Tonight finished an eight week Quebec Writer's Federation workshop led by Susan Gillis.
An excellent workshop it was. Susan Gillis was a compassionate and highly sensitive critic and guide, and group, which included some major talents, was remarkably convivial and caring. (In other words -- nobody there to hear the sound of his own voice, or judge others harshly - a common bane of workshops, I understand...) Time was divided between workshopping (a bizarre verb to me yet), sharing a favourite poem or two, and creative writing exercises. Some of the latter produced some fine poems - among them 1) describe a certain bottle in a poem devoid of metaphor, 2) compare that bottle to one of your parents 3) write about the bottle as possessing a personality traits of the person you have in mind without actually naming the person. Another was to take three lines -- an image, a metaphor, a phrase -- from one of the favourite poems and appropriate them into a 12-line, 3 stanza poem of our own. A final exercise was to imitate a poem of a favourite poet. We learned about resources such as Chase Twitchell's Practice of Poetry, which is full of such exercises, as well as Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, Miller Williams' The Patterns of Poetry - An Encyclopaedia of Forms, and 20th Century Pleasures by Robert Hass.
For me the workshop fulfilled all objectives I could have set out for. For a first workshop experience (well, I went to Toronto's Phoenix Workshop about 16 years ago, was turned off by some picky and arrogant personalities, and never went back), it was a great debut. I got excellent feedback on some of my poems, made some poetry friends, and for sure some of us at least will continue in some way, monthly meetings perhaps…
Word has it (who is that guy named Word?) that the QWF (Quebec Writer's Federation) workshops are often better than those in the Concordia Master's Program, as they attract more seasoned writers… well, this may or may not be true, but this one was a good one.
Does anyone out there perchance have anything to say about that?
So, workshops can be good, even life-changing. Lucky me - or rather, us!
How many out there (who care to answer -- haven't got many replies yet!) have had similar experiences? For those who have been to many workshops, how many could be called good and how many bad?
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Monday, November 22, 2004
Corey, Tate, Snider, Difficulty
Among the people I have on my blog roll is Josh Corey, a poet who is capable of some pretty stellar expository. Check out his posts starting with Nov. 18. I had never really read James Tate before reading this, but after reading a few poems in my Norton Anthology, I could see exactly what he was talking about vis-a-vis this guy, and ibid for Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, all these easy, popular poets who nevertheless are lauded (with reservations) by the literati, included in major anthologies, etc.
This had lead to a debate between Corey and one Mike Snider about the value of difficulty/abstruseness in poetry. My take on it is that there is a certain degree of difficulty, of challenge, of pushing the limits in poetry that is of value, and the limit varies with eveyone. I like intellectual challenge and scope , arcane vocabulary, purely "expressionist" use of language, etc. My limits go to say, Eliot's Wasteland. Pound, or, among our contemporaries, G.C. Waldrep, poets I find immensely rich and enjoyable. But if poetry becomes too impenetrable, cryptic, private, "cerebral", devoid of evocative imagery -- again, what is "too" is purely personal -- well it tips the scales into a kind of abyss.
This had lead to a debate between Corey and one Mike Snider about the value of difficulty/abstruseness in poetry. My take on it is that there is a certain degree of difficulty, of challenge, of pushing the limits in poetry that is of value, and the limit varies with eveyone. I like intellectual challenge and scope , arcane vocabulary, purely "expressionist" use of language, etc. My limits go to say, Eliot's Wasteland. Pound, or, among our contemporaries, G.C. Waldrep, poets I find immensely rich and enjoyable. But if poetry becomes too impenetrable, cryptic, private, "cerebral", devoid of evocative imagery -- again, what is "too" is purely personal -- well it tips the scales into a kind of abyss.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
PAPA WALT
What I'm saying here has been remarked plenty of times before, but maybe because some recent reading has smacked it once again into my face, it seems to bear repeating: if there's anything that is truly distinctive about American poetry as compared to that of other nations, if there is anything that truly distinguishes it, it can be summed up in one word: Whitman. (If you feel you've heard and read just about enough about Papa Walt, please feel free to click on to something else…) Sure, there are other currents- even at his time Dickinson and Poe provided very different poetics - but these seem like little eddies compared to the grand stream that followed Whitman's wake ("wake", by the way, in any sense you like it). Think of the poets who bear his mark, that expanded line, that relaxed diction, that joyful (even if anguished) cataloguing of everything: Pound ("Let there be commerce between us" - A Pact), Hart Crane (well, quite different in language sensibility, but yes--), Sandburg, the Beats (I think particularly of Ginsburg), Frank O'Hara, Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, Olson, Duncan, the langpo people like Bernstein, Hejinian, Silliman… am I missing anybody important?
John Ciardi had some perceptive things to say, in the 1987 edition of How Does a Poem Mean, which I've been reading with great delight these last few weeks. After citing Song of Myself, #26, he writes,
Whitman fathered a large pretence that his catalogues were all inclusive, that every sort of detail was equally welcome to his mind. Obviously, however, certain kinds of images were more welcome to his sensibilities than were others. Whitman tended to welcome without reserve, all images of industrial expansion, of fruitful nature, of the brotherhood of man, of astronomy, of the bustle of urban life, and of physical strength, for example, but one will not find anywhere in his catalogues such satanic images as one may find in Poe or in Baudelaire. One only has to turn to "Prufrock" or to "Dirge" (Kenneth Fearing) to see two categories of properties that would never occur in Whitman, despite his pretence to all-inclusiveness.
There is, that is to say, some principle of selection at work. One can see certain kinds of images that occurred readily to Whitman's mind and were welcomed into his poems. And one can locate other sorts of images that not only were pushed away from the poems, but that probably never occurred to the poet's mind. (p. 245)
Only America could have fathered Whitman (and it's funny how the word father keeps coming up in reference to Whitman… Pound again: "I come to you as a grown child/Who has had a pig-headed father"), and only at the time it did. Now as America sullies itself, the world, and indeed the planet, poets who follow his lead have been forced to admit images into their oeuvre that Whitman was able to happily screen out. The challenge for those poets is to catalogue everything and still maintain that feisty affirmativeness - in other words, to throw away the pretence, and still celebrate - or at least not throw themselves off a boat or bridge as Hart Crane or Berryman did. A tall order.
Of course, we Canadians have no Whitman, nor anyone who occupies such a central place in our poetry. What I'm doing here is what most Canadians do: live as far south as our citizenship permits, and observe from the sidelines. That 49th parallel cuts us out of that enterprising American spirit as conclusively as any Berlin Wall. What I observe is that the out-and-out materialism/imperialism of America, which created Whitman, now produces a series of hollow political parodies, the latest and most egregious being George W. Bush. Culturally speaking, Bush is to Whitman what Hitler was to Beethoven. And what I do as a writer is what many of the powerless do in America: absorb influences from everywhere I can, and out of my limitations, speak anguish, speak joy, speak out of a kind of loneliness.
John Ciardi had some perceptive things to say, in the 1987 edition of How Does a Poem Mean, which I've been reading with great delight these last few weeks. After citing Song of Myself, #26, he writes,
Whitman fathered a large pretence that his catalogues were all inclusive, that every sort of detail was equally welcome to his mind. Obviously, however, certain kinds of images were more welcome to his sensibilities than were others. Whitman tended to welcome without reserve, all images of industrial expansion, of fruitful nature, of the brotherhood of man, of astronomy, of the bustle of urban life, and of physical strength, for example, but one will not find anywhere in his catalogues such satanic images as one may find in Poe or in Baudelaire. One only has to turn to "Prufrock" or to "Dirge" (Kenneth Fearing) to see two categories of properties that would never occur in Whitman, despite his pretence to all-inclusiveness.
There is, that is to say, some principle of selection at work. One can see certain kinds of images that occurred readily to Whitman's mind and were welcomed into his poems. And one can locate other sorts of images that not only were pushed away from the poems, but that probably never occurred to the poet's mind. (p. 245)
Only America could have fathered Whitman (and it's funny how the word father keeps coming up in reference to Whitman… Pound again: "I come to you as a grown child/Who has had a pig-headed father"), and only at the time it did. Now as America sullies itself, the world, and indeed the planet, poets who follow his lead have been forced to admit images into their oeuvre that Whitman was able to happily screen out. The challenge for those poets is to catalogue everything and still maintain that feisty affirmativeness - in other words, to throw away the pretence, and still celebrate - or at least not throw themselves off a boat or bridge as Hart Crane or Berryman did. A tall order.
Of course, we Canadians have no Whitman, nor anyone who occupies such a central place in our poetry. What I'm doing here is what most Canadians do: live as far south as our citizenship permits, and observe from the sidelines. That 49th parallel cuts us out of that enterprising American spirit as conclusively as any Berlin Wall. What I observe is that the out-and-out materialism/imperialism of America, which created Whitman, now produces a series of hollow political parodies, the latest and most egregious being George W. Bush. Culturally speaking, Bush is to Whitman what Hitler was to Beethoven. And what I do as a writer is what many of the powerless do in America: absorb influences from everywhere I can, and out of my limitations, speak anguish, speak joy, speak out of a kind of loneliness.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
FINAL LINES
Final lines have been accosting me lately. In a long-distance conversation with Adze, my own most careful and dedicated critic (lately we've been mailing poems back and forth and critiquing…) he was saying that that final line has to be the most crucial - and most difficult to pull off -- in any poem. It may not be difficult to come up with something approximately right in a first draft, but it's often very hard to get it right on, in a clear, wholly satisfying way. (Sometimes, of course, one can be right on right off …but as Sheryl Crow said about songwriting, "Inspiration's great, but knowing the craft will save your ass!" This little post is about craft…)
I have a tendency to sum up or round off poems with a cryptic or mysterious statement, or return to the beginning in a kind of "refrain" or circular movement repeating earlier elements or variations of one of the first lines (if not the first line). As methods for arriving at final lines go, the "circular method" is certainly the easiest and perhaps the most common. … but there are other ways to finish that are far more ingenious, can have more impact, or resonate more deeply. Ending with surprising image, one that somehow sums up the poem although it hasn't appeared before, is one way. Having a concluding image or idea that the whole previous poem "leads up to" is a related , probably rarer way. Victoria Chang's poem, Yang Gui-Fe, which recently appeared in the New England Review, is a superb example of a final concluding line that the whole poem leads up to and that encapsulates the whole thing. Or think of the final lines of Hughes' Thought Fox.
Adze was also telling me that in my own recent poems (or rather, drafts of poems) some of my concluding lines might be best deleted so as to allow that deeper kind of resonance to happen. I think he's right here … I don't pretend to be immune at times to final line deficiencies. For instance, one rather lengthy draft called Emblem, I end with
lines bars binds of thought blending into colours curves hues
memories time and now on a shelf
this picture, twenty-three years later, me smiling with you --
I had put the camera on the rock and set the timer, we had to do it
a few times to "get it right" --
around it stones and twigs we had picked from the shore, embedded with dust,
emblems selected from that day
(NB: because Blogpspot protocol doesn't recognize internal spacing and pushes all lines to the left, the lines quoted above end up being rather more compressed than I'd like ... to see them more faithfully reproduced, click on my blog-city link …)
Adze suggested, take out the final "summing up" line, and let it end with "embedded with dust", a final image which packs much more symbolic resonance… Emblem too becomes a more interesting title: because it is a word that no longer in the poem, and therefore sheds a more singular light on the poem (more about titles later). This tendency to "talk about" and "sum up" with a line like "emblems selected from this day" is a habit taken from literary analysis, he thinks… I tend to think though that it's just crude expression of our need for symmetry…
(For some of our correspondance, see Blog City, June to August. )
After this conversation, I looked up Mark Strand on Poetry Connection (that was just before the Strand reading I attended). What did I see?
Mark Strand - Lines For Winter
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.
This is one excellent poem about dying… right up to that final line. Hate to say it … that line is terribly trite. Certainly unworthy of Strand. "Tell yourself that you love what you are" ... did Oprah take over? What a shame!
Staring at the poem with this god-awful line as if it were one of my own, I thought, hey, maybe it could end something like this:
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you will go on
that you are.
This is of course is following the common "final line" method: Going back, repeating a major element in a kind of refrain or circular return.
Maybe, though, there's a better way. A more cunning, ingenious way…an encapsulating image, perhaps… can anyone out there come up with one? (It's fun to test our editorial skills this way…)
I have a tendency to sum up or round off poems with a cryptic or mysterious statement, or return to the beginning in a kind of "refrain" or circular movement repeating earlier elements or variations of one of the first lines (if not the first line). As methods for arriving at final lines go, the "circular method" is certainly the easiest and perhaps the most common. … but there are other ways to finish that are far more ingenious, can have more impact, or resonate more deeply. Ending with surprising image, one that somehow sums up the poem although it hasn't appeared before, is one way. Having a concluding image or idea that the whole previous poem "leads up to" is a related , probably rarer way. Victoria Chang's poem, Yang Gui-Fe, which recently appeared in the New England Review, is a superb example of a final concluding line that the whole poem leads up to and that encapsulates the whole thing. Or think of the final lines of Hughes' Thought Fox.
Adze was also telling me that in my own recent poems (or rather, drafts of poems) some of my concluding lines might be best deleted so as to allow that deeper kind of resonance to happen. I think he's right here … I don't pretend to be immune at times to final line deficiencies. For instance, one rather lengthy draft called Emblem, I end with
lines bars binds of thought blending into colours curves hues
memories time and now on a shelf
this picture, twenty-three years later, me smiling with you --
I had put the camera on the rock and set the timer, we had to do it
a few times to "get it right" --
around it stones and twigs we had picked from the shore, embedded with dust,
emblems selected from that day
(NB: because Blogpspot protocol doesn't recognize internal spacing and pushes all lines to the left, the lines quoted above end up being rather more compressed than I'd like ... to see them more faithfully reproduced, click on my blog-city link …)
Adze suggested, take out the final "summing up" line, and let it end with "embedded with dust", a final image which packs much more symbolic resonance… Emblem too becomes a more interesting title: because it is a word that no longer in the poem, and therefore sheds a more singular light on the poem (more about titles later). This tendency to "talk about" and "sum up" with a line like "emblems selected from this day" is a habit taken from literary analysis, he thinks… I tend to think though that it's just crude expression of our need for symmetry…
(For some of our correspondance, see Blog City, June to August. )
After this conversation, I looked up Mark Strand on Poetry Connection (that was just before the Strand reading I attended). What did I see?
Mark Strand - Lines For Winter
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.
This is one excellent poem about dying… right up to that final line. Hate to say it … that line is terribly trite. Certainly unworthy of Strand. "Tell yourself that you love what you are" ... did Oprah take over? What a shame!
Staring at the poem with this god-awful line as if it were one of my own, I thought, hey, maybe it could end something like this:
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you will go on
that you are.
This is of course is following the common "final line" method: Going back, repeating a major element in a kind of refrain or circular return.
Maybe, though, there's a better way. A more cunning, ingenious way…an encapsulating image, perhaps… can anyone out there come up with one? (It's fun to test our editorial skills this way…)
Saturday, November 13, 2004
MARK STRAND
Today Mark Strand came to Montreal to read at Concordia University, as part of the Writers Read series. A tall hale 70-year old, centred, whimsical, bright, it was easy to see the young man in the old man. There were some hundred and fifty-odd in the hall, rather remarkable in this rather small Anglophone town in a Francophone city. I enjoyed his strange, spare - and rare -- poems. His reading style was not especially dramatic, but suitable to the understated humour of his work. He read mostly newer stuff, including some very recent, unpublished work. During the question period afterwards he was charmingly modest, wry. Standard questions: Who influenced you, and do you think you will be an influence on younger writers? For influences on himself, he mentioned Ashbury, but other seminal or influences he couldn't really remember. Some poets in the generation before his - like James Merrill - he found simply so skilful with language as to be inimitable. People like Merrill were so skilful that they "priced themselves out of the market" as far as imitators were concerned. As for the second part of the question, he said some of his early poetry got some attention and even inspired imitators, and some of his imitators wrote his own verse better than he did, especially as his own style changed with subsequent books…but who would want to imitate his weird stuff today? Sharon Olds does something different than he would want to do, but does it well, and is much more imitable than he was, and he would say was a much greater influence than he would ever be… When did you realize you would be a poet? someone asked. He said he has never really realized it. People said his work was great and that encouraged him, as you tend to believe whatever people tell you - but within himself, there was always a doubt. He has met people who are so sure of themselves he has felt genetically short-changed. Now though he feels that a self-doubt is healthy. There is a hope that he will be a seen as a poet, but he always has had this doubt.
Here's a favourite poem of mine from his earlier years. It's been much anthologized:
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
For more work by Strand, click here.
Here's a favourite poem of mine from his earlier years. It's been much anthologized:
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
For more work by Strand, click here.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
DID BUSH STEAL THIS ONE TOO?
Exact? Yes. Plausible? Looks quite. True? Dunno. But check out this detailed site on what may be a growing voting machine controversy...
http://thesquanderer.com/votingmachines.html
http://thesquanderer.com/votingmachines.html
Monday, November 08, 2004
BUSHWACKED (A TREATISE ON OCCASIONAL POETRY)
Bush just won his first election (bare pass-- 52%), and after making a few perfunctory conciliatory noises to the other side, he's already crowing about using his "political capital". To the max, we can assume. (As he did the last time.)
Friend of mine wrote me the other day,
I have an urgent matter to discuss.
There is a poetry society meeting planned for my
dreams tonight, and I need to come with some kind of
verse that will kindle the spirits to action on behalf
of people the world over who will be suffering from
(said in Schwarznegger (sic) accent: FOUR MORE YEARS.
Could you possibly come up with some kind of verse -
question mark
So here's my contribution:
All you out there who voted Bush,
May you'all get a kick in the tush!
There.
That'll keep those suffering spirits busy for a few years (kicking tushes).
Now I'll join PEN International.
Friend of mine wrote me the other day,
I have an urgent matter to discuss.
There is a poetry society meeting planned for my
dreams tonight, and I need to come with some kind of
verse that will kindle the spirits to action on behalf
of people the world over who will be suffering from
(said in Schwarznegger (sic) accent: FOUR MORE YEARS.
Could you possibly come up with some kind of verse -
question mark
So here's my contribution:
All you out there who voted Bush,
May you'all get a kick in the tush!
There.
That'll keep those suffering spirits busy for a few years (kicking tushes).
Now I'll join PEN International.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
THINGS I'M READING RIGHT NOW
Things I'm reading right now:
A.R. Ammons, A Coast of Trees. Winner of the 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award, with big metaphysical poems like Swells and Easter Morning. Lyrical poetry of his later years.
G.C. Waldrep, Goldbeater's Skin
Actually I'm re-reading this one. Fiercely intelligent, interior, hierophantic. Opens doors to linguistic risk. Provokes a desire to read the dictionary from cover to cover and find obscure words to use purely for their evocative, aesthetic properties. Love it. Poet's poet.
Billy Collins, Sleeping Alone Around the Room
One couldn't imagine a poet more different in style and approach Waldrep. Accessible, charming, brilliant. A romp. If humour columnists Josh Freed (Montreal Gazette) or Gary Lautens (Toronto Star) wrote poetry, this is how they would write. Actually, I find a lien to Italo Calvino. In particular, Mr. Palomar.
John Ciardi: How A Poem Means (© 1987,second edition, co-authored with Miller Williams).
A delightful read, if you haven't read it. I had the good fortune to pick this up at a second-hand bookstore. Written as a text book/anthology for undergraduates, it seems designed for poets who want to/have to resharpen their critical/editorial pencils outside of an MFA program (My pencil dulled by lack of use… well, that metaphor breaks like a pencil under scrutiny…switching horses in midstream, as Dylan (Bob) put it!) . How A Poem Means is informed by a passion for literature and sympathy for poet as creator, the writer being not just an academic but an excellent translator & pretty fair poet himself. Ciardi selects poems - as a semelier would fine wines -- from all over the canon - traditional ballads, poems from the renaissance, modern, to discuss their tastes & textures from point of view of symbolism, language, rhythm, meter, etc. I love the discussion of rhyme in English (as compared to Italian), language vs. diction, hard and soft diction, (which I'm reading right now). A great way to revisit old favs, like Ode to a Grecian Urn or Rime of the Ancient Mariner and discover newer poets (Nemerov, XJ Kennedy for example). Can't say enough in praise of this wonderful book….
2004 Best American Poetry: So far have only read a few selections of this anthology guest edited by Lyn Hejinian… includes Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein of the "langpo" movement (a group I'm extremely curious about), a bunch of younger poets, older poets. A much more "kicked back" collection than the 1994 edition edited by AR Ammons, also on my shelves… although that one includes, curiously enough, Hejinian.
George Elliott Clarke: Whylah Falls, a series of dramatic monologues that is itself a drama, by this acclaimed black writer from Nova Scotia. My reading of this one was interrupted by summer teaching & other things; it needs to be read like a play script, so I'll have to start over. Was very impressed by the sensual, colloquial yet learned beauty of this man's language. Somehow though, the work's preoccupations are tangential to my own - a kind of romanticized, sepia image of an earlier time - so I didn't resume. But definitely will…
Lots of good stuff on my shelves waiting to be delved into, including
Best American Essays, 2002
American Linden by Matthew Zapruder
Jorge Louis Borges, Selected Poems (bilingual edition) edited by Alexander Coleman and translated by a dozen or so poet/translators
Don McKay, Camber. selected poems by a marvellous Canadian poet who I hardly know as yet. Speaks of poetry - or those first inspirations -- as "the tiny sea in the ear/ and the moth wing in the mind, which wait."
Susan Gillis, Volta
A.R. Ammon's Garbage.
Hat on a Pond, by Dara Wier
Mary Oliver, New & Selected Poems Volume One
Side/Lines, A New Canadian Poetics, edited by rob mclennan
Anne Simpson, Loop, this year's Canadian Giller Prize winner
A.R. Ammons, A Coast of Trees. Winner of the 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award, with big metaphysical poems like Swells and Easter Morning. Lyrical poetry of his later years.
G.C. Waldrep, Goldbeater's Skin
Actually I'm re-reading this one. Fiercely intelligent, interior, hierophantic. Opens doors to linguistic risk. Provokes a desire to read the dictionary from cover to cover and find obscure words to use purely for their evocative, aesthetic properties. Love it. Poet's poet.
Billy Collins, Sleeping Alone Around the Room
One couldn't imagine a poet more different in style and approach Waldrep. Accessible, charming, brilliant. A romp. If humour columnists Josh Freed (Montreal Gazette) or Gary Lautens (Toronto Star) wrote poetry, this is how they would write. Actually, I find a lien to Italo Calvino. In particular, Mr. Palomar.
John Ciardi: How A Poem Means (© 1987,second edition, co-authored with Miller Williams).
A delightful read, if you haven't read it. I had the good fortune to pick this up at a second-hand bookstore. Written as a text book/anthology for undergraduates, it seems designed for poets who want to/have to resharpen their critical/editorial pencils outside of an MFA program (My pencil dulled by lack of use… well, that metaphor breaks like a pencil under scrutiny…switching horses in midstream, as Dylan (Bob) put it!) . How A Poem Means is informed by a passion for literature and sympathy for poet as creator, the writer being not just an academic but an excellent translator & pretty fair poet himself. Ciardi selects poems - as a semelier would fine wines -- from all over the canon - traditional ballads, poems from the renaissance, modern, to discuss their tastes & textures from point of view of symbolism, language, rhythm, meter, etc. I love the discussion of rhyme in English (as compared to Italian), language vs. diction, hard and soft diction, (which I'm reading right now). A great way to revisit old favs, like Ode to a Grecian Urn or Rime of the Ancient Mariner and discover newer poets (Nemerov, XJ Kennedy for example). Can't say enough in praise of this wonderful book….
2004 Best American Poetry: So far have only read a few selections of this anthology guest edited by Lyn Hejinian… includes Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein of the "langpo" movement (a group I'm extremely curious about), a bunch of younger poets, older poets. A much more "kicked back" collection than the 1994 edition edited by AR Ammons, also on my shelves… although that one includes, curiously enough, Hejinian.
George Elliott Clarke: Whylah Falls, a series of dramatic monologues that is itself a drama, by this acclaimed black writer from Nova Scotia. My reading of this one was interrupted by summer teaching & other things; it needs to be read like a play script, so I'll have to start over. Was very impressed by the sensual, colloquial yet learned beauty of this man's language. Somehow though, the work's preoccupations are tangential to my own - a kind of romanticized, sepia image of an earlier time - so I didn't resume. But definitely will…
Lots of good stuff on my shelves waiting to be delved into, including
Best American Essays, 2002
American Linden by Matthew Zapruder
Jorge Louis Borges, Selected Poems (bilingual edition) edited by Alexander Coleman and translated by a dozen or so poet/translators
Don McKay, Camber. selected poems by a marvellous Canadian poet who I hardly know as yet. Speaks of poetry - or those first inspirations -- as "the tiny sea in the ear/ and the moth wing in the mind, which wait."
Susan Gillis, Volta
A.R. Ammon's Garbage.
Hat on a Pond, by Dara Wier
Mary Oliver, New & Selected Poems Volume One
Side/Lines, A New Canadian Poetics, edited by rob mclennan
Anne Simpson, Loop, this year's Canadian Giller Prize winner
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
HELL, HANDBASKETS, BIRD IN THE BUSH, ETC.
So it looks like Bush has won it fair and square -- or crooked and oblong. Maybe Bush should rule 52% of the time, and Kerry 48%. But no way -- here winner takes all, & to hell with the rest. More than ever. Big time. Yeah. Yadah yadah. (zzzzz...)
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Cruzarse los dedos...
Every night for the last couple of weeks, I've been half-expecting when turning on the news to hear of some catastrophe in the States, another 911 (planes winging it into the Sears Tower, perhaps?), a suicide bomber setting himself off in some ridiculously crowded place, or a New York subway train blown to smithereens, a la Madrid. Here it is, the morning of Election day and nothing like that has happened. (I'll continue though to keep my fingers crossed.) Should we thank Bush for keeping America safe? Personally, the idea of four more years of Bush bushes me. Like most of us up here north of the border, I would prefer Americans Kerry on with Kerry. (Excuse my punning… that's about the only sabotage I'm capable of right now…) Even if the latter sees us as a drug source comparable with Colombia (only vis-a-vis legal drugs). Bush doesn't seem to trust us as much… but look at those he does. (And we don't know half the story with either of those two.) Anyway, lots of reasons to keep fingers crossed...
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