LEANING OUT...

Si, poeta es asomarse
a las puertas
del misterio
y volver de el
con una
vislumbre de
lo desconocido
en los ojos

Rubén Darío
(Semblanzas)


Yes, to be poet
is to lean out
through
the doors
of mystery
and turn back
with the light
of the unknown
in your eyes

Rubén Darío
(Biographical Sketches)

SIGNING OFF

I'm signing off this blog for the summer. For the next six weeks I'll be teaching/coordinating the Adult English Second Language Immersion Program at Bishop's University, Lennoxville, Quebec. This involves about 6 hours a day teaching from Sun. aft. to Fri. + extracurricular activities + course preparation etc. Totally hectic (a gruelling pace, in fact) but fun; this gig also enables me to live on a part-time salary through the year and get more WRITING done. During that time, I expect I'll be occasionally dropping in on others' blogs, posting comments, etc. After that I'll be going to cottage in Northern Quebec to cool out and lean out into the mysteries... there, there will be no internet access (thank goodness for that!). Expect postings here again in late August. Ciao for now, & fun in the sun, everyone...

Why I'm a member of the LCP

The League of Canadian Poets (otherwise known as the LCP) -- for those readers who are unfamiliar with this organization -- is in no wise connected to the National Hockey League, nor the CFL, NFL, nor any other sporting organization. In the LCP, there are no playoffs, coaches, or teams. There are committees, and identifiable cliques (the closest thing I suppose in the poetry world to a team), but every member has free agent status.

I myself am a card carrying member (yes, indeed, I have a card, and sometimes I even carry it in my wallet), and have been since 1995, although I let my membership lapse from 1997 until last year, when I realized once again I had interests there and successfully applied to be drafted back in.

The main attraction of the League for poets of the Great White North is that it is the body through which funding from the Canada Council of the Arts (our Federal Government arts organization) and other provincial organizations for paid readings, poets in the schools and the like, is directed. In the words of its website, it is the national association of professional publishing and performing poets in Canada.

There are dues to pay: to be a full member, it's $175 Canadian per year. To be drafted as a full member, you must have published a book of poetry of a minimum 48 pages (enough to merit an ISBN number), and pass assessment by the membership committee, which is elected by the general membership. At this latest Annual General Meeting, we voted to eventually liberalize that requirement, so that the 48 pages published anywhere, in magazines, chapbooks, etc. is an acceptable criterion (someone is looking into the language for that right now)

Ironies abound, of course. For instance, because of Neo-con freezes & cutbacks, etc, the budget for readings is extremely small -- about $85,000 in reading and travel fees for nearly 600 members across Canada. Enough, in other words, to pay Mario Lemieux for a shift or two when he played for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Or one traffic cop for a year. Members are limited to 2 or 3 paid full Canada Council readings per year, if they can get the venues to apply on time., which can take some doing. I in my 4 years of active membership have actually have only managed to arrange 1 half reading, in Ottawa, which together with travel expenses came up to about $160 -- enough to almost cover my dues for that year. Part of what muddles me up here is a variable work schedule that frequently conflicts with literary evenings.

There are other benefits though: the Annual General Meeting is really a kind of poetry festival as well as policy forum, with panel discussions, open mikes, book launches, etc.; many of our best poets (Margaret Atwood, George Elliott Clarke, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Simpson, Erin Moure, Steven Michael Berzensky, Lillian Allen, etc.) are members; you get to hobnob, make friends, find out who's publishing where and what. The League has an excellent website (including a Poetry Markets for Canadians, an indispensible service, free for members), and a newsletter that fills you in on competitions, events and the like. Again, it is the professional poet's organization in Canada -- so there is some element of status in that.

The League however has had a rather checkered past -- there was a time, back in the early '80s, when for many it became unbearably stuffy, causing certain poets (Cris Faiers, Shaunt Basmajian and others) to form a rival organization open to all and sundry called the Association of Canadian Poets. This was also the time of Ann Diamond's Terrorist Letters, a series of hilarious and brilliantly scathing missives she sent to the League head office threating to bomb them unless they changed their attitude to poetry. (Shows a sea-change in the spirit of the times: in those days terrorism was not such a serious possibility...) In response, rather than just call her up, see if she was OK and share a laugh or two, League poeticrats actually dialed the RCMP, who actually pointed out to them that it was a literary text, not worth acting on. (NB I've since learned there's some error in these remarks about Ann Diamond: Actually, she wrote me to say, "There was no bomb threat, that I can remember. All I threatened to do was run for president of the league and perform "hairspray demonstrations" at their AGM. This was in 1988?? long before shoe bombers and 911, but paranoia was widespread among Canadian poets.... " Clearly, a confabulation on my part! she went on to tell me that the core purpose of the exercise was to make the rather pedestrian point that the organization was rather Ontario-centric at the time, cutting off her poet in the schools funding as soon as she moved to Quebec.)

Things about this organization that still make me wince, cringe or otherwise annoy:

1) The fact that it's called the League of Canadian Poets. Although the word "League" has classical antecedents, I find it hard to boot out of my mind the image of poets wearing hockey jerseys and making mad rushes up and down the ice. If the term seems rinky-dink (pun entirely intended) to me, how does it seem to our Members of Parliament and corporate/government funding sources, for whom poetry is already a pretty twinky business? It's ironic that the rival organization, which has little more than sentiment behind it, has the more official-sounding name.

2) The fact that it's called the League of Canadian Poets. The implied pretention that this is indeed an umbrella organization for all poets in the domain of Canada. Actually, it's the League of English-Canadian poets. Every so often a member raises the question (with a heavy English accent) pourquoi pas avoir les poets francophones dans la organization? Actually the francophone poets have their own organization, festivals, and community of interests. Many are sovereigntists (those who oppose them call them separatists) who would cringe to have their professional organization under the umbrella of the LCP, or any other national organization for that matter. That would be a little too reflective of a not-so-nice historical reality of Canada. Poets here on both sides of the English/French fence actually don't have much affection for that historical reality. Many of us English Canadians feel deep down that if we were Quebecois we too would very likely be sovereigntists, since that's definitely the more romantic option. On top of that we English-Canadian poets have trouble determining whether French Quebec is a part of Canada or not, since they have such trouble determining that for themselves. To make matters even more obscure, we tend to forget that a whole world of Quebecois literature even exists, since most of us can't read it. So the League of Canadian poets remains decidedly English, while sending representatives to the Festival International de la Poesie de Trois Rivieres and the like.

3) The feminist caucus meeting + reading at the AGM + Pat Lowther award for best book by a Canadian woman. Sorry to be unpolitically correct, but all this amounts to an affirmative action program that has long outrun its course. Right now a sizable majority of poets are women, as are editors, league executive, etc. Poetry and literature have been feminized all over the world. This year, weirdly enough, all but one of six nominees for the Gerald Lampert award (best first book) were men. That also seemed peculiar, as I know of at least one worthy book by a woman that was overlooked. Is the Gerald Lampert Award being used as an affirmative action program in reverse? As I was saying to one of our other few male members, maybe we men should form our own masculinist caucus. We have the cocks -- why not form a caucus? (Excuse the pun... I suppose in the interests of PC we males should keep such jokes to ourselves.)

4) The relative lack of youth, and verve of youth, as alluded to before.

Right now, though, I find the league to be a friendly, unpretentious organization, with many talented, well-meaning people who are openly critical of any sort of stuffiness or conservatism. Although it still is rather WASP-heavy, there is a definite interest in attracting cultural minorities to its fold. It is also interested in giving recognition to alternative forms of poetry due recognition, funding, prizes, etc. Perhaps changes in membership criterion will bring in younger poets. I think more $$$ for readings and other programs would do more towards that. Arts grants policies still favour the two official languages. If more money were channeled towards writing and translation from "unofficial languages", the League might eventually reflect the multicultural fabric that is Canada. Who knows? Some day (not any day soon, though), I could see myself taking part in the executive -- as Quebec/Nunavut rep? -- since I believe this organization serves a vital need. Even though I find protracted policy discussions a deadly bore, and lack a head for figures (except figures of speech). But considering the latest financial crunch -- the League without warning almost dived into bankruptcy this year, leading to laying off of staff and cries of alarm -- I don't think I'd be too alone in that regard.

OTHER BOOKS

That was quite a plug I gave for Barbara Pelman, something I wasn't consciously setting out to do when I started that post. Obviously, I was genuinely impressed by both her poetry and her teaching ideas. By the way, I revised and expanded on the post just now...

Whenever I go to TO, I pick up a slew of books because the book stores there, of course, are so much better than the English language bookstores in Montreal.

At the LCP AGM, besides Pelman's One Stone, I also picked up (all Canadian poets of course):

Ray Hsu's Anthropy (this year's winner of the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry -- funny, Pelman's book wasn't even nominated). This promises to be another "poet find". Hsu blends prose poems and poetry in an arresting way, reminding me a little Tony Tost...
George Elliott Clarke, Quebecite (with accent aigu's over all the e's -- looks funny to me without)
Carolyn Marie Souaid's Swimming into the Light
Wendy Morton's Undercover
and fresh off the press,
In Fine Form, The Canadian Book of Form Poetry an anthology which makes a good companion for The Making of a Poem: The Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms edited by Mark Strand -- it's the same idea, except that all the poems are by Canadians and actually more forms are described and exemplified than in the Norton volume (which is really not as exhaustive as Norton Anthologies usually are). Forms in the Canadian book that are not in the Norton include the Fugue, Madrigal, Ghazal, Glosa, Haiku and other Japanese forms, Incantation, Palindrome, Rondeau, Syllabics, Triolet, Tercet.

From a couple of used bookstores,

Phyllis Webb, The Vision Tree: Selected Poems
Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems (Penguin edition) and Poems of Akhamatova, trans. by Stanly Kunitz & Max Haward (the two books sold for so little I bought them both)
The New Canadian Poets 1970 - 85 edited by Dennis Lee

New I bought:
John Berryman, The Dream Songs + His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (in one volume)
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems (this one with exerpts from his notebooks and letters -- I think it's the third time I've aquired this volume... I keep losing them to absent minded friends!)
Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God (Certainly I could have bought this one in Mtl, but it was there, in front of me... I almost bought a volume by Charles Bernstein, but she won the "battle of the books" that day!)

Sold very cheaply to to me by a friend were:
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ
Albert Schweitzer, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization (how weighty a title for a book of 90 pages!)
Robert Bly, American Poetry: Wildness & Domesticity

purchased at its booklaunch, in a gorgeous hand-stitched and illustrated edition

Allan Briesmaster, Galactic Music

and "borrowed" from my parents' bookshelf,

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

As you can imagine, on the train trip back my suitcase weighed a ton. Quite a lot of *stone* there ...

BARBARA PELMAN

Perhaps my most exciting find poet-wise at this year's LCP AGM was Barbara Pelman.

One Stone, her first trade book, came out this year -- but poetically speaking she is no neophyte. At 50- something, she has been a full-time secondary school teacher for more than two decades, teaching and writing poetry all that time, patiently developing her craft in various writer's groups, submitting here and there, publishing occasionally in some of Canada's more established journals. At the new members' reading, she read this poem, which took my breath away -- and impressed me enough to buy her book. The book is about coming through a divorce after 20 years of marriage. In this poem, the final one in the collection, that painful process becomes analagous to the Isrealites wandering through the desert into the promised land. This association -- she said as much at the reading -- was a private one, but that level of meaning becomes clear in the context of the collection itself.


COMING THROUGH

400 years in a narrow land,
our veins thick and stagnant;
blood runs thin in a place of dust.

When we crossed the Red Sea,
the waves rising like walls
and the land dry before us,
we thought we were free.

But there was the desert --
our minds could not fathom
the space, saw only sand
and no water. Sand.
No water. Our garments,
of Egyptian cotton, fell from our shoulders,
in strips and rags. The sun beat
our backs, burned our hair
white. Soon even our tears
dried in the desert air. There was rock
and no water. We sat on stone,
looking back at the green fields,
the small huts of Mitzrayim.
Why look forward
upon nothing?

Miriam led us from well
to well, cool water at the end
of a long day. But there was no place
to build, only a moment
of shade, sun reflected
on the palm frond, wind
scratching its spiky fingers:
wind on the hot face, a cup
of water.

Now is the time
for turning. Between us and Jericho
is only a stretch of grass,
tender green in the spring breeze,
and a wall. In my hand,
the ram's horn, a smooth bone
of sound -- with my breath
I can shake the walls, stir the stones
into flight.

In front of me, the shadow of a wall,
In my hand, a trumpet.

The writer of The Journey of the Magi could do no better.

Thematically, this poem is immense; technically it works so well on so many levels. I love, for instance, that "smooth bone of sound" amid all that aridity, and water/heat contrast is so natural one is somehow not immediately reminded of Eliot; it's been a while since I read a poem where the linebreaks were so effective. For instance, in the second stanza

our minds could not fathom (SPACE)
the space, saw only sand (NOTHINGNESS)
and no water. Sand. (AGAIN NOTHINGNESS)
No water. Our garments, (SOMETHING ELSE?)
of Egyptian cotton, fell from our shoulders,
in strips and rags. The sun beat (WHAT? WHO?)
our backs, burned our hair
(SURPRISE) white. Soon even our tears (WHAT?)
dried in the desert air. There was rock (PAUSE -- WHAT ELSE?)
and no water. We sat on stone,
looking back at the green fields,
the small huts of Mitzrayim.
Why look forward (NOTHING)
upon nothing?

In many poems this kind of "pregnant pause" or "leave the reader hanging" linebreaking seems a kind of cheap trick, as in say (I'm making up something here, but I'm sure many of you have seen similar)

I turned the light
off. Was thinking about
calling you up as I went to
bed.

but here, because of what the poem is about -- coming through such an inhospitable environment towards such an uncertain goal -- it serves its purpose well in slowing the reader down, in suggesting a number of uncertain possibilities before one, much as the narrator faces uncertain possibilities with each and every step as she/he makes her/his way through.

Her collection, at a 104 pages, is longer than most first books, but having only read part of it, I can see she takes us on quite a journey, along which she delivers a number of poems as strong as this one.

__________

I first saw Pelman on a panel about teaching poetry in the schools. It soon became clear that she was the most experienced teacher on the panel, and had come up with a number of inspiring formulas for teaching high schoolers to enjoy poetry ... a pretty daunting task at any time. People that age need anything to be strongly related to them personally to be at all relevant. One of her more striking assignments (maybe this idea is from the literature, but I have never heard it before) was for the student to choose from an exhaustive list a poet who was born on his or her birthday, write an interview with that poet, and then write a poem in the style of that poet. To get students away from the trite but universal impulse to write confessional rhyming poems, Pelman emphasized (this seemed to be her own formula, and teachers, as she said, always need them), the "Three P's of Poetry", ingrediants found in any good poem:

Passion
Persona
Play

Passion here is pretty self-explanatory. By Persona, she means a certain indirectness (persona of course meaning mask), i.e. an idea expressed by Billy Collins, that if you write about your father write about anything but your father... rather images & impressions either associated with him or somehow imbued by him. By Play, of course, she means play with language, and she suggested a number of interesting ways to impel the students toward that.

Anyway, Pelman struck me as a great teacher, giving the lie to that old GB Shaw walnut, "Those who can't do, teach..."

Lillian Allen at the LCP AGM

I happened to come into the panel discussion on Dub poetry and Spoken Word at the LCP AGM just as Lillian Allen started to speak. I've seen her perform a number of times before, and always found her to be really neat, a great performer with a lot of depth, warmth, & humour. I love listening to her Caribbean lilt, and after a few hours would probably start adopting her intonations (I doubt if she would pick up on mine if she listened to me for any length of time -- nor would I wish that on her!).

Here, only slightly expanded upon for coherency, are my notes:.

-- poets (dub) fighting to open up sacred spaces, lost roots

-- alienation from the language of dominent culture, it's supression of vernacular

-- private spaces of communication: you feel it in your body, in who you are, as you express... leads to flow, transformation.

-- perfection (ism?) in language is an excuse for abuse

-- why tenses? Isn't the present tense all we really need?

-- varieties of English (so-called high, low) used for social demarcation, to create heirarchies (convenient way to shut out the underprivileged, stigmatize users of so-called slang & varient forms...) : Lillian's response:

"The Queen's language is her own,
& she should speak it from her throne."

(audience laughs)

Dub:

-- forming collectives, rehearsal space
-- going back to language, words; & words back to roots in music.
-- not done to make money
-- poet as speaker for community: everyman cultural leader, inspiration for others
-- asks people to consider what is important in their lives
-- turning information into knowlege (inner truth, conviction)
-- political agenda: underprivilged rise up, throw aside fetters, claim what is theirs, birthright
-- akin to liberation theology. Dub poetry is liberation theology.

-- we need these voices, they are not superior or inferior, but a necessary part of the spectrum
-- do we prefer them cut out, ignored, to go back underground?

Lillian of course read/recited a couple of her poems... poems I would imagine would be half alive on the page, but which performed were as fully, truly alive. Following her was a young fellow who goes by the name of Spin. He did a remarkable recitation (more hip-hop influenced of course than Lillian), so did a younger protege of about 15. Spin emphasised poetry as a means by which the underprileged can not only to tell others what's wrong, but share what has empowered them to overcome their difficulties (including heavy stuff like substance abuse, doing time in prison, etc.), become an example for others. He promotes dub poetry in the Ontario school system.

If you want a good capsule definition of Dub Poetry, check this link. Interesting... Lillian is listed there as one of the notable practitioners of the art...

LEAGUE OF POETS AGM

Back I am from Toronto and here as promised... The LCP AGM (otherwise known as the League of Canadian Poets Annual General Meeting), which took place this year at University of Toronto's Hart House, will certainly be remembered, among other things, as the Meeting Where We Practically Sweltered To Death. Hart House, gorgeous though it may be architecturally, is not air conditioned, and those few days Toronto was about as hot & muggy as it gets, with temperatures soaring to 33 degrees C. and heavy smog warnings in effect. Pretty hard to listen to readings and discussion without falling into a slumber and slithering in sweat out of one's chair!

Last year it so happens I also went to the AGM, which took place in Montreal, my other home town. Below are comments I made at that time. A number of them apply to this year so for ease and speed I cut, paste, & compare. Here goes:

... It was enjoyable, hearing the readings, book launches, speeches, and sitting in on committee meetings, awards ceremonies and the like. Tempting though it is, I won't be too sardonic: the polite-old-ladies-in-pearls-and-flowered-dresses contingent was pretty prominent among the hundred or so present, as were the grey-professor-poets. In fact I felt like one of the younger ones there. Where was the young blood? I could have counted younger poets on one hand. My partner wondered if it reflects on poetry as a dying art in our society, that very few young people are writing it anymore. Actually it reflects on poetry funding as ... well... a dying industry. Travel/accommodation costs to the AGM aren't subsidized anymore, so any out-of-towners have to shell out of their own pockets to be there. That pretty well cuts out anyone but the well-heeled and tenured. Since arts funding is so poor right now - the entire budget for poetry readings (for 500-odd members) from Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, the Heritage Ministry, etc. is $80,000 (think of it -- it's the salary of an average city bus driver or traffic cop) -- things are rather limited.

Ibid for this year, except that younger poets were somewhat more in evidence, partly because Torontonians in the organization could attend without incurring outlandish travel costs, partly because the meeting featured a panel discussion on Dub Poetry and Spoken Word, and a handful of younger representatives of Poetry Dub- & Slamdom were among the more prominent participants in the AGM as a whole.

To its credit, this overly WASP organization (one friend calls it the League of Canadian Anglo Poets With Money; a number of leading members have drawn attention to the problem of lack of diversity) is making a concerted effort to embrace minority poets and attract them into its fold. This year, for instance, Lillian Allen (a longtime member, by the way) and the Slam poet Spin participated in the panel discussion mentioned above; George Elliott Clarke, who at the age of 45 is already perhaps our most distinguished Afro-Canadian poet, conducted the Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture, focussing on nature of black poetics in Canada and how black poets and writers have been consistently dismissed and overlooked by our traditionally all-white literary establishment.

More on these panel discussions, etc. in posts to come. . .

I'm off...

Tonight I'm rolling down to Toronto, where I'll be taking part in the Canadian League of Poets' AGM for most of the weekend. I plan to be in my old hometown for a week. After the AGM (which is really a kind of poetry conference) I will be spending a lot of time with my mother, seeing my father in the Veteran's Hospital where he is spending his final days in an Alzheimer's ward, and finding emotional relief in the company of some old Toronto poet-friends.

For sure there will be an afternoon and evening wine-and-poetry get together with among others, Francisco Santos and Allen Sutterfield (aka ADZE), a Morelli-like figure (if you've read Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, you'll know what I mean) who has appeared from time to time to time in this blog. That I'm especially looking forward to.

In the unlikely event that blogging fever overtakes me AND a computer with internet access happens to be standing by, there may be a post or two. Otherwise, bye bye until next Thursday....

ON THE SILLIMAN FONT

By the way, do any of you prefer this font to my usual one? I think it's rather more relaxing for the eye. It's actually Silliman's font -- Ariel Large. Fellow bloggers -- if you want to start looking and sounding like Ron Silliman, all you have to do is start posting in Ariel Large too! (Maybe I'll find myself inexplicably convulsing when I look at my shelves full of SoQ and SoQ-type poets!)

MIND MOVING A MILLION MILES AN HOUR (REVISED)

Thanks y'all, for your feedback on my preface to the bilingual edition of Undressing the Night, selected poetry of Francisco Santo. I thank particularly Stuart in blogland and three friends here in Montreal who responded by e-mail. Several of your suggestions were useful; even those ideas I rejected were well worth considering. Indeed, before I received responses at all, it was an extremely valuable experience for me just to see the work posted in a different font and context (a public one, at that). It refreshed my critical eye, I caught a couple glitchy errors I had missed in previous proof-readings, and made two or three improvements in turns of phrase besides. Makes me reflect upon the usefulness of the blogging medium as a way of creating one's own "trial proofs" for work before submitting or publishing or whatever... Below is a revised version of the preface posted earlier. I'm still open to comments & suggestions, of course.

MIND MOVING A MILLION MILES AN HOUR…

If I could sum up my response to Francisco Santos' poetry in a brainstorm list of phrases, that list would include: word alchemist; painted eggs that reveal whole worlds; harrowing; lucid; finely honed; surreal; virile; whimsical; political; romantic; mind moving at a million miles an hour. For me his poems compel both as artistic creations and wholly authentic expressions of the passionate, mercurial bundle of contradictions that is the man.

I first met Francisco Santos in Toronto in 1988. Francisco had dropped into a local poetry workshop to get an idea of what was happening in the literary scene here in Canada, this new country of his. None of the workshop members understood Spanish, but they were impressed by his sensibility, and as one of them happened to be an acquaintance of mine, Francisco was fortunately referred to me.

At the time, I was at the height of my Hispanophilia. I had completed a long journey through Mexico and Guatemala just two years before, was reading Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, translating the Spanish poet Gabriel Celaya, and listening ardently to singer-songwriters like Victor Jara and Pablo Milanéz. On that first visit to my apartment, he told me later, he found my love of Spanish and tastes in music both charming and somewhat quaint. I suppose for me it would be rather like going to Madrid and meeting an ardent Spanish aficionado of folk from the summer of love. Although his English was rudimentary at the time, he also liked, however, what he understood of my poetry. I could see that his poetry breathed and had promise of being the "real thing", but I would have to translate it to be really sure. After those first translations were done, it became clear that he was a very considerable poet, and on a personal level, we hit it off.

Initially, I translated his work for pure pleasure, to benefit friends, and to give Francisco a chance to share his work with other Toronto poets. It wasn't long, though, before we entertained the idea of a bilingual book. He became an integral participant in a group of poets that first met at my apartment and later at the Art Bar at the Gladstone Hotel, where public readings took place. My move to Montreal in 1990 made my relationship with Francisco more occasional, however. Perhaps half of these translations were done on train rides or at get-togethers at his place during twice- or thrice-a-year visits to my hometown. There was a long period where my energies were mainly dedicated to song writing and recording. Meanwhile, Francisco's book became one more unfinished oeuvre on my (rather our) back burner, a long thwarted ambition that only now sees its realization.

The general outlines of Francisco Santos' life are these: He was born in Managua, Nicaragua in 1948 to what could be described as a lower-middle-class family. He went to Universidad Centroamericana in Managua, where he attended courses in literature and poetics taught by one of Nicaragua's eminent poets, Pablo Antonio Cuadra. During that time, he developed his poetic voice, steeping himself in the best of Latin America's surrealists. He also read whatever literature in translation he could get his hands on, including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and key writers of the beat generation. Pound he considers to this day his greatest influence in English. He and his brother Mario (also a poet, as well as short story writer) became part of a group of writers and artists that frequented the La India, a café-bar in Managua where readings and cultural conversation took place. There he became friends with such poets as Edwin Yllescas, Franklin Caldera, Iván Uriarte, and the famous Sandinista guerrilla poet, Leonel Rugama. In 1973, his first collection, Chichigalpa & otros poemas, was published to considerable critical success. Over the next two years he was included in three prestigious anthologies. It was about this time that he married Maria Eugenia Cuarezma, a painter and sculptress he had known since childhood; they soon had two sons, Rudolfo and Rodrigo. During the turmoil of the Sandinista revolution and the bloody war with the Contras, many poets of his generation, known in Nicaraguan cultural circles as the "generación del 60", dispersed, most of them emigrating to Costa Rica, Mexico and the United States. Francisco was no exception. First he left for neighbouring Costa Rica, and eventually chose to move his family to Toronto, Canada.

Transitions such as these are never easy. For a number of years Santos worked as a Grolier encyclopaedia salesman serving Canada's growing Hispanic communities. This job took him on bus rides across the country, to Montreal, Winnipeg and Calgary. After the market for encyclopaedias dried up, Francisco took whatever jobs he could find: in factories, as an apartment superintendent, in the laundry service of a major hotel, etc. He and his wife also divorced, María Eugenia going back to Costa Rica. Through all these vicissitudes, however, Santos has always been writing, frequently finding undiminished joy in his most recent creation. "There's never time to write," he would say. "You can't find it, you can't even make it: you have to steal it." He almost always carries a notebook, jotting down poems while riding in the subway, on coffee breaks, or sitting in a cafe waiting for a friend. On weekends, he refines his writings, usually in the wee hours of the morning. Many of his poems are so short at least partially because they were written quite literally on the run. If Ezra Pound remains one of Santo's strongest influences, it is perhaps not so much the Pound of the Cantos, but In a Station At the Metro.

Of all the literary pursuits I have undertaken, the translation of poetry has provided some of my richest moments. In the process of immersing myself in the sensibilities of another, the ego is quite set aside; my literary skills are brought to bear on fresh matters, and through this I grow as a writer.

My constant aim in translation is to produce as good a poem in English as in the original Spanish, if not better (so much the better!), while being faithful to the intent, meaning and feeling of the original. Of course, in translating poetry many linguistic dimensions are involved besides the literal, including sound, nuance, length of line, etc. Very frequently I - like any translator - am forced to choose, to sacrifice one value for another. If a literal translation of a word or phrase has turned out so trite or flatfooted as to violate the beauty of the poem, I have occasionally chosen to go with a word or inspired phrase of my own. Usually this word or phrase rings well and is faithful to some dimension of the original, or to that mysterious, impalpable thing I feel to be the "essence" of the poem. Here of course things get dicey. Every translator has his own limit as to how far he is willing to stray from the literal. The poems of Santos that translated easily and well were generally those where the juxtapositions of image or idea were startling in themselves, or where an appropriate sonority could be retained. Poems that did not translate so well generally depended on wordplays or rhymes or other effects impossible to render into English. These I simply abandoned or, for the most part, didn't attempt at all. The translation of the poems in this collection offered unique opportunities because the poet was present to respond, usually to a finished result, but often during the process as well. With the title poem "Media noche desnuda", for instance, a curious interaction took place, where the translation spurred the poet to try to change the original to conform to the translation, because he liked aspects of the latter better (it soon became clear this didn't work, however). Francisco is a compulsive reviser, sometimes by his own admission overworking his poems. Some poems he reworked after I had translated earlier versions. Some of the new versions I find quite untranslatable, or just don't work as well in my view as the previous ones. A number of these have been published in his third collection, Media noche desnuda. Readers of Spanish can compare them with the versions in this book and judge for themselves.

I remember Francisco once saying, "Don't just describe your feeling, express it. Don't just say 'I love you', express it. If something is horrible, don't say it, express it, evoke it with words. Don't just state who you are, express who you are, evoke who you are." This, of course, is a rephrasing of the old chestnut, "Show, don't tell", but Francisco put it with such passion and urgency that I somehow feel he lead me to a special insight into that poetic credo. A poet is compelled to seek original combinations of words, surprising juxtapositions of images. When a poem works, the sensation is of synapses that have previously remained far apart being brought into contact for the first time. The brain feels different, perceptions are cleansed, and ultimately a deep healing has been undergone.

-- Brian Campbell, Montreal, April, 2005

© Brian Campbell 2005

NB, For readers new or infrequent to this blog,"Undressing the Night", the bilingual edition of poems by Francisco Santos (translated by yours truly) is in the next year or so to to be published by Editorial Lunes, Costa Rica. I've already posted translations of Francisco here, here, here, and here.

Local Poetry Gig

POETRY PLUS

Tuesday, June 7^th, 8:00PM
Arts Café, 201 Fairmount West, corner Esplanade, Mtl., Que.
Parking: suggest further east along Fairmount towards the Main

LINEUP:

First set: Rana Bose, Anna Fuerstenberg, Endre Farkas, Louise Dessertine, Raphael Bendahan

Second set: Neale McDevitt, Jaspreet Singh, Katherine Cram, Brian Campbell , John Fretz

NB: second set starts 9:30PM

GRIFFIN PRIZE & MORNING AFTER THOUGHTS

Well, big announcement: Roo Borson & Charles Simic have won that most American of Canadian poetry prizes (only because of the money involved), the $100,000 Griffin Prize, the world's richest award for a single volume of poetry.

I can't help but smile as I read this:

The Griffin prize, established in 2000 by entrepreneur Scott Griffin, was presented Thursday evening at a Toronto gala attended by more than 300 poetry fans, including Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and author Margaret Atwood, who is on the Griffin Prize board of trustees.

"It's been huge," Atwood said of the increasing international recognition of the award. "It's now a known award in poetry circles all over."

Griffin funds both the lucrative prize and the swanky party and says the cost is justified because it gives him the opportunity to shine the spotlight on poets and their work.

"There are a lot of literary prizes and unless you make a big statement, you just get lost," he said.

Well, well, what a surprise. Money hath been known to talk...here, my liege, it speaketh most eloquently. So come on, Tupelo, Crab Orchard, Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, Speakeasy, Stanford, Blue Lynx, Blue Heron, Iowa, Ralph Gustafson, Ruth Lilly, Spoon River, Byron's Quill etc. etc. etc. etc., SHOW US THE MONEY!

On my own award-giving front (no money involved here, sorry), I decided to move Cris Lott (Cosmopoetica) back to my list of faves. Seems he posts sporadically rather than infrequently, with a flurry of posts then silence for weeks as he focuses on poetry instead. (Sometimes I think I should do that -- if he's true to his words, who can blame him?) In his writing -- in his humble esteem for clarity, simplicity and emotional expression in poetry over the verbose puzzle -- he provides a valuable counterpoint to Josh Corey and Ron Silliman, whom he frequently contests and critiques.

Blogroll

As the old Tom Paxton song goes,

Are you going away
With no word of farewell...

Well, that's what he upped and did. Though he did announce his intentions the previous week..

Good luck this summer, Eduardo, with the manuscript. I look forward to seeing your new website in the fall.

This made me realize -- time to update my blogroll.

Since the last time, some people have moved out of the fave's list, some into it. Those who've moved in: Anne Haines (Land Mammal) is as warm and terre-a-terre as pomme de terre comfort food in a howling winter for fellow "emerging" poets, especially fellow middle-aged "emerging" poets like myself... a number of her posts (particularly on writers' groups) I've found very useful; AJPL is a bright young fella I have a lot of intellectual fun with so I find myself frequently curious to see what he's up to; Anthony Robinson has moved his blog back out of retirement and has proven to be very poignant and very engaging in his commentary, so up he goes. Emily Lloyd, always worthy, is back into the crowd of "Other Worthies" until she decides what she's doing with her blog, which should be soon, she tells us; Cris Lott (Cosmopoetica), because although I like his writing, he doesn't post frequently enough.

C Dale, you're great, your tips have been invaluable and your insights superior-- but you're on probation. Seems to me your blog has become rather too much a diary blog lately. But I still find myself dropping in on Avoid the Muse every few days...

A big addition to the blogroll: a list of on-line magazines (I'll only hyperlink some of these; I'm getting tired...). Listed alphabetically, it includes some very high-level "establishment" ones, like Slate and Blackbird (the latter strikes me as rather an online version of American Poetry Review -- everyone there is very much a "career" poet, MFA'd, Breadloafed, etc.), the conservative looking Melic Review, which looks at least at first glance like an online Poet Lore; The Page, which besides being a voluminous review has an impressive links list of other online poetry publications; then dignified/funky lit zines like How 2, Rock Salt Plum, 42 Opus, Verse, and the cute and terribly pink No Tell Motel; finally post avant hipster reviews like Shampoo, Exquisite Corpse, Jacket and Malleable Jangle (the latter two out of Australia, incidentally). Quite an assortment. This is as much as anything else to help my own exploration ... if they're at my fingertips, maybe I myself will get to know them better and eventually submit to some of them! (Having them bookmarked hasn't been enough).

Other important resources (under Other Poetry Websites): Poetry Net, a great online selection of important contemporary poets, with bios, pictures, etc; and (what an oversight not to have this until now), the Quebec Writer's Federation website.

By the way, yesterday my site meter recorded this blog's 4,000th visit since last September when I set up "digs" here. Seems things are picking up exponentially; the month of May saw exactly (yes, exactly!) 1,000 of those.

OF DIARY BLOGS

Most diary blogs are of little interest to me -- like Ron Silliman, (I found this entry foraging in the back issues) I usually prefer blogs as an intellectual discipline, source of information, etc. But occasionally a diary-type blog comes up on my radar that is so exceptionally well-written that it proves to be . . . well, an exception.

Last year, when I was on the rolls of Blog-City, I came across a blog called Land of the Blind. It was so gripping and so beautifully written, it is no exaggeration to say that reading it seemed like watching a Pulitzer Prize-worthy novel unfold before my eyes. (No, it is not to be confused with a current blockbuster crime thriller by the same name.) Be-jeezus, some passages took my breath away! I wrote the guy to tell him that if I were Harper Collins or the like, I would send him a hundred thousand dollar advance with a contract proposal... Unfortunately (for us readers at least), as so often happens with extremely "hot blogs", it suddenly vanished into cybersmoke: without much warning, guy pressed DELETE on the whole affair. The blog did get very close to the emotional bone -- it was a surruptitious confessional detailing the stages of a breakup with his wife, and the emotional rollercoaster leading to his own nervous breakdown ... I actually saved quite a few entries on my own hard drive, and am tempted to just post one or two that don't get too personal (after all, I can't ask his permission -- but he did write many extraordinary musings and reflections too) to show how good such blog writing can be.

Blaugustine is written on a much more even keel... (This one I discovered thanks to Emily Lloyd's blog-roll...) No, it is not P-Prize material, but it is very well written and illustrated. The diary of Paris-based artist and illustrator Natalie Arbeloff , it is a veritable feast for the eyes... one of the most gorgeous blogs on the net. Under a lovely pastel (acrylic?) illustrating the subject (you have to go to the blog to see it), here are some reflections from May 17:

The African presence in Paris is nowhere more evident or more vibrant than on the RER platforms of the Gare du Nord and on the commuter trains. On my way to and from the suburbs where my aunt and uncle were hospitalised, I was enchanted by the spectacle of ordinary Africans going about their daily lives dressed in dazzling exotic plumage, colours that we consider clashing, patterns we disdain as garish, fabrics knotted and draped every which way over solidly curvaceous bodies in glorious, cacophonous harmony. Birds of paradise glowing against a background of concrete, steel and soot. I don't know their individual stories, where they came from, what they feel about living in France, whether they're happy or miserable or resigned. But compared to them, the rest of us seem to be in some kind of uniform, whether it's designer grunge, designer chic or just plain drab global sameness. The Africans in Europe (at least those who don't dress "like everyone else") wear their continent on their bodies and I for one am grateful to them for bringing such joy to my jaded eyes.

Here in Montreal we also see such Africans (mostly they come from from places like Senegal, Rwanda, and Burkina Faso), evidently not in such great numbers as in Paris, but she voiced my feelings about their dress versus ours exactly.

This is a blog I'll surely drop into from time to time.

Surely, though, there is great literature evolving somewhere in blog land. Does anyone have any recommendations?