from one poem to the next the story in What It Means to be Human does eventually emerge. The difficulty is that too often the effort to follow the story interferes with our appreciation of the poetry – good poetry, as it turns out, as in this poem voiced by Mary, the mother, “Think of the reason a person doesn’t blink”:

When we might for a second be fearful, standing in the dark,
waiting for the baby to breathe
and knowing it will,
yet in flight between the lighted door way,
gold pouring around
your body.

In the moment between thought and its intention, a paler form of
action,
the breath and you
left still, hand on the knob.
These are the internal landscapes that make up the uneventful
existence that time, as has been observed, lies
between unexistence
and death. A great beast might lie upon its heart.

Few devices are as under developed and over interpreted as enjambed and fragmented lines, here executed with more skill than usual (i.e. through indents and line breaks that replicate the act of breathing and recreate the suspense necessary to the poem’s intent). The images are also very strong, but Reid manages something equally important in this poem and the one before: he finds the human moment, imbues it with emotion, passion or compassion, and then completes the moment with a resonating thought (the great beast or darkness that lies at the heart of life) or a question (how can we reconcile guilt and desire when life is largely meaningless?).

Like Tim Lilburn’s work, the metabolic rate of Reid’s poems is pitched very high, the effort to meld the poetry’s imagery and the narrative prodigious. The challenge remains how to convince readers to meet the writer half way by putting in the work necessary to unravel the story and understand the poetry. The answer might have been to forgo the story altogether (the least original or interesting part of the book) and to settle instead for that synthesis and cohesion we normally look for when considering a book of poems as a whole. Reid is too good a poet for us to require more of him than this.

(What It Means to be Human, Ekstasis Editions, 2009, paper, 127 pp. $21.95)

That Chicken Idea and which came first...

2010-04-16T00:04:00.000-07:00

We’ve received a lot of positive comments, posted and e-mailed, about the last blog. It’s emboldened me to continue the discussion a bit longer, aided last week by John Pass’s very cogent observation about the relationship between ideas and things. I argued that poets have been mislead into thinking that ideas and intellect are off bounds to them, reflected in their singular preoccupation with “getting objects right” (read images) and a common misunderstanding that continues to this day about how objects or “things” are constituted in the first place. Pass responds:

“(W)orthy thought and ideas depend upon our experience and articulation of observable phenomena. Good ideas are grounded. (And, for poets, inhabited, fully experienced subjectively rather than merely “observed” objectively. That is, the subjective and objective are melded in a taut balance. See George Oppen’s The Materials, for example.)

I was only partly convinced by my subsequent reading of Oppen’s book of poems (Some very good ones captured the Imagist principles to a T, but others were rather flat and abstracted, I thought). I was more persuaded by the connection between Williams and the Romantics and by Pass’s take on the expansion of Coleridge’s ideas about the Imagination i.e. “If we `imagine’ badly,” he says, “if as a culture we allow the degradation of our imaginations, hive them off from the “things” of the world or the “ideas” generated in that adjacency, fail to talk the world we’re walking, we suffer big time.”

Pass’s emphasis upon “imagining well” by embracing the world of things seems right to me. I offered two citations from Coleridge to support his interpretation, and will add one more - that the genius of Wordsworth’s imagination, rested, in part, in the “human associations” that “had given both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects...” I understand by “human associations” Coleridge meant ideas or thought, as well as sense impressions, play a role in forming our understanding and our poetic translation of the “real” or “objective” world.

The importance of ideas is underscored by the sometimes inimical relationship between the imagination and our senses, resulting, Coleridge believed, in something less than wonderful poetry: “A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we well know, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism.” All of which has me wondering if contemporary poets aren’t possessed of a similar superstition surrounding ideas and a fanatical insistence upon sense experience as the only useful material in the construction of poems.

But over-reliance upon sense experience is only part of the problem. The under-representation of the intellect in poetry further inhibits and suppresses the pleasure that we might get from poetry. Williams believed this, just as Coleridge did before him:

“(W)here the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blended more easily and intimately with these ideal creations, than with the objects of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things…”

Plainly, here is where Williams and much of 20th and 21st century poetics departs from Coleridge. Still, the intellect and how we think about the making of poetry were as important to Williams and the best of the poets who followed as they were to the Romantics. In a letter to Henry Wells, Williams points out how the breadth of his intellect and critical faculties were oftem distorted or ignored.

“I think you fail sufficiently to take into consideration my role as a theorist...For I think that only by an understanding of my “theory of the poem” will you be able to reconcile my patent failures with whatever I have done that seems worthwhile.” (Poems of William Carlos Williams, Linda Wagner, Wesleyan University Press, 1963, p7)

An argument for poetic theory as part of poetic practice? Think about it.
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Both John Pass and Chris Banks like Wendell Berry’s take on “the Real” and so I borrowed Berry’s Recollected Essays 1965-1980 from the library. Berry’s prose has an earthy, Thoreauvian feel to it, but I was particularly struck by an image from an essay called “The Rise”: “The cardinals were more brilliant than ever,” Berry writes, “kindling in the black-wet drift of the cold wind.” A line that would have done Pound or Williams proud. I was also struck by the number of times the “imagination” figured as a term in Berry’s essay. That magical faculty that galvanized Coleridge, Worsdworth and Williams has fallen on hard times in recent years. In greater favour are rule-based poems, poems fuelled less by the intricate vivacity of the imagination than powered by a will to dominate the language and the reader.
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Something else Wendell Berry is known for is his conversational style and plain spokenness - nothing new there for prose stylists; an entire 20th century of prose has been devoted to the spare, unvarnished diction of the ordinary person, a bias elevated to a rule by Hemingway. The interesting thing is the ardour with which poets, especially Canadian poets, have embraced the plain style. We should, it seems to me, abominate plainness when used unconsciously to excuse the poet’s lack of imagination or willingness to work. But when used capably, plain diction works. Wordsworth thought so, arguing that “the essential passions of the heart…speak a plainer and more emphatic language…” Eliot viewed Wordsworth’s own approach as an “escape from a poetic idiom which had ceased to have a relation to contemporary speech”. Of Dryden, Eliot said “He restored English verse to the condition of speech.” (Missing Measures , Timothy Steele, University of Arkansas Press, 1990)

Timothy Steele tells us the desire for a plainer, more contemporary style of language goes back even further than Wordsworth. “It has ever been and ever will be permitted,” said Horace, “to issue words stamped with the mint-mark of the day.”

Thinginess

2010-04-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

It’s a bit of a paradox: an idea that has influenced the writing of poetry for the better part of a century that shuns the idea of ideas. “No ideas but in things” invoked by William Carlos Williams held that poets should reject preconceived ideas and inherited “literariness” in the construction of their poems and use instead, as their exclusive, primary material, the objects they find locally. Three decades later Charles Olson would re-shape Williams’ line as “not in ideas, but in things”, a dictum which Bruce Elder tells us is actually pretty straightforward: “Language doesn’t constitute meanings on its own. Only the objects of the real world make up its meaning”. Still, “things” get a little tricky when you confer, as Olson does, the status of object upon the inner workings of the poem itself:

“(E)very element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality...these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world.”

What neither Olson nor Williams explains is how a new aesthetic should emerge around the notion of “objects” when what actually constitutes an object or thing remains in dispute after several millennia of some very smart people trying. A very old view and one to which many poets still subscribe is the commonsense view of physical objects, i.e. that they exist independent of our perception of them. Why is this important? Because whole generations of poets have largely turned away from ideas to locating just the “right word”, the “right image” to capture the “essence” of things or at the very least those essential characteristics of objects that become important to the poem.

The results have been mixed. Uninteresting or very bad poets behave as if there really is a strict demarcation between themselves and the objects that make up the world around them, at which point the job of the poem becomes simply to ensure that it mirrors the “real” world. Other poets recognize an interrelationship between themselves and objects. They understand implicitly that we have no way of knowing objects except by way of our several senses and that far from being an unreliable source of information, our experience, our senses are a primary and continual source for the variety and ambiguity and richness that makes up the real world of object and subject and the making of poems.

This “representational” view of the world is derived from a long line of philosophic enquiry that began with Plato and culminated in the speculative work of Rene Descartes. What intrigued Descartes, and later Immanuel Kant, is the place that ideas or concepts play in this representational construction of the universe. For his part, Kant gave ideas equal place in our understanding of the world: “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.”

But don’t take Kant’s word for it; simply observe a child charmed by the light of Christmas tree lights who later reaches out and touches what appears to be identical in shape and intent – a burning candle flame - only to recoil in pain when her idea of a thing fails to match her experience. It’s a way of understanding (or misunderstanding) the world that stays with us, adjudicated by how the ideas we have about the world and our experience of it converge or diverge. When what we believe is validated by our experience we have that wonderful sensation of “getting it right”. When our experience confounds what we’ve been led to believe though our education, our parents etc we’re momentarily deflated and must start back at the beginning - but not by dismissing ideas but by adjusting them or looking for better ones.

Ultimately, all our ideas coalesce into a large schema of the world that is continually being tested – not in university classrooms, but in our daily experience, ideas filtered and synthesized through experience and ultimately providing a coherent picture of the world.

So why have so many poets failed to appreciate this fact or worse still turned their back on the enormous richness and variety of ideas that are available to them and that might be useful in the one experience that matters most to them – the writing of poetry? Why have they focussed with such enormous strain upon the image of things at the expense of what they think and feel about those things and what all this might mean for their work and for their readers?

The answer is that we’ve been hoodwinked into believing ideas, however broadly you define them, are off limits to poets.

Even Williams and Olson understood that their aesthetic could not survive without ideas. As Olson said in the quote above, “every element” - and that includes sense - must be “taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality.” Speech and the words from which speech is derived are “prior to all you are, and more necessary to you...than your toes, or your opposable thumb.” The question remains then of what this speech and these words comprise. Answer to the first question, says Olson: the spoken unit of speech, the syllable. Answer to the second: the head, the intellect, ideas.

“I am dogmatic, that the head shows in the syllable. The dance of the intellect is there, among them, prose or verse. Consider the best minds you know in this here business: where does the head show, is it not, precise, here, in the swift currents of the syllable?”

To say that Olson suppresses the importance of the intellect and ideas is not to say that he rejects them outright. And why would you want to? After all, there’s a reason you’re bored to tears as someone drones on at so many poetry readings. It’s because an important part of you is not being engaged.
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One reason David Zieroth won the Governor General’s Award for poetry last year is his courage in tackling ideas. A case in point: his poem “Man in the Ice Fog” where the speaker “tries to believe that somewhere sun/shines hard on beaches, hot dog buns/scrambling children, waves, a seaside town/laughing at its own leisure”. The effort here is not to assemble an inventory of objects as a way to conjure up feelings of longing or loss, but to test their reality, to question the substance of things and of existence itself:

…The man in the fog scuffs
his shoe against the cold unforgiving
stones; their grey blank layers don’t change,
he knows, for even in day-bright they’re strange

unremarkable chunks – like him today
earthbound, unable to walk beyond this mist

It’s clear that Zieroth’s poems emerge as a result of both ideas and images. Some ideas are very complex, like the nature of reality and existence explored here and elsewhere in his work. Other ideas are less so and as Zieroth explained in my recent interview with him (Speaking of Poems January 29) can result “from snatches of conversation. The people around me—at coffee shops, on buses, in conversation—are natural suppliers of ideas and lines and titles.” After a reading a few years ago Ken Babstock also talked about how “an idea would come to him” before he begins to write a poem.
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What William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson really opposed was not so much ideas as unwarranted abstraction. Both pursued their objections to abstraction in their famous long poems about cities, Paterson and The Maximus Poems. It reminded me that I have agreed to stand up in front of Victoria City Council on May 13 and read a poem and also that nowhere do abstractions occur more frequently than in the political and administrative arms of large political bureaucracies. So what should a poem before city hall do but remind politicians and bureaucrats of the lives lived out beyond the confines of city hall and the policies on parkland, poverty and down town beautification.

I want to say to them that reading poems helps bring all that back to us and then read a poem to illustrate the fact, not to read a poem about cities necessarily, but about life. So that’s where you come in. Suggest a poem that reminds us about life, in whatever form it takes, the ground of our being or of our landscape, and I’ll read it May 13.

Double Dog Dare

2010-03-26T23:43:00.000-07:00

I’ve been “power-reading”. Poring through hundreds of poems looking for the Magical One. Because once a month Canada's hardest working poet laureate Linda Rogers arranges the reading of a poem before Victoria City Council – to remind city dwellers there is more to life than congested traffic, zoning by-laws and referenda on hockey arenas. So Linda has honoured me with a reading spot for May 13, and I’ve been looking for the poem from 2009 that grabs me the most.

Trouble is there are so many great poems, I can't choose. So if there's a poem from 2009 that you think the world should know about send it to us via the comment box below or to my e-mail dwkosub@shaw.ca. If we like it, too, I'll share it with the City of Victoria May 13.

Meantime, here's a poem from 2009 that I really like:

Autumn News from the Donkey Sanctuary

Cargo has let down
her hair a little and stopped pushing
Pliny the Elder on

the volunteer labour
During summer it was all Pliny the Elder,
Pliny the Elder, Pliny

the – she’d cease only
for scotch thistle, stale Cheerios, or to reflect
flitty cabbage moths

back at themselves
from the wet river-stone of her good eye. Odin,
as you already know,

was birthed under
the yew tree back in May, and has made
friends with a crow

who perches between
his trumpet-lily ears like bad language he’s not
meant to hear. His mother

Anu, the jennet with
soft hooves of Killaloe, is healthy and never
far from Loki or Odin.

The perimeter fence,
the ID chips like functional cysts slipped
under the skin, the trompe

l’oeil plough and furrowed
field, the UNHCR feed bag and visiting
hours. These things done

for stateless donkeys,
mules, and hinnies – done in love, in lieu of claims
to purpose or rights –

are done with your
generous help. In your names. Enjoy the photo.
Have a safe winter

outside the enclosure

- Ken Babstock (The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009, Tightrope Books)

The more things change...

2010-03-19T05:25:00.000-07:00

The book has been lying around the house for months before I decide to pick it up. A relic really. Two men in the front cover photo looking for all the world like 1950 insurance salesmen: jacket, tie, Elvis Costello glasses – and then I remember that Wallace Stevens was an insurance agent…Actually no, Stevens was a senior VP in a Connecticut insurance firm. And so I relent. I pick up the book and remember with surprise why I bought it in the first place. Written by a prof of mine years ago: Frank Davey. Where is Frank these days? I wonder. And who, asks the guy raised on Eliot and Larkin, are Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster?

(l-r: Raymond Souster, Lena Souster, Avi Boxer, Bob Currie (on floor), Louis Dudek, Aileen Collins. Laurentian Hotel, Montreal, Autumn 1955.)

For 175 pages I try to find out. Early on they are the Duddy Kravitzes of mid-20th century Canadian poetry: Dudek, implausibly writing letters to Ezra Pound, then turning “legman” to the old loon following Dudek's visit to Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital. Souster, a member of the RCAF persuading Ralph Gustafson, Irving Layton and Miriam Waddington to publish their poems in his little magazine, Direction, mimeographing the lot on stolen RCAF paper and equipment along with portions of Henry Miller’s banned book Tropic of Cancer.

“They wanted,” Davey says of Souster and Dudek, “to become historically important both as emancipators of Canadian poetry and as the most original and talented writers of their time.”

Dudek and Souster first come together at a dinner hosted by John Sutherland whose new literary magazine First Statement preached in Davey’s words a “literary rebellion” that appealed to two young men anxious to make their mark. “Both perceived the relevance of Sutherland’s iconoclasm to their hopes for their own work and for Canadian poetry; more importantly, both recognized that Sutherland’s use of the “little magazine” form had deeply interwoven sociological and literary implications.”

Eventually Souster and Dudek would break from Sutherland, determined to cut their own path. Along the way they would establish, then kibosh through disagreement, youthful ineptitude or sheer exhaustion a half dozen magazine ventures: Direction; “Poetry Grapevine”; Enterprise; Contact; Combustion; Delta; CIV/n - virtually all of them mimeographed in Souster’s basement or carbon copied on Dudek’s typewriter and mailed without cover or wrapper “to anyone sufficiently interested to request it.”

Their most material accomplishment would be transforming the “little magazine” Contact into Contact Press, cornering the market on manuscripts by new poets by locating it “more precisely than could its commercial competitors” like Ryerson Press. But what's more striking than their need to feed their entrepreneurial instincts is their passion for poetry: Souster, intuitive, less cerebral than his friend resisted Dudek’s infatuation with Pound largely on grounds of feeling: “I know I get sloppy very often, too sentimental,” he exclaimed in 1965, “but I hope I never get Ezra Pound cold, Robert Creeley controlled.” That feeling is evident in Souster's “The Candy Floss of the Milkweed”:

Softer, more delicate
than the skin of any girl
who ever walked up Yonge Street,
the candy floss of the milkweed
carried by the wind
to the farthest corners
of the valley
(valley dead
and dying with autumn)
a first snow
already lightly falling,
but carrying life
not death
wherever it touches
however carelessly the earth.

By contrast Dudek espoused a contradictory mix of abstract social and philosophical ideas and more audacious “action-inducing uses of language”. Ask Canadian poets, he writes in a letter to Souster in 1951, “to write again when they think they’ve said something straight from the shoulder, no monkey business. Goddamn decoration. All icing and no cake. All cake and no meat. We want something to chew into in a poem, not just words.’

Chew into this, says Dudek, from “A Street in April”:

There a pale head rising from an eyeless cavern
swivels twice above the street, and swiftly dips
back into the gloom of the skull, whose only lips
are the swinging tin plate and the canvas strips.

And here are infants too, in cribs, with wondrous eyes
at windows, the curtains raised upon a gasping room,
angelic in white diapers and bibs, to whom
the possibilities in wheels and weather – bloom.

But I have seen a dove gleaming and vocal with peace
fly over them, when his sudden wings stirred
and cast the trembling shadow of a metal bird;
so April’s without flower, and no song heard.

Dudek's poem is rather Yeatsian in manner, but powerful. Souster’s poem shows the influence of both Pound and Williams and is pretty good, too. These and other poems lend authenticity to their claims to be among the best Canadian poets of their generation. They also underpin the fascinating story of their collaboration.

Balance, equivocation or a fire in the belly?

I admire Raymond Souster enormously. It was he, more than Dudek, who drove the creation of the small magazines that the pair of them, together later with Irving Layton, would collaborate on. He also won the 1964 Governor General’s Award for The Colour of the Times and poems like the one cited above.

But for me the larger achievement belongs to Dudek whose role in bringing Canadian poetry out of a state of infancy Davey describes as “crucial”. It was, says Davey, a process whereby “Canadian poetry turned away from modernist austerity and existential despair and towards the expansions and affirmations which characterize post modernism.”

The statement makes my pulse quicken, not just for what it says, but for the fact it was said at all; that anyone should endeavor to summarize the thousands of particularities, the half or halting steps, the misgivings and hesitations, the halleluiah moments and moments of conscious failure that must comprise the work of a great many people over a long span of time – to attempt all this and to seem to get it right, is the thrill that comes all too infrequently from our reading.

So Davey says it and almost immediately you recognize how important it is not just for what it says about poetry a long time ago, but for what it says about poetry today, how the battle lines drawn in 1950 are virtually unchanged in the year 2010. Louis Dudek at the end was a morass of contradictions and competing impulses, Davey tells us – a latter day imagist committed to hard hitting clarity and economy of style, while at the same time writing in a vigorous, “fragmentary” fashion” culled from the organic processes of the “meditative” consciousness.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Economy of style, plainness and a preoccupation with “getting the image right” - to the point where contemporary poetry resembles nothing so much as a still life painting of Ken Dryden at the goal mouth – are today the distinguishing features of Canadian poetry. From the other end of the rink an effort to move the puck in ways we’re not used to, invoking greater playfulness, more adventurous deeks and turns, imprinting more vivacious, outraged pictures on the retinas of the opposing players and their fans – the Herculean efforts of a handful of poets who doubtless eschew hockey metaphors but for whom the intensity of the game is of equal importance. Guriel, Starnino, Wells, Outram, Lilburn, Babstock.

Would the arch rationalist Dudek have cut these poets any more slack than he did George Bowering in 1967 when he called Bowering’s work “light and flimsy”, or Victor Coleman whose poems he dubbed a “messy sort of doodling”? Likely not. Would Souster? Perhaps. Souster seemed less constrained by the iconoclasm that he and Dudek shared, less messianic in his intentions towards Canadian poetry – and perhaps for that reason more like us.

And what do we make of it, this desire to create, as Starnino calls it, a “meddlesome” poetry, poetry that risks seeming unpoetic, inclined to shake things up for no other reason than to shake us out of our doldrums? Where success and failure are not only not relative, but finally unimportant compared to the sheer will to make something on the page simply live.

Who are Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster finally? They are all of us.
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Alas, Frank Davey’s eminently readable Louis Dudek & Raymond Souster (Douglas and McIntyre, 1981) is no longer in print, but should be available at most central libraries or through Open Library at http://openlibrary.org/b/OL3821755M/Louis_Dudek_Raymond_Souster.

Push Pull Pen

2010-03-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

What do I have to do to get my manuscript published? How long will I have to wait to hear? You published my previous manuscript; why not this one? These are just some of the questions poets ask when talking to publishers about their new manuscript. This week I spoke to five editors across the country about the challenges and opportunities facing beginning and mid-career poets.

Until he turned the operation over to Randal Macnair, Ron Smith had been running Oolichan Books based in Fernie, B.C. for 36 years. In that time, he’s seen the industry grow, then shrink as the number of poets writing in Canada soared. It’s meant fewer opportunities for poets to get their poems on to book store shelves and tougher choices for publishers over who gets the congratulatory note, who the rejection slip.

“When I started we expected to sell between 800 and 1,000 copies, with a few like Robert Kroetsch’s Stone Hammer Poems selling as many as 4,000,” says Smith. “But that’s steadily gone down. There are more people writing poetry and more poetry titles being published than in the past, but the audience is small. They’re still a dedicated audience, but their purchases are spread over more titles and so editors are more selective.”

Oolichan receives approximately 800 manuscripts each year. Thirty to forty of these, Smith says, will be interesting, but only three or four will make it into production and into book stores. The ratio is a little better at Brick Books, Canada’s largest poetry-only publisher based in London, Ontario, where acquisitions editor Barry Dempster and an editorial board will shepherd seven titles through production each year. Dempster says one of the poet’s biggest challenges is knowing when their manuscript is ready for prime time.

“Often people jump the gun; they put together a manuscript, they’re excited, they want to be able to make our reading period, so they send the work in and it’s not quite ready.”

Dear Ms. Atwood, we are pleased to inform you…

Assuming a publisher agrees your manuscript is as brilliant as you say it is, other hard realities loom large. Because the average title will sell 3-400 copies most poets understand they’re unlikely to get rich. Most also understand that the promotion wings of publishing houses are normally very small – often one-person shops - and hopelessly under-funded. That the Canada Council will backstop reading tours and a reading fee for some poets is undercut by the abysmal support for the arts in this country overall.

Poets get this. They also understand it’s a collaborative effort: the publisher doing what they can to get the word out, the poet buttonholing friends and family to come out to their readings. What poets don’t understand is why no-one outside of family and friends seems to take notice. Once upon a time it was reasonable to expect your book of poems would be reviewed, says Carmine Starnino, editor of Montreal’s Signal Editions. Not any more – and once again it’s a matter of numbers: too few freelance writers knowledgeable enough to write about poetry, too few poets willing to fill the breech. He thinks that should change.

“I just find it hypocritical for me to approach Poet X to review a book and Poet X will say no, I don’t want to do that, it’s too dangerous. But the very moment Poet X has a book out, he or she expects a review. There is a connection between the two and I think poets fail to see that. So we have reaped what we have sown.”

Some of the biggest misunderstandings, though, begin long before a book is ready to be reviewed. Under Ezra Pound’s pen editing assumed near mythic importance in the delivery of Eliot’s The Wasteland. Hence Starnino's surprise when he gets a call from a poet he’s just signed expressing alarm that their manuscript is deemed imperfect and in need of red ink.

“I think that many poets no longer expect to be edited and do not like it. I have accepted two manuscripts where the poets bolted after they learned there would be real editing happening on the books…Not enough is said about the ways in which alert structuring and sequencing can toughen and transform a group of poems.”

Ron Smith agrees:

“I’m somewhat reluctant to take on someone who has decided that their manuscript is finished and clean and pure. Because none of us is a particularly good editor of our own work. There is always something that can be changed or helped along the way.”

One rule of thumb nearly everyone agrees upon is the ban on multiple submissions. “When we discover that you’ve sent your manuscript to five different publishers,” says Barry Dempster, “and that now three of them want you, that’s really frustrating because of the amount of work we put into a manuscript.” Thistledown Press publisher Allan Forrie echoes that sentiment. “For us to read and write notes and sometimes pay readers to do this, to take a manuscript through that process, then have the poet say `Oh by the way this has been accepted by another press, that’s lost faith, lost work.”

It’s a stance embraced by most, but not everyone, in the industry. Alana Wilcox, editorial director for Coach House Press says outside of those moments when she or Acquisitions Editor Kevin Connolly actively solicits a manuscript multiple submissions are fair game:

“If it’s just over the transom then I don’t have any trouble with it at all, because I know that it takes us a long time (to make decisions) because we’re swamped with getting the spring books out and can’t possibly read any manuscripts.

“I do have a problem when people do that and don’t keep everyone informed about what’s happening. I like to know that it’s out at other places and that if something happens the poet will let me know.”

Poets want to know where their manuscripts stand, too. And while much depends upon the number of manuscripts publishers are considering and the point at which a poet submits their manuscript most editors agree poets should not have to wait longer than eight or nine months to hear if their work has been accepted. And no-one is offended if you send a query note asking where your manuscript is in the process.

The Mid-Career Poet…

One of the grimmest conversations a publisher will have is with a poet whose book the publisher has just published and who automatically expects a contract for another. That’s not always a legitimate expectation, says Ron Smith.

“I’m going to tell them if we continue to work together that my expectation is that the next book will build on the first; it’ll go in a new direction, it’ll do something different, it’ll surprise me in some different way.”

Carmine Starnino believes publishers and editors have as much responsibility for the poet’s career as for their last book. He expects a poet to stay with Signal Editions in return for the editor “making sure that second book is as strong as possible.”

“And if it means waiting an extra year or two until the poems are written, that is what we do. In rare cases, where the poet has just lost all ability and there is just no way I can edit this into shape, and no way this can appear in print, then I will turn the book down.”

Every poet looks forward to that day when they’re known as an “established” poet, one whose reputation has been secured through the continued delivery of vivid, adventurous, iconic poetry. But there are down sides, not the least of which is an attitude prevalent among younger poets coming up that you’ve essentially shot your bolt, that you are in a word done. It’s for this reason that many publishers, including Coach House Press, shy away from publishing Selected Works.

“I don’t like selecteds that much,” says Alana Wilcox. “We really haven’t done one recently in my tenure for a number of reasons: First, yeah it’s a sense that it’s over. But also I think it’s a little bit unfair to the other books that a poet has, and to the other publishers, because suddenly all those books become irrelevant or unsellable.”

Wilcox says she’d rather devote the six spots Coach House reserves for poetry books each year to new work. Carmine Starnino agrees Job One is finding “good young poets” but also thinks selecteds have a larger place in publishing. It means re-visiting “not just the dead guys”, he says, “but the mid-career poets”.

“Very few presses out there are interested in doing selecteds, but it’s something I take very seriously and so you’ll find many selecteds in my series since I’ve been editing.”

Anthologies are also considered to be essential to the mid-career poet, but even these have limited importance according to Allan Forrie. “If poems migrate to an anthology I suppose it is recognition of the poet in terms of audience and I think anthologies have a workable purpose in education…But for the intimate experience of the one reader and the one book, I’m not so sure.”

Quality still counts…

So what do editors want to see when a manuscript slides across their desks? A basic grasp of verse forms, an understanding that poetry appeals both to the eye and ear and that line, rhythm and image really matter. Most importantly, poets are expected to be aware of an audience, however that audience might be defined.

“We’re looking for craft and skill first,” says Barry Dempster, “for a certain originality of voice, and for some sense of vision that guides their effort to do something that perhaps hasn’t been done quite that way before.” He and other editors are also looking for a manuscript with a sustained quality from beginning to end.

The good news is that if you’re good enough you will get published. This is where Starnino differs with some of his colleagues: he believes the opportunities for publishing your poetry have never been greater. Where the larger poetry houses have died off, smaller presses have taken their place. And where small presses can’t handle the load, blogs and poetry websites can.

“I think collectively we’re oeuvring up everybody,” Starnino laughs. “Honestly you’d have to be a pretty bad poet in this country not to find a press, and in the end you’ll just publish yourself. That’s how a lot of presses have started actually.”
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http://www.nfb.ca/film/still_waters/e

Poetry of Witness

2010-03-05T07:35:00.000-08:00

Author of more than twenty books of poetry, Governor General's award winner and one of Canada's most respected and revered poets, Patrick Lane is still going strong. During my interview with him earlier this week he talked about meaning and tone in poetry, his first novel, poetic theory and practice, and new projects.

DK: People are fascinated by your foray into prose with your award winning memoir There Is A Season and more recently Red Dog, Red Dog. The obvious question is Why tackle prose? but I’m also interested to know about the challenges along the way? Ever throw up your hands and cry Why am I doing this?

PL: The memoir arose out of the rather fragile wreckage of my life in the month following my release from a treatment centre for alcohol and drug addiction. I began writing about my garden because it was a safe place to explore. I worried that once sober and clean I wouldn’t be able to write anymore, so I avoided poetry and fiction, practices where I’d succeeded. There Is A Season was never intended to be a book, but was only an exercise, a way of re-entering my writing life. That it turned out to be a memoir, and a successful one, is fortuitous at best. The novel, Red Dog Red Dog, began a few weeks following the completion of the memoir. It was a natural segue and a desire on my part to actually finish a novel, three previous attempts in the 70’s and 80’s dying on the altar of alcohol and cocaine. And, no, I never ask why I’m writing. I sacrificed two families to poetry, my life to art. After fifty years of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, writing is as natural as breathing to me.

DK: Red Dog, Red Dog appears to be character driven, not plot driven. Do you see a relationship between the character traits or tone there and the speakers in your poems? Was it ever a concern for you that the style and tone of your prose distinguish itself from the tone or style of your poetry?

PL: Tone is a question that was never asked back in the days of our oral culture. Now we ask just to make sure a piece of writing is not sarcastic, ironic, glib, humorous, etc. We read now, we don’t listen. Tone is the attitude a writer takes to the subject at hand and is a delicate matter, indeed, given that it must be right for the characters, the living men and women who inhabit a place and a time, the ones who live in the story. The novel is its characters, though I had hoped the plot equally important, the question of, “Who killed father,” central to the book. I always felt the novel was a murder mystery. I don’t distinguish by genre, such distinctions made up by academics so that there should be some kind of order to the canon. Good writing is driven by rhythms and patterns set down by Homer and worked on by writers for these past 3,000 years. Did you ever find it odd that we’re called “writers” and not speakers or singers, tale-tellers, story-makers, poets?

DK: Will you continue to publish prose or shift back to publishing poetry?

PL: I’m bringing out a definitive “New and Selected Poems” this fall from Harbour Publishing. It will contain the most requested poems, the “old chestnuts” of the past fifty years. In the fall of 2011, I will bring out a “Collected Poems” from Harbour. This will be the complete works from all the chapbooks and books I’ve published, somewhere around 25 collections of various kinds. I’m looking forward to both these books. Of course, the ultimate “Collected” will be every miserable jotting I ever penned, but that will happen after my death. Thank God I won’t have to look at it all.

DK: Many of your poems seem underpinned by a tragic vision of life, with a strong elegiac tone mixed in with your emotions for the landscape. Does this stem solely from the tragedy that you’ve seen in your life or is there also a particular tradition that informs your vision?

PL: Who was it said that history is the study of tragedy? I lived through sixty years of the last century and no more brutal, bloody, vicious time ever existed for us humans, let alone the other forms of life that we co-habit with, the deaths of oceans and lands. I grew up in the days and nights of World War II and the latter days of the Depression, a period that did not end until after the Korean War in the early Fifties. My father took us on a holiday in Washington State when I was ten years old. He stopped the car on a highway in the Okanogan country south of the border and pointed out a bridge where three working men were lynched by Company killers. The struggles of ordinary men and women, their endurance and mere survival informed my life then, and continue to inform it now. Remember that poem by Milton Acorn, “I’ve Tasted My Blood?” Well, that comes close to how I feel. I have always believed that great literature arises from the “place” where you live. In my case it is western Canada, a huge piece of land and water and sky that is rich with story, alive with lyric intensity. My writing is from the tradition of “Witness.”

DK: Your last answer brings to mind the famous anthology 15 Canadian Poets where you were quoted as saying your “search for enlightenment...is always balanced with my social commitment to the lower classes of which I am a member”. Did you intend this as political statement at the time and has it changed at all?

PL: I now include everyone. Like Whitman, I think I am of the world and not limited to a single class of people.

DK: Poetry has seen a lot of developments since you began (e.g. the Tish Movement, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry). What are the more significant changes, and is poetry better off because of them?

PL: Those old, so-called language movements and the poets who espoused their theories, dictums, and causes were never kind to my writing. They aren’t now. Literature and Art have always had their miseries for the practicing artist. I have tried to be a writer in this world. I am a “humanist,” something Louis Dudek, Warren Tallman, and their acolytes ridiculed in me and in my work. Like William Faulkner’s Dilsey, I have endured.

DK: In a 1997 interview you said the canon of contemporary Canadian literature should be re-appraised? Has that re-appraisal occurred and if so, has it made room for different kinds of poetic voices?

PL: I think I was being a bit pretentious when I said that. There is always room for the human voice. As to the re-appraising the canon, I’ll leave that remedy to the ones who feel they have a need to mend it.

DK: Here’s a question that will make some people’s eyes roll, but we’ve heard much about the importance of traditional form and technical virtuosity on the one hand and the more experimental avant garde on the other. Has the case been sufficiently made for the emotional component in the poem, that is, human sympathy or feeling as the wellspring from which a poem flows?

PL: The pyrotechnics and virtuosities, the experimental and the avant-garde will always be with us. I applaud their skills! The history of art is the history of our humanness, our sympathy, empathy, understanding, and knowledge. There is no poetry, no literature, no art that does not contain our humanity expressed with our physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual gifts. I have always believed the poem arises from the need to speak, an outcry if you like. There are times the poem flows from out of that Yeatsian “rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

As to the younger generation, those who regularly tire of us older writers. Listen, I was once a young man, ambitious, intemperate, arrogant, and, yes, terribly impatient. I wished the older generation to get out of the way and make room for me. There were times when I judged my elders and found them wanting, the endless repetitions of their poetic preoccupations exhausting and of no significant value. And I sometimes judged my peers, those who lived in my country, the Canadians. I wanted the world to see me, not just Vancouver or Toronto, Salmon Arm or Saskatoon. We must remember that the avant-garde soon enough becomes the old guard. We endlessly invent replicas of ourselves and call it new. The real question is why do we poets do what we do and why do we spend our lives doing it? I have always believed that we poets wish to make something beautiful, but why we wish to do that no one knows. I wrote a poem once entitled, “The Beauty.” It is as close as I’ve come to understanding this dilemma:

This too, the beauty
of the antelope in snow.
Is it enough to say we will
imagine this and nothing more?

Who understands that, failing,
falters at the song.
But still we sing.
That is beauty.

But it is not an answer
anymore than the antelope,
most slender of beasts,
most beautiful,

will tell us why they go,
going nowhere,
and going there
perfectly in the snow.

DK: We hear about the influence older poets have on younger poets? Does it ever work the other way around, where an older poet is sufficiently moved or impressed by a younger poet that his or her own poetry is affected?

PL: O yes, I think so. Yeats was much influenced by Pound, to name just one historical example. There are many more.

DK: Is there anything about the poetry being written today that excites you? Any young talents we should watch out for?

PL: My wife and fellow-poet, Lorna Crozier, is presently compiling the best poems that appeared in magazines in Canada in 2009, an onerous task I assure you. I was reading through her tentative, early selections and was struck by the remarkable work being done by the younger generations and, as well, the work of so-called older writers who have only appeared recently. There is no healthier art form being practiced today than poetry. I’m not always on top of every thing being written. I don’t subscribe to the hundred or so print magazines, nor do I read much on the web (forgive me that!). I spend what time I have these days writing, given I’ve only another decade or so to practice this craft of mine. I’m presently writing another novel, the second of three l wish to do in this seventh decade of mine. And, of course, I’m writing poetry, my first love.

DK: You conduct regular poetry retreats and workshops and are referred to as a poetry teacher, but is it really possible to teach poetry?

PL: O yes, of course! I long ago rejected the “workshop” technique, that form of study we inherited from the Iowa School back in the 1930’s, the one that is ideally suited to schools and universities, those who need to measure excellence. Why do we ask students to critically respond to poems when they know very little about “how” they work? I believe we learn from the “practice” of writing. The old saw: we learn to do by doing, is as apt now as it was when it was newly coined. There is still “the craft so long to learn.” I offer written meditations and instructions, plus specific writing exercises with examples of writing from the masters to students at my retreats, but I do not ask participants to respond in round-table criticism of each other’s work. How hapless that can be! One must learn the “how” of poetry, not the “meaning” of it. Words will mean what they mean, it is the expression of them that matters to the writer. Just as a beginning singer practices her song, so must a beginning poet. Sometimes what we learn is part of what we must unlearn, schools and universities providing us with certain ways of looking at a text. They rarely teach us how to write a poem. I do.

DK: Finally, a certain mythology has arisen around the poet and person we know as Patrick Lane, centred principally on your fight with addiction. Are there other aspects of your life or personality that people are missing as a result?

PL: I wrote my memoir There Is A Season ten years ago and co-edited an anthology with Lorna Crozier entitled Notes From the Belly of the Beast thirteen years ago. Both books deal with addiction, the former with the story of my recovery from alcohol during my first year of sobriety and coincidentally anecdotes from my life that are offered not as metaphors but as personal discoveries of the past and my understanding of them free from the distortions caused by my addictions. The latter book contained the brief testaments of a variety of Canadian writers who suffered from substance addiction and later, in another North American edition, with a group of American and Canadian writers who also suffered. I no longer dwell on that past period of my life, but I work almost daily with addicts and alcoholics. I don’t subscribe to the “Black Romanticism” of the late 19th Century, nor am I interested in “People Magazine” journalism. I don’t embrace as truth any of the many mythologies that have been made about my life, nor do I think my readers and critics should. God knows, there have been enough myths promulgated about me. I am a good and caring man. It’s taken a long and varied life to be able to say that with sincerity.

My poetry, fiction, and non-fiction are not “confessional” by nature. As I said before, my poems come out of the poetry of witness. I have reinvented myself as a writer several times over the past fifty years. There have been significant moments when I realized I could write a “Patrick Lane” poem better than anyone. Each time that I recognized I was repeating myself in both form and content I changed my writing. Whether I was successful or not isn’t up to me. I just do it. As I sit here this week putting together my “New & Selected Poems” for this autumn, I can see the watershed years of 1962, 1969, 1978, 1986, 1997, and 2001.

What Language Can't Reach

And the only way I know
how to do that is to stand far off
as if you were on a low hill
under a thin moon
watching a passenger train
stopped
at a siding in the distance
of a prairie night in winter.
In the snow, and watching.
That far away, that sure.

Patrick Lane
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Next week: What Poets Expect…What Publishers Want

Around About

2010-02-26T17:34:00.000-08:00

Give poetry critics their due. In the midst of an ever-dwindling audience here are people not only prepared to read your poetry, but to take what you do seriously enough to talk about it. How they talk about it, the terms they use, the energy and insight they bring to their reading is entirely dependent upon their understanding of their craft. But it remains a matter of public record: when they could be doing something else – like mowing the lawn or enrolling in Reiki courses – someone chooses instead to write about your glosa, your use of the hendecasyllable.

More impressively, they do so while resisting the poet’s inclination to subvert an instinct most people take for granted: the simple desire to know what things mean. Critics trade in explanations, poets do not. While the poet may rightfully ignore any effort to press her about what she means in a poem the critic is under a different obligation; the only mystery is why so many settle for writing about whatever ill-defined, ephemeral effect a line of poetry has on them instead of its underlying meaning or truth.

Instead, a rough “gloss” will do, invariably made up of large, rather vague abstractions that really don’t tell us anything about anything - like the one we encountered last week when a reviewer discovered new poems “that are not only haunting for their language, but also for what they tell us about humanity.” When the writer uses the word “about” here, her failure to unpack whatever qualities of “humanity” she says exists in these poems makes it clear she doesn’t really mean it. She can’t tell you what these poems are about. She can only offer us what most reviewers offer - a gesture towards, an approximation of, truth or meaning.

Jacques Derrida tells us there’s a reason for this. Even a cursory glance at your OED reveals that talking “about” anything is hampered by basic etymology. Far from reflecting our capacity for fixed meanings the word “about” is defined variously in over a dozen entries as “around”, “circular”, “on every side", "nearly",
“approximately”, “in a circumlocutious or winding course”, and “less definitely.” Only one entry defines “about” in the sense that we’re discussing it here, as “touching”, or “concerning” the constitution of particular things. So, as much as you believe you can say what a poem is about, your ability to identify very precisely what that something might be is impeded by the imprecision of language itself. Or as a quantum theoretician might put it: you can’t fix something using tools that appear broken, unfixed, uncalibrated.

Our position is made even more precarious by the fact that most poems are themselves largely meaningless, which is only to say that they’re less concerned with providing fixed, indelible, memorable meanings than they are with producing a handful of salubrious effects, a wash of meaningfulness as in “I found that poem to be really meaningful, but what it means to say precisely, I can’t tell you.” It’s this expectation that poets now write to and to which critics have become inured.

An example of this can be found within the pages of a review by American poet and reviewer Joshua Mehigan in last month’s issue of Poetry. It’s plain to see that Mehigan likes the poems in Stephen Edgar’s History of the Day very much. He makes two very strong statements at the beginning and end of his review: Early on, he says these poems “yield meanings sharable by reader and writer...a brand of mystification that leads to some very satisfying eureka moments”; the poet, he concludes, “modulates his language in the service of meaning.”

Testing these propositions against the rest of the review you’d be forgiven for concluding that meanings are actually few and far between in Edgar’s collection. Mehigan discusses Edgar’s “radical zoom” technique, his abstractions and his use of “Thought-provoking references…to Beaumont and Fletcher.” He details Edgar’s use of science to take poetry “into territory untrodden by most poets,” a large statement mostly undercut by the science-as-poetry industry that has sprung up all around us in recent years. Edgar’s “mastery” of rhythm and meter, his irony, a veiled suggestion to his “aplomb” - it’s all there. But “meaning”? “eureka moments”? Hardly a whiff.

The closest we come to heightened feeling in the presence of newly discovered meaning is following Mehigan's partial citation of the poem “Succes de scandale”, surely the best part of the review:

The annelids, the giant dragonflies
With wings of sunlight peeled from the water’s surface
Stretched tight, incinerated sauropods
Among the ferns that saw the holocaust
Unfold and ripple like a hot aurora
Pouring from heaven and, in pits of pitch,
Attempts at deer like bottled specimens
And smiladons appended by their fangs
Deep in the black museum – all wasted effort.
The feather in the shale like a pressed flower
In a book of verse, a fetal hunch of bones
Delivered from the rocks: unshockable,
Completely ill-equipped to get the point.

The poem makes me want to go out and buy the book; the review does not. Instead, a strong, artful poem is summed up this way: “Edgar’s perspective, vast or miniscule, conveys something important about his worldview. There is nothing starker than that of nature, or more sublime.” That’s it. Forgetting that reviews are not just vehicles for carrying poems, but for explicating them, Mehigan opts for a large, overworked abstraction that far from showing his excitement about the poem pins a flat, uninspired gloss on the thing every bit as dead as the specimen on an entomologist’s wall. It’s the closest we come to the meaning Mehigan promises us is in the poem - meaning better suggested by the poem itself, than uncovered by the critic.

Some, likely poets, will say this is as it should be. Others, notably critics, will say the writer has fallen down on the job.
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Coming up: an interview with one of Canada's foremost poets, Patrick Lane.

Who's Guarding the Guards?

2010-02-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

If the audience for poets is small, it’s a safe bet it’s smaller still for those who write about poets. The poetry reviewer’s audience is typically divided into two parts: non-poets, i.e. those who read poetry for pleasure - and poets themselves, anxious to discover how their poems fare under the judicious gaze of writers steeped in literary tradition and analytical know-how. Unfortunately, the truth may be harsher than this: that the only people who read poetry reviews are poets.

All of which mystifies most critics, given the scorn heaped on them for practicing a craft which, while admittedly minor compared to the arts, seems so indispensable to the people who complain about it the most. Still, let’s for the moment give unhappy poets their due and imagine for a moment a conversation in which a critic is brought to the bar of aesthetic justice. The poet’s simple quest: to learn why the critic has it in for him:

Critic: You want answers?
Poet: I think I'm entitled to them.
Critic: You want answers?
Poet: I want the truth!
Critic: You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has words. And those words have to be guarded by people with sensibility. Who's gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the negative review I qave you and you curse the critics. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that that review, while tragic, probably saved careers. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves careers...You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me at my laptop. You need me at my laptop. We use words like technique, imagination, feeling...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use 'em as a blurb on a dust jacket. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to someone who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very publicity I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a pen and stand at post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!

Okay, apologies to Aaron Sorkin and Jack Nicholson. Still, the point remains that critics, the good ones at least, do believe they’re defending something, though what that something might be seems to shift with changing tastes and moods. But rather than spend too much time outlining my own preferences, I thought it might be worthwhile to ask if the poets are right - that the only thing indefensible are the standards critics apply to their work - to look at, if not the biases, than at least the practices that characterize a great deal of Canadian poetry criticism.

I have to say from the outset that it’s not all bad; in fact there are at least half a dozen reviewers in this country who do a superb job. The problem, of course, is that they can only write in so many places at one time. Which has left it to a mid-level coterie of moderately capable reviewers and a small army of discursively challenged poets to fill the breach. Consider our good fortune upon learning, for example, that a new book of poems contains imagery that is “fresh and startling in its beauty” and that the verse is “pleasing both to the eye and ear.” Or that what commends another book of poems to us is “the strength of its voice” or that a poet’s latest offerings “are not only haunting for their language, but also for what they tell us about humanity.” A poem “resonates with power”. Another speaks “directly to the reader”. Still another is “meditative”, a wonderful word which, if used well, can aptly describe a mood or tone, but which too often becomes synonymous with any soft feeling or poetic attitude that escapes the reviewer’s capacity to describe accurately.

There are other irritants, of course. One of the most common is the reviewer who heaps great praise or scorn upon a poet that is wildly disproportionate to the amount of poetry actually cited in the review. The preoccupation of at least three reviewers I’ve encountered recently was with cover art and epigraphs, with one insisting that the poet had failed to use enough epigraphs in the middle of the poem, and even going so far as to supply an epigraph himself. Or the reviewer who, not content to cite part of the epigraph at the beginning of the review, ended the review with the rest of the epigraph, ignoring whatever poetic felicities the poet herself might have offered.

One favourite recourse of reviewers unwilling or unable to discuss the work in front of them is to compare some aspect of it with the work of another poet. Often the parallel is tangential at best, with the reviewer eventually backtracking to say why it is the two poets are not alike at all. In one case, a reviewer spilled at least as much ink writing about the poet being used for comparative purposes as the poet whose work she was commissioned to write about. And the name dropping is legion: Lowell, Hopkins, Yeats, Williams and Eliot. Crane, Whitman, Pound and Bishop. It appears a great many of our poets enjoy talents to nearly match the capacity of the entire western canon, though most reviewers are cagy enough not to overstate the parallels. Simply to have drawn a connection suffices, redounding, I suppose, both to the talent of the poet being reviewed and the erudition of the critic.

Our greatest susceptibility as commentators, however, is our capacity for thinking in rhetorical tropes, i.e. ready-made phrases or sentences that sound intelligent, but which upon closer examination make us sound…well, idiotic. Consider one reviewer's comment that the poet “writes of the primal experiences of death, birth and sexuality and their intrinsic and metaphoric relation to the natural world.” While these are certainly important themes, experiences such as sex and dying don’t “relate” to the natural world; they are the natural world.

The lines in another poem, says the reviewer, are “dreamy and descriptive”, all rather vague and more reminiscent of a teenage crush than the language of critical analysis. Concision is a much sought after virtue these days. Thus, one reviewer writes endearingly of another “The brevity became him, his terseness punctuated only by his clarity.” I might have reversed that, i.e. “his clarity punctuated only by his terseness”, but I don’t think even that saves the line. And why brevity “becomes” this poet as opposed to anyone else, or some other human trait, remains a mystery, too.

Structure is always a tricky thing to talk about intelligently. Opines one scribe “The structure does, however, also yield some poems that seem formulaic, especially those in which Mierau’s propensity for juxtaposition and non-sequitur overpower the poem’s coherence.” What is more intriguing than the weasel words used here, i.e. “seem” and “propensity” (another way we have of writing without conviction) is how something “formulaic” can be made up of non-sequiturs. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but what would that actually look like? Unfortunately we can’t know because the author won’t show us.

All of which leads us to one of the more frequent problems in poetry criticism: the failure to provide evidence, though worse still is to mis-read the evidence, to see precision or rhythmic variety or sensual imagery where there is none. Nearly as bad are those among us who read into a poet’s work a philosophical or aesthetic stance that is not there. A case in point, the following:

“Zieroth is at least as concerned with the historic underpinnings of post-modern thought and perennial questions about death and dying as he is with the materials and strategies of contemporary poetry (e.g. lineation, typography, counterpoint).”

The fact is David Zieroth couldn’t give a hoot about “post-modern thought”. His philosophical thought extends principally to Marcus Aurelius and St. Thomas Aquinas, enriched by his own musings about life and death. The culprit in this case was yours truly, caught up in my own preoccupations with formal philosophy and contemporary poetics.

My only excuse is what any reviewer anxious to do a good job quickly discovers: reviewing poetry is hard. My inspiration is the critic who gets it right, who brings style and critical acumen to his or her judgments: Connolly, Jennings, Starnino, Graham and Guriel to name a few. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that only the writer who invests the same effort and imagination and linguistic skill to their analysis as the poet brings to the poem is worthy to be called critic. It’s a notion I have great sympathy with. At bottom the only truly compelling force in play, though, should be our desire to read well and convey what we read with a measure of insight and precision. All of it supported, I hope, by humility for the enormous gift of the poet.

Heart Moves

2010-02-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of year again when all but the very jaded point cupid’s arrow in the direction of their beloved, the more thoughtful attaching to the shaft a written testimonial to their undying affection. Not to be outdone this week I offer half a dozen poems about love, romantic love featured prominently, of course, but other kinds of love as well, by some of my favourite poets. I hope they strike your heart just a little, too.

Live with me on Earth among red berries and the bluebirds
And leafy young twigs whispering
Within such little spaces, between such floors of green, such
figures in the clouds
That two of us could fill our lives with delicate wanting:
Where stars past the spruce copse mingle with fireflies
Or the dayscape flings a thousand tones of light back at the
sun—
Be any one of the colours of an Earth lover;
Walk with me and sometimes cover your shadow with mine.

(Dig Up My Heart: Selected Poems 1952-83 by Milton Acorn. McClelland and Stewart, 1983)

The lovely collision of colour in the first and third lines, the delicate imagery to match the emotion underneath make Milton Acorn’s love poem “Live With Me On Earth Under the Invisible Daylight Moon” one of my favourites. I love the undulating rhythm which opens the poem, but also the way Acorn leaves lots of space after “whispering” at the end of line 2, to give the line and the reader air to breathe. The poem is sweet and brief with just enough darkness at the end to provide emotional contrast with the primary colours which dominate the opening of the poem. A lovely poem.

We’re all familiar with the next poem, unfortunately one so heavily overworked and satirized that its original beauty has been obscured. But if you re-read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s "Sonnet 43" you’ll discover why it remains a model of technical virtuosity and feeling. Interestingly, the use of biblical anaphorae or repetition was supposed to have been an invention of Whitman’s, but here Browning uses it to enormous effect. Pay special attention to the wonderful rhythmic and syntactic variety that follows each repetition of the phrase “I love thee”:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

My favourite sentiment in Browning’s sonnet is the line “I love thee to the level of every day's/Most quiet need...” Curiously, the same quotidian of love gets a slightly earthier and more amusing treatment in this traditional Scots poem “Supper Isna Ready”:

Roseberry to his lady says,
“My hinnie an’ my succour, O
Shall we do the thing you ken
Or shall we take our supper?”
Wi’ modest grace, sae fu’ o’ grace
Replied the bonnie lady,
“My noble lord, do as you please
But supper isna ready.”

As I suggested earlier poems about love come in many shapes and guises. Rhona McAdam’s love for her late mother is expressed in a moment of uncanny metamorphosis in “Making Sense”. The poem demonstrates why McAdam is one of the best at supporting plain, unadorned narrative with a deep, yet playful imagination.

Fed from my mother’s hand
for a dozen years, my dog knows more than I
of my own flesh. She is watchful.
When I rise, she rises. She follows me room
to room, keeping track so one day
she can report to my mother
what I wore, who I saw, what I ate.

It is tiring work. She sighs on the square rug
at the foot of my bed, smacks her lips,
tasting sleep, and liking it.
As my mother slept her final years
so the dog sleeps on through the day
only waking at my footstep
or sensing the keys in my hand.

She sits in the car as my mother sat
in her final months, looks out
at the trees, dumb with joy,
and we walk in my mother’s
favourite park, her gait unsteady
now as my mother’s at the end,
her eyes as milky.

Evenings when I sit in my mother’s
easy chair, the dog lies beside me,
paw rising to my hand, insistent
that I take it, that I not let go,
that I stroke its soft back
with my thumb, and when I squeeze,
someone squeezes back.

(Cartography, Oolichan Books, 2006)

As many testimonials as there are to love there are at least as many devoted to unrequited love. They are not always, as you might imagine, characterized by forlorn looks and weeping. A case in point: The Daughter of K’ab Rabia in “A Curse”:

This is my curse. God send thou love
One like thyself, unkind and obdurate,
That knowing Love’s deep cautery, though mayst write
In loneliness, and know my worth too late.

Disappointment in love comes in many forms, too, as evinced by “The Kiss” by Sara Teasdale:

I hoped that he would love me more,
And he has kissed my mouth
But I am like a stricken bird
That cannot reach the south.

For though I know he loves me,
Tonight my heart is sad;
His kiss was not so wonderful
As all the dreams I had.

Is there anything more painful than unrequited love after romance or marriage? Consider this trenchant offering from Vera Pavlova’s “He marked the page with a match”:

He marked the page with a match
and fell asleep in mid-kiss,
while I, a queen bee
in a disturbed hive, stay up and buzz:
half a kingdom for a honey drop,
half a lifetime for a tender word!
His face, half turned.
Half past midnight. Half past one.

A confession. Despite his reputation for great love poetry, I struggled with Pablo Neruda. Then I stumbled upon this gem entitled “Lone Gentleman":

The gay young men and the love-sick girls,
and the abandoned widows suffering in sleepless delirium,
and the young pregnant wives of thirty hours,
and the raucous cats that cruise my garden in the shadows,
like a necklace of pulsating oysters of sex
surround my lonely residence,
like enemies lined up against my soul,
like conspirators in bedroom clothes
who exchange long deep kisses to order.

The radiant summer leads to lovers
in predictable melancholic regiments,
made of fat and skinny, sad and happy pairings:
under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and the moon,
goes an endless movement of trousers and dresses,
a whisper of silk stockings being caressed,
and womens breasts that sparkle like eyes.

The little employee, after it all,
after the weeks boredom, and novels read by night in bed,
has definitively seduced the girl next door,
and carried her away to a run-down movie house
where the heroes are studs or princes mad with passion,
and strokes her legs covered with soft down
with his moist and ardent hands that smell of cigarettes.

The seducers afternoons and married peoples nights
come together like the sheets and bury me,
and the hours after lunch when the young male students
and the young girl students, and the priests, masturbate,
and the creatures fornicate outright,
and the bees smell of blood, and the flies madly buzz,
and boy and girl cousins play oddly together,
and doctors stare in fury at the young patients husband,
and the morning hours in which the professor, as if to pass the time,
performs his marriage duties, and breakfasts,
and moreover, the adulterers, who love each other truly
on beds as high and deep as ocean liners:
finally, eternally surrounding me
is a gigantic forest breathing and tangled
with gigantic flowers like mouths with teeth
and black roots in the shape of hooves and shoes.

After all is said and done, the poems that linger longest are the ones that remind us of who and why we love. I could have cited any number by Donne, Herbert, Dickinson et al, just as I’m sure your own favourites come to mind. This final poem by e.e. cummings is a favourite of my wife’s and one I grow fonder of with each re-reading. Happy Valentine’s Day, Gael.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Notebook

2010-02-05T00:33:00.001-08:00

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

- from "Church Going" by Phillip Larkin

Is it just me or are others subjected to the same caution: Whatever you do don’t take what you do too seriously – or don’t take your self too seriously, which I gather is the very worst thing a person can do. Whenever I’m accused of this (not every day, but just enough to wince slightly when it does happen) I become a little confused about what it might really mean to be too serious about something and about the possible consequences. I suppose if you get too serious about one thing, like the family dog, for instance, you neglect other things – like the family. Or sacrifice so much time with your partner that he or she performs the inevitable and leaves – all because you spent months, perhaps years, getting your award winning manuscript on love out the door.

There are other possibilities, of course. It could be this injunction against taking things too seriously is mostly centred around fear – like the fear of assuming a great challenge, this in turn horribly mixed up with a fear of success, or worse, the fear of offending others; that last one seems to fit in with the urban myth Canadians are supposed to have about themselves. Hiding our light under a bushel for fear of bringing shame or derision down upon us from the neighbours – forgetting that light is a way of helping us pierce the darkness, to find our way.
…
Phillip Larkin is said to have been so serious about pursuing a life in poetry that he spurned most of the other things that constitute a normal life: Marriage, Children, Social Connections - all out the window as he focussed his entire energies on crafting not just the very best poem he could write, but the very best poem anyone could write. Among the results, “Church Going”, in which he described his subject as “A serious house on serious earth”, which might just as easily describe Larkin’s attitude towards poetry. Poetry, like religion, is serious business. Or at least that’s the way Larkin seems to have understood it.

But so did Robert Lowell apparently. Not content with understanding his significant New England literary roots, Lowell assumed nothing less than a study of the entire tradition of Classical-Anglo-American literature. To this he added a thorough re-thinking and re-working of his most well regarded poems. W.H. Auden was so serious about stemming any lessening of his poetic powers he routinely moved once a decade to a new country: first America, then Italy, finally Austria. Arguably, he gave new life to his poetry and his career.
…
Is it possible to be too serious? No one likes a bore after all. And being really serious suggests a capacity to deliver the goods; heaven forbid you’re serious, but also second rate. In which case you really are too serious - for your own good, or anyone else’s.

So serious, not solemn. Devoted to your calling, but not to the exclusion of the world or other ways of living or thinking. Disciplined in your work habits, but making time for Irish tenors, kids and small dogs. Unflinching in your opinions, but rigorous in how you go about developing them and equally determined to hear and understand others. Allowing yourself the luxury to get mad, to get really pissed about the world and what you think should be done to fix it, then allowing yourself a chuckle at the whole absurd mess.
---
At bottom, truly serious people are curious people. In their hearts they simply want to see where things lead and how they turn out. Typically, curiosity begins when you’re young and if it isn’t squished out of you by age six you go on being curious; it’s now part of your nature. That’s the curious thing about curiosity: you aren’t simply anxious to know why something is the way it is one day and then upon discovering the answer the following day find you are no longer curious. Quite the opposite: discovering why Canadian geese flying in formation routinely change positions over long flights invariably uncovers other questions beyond the aerodynamic principles that underpin the draft of a bird’s wing. Now you want to know the structure of the bird’s wing or the nature of the movements of wind or the innate homing capabilities of Canadian geese over great distances. Suddenly you’re impressed not by your capacity to answer a question, but by the sheer inexhaustibility of the universe to place more questions at your feet.

If you’re lucky and are conscious enough this last discovery presents you with another gem to put you in good stead for the future: you discover humility. Which brings us back, I suppose, to where we began, but now with a potential answer and antidote to our original dilemma. Perhaps, it really is possible to be too serious, measured not against what others may say or the limits they place on our human ingenuity and industry, but against that enormous backdrop of a cosmos that is largely indifferent to our small efforts at shaping a destiny for ourselves, but which simultaneously compels us to take it seriously, if only by virtue of its sheer magnitude, enormous beauty and infinite variety.
---
Christian Bok doesn’t think Canadian poets are very serious. In fact, he says, they’re downright lazy. I don’t imagine they’re lazy so much as overworked and distracted by the infinite number of things that poets are expected to do in a day, besides writing a really good poem - from manuscript prep to query letters to magazine and book publishers to the endless stream of poetry readings, competitions, and grant applications. Poets like everyone else also must earn a living, which usually means a low paying job as a teacher, librarian or baggage handler. In the midst of this is the enormous pressure to be everything we expect them to be as poets: meticulous technicians, profoundly sensitive barometers for our deepest feelings, diviners of history and culture who are, by turns, enthused, enigmatic, entertaining – and yes, deeply serious. How, you might ask, is one to keep up?

Perhaps Emily Dickinson had the right idea after all. You don’t have to read much of her work to recognize that Dickinson was deadly serious. No Canada Council or NEA grants for her. No poetry contests or quietly hysterical letters to publishers about the dearth of public readings. Dickinson published virtually nothing during her lifetime. Instead she wrote poems, a lot of poems, sharing them occasionally with a special friend, but seldom venturing beyond the door of her home in Amherst, Massachusetts.

If you’re serious about anything, poetry or the DNA structure of the fruit fly, it seems you have to focus in on the thing that matters most to you, culling the extraneous. Above all else, caring counts.

Breaking Through

2010-01-29T08:16:00.000-08:00

The 2009 winner of the Governor General's award for English-language poetry is David Zieroth of North Vancouver, B.C. According to the national panel which selected the The Fly in Autumn as the best work of its kind for 2009 Zieroth “addresses our common and defining human fate—the loneliness that is a rehearsal for death—with a tenderness and buoyancy that shows the reader ‘how to walk in the dark with flowers.’ The intricacy and exuberance of rhyme and the breadth of vision are stunning.” Earlier this week I asked Zieroth about his poetry and the significance of the $25,000 award.

DK: Winning a Governor General’s award for poetry must be an important milestone for you, but are there practical benefits to winning the award?

DZ: I had already reached a point in my life that enabled me to enjoy the prize without being thrown off kilter by its impact. If I hadn’t been nominated or won it, I would have still kept writing, of course. I’d also arrived at some sense of self-completeness connected somehow with my age, my retirement from teaching, my younger daughter’s marriage, the birth of my grandson, and years of writing. Big cycles were wheeling through me, bringing me to this particular place, and the award was part of that development, an acknowledgment.

The benefits? I had moments of great fantasy in which I flew to the southern hemisphere following the sun and the warmth, far from the purple twilight of the coastal clime, but that hasn’t happened yet. I do intend to continue my connection with Vienna—my younger daughter and her husband live there—and I look forward to returning, to walk those streets, to sniff out the lives that live and have lived there, to savour the coffee, to feel the church bells ringing through my ribs, to imagine myself as Mitteleuropean.

All that aside, I am deeply honoured to have won the award. And, of course, there’s the money, the tax-free cheque, and when asked about it I soon found I was replying with this refrain: pay off my debts, fix my teeth and travel. Perhaps the best benefit of all is the great pleasure my winning brought to many people: happy for me, happy for themselves, to see someone who has worked and kept at it, to see the kind of poetry they like winning.

DK: Outside of winning the GG award has The Fly in Autumn been a breakthrough book for you artistically, and if so, how?

DZ: Sometimes I think breakthroughs occur all the time—isn’t that what every poem must be?—each poem a departure; at other times I think there’s no such thing, that all is a slow movement somewhere, not necessarily forward, though perhaps that, too.

I also tend to think breakthroughs are what other people see in work they themselves have some distance from, not likely their own. Although I do see that certain poems I have written since I started writing over 40 years ago have been, if not breakthroughs, then consolidation. I think poets are remembered more for their particular poems than for their books.

Yet I can see The Fly in Autumn as a breakthrough book because it includes something new, even daring: heroic sestets (though without their required tetrameter, which was beyond me). Heroic sestets use form and rhyme in a way that wouldn’t have been thought likely from me before the book’s publication; I’m considered mainly a lyric and narrative poet.

DK: Where does a poem begin for you? What stages must it go through before you consider it complete?

DZ: Some poems come unbidden, from somewhere that remains hidden but active, that odd combination that I once despaired of knowing more about but am now content to let be, grateful its “is-ness” has chosen me.

Ideas for poems arise frequently from snatches of conversation. The people around me—at coffee shops, on buses, in conversation—are natural suppliers of ideas and lines and titles. I am fond of saying after a particular phrase has been uttered by someone quite unaware of its literary clang and value, “That’s the title of my next poem,” though more often it appears somewhere inside a poem.

Often poems arise from my reading, curiously more often from novels and travel books than from poetry. Or my mind throws up phrases and images just before I fall asleep, and these get me out of my warm bed. I have also attempted to record those words that flash through in the middle of the night and seem so lucid, only to discover that next morning they are as indecipherable as a foreign language.

The stages of writing? I compose by hand or on the computer, following where the thread takes me until I feel I have arrived at the point where the poem needs no further movement. Then comes the rewriting, and the putting away, and the waiting.

I also walk as a way to remember what I’ve written, and those parts I can’t remember clearly are often the very bits I can trim away. I send the poem or read it to a handful of poets who are kind enough to comment. It is always amazing to me what I can’t hear and see what these initial readers can hear and see (my veering toward the prolix and baroque, for example), and I am always grateful for their honesty and clarity.

DK: “How to Walk in the Dark with Flowers” is so strong, has garnered so much attention, that I wonder you didn’t make it the title of your book. What was the genesis for this poem? Are there other poems that stand out for you?

DZ: I was thinking of using that poem as the title of the book, and then a friend suggested that I already had one How-entitled book ("How I Joined Humanity at Last"), and that perhaps I might find something less repetitious, and I agreed. Also, the present title is succinct and adds a note of drollness and humour, needed in a book with so many poems about death and dying.

The origin of “How to Walk in the Dark with Flowers”? A member of our community died. I belong to a group of poets and poetry lovers in North Van and we talked of this woman’s death. Some of the images in the poem arose from that conversation. The poem has since been read at two memorial services at least.

My other favourites include “How Brave,” “Am I Dreaming?” and “Sorrowful Friends” —but then I remember how I loved each poem as I wrote it, how it seemed to alter the whole of the work that had gone before. Also how grateful I was for such a change, to think that change was possible, inevitable even, even glorious and deeply desirable, evidence of some prime force.

DK: You say The Fly in Autumn owes much of its success to your editor. What does that mean precisely and what should poets generally look for in an editor?

DZ: I have been very fortunate to have worked with two of the country’s best editors—Dennis Lee and Gary Ross—and what they were able to do with my work is what every writer should hope for: someone who can find structure and narrative, who can cut the scaffolding and cajole and release a greater meaningfulness, someone who knows what your writing is better than you, because you are too deeply inside it.

What Silas White did with The Fly in Autumn was similar: he took the large manuscript I’d sent to Harbour and found within it the book. He was able to make that transformation, I think, by living with the poems, so that he was able to discover the voice that would begin the book, and thus give a voice-shape to the book.

Of course, Silas also made me look again at certain passages and words (as Lee and Ross also did). He helped me to see again what I had grown too familiar with. He added another layer, by looking at the poems through a different lens.

DK: Is your reading confined to reading poets?

DZ: I read poetry often, for all the reasons one does, often anthologies as a way to hear new voices and to estimate the anthologist’s gist of the geist, so to speak. I frequently have several novels on the go (I adopt a Darwinian approach: may the best book take me over), and travel writing, history and memoirs, and I went through a phase not long after retirement in which I read many mysteries, a phase that may be waning.

In fact the year after I stopped teaching, I read 130 books overall, and I kept track of their titles because I thought that I might begin to read something I had previously read and be that far along before realizing. I have no television. I can’t watch movies at home without twitching. Nothing calms like a book. And releases. My favourite book of last year was Claudio Magris’ Danube.

DK: You are not a philosophical poet per se, but your work suggests a strong pre-occupation with our ability to see and know the world. Is that the case? How large a desire do you have to say something of lasting meaning?

DZ: Your question makes me smile, as if you have discovered about me something that I have always felt no one would notice, that I have at times tried to hide under a bush, as it were. Because “to say something of lasting meaning” is of course the point, the drive and the great challenge, which I feel I am digging out of myself by trying to see who I am in this world and trying to see what the world is.

All I have to see with is who I am. And how incredibly difficult it can be for me just to describe something truly. I don’t mean some state of feeling or being, but just the everyday physicality of, say, a bird, as, for example, Elizabeth Bishop does so perfectly in “Sandpiper”.

DK: You write a great deal about death and dying, relying in part upon the great stoic Marcus Aurelius. How has he helped you come to terms with mortality, both personally and in your poems?

DZ: Margaret Laurence said to me once that we only get one subject and we work it over and over. I think perhaps my subject is death and dying. It’s a subject I’ve been addressing in all my books, and even more so as I age. I need to examine that phenomenon, which is one we all experience and yet can’t really know beforehand—and so we must imagine what the experience will be and what it will mean as one’s biography begins to reach a conclusion.

I carry The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius with me on the bus sometimes as I travel around the city on my various chores, and he’s a help when I’m waiting at the bus stops, a distraction from the mêlée around me, but an illumination of that fracas, too. And his no-nonsense approach to dying (“Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.”) is what I need, some consolation about how short life is and how inevitably one must leave behind all the human and natural riches of the earth.

DK: In my interview with Tim Steele (see Speaking of Poems, Dec. 18) he said when he writes a poem he has in mind his wife, his extended family, his friends, and “a community of fellow poets I particularly admire.” Who do you write for? For readers? For yourself? Other poets?

DZ: I write for myself. I write to find out what I know, how well I know it, how best to articulate that knowledge, what delights I might encounter along the way and which directions I couldn’t have imagined had I not begun—that eureka moment of chthonic connection, that golden thread. I write to keep in touch with the mystery of poetry, that power beyond reason.

I also write for the perfect inner ear of the perfect listener.

DK: Christian Bok said recently young people really have nothing to offer in their poems because they don’t know anything. Is there any truth to this?

DZ: I taught writing for 25 years, and I thought about these questions almost every day, but that time has passed now. However, I can say that I’ve been surprised many times by my students, by the effortlessness (and anger) of their poems. In my experience, nearly everyone has some song inside.

DK: You have created a micro press for publishing chapbooks of poetry. How rewarding is that for you?

DZ: Yes, I do all the work in my office: on my computer, printer and work-table, designing and printing and folding and stapling and trimming and mailing out the chapbooks, and the labour is very grounding and satisfying. I love working with poets in this way, getting to know them by living with their words for days on end, and working with the other editors at Alfred Gustav Press, named after my father, has helped me enormously to understand what poems are and what I think about them.

DK: What is next for you?

DZ: I’m working on a group of poems based on my experiences in Vienna, plus a lengthy group of eleven-line poems about the sloping city neighbourhood where I live. I’m working on a prose manuscript—part science fiction, part romance, part mystery, part quasi-reflection and monologue—about a flaneur and his city-street rambles and his observations about the local populace, a manuscript in which simultaneously a story unfolds about how all humankind suddenly vanishes except for one man left utterly alone.

I’m also working on a long poem called “Hay Day Canticle,” after Louis MacNeice’s "Autumn Sequel" (so the love of rhyme and form returns or rather continues).

Then, of course, there’s my sweet little grandson just upstairs. And travel. And writing. And reading books. And here I find I disagree with that venerable Roman who said “Give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch.” And always the daily moral work, from which there is no day off, of trying not to grow into someone I might regret.
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To get a taste of David Zieroth's wonderful style, see "How to Walk in the Dark with Flowers" in our "Great Poems" section to the right.

An Old Chaos

2010-01-22T08:10:00.000-08:00

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.” - D.H. Lawrence

Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote that each of us is required at least once in our lifetime to declare ourselves. By that I took him to mean not so much our epistemological stance on the universe as our feel for our precarious position within it, sharing the fear and joy of living in a benign or malevolent universe (take your pick), with others as fearful or joyous as ourselves. We are still sufficiently tied to our pre-literate, paleomammalian limbic system that anything which shakes the ground beneath our feet, shakes us to the ground of our being. This suggests a larger, pragmatic truth: Not only is it foolish to refuse the truth of our predicament on this planet, it might be sensible, possibly even heroic to embrace it.

And so several of us declared ourselves last week. Wearing our care and allegiance to poetry close to our hearts we took our respective stands on what we each felt should constitute the impetus of a poem. Beginning as a discussion about anger and whether it makes appropriate material for poetry, participants eventually seemed torn - wanting to strike a balance (a perfectly Canadian thing to do) between emotion and virtuosity, while resisting that balance, too. Emotion, whatever people claim is its correct place in poetry, has its primary pull.

And had its pull, John Pass chastened me, in poetry of the 1960s: Not only did poets such as Robert Bly express anger in poems like “Teeth Mother Naked At Last”, they did it with considerable power:

Artillery shells explode. Napalm canisters roll end over end.
Eight hundred steel pellets fly through the vegetable walls.
The six-hour old infant puts his fists instinctively to his eyes to keep out the light.
But the room explodes,
the children explode.
Blood leaps on the vegetable walls....

Do not be angry at the President?

Gary Geddess reminded me that anger played its part in W.S. Merwin’s war poems, too, anger morphing into something more contemplative, though no less painful in “The Asians Dying”:

Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything.

In “Advent 1966” Denise Levertov comes as close as anyone to disavowing our quainter, more patrician instincts in poetry. Here, Levertov’s “clear caressive sight”, given to her to “stir me to song” is suddenly interrupted by a “monstrous insect” that enters her head, and sees with her eyes:

And this insect (who is not there--
it is my own eyes do my seeing, the insect
Is not there, what I see is there)
will not permit me to look elsewhere,

or if I look, to see except dulled and unfocused
the delicate, firm, whole flesh of the still unburned.

Is this anger or the fruits of anger? I’m not sure. If the latter, should we privilege the softer, mediating expression that remains over the igniting power of our original experience, our anger? John Pass suggests as much: “The practice of poetry, like any art, moves the practitioner quickly past the easy moral certainties that anger asserts. And anger is not communicative, is destructive of relationship, of metaphor.”

To which Adrienne Rich might reply:

Fantasies of murder: not enough:
to kill is to cut off from pain
but the killer goes on hurting
Not enough. When I dream of meeting
the enemy, this is my dream:
white acetylene
ripples from my body
effortlessly released
perfectly trained
on the true enemy
raking his body down to the thread
of existence
burning away his lie
leaving him in a new
world; a changed
man

From 'The Phenomenology of Anger'

Okay. Anger really can be destructive of relationship. But it also seems pretty creative, judging by its transformation into metaphor here. And while we need to be careful not to misrepresent her (Rich, like Pass, also talks about anger morphing into grief), Rich goes further. “Anger,” she states “can be visionary, a kind of cleansing clarity.”

Beyond the Insect’s Eye

Everyone’s right, of course; it’s not just anger we’re talking about, but emotion. What emotion looks like on the page. Which emotions belong there and how much of it. In 1924, Edmund Wilson praised Wallace Stevens for the “richness of his imagination” and “ingenious, charming and sometimes beautiful” poems, but demurred on the question of Stevens’ emotional investment in his poem:

“Mr. Stevens, who is so observant and has so distinguished a fancy, seems to have emotion neither in abundance nor in intensity....Emotion seems to emerge only furtively in the cryptic images of his poetry, as if it had been driven, as he seems to hint, into the remotest crannies of sleep or disposed of by being dexterously turned into exquisite amusing words.”

Run Wilson’s remark alongside an actual poem by Stevens, like the closing of “Sunday Morning”, for instance, and you begin to see a disconnect between what different people mean by emotion and where the actual experience of emotion in a poem resides.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

The emotional impact of this poem seems to me unavoidable, but where it is actually located is hard to judge. Whatever the poet might have felt while writing must remain a mystery judging by the exquisite control demonstrated. In the reader, then? Well, even that can be hard to pin down. Emotion for me is not generated by the image of those “casual flocks of pigeons” or by the argument against religion that permeates the rest of the poem. Instead, it seems to occur in the linking of the image and the thought, the shared tragedy of our “unsponsored isolation” and the inescapable freedom and sadness of those “extended wings”.

This is my bias. Read the poem in its entirety, check your own pulse and I’m betting you’ll find it’s yours, too. It’s also the only answer I know to the charge by Zachariah Wells and Harold Rhenisch that what we are most hobbled by is linguistic and cultural “blandness”. But at the end of the day we’re not asking that more writers express their anger, but to look inside themselves and ask “What, after all, do I feel? I know what I think. But what is the nature and scope of my emotional life and its relation to the world around me and, if it has a place in my work, how am I to embody it?”

Finally, this from Matthew Arnold:

But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves;
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on forever unexpress’d.

from “The Buried Life”
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Next week, an interview with Governor General award winner, David Zieroth.

P.K. Page dies

2010-01-14T16:13:00.000-08:00

It is with great sadness that we report the death of P.K. Page at the age of 93 on Thursday, January 14 in Victoria. Her contribution to Canadian letters was immeasurable. Page was a true icon of Canadian poetry and will be greatly missed.

Patricia Kathleen Page was born in Dorset, England, in 1916, and moved with her family to Red Deer, Alberta one year after the First World War. Page got an early look at this country as her father, a military man, moved the family to posts in Calgary, Montreal and Saint John.

Page’s poems first appeared in magazines in the late 1930s. Working as a scriptwriter for the National Film Board in the mid-1940s, Page met her future husband, Maclean's editor and later NFB commissioner William Arthur Irwin. The couple spent nearly a decade living overseas while Irwin served as a Canadian diplomat. In the mid-1960s, they settled in Victoria, where Irwin died in 1999.

Someone who knows Page’s work well is Victoria poet Yvonne Blomer. “Page was the last of her generation,” says Blomer. “Her legacy to younger poets is her strong formality of language and her care with language. She taught us to pay attention to the details in the world around us and to capture those precisely in our poetry.”

Poet Dennis Reid agrees, citing a line from Page’s poem “Planet Earth” which was selected to be part of a United Nations program to foster dialogue among nations:

It has to be made bright, the skin of this planet
til it shines in the sun like gold leaf.
Archangels then will attend to its metals
and polish the rods of its rain.

“That’s a totally unusual, but very precise way of putting it,” says Reid. “And it’s something I paid a lot of attention to in her poetry.”

An eclectic artist, Page published over a dozen books during her distinguished career, including poetry, fiction, non-fiction and children's books. She was also an accomplished painter, exhibiting paintings and drawings in one-woman shows. Her paintings are featured at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

One of Page’s closest friends was poet Marilyn Bowering.

“P.K. was not satisfied with the superficial. Everything she did was with an eye that would look right through to the essence of things. She was very interested in what made things work. So you get that probing quality in her poetry and in her visual art, too.”

The passing of an era? Bowering bristles at the notion. P.K. Page, she says, was “a modernist” and “very very contemporary.”

“She was involved in environmentalism; she had very strong political opinions. She was connected to younger artists. I see her much more as setting standards that are there for the rest of us.”

Page won the 1954 Governor General's Literary Award for her poetry collection The Metal and the Flower, and received a National Magazine Award and a B.C. Book Award. She was also made a companion of the Order of Canada.

Dennis Reid cites a comment years ago by Victoria’s Poet Laureate about Page. “Linda Rogers put it right. She said P.K. had `poems of true power’ and that has stuck with me. That’s what true writers do. So will she be remembered? Unquestionably.”

For an example of P.K Page's memorable style, see "Deaf-mute in a Pear Tree" in our "Great Poems" link to the right.
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Photo of P.K. Page by Marilyn Bowering

Our Ireland

2010-01-08T07:45:00.000-08:00

Has the anger driven underground for the general population been met on the other side by an even deeper emotional implosion within poets, making them unknowable even to themselves, let alone to an external audience?

Years ago, more years ago than I care to remember, an entire world of possibility opened up to me as I sat in the back row of my first university class on poetry. We were reading Philip Larkin that day, and at that time it seemed to be a jaded, world weary kind of writing that fit in well with the anti-heroic stance so familiar to us in books like Catch 22 and Miller's Tropic of Cancer and in the grim mechanistic landscapes of movies like Midnight Cowboy. In a word I was intrigued, intrigued by what Philip Larkin saw in the world around him, by his language and his rhythms.

Which is not the same thing as saying I understood everything Larkin was trying to convey. Quite the opposite; that first day in class I was raw to the experience of poetry and mostly confused. Poetry was unlike anything I had ever encountered before: the words on the page despite being blessedly few in number compared to the prose I read were mostly a jumble. The three components of the simple declarative sentence – subject, verb, object, which I had been taught to use as my guide in understanding others and being understood myself were suddenly and terribly mixed up: the “who” of who’s speaking mostly disguised, the “action” verb which we had been taught to cultivate in our own prose clouded over by indirection and mis-direction, adjectives and adverbs gone astray.

But what I really didn’t understand is why Larkin and to an even greater extent other poets seemed deliberately determined to make my ability to understand them so difficult. My dilemma would only deepen years later when poetry became less a reading activity than an exercise in cultural divination. But that part of the conversation must wait.

Because eventually I got it. Eventually I understood that it was not only possible to tie the poet’s apparently disparate thoughts and images together in a way that made sense, but made pleasing sense. At the simplest level, poetry operated very much the way riddles or very good jokes do, with irony, surprise, sometimes with illumination. At their most complex, poems unlocked moral truths about the world and how human beings are able – or unable – to operate there, truths about our ability to know and understand our universal condition, to know our capacity for doing both good and evil and for achieving redemption when so much of the rest of society seemed driven by hate and destruction. The war poets and Yeats. The metaphysical poets Donne and Herbert. The trenchant, modern despair of Eliot and Stevens. Eventually, what they had to say made sense to me, in the broadest understanding of that word.

Then, somewhere along the way, all that got away from me. I stopped reading poetry. I’ll say straight up this was less the fault of the poems I was reading than everything else that was happening in my life at the time. For one thing, the Viet Nam war was on. For another, I was angry, angry not just at the war, but at our entire society, an anger that was not captured or released by poetry, but by songs, popular songs that tapped into the energies of an entire generation, a generation that spent its time trying to unravel - not the intricacies of the Shakespearean Sonnet - but the wrongs of society, wrongs seemingly perpetrated against its weakest members and occurring at every level of human activity, in the relations between the races, between men and women, between classes of people, between the very rich and very poor. The egregiousness of society’s actions were reflected in the ways it had contrived for us to communicate with one another, through advertising, through mindless television programming, through the lies that were told during election time and yes, through the same recording industry that produced those songs I mention above. But where poetry might have been a courageous, revivifying antidote to all this, it became instead a quaint, distant pastime that had very little to do with the world around us and it. It was something that no longer spoke to me because it could no longer be heard above the din of a world which had quite simply gone mad.

All that seems like a long time ago. Since then, the world, to use a term that continues to have currency since it was coined in the 90s, has learned to “chill”. It is not so much that people are less angry as their anger has seemingly gone underground, leaving a cool exterior in its place where heat once lived. Anger, that strident, seemingly inexhaustible, morally outraged response to the way in which all aspects of society seemed to conspire against the world's downtrodden became repressed or sublimated into other things, like a need to compete and to pursue one’s self-interest above all else. It’s an anger that when it chooses to emerge (and at its worst it chooses us, we don’t choose it) does so in our relationships with spouses and children, instead, as it once did, with our parents and the “authority figures” with whom we took such umbrage those many decades ago. But it is a manageable, unexpressed or inexpressible kind of anger, and one that our children seem to have inherited. It is an anger that may threaten rupture with the ones we love, or don’t love as the case may be, but not the broader social structure that suffered such a merciless - and dare I say it - much needed shaking up back in the 60s and early 70s.

These are the worlds, the decades-long paradigms that poetry has had somehow to survive in. Notice that I say survive, not thrive. Understand, too, that I am speaking not just about the writing of poetry, because poets will write no matter what the nature of the world around them and more often than not despite the world around them. Reading poetry is a different matter altogether. Reading poetry requires – how best to characterize it? - a dogged determination to find the bones or jewels buried deep beneath its surface? an irrational, self inflicted and sustained form of masochism? The truth is we do not read poetry so much as sample it, glancing at a page of new poetry as one poet told me not so long ago and flinging it aside the moment it fails to meet our tastes or expectations. Sustained reading, even of a single poem, seems bordering on obsessive compulsive, overly earnest and worst of all cerebral.

What has happened to make this so? Conventional wisdom says competing, more easily digested diversions are to blame: radio and TV, the Internet, the Blackberry and iPhone, the video game and equally ubiquitous DVD industries. Some might suggest it is the ready availability of the English language itself. It is, after all, all around us, in diverse forms of spoken and written, TV and ad-campaigned English, compressed into hyper-abbreviated text messages. Much of it is delivered expertly with dash and texture, though less and less of it seems to be very edifying or enduring. Have we simply become complacent? Lazy? Prevented by our inexigent, desultory natures from truly appreciating the special nuance in language that is poetry?

Or are the poets to blame after all? Have they turned too much inward, abandoned their readers. Has the anger driven underground for the general population been met on the other side by an even deeper emotional implosion within poets, making them unknowable even to themselves, let alone to an external audience? Have they substituted something else for the thinking, feeling human beings we know them to be, want them to be, something cooler, more culturally or philosophically sophisticated, or as the English might say “too clever by half”?

The great irony around the debate over “accessibility” is that we fail to ask the important questions: what are we trying to achieve by reading poems? who or what are we trying to gain access to? Fellow citizens with simple truths to tell? Singers with sublime voices? For the longest time I’ve been telling friends I read poetry because I want to see the world in a fresh way, in a way that subverts my familiarity with how things normally appear or operate. And I still believe this is a good reason for reading poems.

But surely something more is wanted. In his 1995 Nobel Lecture Seamus Heaney cited Archibald MacLeish’s comment that a poem “should be equal to/not true”. And as accurate as this was, it seemed insufficient to Heaney. “As a defiant statement of poetry’s gift for telling truth, but telling it slant,” he wrote, “this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want a poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.”

In one way my generation was lucky. We lived in a world that announced its need of re-tuning. The world and the universe seemed interconnected. Where are those interconnections today? Much of the power underlying Heaney’s speech was driven by the pressure and pain that was Ireland. What is our Ireland? When we hear about the horrendous ravishment of Darfur or witness with astonishment acts of vanity and excess like the erection of the Dubai tower, where do we place ourselves? How large is our scope? Who are we really?

Be us resolved…

2010-01-01T01:06:00.000-08:00

"Poetry and criticism thrive not just upon the size of their readership, but upon the degree of their readership’s intensity and sophistication."

It’s that time of year when we resolve to make ourselves better people. We all got a head start three weeks ago when two of our ablest critics attempted a correction of taste intended to make us not only better writers of poetry, but better readers, too (See The Great Cage Match: Starnino vs Bok in right hand column). I’ll say it straight up that I felt the subsequent assessments of the contest were weighted unfairly in one direction. Despite the entertaining histrionics, Christian Bok was far too glib and pleased with himself for us to take too seriously his grievance over the avant-garde's relative anonymity. Carmine Starnino’s performance got stronger as the debate progressed and he did us a favour by reminding us of a few home truths: syntax really is an extension of emotion, vowels and consonants are fundamental to sense and a poem's audio effects are vital to the creation of meaning.

Bok’s main assertion is that Canadian poetry isn’t doing its job, which should be, he says, “to provide an aesthetic of critique and surprise” and to generate knowledge “in the same way scientists do…through discovery”. A rallying cry for younger poets, then, and a plausible one, but for the fact poetry trades in more than just “information” and that it’s potential as a body of knowledge comparable to science was part of an initially seductive, finally discredited distraction from the last century (see my interview with Timothy Steele, December 18). The theory subsequently dusted off by Chris Dewdney and others has yet to produce a single poem comparable in impact to the discovery of calamine lotion, let alone Einstein’s theory of relativity or quantum physics.

Bok counterpointed his equally overworked assertion about the “mediocrity” of Canadian poetry with the success of his own book in Canada and the UK, but stumbled over other indisputable successes, among them some world class poetry by Birney, Atwood, Carson. Starnino’s rejoinder that Canadian poetry has gotten a bad wrap is not new either, of course, and his further contention that “the stories we tell about Canadian poetry don’t fit the facts” is also likely true. To say that poetry “from Pratt to Babstock” is distinguished by a “protean diversity and variety” is still subject to debate, it seems to me, and to a considerable amount of legwork by those still willing to hazard a reassessment.

Off the dime, please…

Can it be that both were right? That most Canadian poetry is deadly dull stuff, requiring an injection of new energy, fresh innovation, but also that much Canadian poetry is of the highest calibre but for our willingness to talk about it, to examine it and to observe its felicities? If so, then disagreement about the quality of Canadian poetry seems pointless. Because whether you agree or disagree a bigger problem presents itself. Both Bok and Starnino base their assertions, and by extension their agendas, upon a single, continually recycled observation: that not enough people in Canada are reading poetry, Canadian or otherwise.

Here is a truism, to put it simply, that has outworn its welcome or usefulness and that has ceased to be the impetus for change we imagined it to be decades ago. Just how irrelevant the observation has become was underscored for me recently when I read about the scores of poetry magazines in the U.S. and U.K. that lived and, yes, died in the last century on the basis of readerships not much larger than those which patronize existing Canadian poetry magazines. Despite the ups and downs, poetry in these countries went on being written and talked about in magazines that survived or started up anew. The readership though small appeared to be vibrant enough to generate continued interest and debate and to foster the production of new poetry.

How could this be possible? Perhaps poetry and criticism thrive not just upon the size of their readership, but upon the degree of their readership’s intensity and sophistication. Are readers not better served by a painstaking assessment of poems by articulate, knowledgeable critics anxious to unravel the wonderful intricacies of well written poetry instead of generalized laments about the buying habits of a larger potential audience? Is it asking too much of our poets and critics to focus on the people who already read poetry instead of fruitlessly searching for more readers from the legions of pulp novel readers that swell the nation’s transit systems? Do current readers of poetry count for nothing?

Be us resolved…

Whatever you may think of Bok and Starnino, there is little question that both are able critics. I have yet to make up my mind about their poetry, however. Bok's experiment in Eunoia, much worked up and occasionally brilliant, eventually serves to remind us how truly rich a poem can be when all five vowels are brought together to work in concert with all the other properties of language. Starnino has twice won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and this year was nominated for the GG award for This Way Out, so obviously someone is paying attention. But what would also be helpful to understand is how they view their readers. Are Bok’s readers as stupid and lazy as he says Canadian poets are (thereby calling into question their decision to buy his book)? Or are readers simply undernourished, as Starnino seems to suggest, by a cadre of critics and reviewers given to spoon feeding us exegetical pabulum instead of providing sensitive, unalloyed analysis and hard headed judgements?

My answer for a brand new year: Perhaps all of us – poets, critics, readers - could work just a little bit harder.

Colouring Christmas

2009-12-25T11:25:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking all week about how to mark this day. I settled on a poem, one that captures the texture of the day, if only in memory, while provoking us a little, too. Brenda Shaughnessy's poem reminds us that even in the absence of snow we dream of snow, in all its wonderful and sometimes unsettling ambiguity. Merry Christmas everyone.

Why is the Color of Snow?

Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn't?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It's true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that's occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won't stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don't we melt it?
Aren't we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question—

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

Oh Materialists! Thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets
to keep our treasure safe forever,

what world is made, that made us that we keep
making and making to replace the dreaming at last.
To stop the terrible dreaming.

From Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press 2008)

Net Gains

2009-12-18T07:04:00.000-08:00

“A poet may, moreover, volley a syllable about in a way that reminds me of what my sister does with the ball when we play tennis. She repeatedly hits shots in one direction and, just when I have been lulled into thinking that she intends to continue this arrangement indefinitely, she rifles the ball to the opposite and undefended side of the court.”

American poet Timothy Steele’s analogy for the wonderful asymmetrical properties of metrical verse recalls an earlier famous remark by Robert Frost: “Writing free verse,” he wrote, “is like playing tennis with the net down.” Both comments underscore a commitment to the practice of metered poetry, while reminding us of the frustrations Steele and many other poets and readers have had with the more dominant, open forms of poetry in this and the last century. A widely acknowledged authority on metrical poetry and author of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, Steele offered comments on both metrical and open form poetry during my interview with him in early December.

DK: You’ve said you prefer to be called a “metrical poet” as opposed to a New Formalist. Why is that? Form is more than meter, isn’t it?

TS: Yes. That’s the problem. Form has many different meanings. The OED devotes six columns to definitions of it. Even the loosest free verse has form in the sense of “shape,” “manner,” or “distinctive character.” What I love—and hope we poets will preserve—is meter, the art of rhythmically organized writing.

Besides, as I said on another occasion, the only real New Formalist in English is Geoffrey Chaucer. And I believe that our modern obsession with technical novelty is misguided, based as it is on a confusion of the methods of literature with those of the physical sciences. Whereas science often advances by refinements of apparatus, literature mostly stays new and vital not by technical innovation but by our responding feelingly and intelligently to the ever-changing moral, social, and political conditions in which we live.

DK: An awful lot of really good “free” or open form poetry has been written in the past 100 years. Why does formal poetry continue to be your principal source of satisfaction as a poet and a reader?

TS: Meter supports and encourages memory. It gives the ear and mind a special purchase on language. Against the bass line of meter, one can hear the shadings of the individual voice more clearly than one might otherwise. Also, no other form of writing offers such an engaging blend of order and flexibility. On the one hand, you have the regular measure; on the other, you have, playing across the measure, a wealth of different sentence types, with all their interesting irregularities of phrasing and thought.

Perhaps most important, meter is an instrument of discovery. Working with it (and with related devices like rhyme and stanza) forces you to be more thoughtful than you might normally be. Attempting to secure a cadence or locate a rhyme, you find yourself trying different ways of saying things, and often you come up with something better than you had originally. Meter is almost like a good-natured but tough-minded friend: Being other than you, it is not swayed, as you are, by your impulses and inspirations; and it encourages you to test their soundness and see if you can enrich them with reflection and effort.

DK: Do you enjoy reading very much open form poetry yourself?

TK: Some of it. The intellectually charged imagist poems of Wallace Stevens—“The Snow Man,” for instance, or “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—plus some of his humorous work like “Ploughing on Sunday.” Also, William Carlos Williams, especially the poems in his Sour Grapes and Spring and All period. Thom Gunn wrote some wonderfully sinuous satirical free-verse poems, including “As Expected,” “The Cherry Tree,” and “Convergence.” And there are other particular poems in vers libre that I’ve much admired, such as Gary Snyder’s “Piute Creek” and Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song.”

That said, the sheer volume of free verse published in recent decades presents a serious problem. It’s impossible to digest all of it. And one grows reluctant to devote inordinate amounts of time to it when so many people are so prolifically practicing it, while a valuable alternative tradition suffers neglect and misunderstanding.

DK: What are the specific deficiencies in contemporary free verse that you think might be rectified by the application of specific metrical or formal principles?

TS: A greater attention to rhythmical organization might encourage free verse poets to go deeper into their subjects. This relates to the matter we just touched on. When I started reading widely in contemporary poetry as a student, I noticed that many of the leading free-form poets would publish a new book every two or three years, and you’d sort of have to comb through the books to find the several good poems or passages. In contrast, fine metrical poets like Richard Wilbur, Louise Bogan, Edgar Bowers, Philip Larkin, and X. J. Kennedy published less; yet when you read their books, the poems were consistently thought through, featured a wide tonal variety, and offered many striking and just observations of the world. They weren’t simply writing Poetry with a capital “P”; they were also writing arresting and appealing individual poems. Though working with meters and rhymes evidently slowed down their output, the result was, at least for me, much more enjoyable.

DK: There seems to be a rise in the number of poets writing in traditional form? Are more poets taking the trouble to understand the traditions behind metrical poetry or is there something else that accounts for the increase in formal poetry?

TS: A century ago, free verse introduced a breath of fresh air into poetry; but the stale Victorian-Edwardian diction, subjects, and attitudes that prompted the modernist revolt have long since passed away. Free verse has become official art and has ramified into increasingly scattered and fragmented modes. Poets are realizing that we can’t keep recycling the spirit of 1912. And it’s probably only natural that some poets are rediscovering meter and availing themselves of its perennial advantages and pleasures.

DK: You take issue with Eliot and others who believe, in your words, that “skilful versification involves departure from a norm rather than variation within it", for example, using and, at the same time, withdrawing from iambic pentameter as a kind of a foil within a poem to create a new metric. Since then, people like H.T. Kirby-Smith have gone further by suggesting that this habit of withdrawing from an established prosody to create a new one is a feature of all historic revolutionary poetry. Why does this notion continue to have such appeal?

TS: In cynical moments, I suspect it is because it allows us poets to parade our shortcomings as virtues. We adopt rules and then not only break them at our convenience but also boast that these violations are masterstrokes of technique.

As for withdrawing from meter, that practice doesn’t result in a new metric. It results in “parasitic meter,” to quote a phrase J. V. Cunningham coins in his fine essay, “How Shall the Poem Be Written.” Parasitic meter is not a self-sufficient form but, in Cunningham’s words, “presupposes a meter by law which it uses, alludes to, traduces, returns to.” Moreover, as Cunningham notes, “To perceive it one must have firmly in mind the prior tradition from which it departs and to which it returns.” And when a literary community loses hold of the prior tradition, as has happened to a great extent in the last couple of generations, people no longer hear what poets working in this mode are doing. One of the ironies of Pound’s and Eliot’s work is that they so successfully undermined traditional metric that relatively few readers today appreciate the ways their own free verse alludes to and plays off of meter.

Also, this whole idea of prosodic revolution needs re-examining. Revolutions in style can, do, and should occur periodically in any healthy literary culture. But metrical revolutions are rare. Indeed, they aren’t properly revolutions, but evolutions. We can’t will them into being by a manifesto. They involve the kinds of gradual linguistic change that occurred, for instance, in late antiquity when stress supplanted length as the salient feature of European speech or when, in the Middle Ages, the inflectional system of Old English broke down, chiefly under the influence of Norman French, and gave way to a grammar based more on word order than word ending. To create a new meter, you need to create a whole new language or fundamentally modify the phonetic or grammatical structure of an existing one.

DK: Some years ago Charles Hartman singled out lineation as one of the organizing principles of a new prosody for free verse to compete with form. "When rhythm renounces the support of abstractions or independent systems (e.g. meter)," he wrote, "the basic principle of the line emerges and takes control" of the poem. Many agree with him. Do you?

TS: I read Mr. Hartman’s book with interest, though it seemed to me that he was suggesting that typography might serve as a basis for verse. That is, you take away poetry’s rhythmical organization, but you still lineate it in the fashion that scribes and printers have historically employed when dealing with verse. Since the delight I derive from poems involves the experience of rhythm and of hearing the ways in which interesting phrases and sentences are laid across the measures of lines and stanzas, that idea doesn’t appeal to me. But a free-verse poet might be more drawn to it and might find it a rewarding and adequate ground for practice.

DK: Hartman was trying, of course, to counter the charge of “formlessness” levelled against free verse. Is a prosodic system for free or open form possible at all?

TS: Here, again, we should distinguish terms carefully. Free verse can reasonably claim form by various means, such as Mr. Hartman’s principle of typographic lineation or D. H. Lawrence’s concept of plasmatic shape or energy. However, prosody is, to cite the OED’s definition, “the science of versification; that part of the study of language which deals with the forms of metrical composition.” So strictly speaking, no, a prosodic system is not possible for free or open form.

Saying this makes certain people indignant, and some have rather angrily written or told me that free verse does have its own prosody. But they tend to be vague on specifics. And it seems to me self-contradictory to adopt a mode of composition free of meter and then turn around and contend that it constitutes a metrical or prosodic system.

DK: Eliot hoped for a period of stability after an annoying flurry of chaotic poetic experimentation in the early years of modernism. Hasn’t the same level of experimentation continued to this day?

TS: As I noted in Missing Measures, modernists like Eliot, Williams, and Pound anticipated or hoped that the triumph of their experimental methods would be followed by a period of clarification and consolidation. They hoped a new metric would emerge and prove itself as coherent, shareable, and adaptable as the old had been. However, as they came to recognize and candidly lament, the experimentation simply continued, though it no longer had the purpose or energy it originally did.

DK: You paraphrase Wordsworth by saying “poetry should not dwell in a private lexicon” and that poets, above all else “write for readers”. But isn’t that precisely the problem today, i.e. poets employing a private idiom which the reader is at pains to translate? Who are poets writing for?

TS: Prior to the romantic period, poets saw their art primarily as a means of engaging and illuminating the external world. Since the romantic period, poets have more inclined to the view that their art should express their inner feelings. Further, influenced by the prestige of modern science, many modern poets have felt that poetry should be “difficult” in the way that modern science is.

On the face of it, these two tendencies—the self-expressive and the attempt-to-be-scientifically-difficult—are at odds with each other. But neither is very reader-friendly, and together they’ve sort of driven a wedge between poetry and its audience. Today, many poets, regardless of their particular style or school, appreciate this problem and recognize that we must correct or mitigate it. This doesn’t mean dumbing down poetry. It does, however, require an effort to meet the reader halfway—to speak clearly and offer accessible insight even when our subjects are complex and resistant to easy articulation.

In my own case, when I write a poem I have in mind, first and foremost, my wife, my extended family, my friends, and a community of fellow poets I particularly admire. If I eventually publish the poem, I hope it reaches a wider audience. It’s always cheering when people somewhere contact me to say they’ve liked a poem they’ve seen in one of my collections or have heard Garrison Keillor read on his Writers Almanac. (I’m less cheered when students email me questions in the wake of being assigned the task of analyzing a poem of mine that’s appeared in an anthology. Though grateful to be noticed, I want my verse to produce pleasure, not homework!)

DK: Finally, how have your views changed since writing Missing Measures and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing? Anything about them that gives you pause? Would you change or add anything?

TS: Because All the Fun is principally descriptive, and because I did the best I could to survey accurately the topic of meter and versification, I don’t think I’d change much there. I might use different examples in a few places, but probably nothing more than that.

Were I writing Missing Measures today, I might state more often and forcibly that I’m not implying that “free verse isn’t poetry.” I’m sufficiently Aristotelian to believe that all literature that imaginatively represents our experience is poetry—novels, stories, plays in prose or verse, prose poems, free verse, and metrical verse. I remain convinced, however, that to jettison meter would be catastrophic for poetry. It would diminish the entire art, including free verse since free verse needs something to be free from. Preserving meter is still the best way of insuring a genuine and vital diversity of poetic styles.

Timothy Steele is the author of five books of poetry, among them, Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (Random House, 1986) and more recently Toward the Winter Solstice: New Poems (Swallow Press, 2006). Garrison Keillor reads three of his poems in our "Great Poems" section in the right hand column.
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Timothy Steele photo by Barian

1599 Pacific Avenue

2009-12-11T11:13:00.000-08:00

We have a guest blogger this week. Montreal poet Julie Bruck is the author of a superbly crafted, emotionally compelling collection of poems called The End of Travel (Brick Books, 1999). Here, she describes her efforts to recover some remembrance of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who once lived in the same neighbourhood in San Francisco that Bruck now calls home.

For many years, I've read and reread Elizabeth Bishop's poems and prose, as well as biographies and critical studies of her life and work. So, when "Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell" was published last year, I spent a vacation week deep in those 30 years of letters. Between Bishop's characteristic reticence, her "immense, glistening, sibilant loneliness," and Lowell's combination of New England uprightness and brutal manic episodes, the letters of these long-time friends were often most moving for what was left unsaid between them.

After the suicide of her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, the corrosive effect of Bishop's drinking became more apparent in her letters (she was good at covering, but she'd begun to break bones in falls during blackouts). I read the last third of the book with a mounting sense of dread, as both her own and Lowell's lives seemed to spiral downward with an awful, accelerating inevitability.

One particular surprise to me in the letters was that Bishop had lived in San Francisco in 1968, my current home, just months after Lota's death. Like many periods of Bishop's life, this one was notable for her feelings of limbo--she was, typically, between jobs, loves, and homes. But she and a young friend "found a rather funny but comfortable flat on Pacific Avenue--a steam laundry (almost silent) on one side--a body painting place (for CARS, that is!) across the street and also the Cancer Society." Her letters describe the place as a "...pea green wooden early 20th-cent. building--4 bay windows—2 fireplaces--I really like it, and right near Polk Street..."

1599 Pacific Avenue is just a few miles from where I live. I typed the address into Google Earth's search engine, and Google placed 1599 right on a traffic island in the middle of Pacific and Polk--a busy intersection. So, I wrote the number down, and drove across town. After circling what should have been her block, I concluded that the apartment must have been torn down, since there seemed to be no building with that number. When I got home, I saw that I'd transposed the numbers. No matter, I'd go back another day. And I did, on a day when I was running an errand in that part of town. This time, though, I forgot the slip of paper with her corrected address on my desk.

I'm not going back. I am still grateful for the new collection of letters and I hope, one day, to visit the house in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she spent her early years. But 1599 Pacific Avenue, whether or not it's still standing in the shifting San Francisco light, is now outside my frame of reference. I got the message. Instead, I'm going back to her poems, where Bishop continues, as James Merrill observed, her "lifelong impersonations of an ordinary woman," and where, in her own words, "All the untidy activity continues,/awful but cheerful."
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For a beautiful poem by Elizabeth Bishop see the "Great Poems" link in the right hand column. Also, Julie Bruck's "This Morning, After an Execution at San Quentin". Bruck is currently working on a manuscript of poems to be published in 2010.
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Next week: an interview with one of North America's foremost authorities on metrical poetry, American poet Timothy Steele.

Getting Personal

2009-12-04T07:55:00.000-08:00

"The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

(From T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent)

No art form suffers more in the collision between the private and public worlds than poetry. Fiction writers conceal themselves behind characters and plot (with relative degrees of success); sculptors and painters make objects that are literally at arm’s length or longer; classical composers work in a highly abstract, wordless art form that largely overshadows the personality of their creator. All participate in the emotion of creation and performance, but none, regardless of what Mr. Eliot had to say about the matter, are as much in the foreground as poets. By the very nature of their art, poets are expected at some level to reveal something about themselves.

For those of us who attended last Friday’s readings by John Barton, Michael Kenyon and Chris Hutchinson at St. Michael’s University School in Victoria, it all came down to how much should be exposed and how much left at home. John Barton, for one, seemed content with the conventional boundaries that typically exist between poets and their readers, while at the same time offering an intriguing rumination on the poet’s presence in a poem partly captured here and appropriately titled “Persona”:

No question of
who is

speaking, my friend
my stranger, the dis

location between what I
say and what you

hear, androgynous
sited in some

invisible wilderness best
left on its own

to explore us, who remain
so much more than

the sum of the usual
equations thrown

open to the night. (30)

Barton has a tremendous gift for image and for creating captivating transitions across lines and stanzas. A case in point: the opening lines from “Aquarium” - At night, under the river, there are rooms, doors opening and closing/ In the chill arrhythmic currents, all of us floating. (46) He also has a wonderful sense of fun, as when he riffs off a typo in a badly translated French menu - while simultaneously poking fun at Allen Ginsberg:

"smocked salmon” a la carte...
-an epiphany perhaps, but not

the food of love, instead a net full
of this year’s declining catch

stood atwirl on their tailfins
the best of the their generation lined up

and looking quite fetching in frilled
aprons with bibs smocked

by my mother...(47)

From “Saumon Fumé” (Hymn, Brick Books, 2009)

Chris Hutchinson’s overly symmetrical use of identically shaped adjectives tends to dull his rhythms from line to line. That said, I think he tackles questions about relationships with great courage and displays enormous imagination:

I’d rather reflect the sleep
of twenty castle-shaped clouds-

quiet as an unplanted garden,

a belief saddening
In the saddest of times,

clutching the wine cup without
letting a single telltale drop

insinuate itself like
a crystal of aluminum oxide

slipping down the peacock’s
effulgent throat. (39)

From “Mining Sapphire” (Other People’s Lives, Brick Books, 2009)

Michael Kenyon is an able poet, too, though he did himself no favours by using his account of personal betrayal to introduce a poem that provided neither context for his admission, nor a sense of contrition or redemption afterwards. Chris Hutchinson’s failure was of the opposite kind and unrelated to his poetry, i.e. a failure to disclose his physician’s diagnosis of the cold and fever he contracted before taking to the podium. Absent that information, and judging by comments afterward, I had to wonder how much it depleted his book sales among those reluctant to shake his hand or touch his book (Still, I bought his book and am here to tell the tale: a very fine poet).

None of these poets comes even close to being a confessional poet. But they do write very personally. The trick is not how much or too little is revealed - sometimes even the tiniest detail will unleash a flood of feeling and association - but whether what is revealed resonates in a meaningful way with the reader. Poetry that is transpersonal, that crosses the boundary between the poet and reader to deliver that shock of recognition that comes from truthful experience truthfully told, unleashed with power and sensitivity, is the kind of poetry we relish the first time we experience it, and return to time and again.

A truthful poet who historically has kept a cool rein on most things, including her persona, is Margaret Atwood. I’ve just finished re-reading several poems from Morning in the Burned House. A good place to end this week’s post:

You’re sad because you’re sad.
It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill.
or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll
You need to sleep. (4)

From “A Sad Child” (Morning in the Burned House, Houghton Mifflin, 1995).

Quick note: I'll be stepping aside next week to allow Montreal’s Julie Bruck (now residing in San Francisco) to tell a personal anecdote about Elizabeth Bishop and to comment on Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, which was published last year. Give her a read. You won’t be disappointed.