Good news

Got some exciting news in the mail today: my manuscript is one of 31 chosen for the Poetry short list in the CBC Literary Awards competition. (That's out of more than 1,100 on the long list, so they tell me.) The two winning texts will be selected from the short-listed entries & announced on the CBC Radio's "The Arts Tonight" on Feb. 23, 2007.

Absorbing the absorptive vs. non absorptive on this Xmas morning...

In the wee hours of the morning -- and all through the house, nothing stirred except my little pinkies on this keyboard -- I just finished reading Robert Archambeault's summation of the current debate (involving Josh Corey, et al) on "absorptive" vs. "anti-absorptive" poetry -- with, believe it or not, considerable interest. Funny, Josh has been meditating on this binary, under various guises, for at least the past three years. In late 2004, it was "organic" vs. "non-organic" poetry. Were any of you there for that one? You can read my summation of it here.

If anything, over the years Josh has moderated somewhat: now he clearly acknowledges that he enjoys different types of poetry (and prose) for different reasons. As Robert points out, Big Science may yet shed light on how different kinds of poems actually appeal to different parts of the brain. Different personalities also tend to favour different parts of the brain (the enneagram suggests a few things about this). Strokes for different folks... cerebral hemorrhages...

One wonders (at least I do) how much this intellectualized debate -- which really seems to boil down to a highly sophisticated attempt to show how "what I like" is better than "what you like" -- also simply boils down to plain ol' insecurity. Josh, because he prefers composing the difficult & challenging "anti-absorptive" poetry over supposedly simpler "absorptive" poetry, resorts to the same kind of self-justification that poets in general do in defending their art form before a predominantly prose-reading public: that is, by claiming that because it makes more demands on the reader, it's somehow better. The more marginalized poetry has become, the more poets seem to suffer from a mania for self-justification. (This trend, alas, has gone on for centuries.)

Ah well. Proof is in the pudding as well as in the eating. (How Christmasy can we get!) If a particular poem succeeds on its own terms -- if it illuminates and astounds, is brilliant and beautiful (I don't think I use those terms lightly -- do I?) it succeeds no matter side of a particular binary it falls into, what "school" it comes from.

As for absorption, we all know certain kinds of paper are better than others for that.

OK... giftwrap.

Season's greetings!

BC2

My partner took this one of me in Restaurant St-Sauveur (St-Sauveur, Quebec) late last October. After more than a year, I thought it was about time to show another image of moi-même.

Tincture at Cezanne's Carrot

Tincture, a poem of mine, is now up at Cezanne's Carrot.

Bah, humbug!

Listening to the radio (I can't seem to avoid it, what with cafes, stores, etc.), all of the Christmas musical fare strikes me as so much tinsel, so much hype -- so unreflective of the real mixture of feelings we experience at this summing-up time of year. Except John Lennon's

So this is Xmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Xmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very Merry Xmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

That one, with its world- & time-weary feelings of fellowship, is the only truly authentic Xmas song ever written.

Reviews review

Here are some of my perceptions of "respectable" or "prestigious" literary reviews in Canada and the US. Perhaps I should put the scare quotes around "perceptions" as well. As Silliman put it in one of his posts, literary magazine publishing is a kind of constant white noise that's hard to focus on when there are so many contemporary books to read, not to mention canonical writers (let alone -- oh yes! -- one's own writing). I've looked through pretty well all the Canadian mags over the years, and given a good going over some contributer's copies and the occasional subscription. American ones I'm familiar with through the net and the occasional trip to a university library.

In Canada there are about eighteen or so established, top-tier literary reviews, most of which are glossy, beautifully produced affairs associated with the universities. In terms of prestige or reputation, none of these clearly stands head and shoulders above the rest -- unlike in the States, with Poetry and Paris Review, where if you make it there you've unquestionably made it, can with continued effort pretty well expect a book with a good press to follow, if a book or books & prizes haven't already followed (as is usually the case). Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, Poetry North West, New England Review seem to occupy a close second rank along with a few others... hmm, help me, what others? I wonder if there's been a ranking done of lit reviews, like those rankings of universities that come out year after year? Although such rankings can be quite rank in the most obnoxious sense, they are significant in that they both express and reinforce perceptions of prestige.

In Canada, Exile, Brick, Malahat and perhaps Prism International seem to boast the highest international standard (that is, publishing international writers), the latter if only for its name: I'm not that familiar with its recent incarnations. Descant strikes me as rather august -- they've been around for ages, publish some big names, it can take about a year for them to respond, and the confusing thing by the way is that they have theme issues you have to (do you have to?) tailor your submissions around. Brick, primarily a magazine of literary non-fiction, is, as far as fiction and poetry is concerned, closed shop of eminent writers (Atwood, Jim Harrison come to mind) and other quite good ones who "got the call". According to an interview with Stan Dragland, editor of the book publisher Brick Books, in recent issue of The Word (download Jan-Feb. 07) , the press and book publisher (which is still definitely open for submissions) have only a historical affiliation; in other words, they have gone their separate ways. But I still see some bleed -- common authors -- between one and the other. Vellum, a relative newcomer, also has an eye on the world -- interviews and selections of international authors. Between the rest, many of which are dedicated to publishing Canadians only, there's not a lot to choose: one sees the same writers cropping up, even the same kinds of poems. Let's see, we've got (going roughly from West to East) Event, Capilano Review, Quills, Grain, Prairie Fire, CV2, Arc, New Quarterly, Queen's Quarterly (isn't that mostly criticism?), Matrix, Fiddlehead, Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review. Of these, the New Quarterly stands out (in my mind at least) as a particularly engaging blend of articles, stories and poems, and frequently guest edited (as in the issue including yt edited by Robyn Sarah a couple of years back) is, in the "political" sense of the word, no bellwether. Most of these, however, strike me as coming considerably under the Kenyon Review level -- maybe more like, say, the Black Warrior Review (judging by BWR's web site/selections).

Links to all these reviews (and a lot more) can be be found on my sidebar.

It's interesting that such a large proportion of the established Canadian reviews open to new writing are ensconced on sleepy, small-town campuses. Could that be that a reason why one commentator on a recent CBC literary program remarked that although a vast majority of Canadians now live in large urban centres, an unusually large proportion of Canadian writing seems to express the reality of rural areas and small towns?

Notes (on a certain Silliman assumption)

The conflation of aesthetic radicalism & political radicalism is entirely natural -- generally they hang out together, since both speak breaking free of conformity, loosening up & CHANGE -- but not necessarily need this be so. In times of increasing pluralism & fragmentation -- with the growth of the human population, the pool of talented creators is that much larger, for one thing -- we're bound to have aesthetically freewheeling hidebound conservatives and other such bundles of seeming contradictions among our ranks.

Kraepelin

Little known outside of professional psychiatric circles, the work of German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin has by now gained a far more pervasive influence on the current practice of psychiatry than that of either of his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung, or even for that matter the later behaviourist B.F. Skinner. It was he who, assuming mental illness to be of biological origin, evolved the diagnostic categories -- depression, manic depression, and dementia praecox (later called schizophrenia) -- that form the basis of all major diagnostic systems in use today, in particular the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV and the World Health Organization's ICD (With his colleague Alois Alzheimer, he also is credited with co-discovering Alzheimer's Disease.)

Part of the reason K. never caught on with the public is that his writings are far more pedestrian than those of Freud or Jung; his notions, such as he enunciated them in the early '20s, lacked paradigmatic appeal. It would require the development of Big Pharma starting in the '50s to give Kraepelin the almost ubiquitous significance he has today.

But such as it is, his detailed work on manic depression, even by today’s standards, is truly impressive. He not only mapped out the poles of bipolar, but also the less well-known mixed states (agitated depression, racing paranoid or suicidal thoughts while lying on the couch, etc.) in considerable detail. He was a great empiricist: he had a talent for amassing huge quantities of seemingly contradictory data and laying it out in broad, compelling categories.

And yet, there is something disquietingly cold-blooded in Kraepelin’s descriptions of his patients (rather, subjects). That cold-bloodedness is representative of much of what goes on in psychiatry today: medical professionals who for the most part have never been touched by the symptoms they treat, smug in their assumptions of superiority, generally slighting of those with a condition that, while it can be, in extreme cases, truly debilitating if not downright fatal, has also truly enriched humankind, particularly in the realm of the arts.

Manic Patients are (his writings, taken from Godwin and Jamison’s Manic Depressive Illness)

convinced of their superiority to their surroundings…Towards others they are haughty, positive, irritable, impertinent, stubborn… unsteadiness and restlessness appear before everything. They are accessible, communicative, adapt themselves readily to new conditions, but soon they again long for change and variety. Many have belletristic inclinations, compose poems, paint, go in for music. . . Their mode of expression is clever and lively; they speak readily and much, are quick at repartee, never at a loss for an answer or excuse…

Their life is invariably a chain of thoughtless and extraordinary, not infrequently also nonsensical and doubtful activities… Many patients join new movements with fervent zeal which rapidly flags…make purchases far beyond their circumstances… (1921)

K. goes on to discuss a milder form of manic temperament within the domain of the normal but still a link in the long chain of manic-depressive disposition, a form that progressed to what he called the "irritable temperament". This too is perhaps as revealing of K. as the subjects he purports to describe:

It concerns here brilliant, but unevenly gifted personalities with artistic inclinations. They charm us by their intellectual mobility, their versatility, their wealth of ideas, their ready accessibility and their delight for adventure, their artistic capability, their good nature, their cheery, sunny mood. But at the same time they put us in an uncomfortable state of surprise by a certain restlessness, talkativeness, desultoriness in conversation, excessive need for social life, capricious temper and suggestibility, lack of reliability, steadiness, and perseverance in work, a tendency to building castles in the air… periods of causeless depression and anxiety… (1921)

Sounds rather like -- who guessed it? (My castles, though, are real, he he)

It is said that Ludwig Van Beethoven refused to move into a flat on a treeless street, declaring, "Sometimes I prefer a tree to a man." As long as men like Kraepelin remain in the ascendant, people like me are likely to prefer trees as well.

On the isolation of poets -- and blogs as symptomatic of the problem.

Francine Prose, an acclaimed author and longtime creative writing teacher, opens her essay in the 2006 Fiction issue with a question: "Can writing be taught?" As she sees it, some aspects of writing, such as judicious editing of one’s own work, can be cultivated. But others, particularly the “gift for storytelling,” cannot be learned. She invites the reader to imagine Milton or Kafka enrolling in a graduate writing program, seeking faculty guidance for Paradise Lost or taking advice from classmates who nix the idea of a man turning into a giant bug.

Belly of the Beast

Just finished In the Belly of the Beast (Letters from Prison) by Jack Henry Abbot. One of the most gripping testimonies I've ever read, still a classic of prison/institutional literature. The book is both a clear-eyed account of prison violence and a plea for sympathy, but the reader's relation to the narrator, who is at turns searingly angry, trenchantly brilliant, clairvoyantly wise (pls. excuse my blurbolexical adjective phrases), is rendered all the more complex by the knowlege that less than six weeks Abbot's release from prison, largely won by the acclaim for this book and by Norman Mailer's action on his behalf, he committed another murder and was sent back to prison, where eventually he put an end to his life. (Credit goes to my partner's bookcase, where I found it....)

A Timothy Steele poem

Starr Farm Beach

Although the beach, with its adjacent r's,
Alluded to a dairy farm nearby,
We liked to think that, on the shoreline, stars
Were sown and grown and gathered for the sky.
Along the cliffs that led there, we would try
To find good foot- and handholds, and would weigh
The merits of the low road and the high
Or scan the waters north towards Malletts Bay.

Some evenings, from the cliff face, we'd review
The early piercing stars above the lake
And disregard their long-ago debut
To guess which were of recent, local make.
And we imagined if we stayed awake
All through the night, we'd see ghost gleaners, bent
Over the shallows, choosing stars to take
At dawn back with them to the firmament.

We loved swifts that performed wild swoops and swings
Over the lake in unobstructed air;
We loved fish that, in sudden surfacings,
Nabbed supper with quick piscine savoir-faire.
But we best loved stars rising here and there,
Whether from hopes of something we might sow
Or from a lonely impulse to declare
The kinship of the lofty and the low.

Timothy Steele
Toward the Winter Solstice


Steele has been classified as one of the "New Formalists" -- indeed he seems to wear that classification quite proudly.

This poem is braced in fixed form to the britches -- three eight-line stanzas, all lines iambic pentameter (four exceptions, two with clearly an extra stressed syllables, two with extra unstressed syllables), rhyme scheme ababbcbc. Not exactly an ottava rima, it's definitely octastiched together. (Thanks to my dictionary for that.) The tight construction lends the poem not just a pleasing concentration of language but a kind of delicate musicality... the only line that sticks out as flat-footed, rhythmically speaking, is the final line of the first stanza, one stressed syllable too long. After so many regular iambic lines, I don't see the advantage of lengthening the line with "towards", rather than simply "to". The distance to Mallet's Bay is pretty incidental. Oh well. Quibble quibble, you might say.

What I like about this poem is it's particularly clear evocation of the setting -- the beach by the dairy farm, the "r's" of the rolling waves, the cliffs with their foot- and handholds, the piercing stars, etc. I like poems that create a mind map of a place, with long views, short views, etc. It's rather cinematic. And a scene like this is relaxing to contemplate. It's like a guided meditation.

What I don't like, though, are a number things. Who is (are) this "we" that the poet presumes to speak from and for? This "we" meme -- I could call it the "floating", or "indeterminate we" -- I encounter quite a lot among contemporary poets. It's always annoying. Poets who speak out of contented, stable relationships, family, can speak perhaps of such perfectly shared experience -- but is it two people here, or five thousand? (Presumably not the latter, or the beach would suffer environmental damage.) OK, I imagine maybe two, three, four boys who played together. I often feel when poets use this meme that -- like the "royal we" -- they are lending a false authority to what is actually singularly felt and lived experience. It's complacent. Did they all (or both) imagine the ghost gleaners? And proclaiming how they "loved" the wild swoops and swings of the swifts, etc. -- assuming a shared ranking between them, with the stars they "loved the best" -- isn't it more effective to evoke the experience itself, rather than constantly impose the supposed attitude of the supposed onlookers?

"Alluded" to a dairy farm gave me pause (how does a beach do that?) -- it's a peculiar kind of pathetic fallacy -- but after considering that line, I gave it to the writer as more lively than lead to, or blended with, or whatever. (I actually give it credit: straining to imagine what it meant made me imagine more vividly the scene.) But I find, in that whole introductory sentence, the connection strained, and in a particularly unadvantageous way, as this is what the whole poem hangs on. Although there's this dairy farm, we "like to think" the stars are gethered for the sky... hmmm.. why would the presumed "we" like to think the stars were "gathered for the sky"? Why "gathered"? By whom? For what? Why "for"? (Unless it's all to fit that rhyme scheme... when my attention is drawn to that, we're in trouble here) Further down, would people on a beach really guess which stars are of "recent, local" make? (That "local" I also find dubious -- what stars are of "local make"?) Finally there are a number of really conventional (let's say hackneyed) notions at play here -- the division of "low road" and "high", or "lofty" and "low". At first it's quite literal, then, figurative, with a number of unexplored moral and aesthetic presumptions that go with. Although narrator claims it's a lonely impulse to connect the lofty and the low -- a questionable claim at that -- I'm not particularly made to feel that loneliness, especially if it is that damned "we" who are supposedly experiencing it in the poem.

All to say that there's a lot of interpreting -- commentary -- going on in the poem that "obstructs the air" and makes it downright stuffy, even tho we're by a lake, with birds, fish, stars, firmament (don't you love that old "firmly limiting" word!) and all.

It has been said that the obsessive reliance on fixed forms in earlier centuries reflected a fixed, finite universe, with God in his heaven ordering all, and everything linked on a golden chaine of concorde (from "lofty" to "low"). It would seem some semblance of that is in operation here. But it's not convincing. Let's just say that for me, at least, that necessary sympathetic contract between reader and poet only works for a few clauses... then breaks down among the moreovers and heretofores and in consideration of the foregoings that follow.

Thanks, Andrew, for pointing me to this poem...

...reflecting on the foregoing, if *everybody* in anything cultivates something in particular alone, that anything risks declining into a mere whatever so stultifying that that anything itself will wither and die. So we really must cultivate the contrary if we care about the continued life of that anything at all!

(Something, eh?)

(Whatever)

What would a prison be without its wardens?

"If everybody in contemporary verse cultivates rhythm alone, poetry risks declining from an art to a mere activity—an anything-goes pursuit, with poets isolated in small inward-looking schools and composing more and more narrowly on the basis of self-expressive fiat. In such a climate, free verse itself will wither and die. Free verse can be truly free only if it has something to be free from."
-- Timothy Steele, Prosody for 21st Century Poets

Yes, Timothy Steele. "New" Formalists like him (Gioia comes to mind). Not that I've actually read Steele's poetry. (Feel free to accuse me of unfairness...maybe he's actually good!)

One might think, from the quote above, that he's rather simplifying things if he maintains free versifiers cultivate rhythm alone. Makes 'em sound like a bunch of drummers. In the essay, tho, he does concede that excellent poems continue to be written in free verse.

And indeed, his point, in general, is well taken. The limitations of fixed forms and frameworks serve best to help us channel our energies, make them go them farther -- to stimulate fresh expression and more deeply appreciate the nuances & architectonics of poetic (as well as other) language. I like especially his critique of Ezra Pound's critique of meter. There's definitely more to meter than meets the eye, or rather ear. All reasons why I find myself more & more interested in fixed forms these days, while still enjoying the freewheeling qualities of free verse.

"Let Us Compare Mythologies..."

Write a poem -- say a dramatic monologue -- from the point of view of a character from the Bible and just try to get it published in today's literary journals... you will find this a particularly hard go. This is just not cool today. You will probably end up having to resort to the cloying sub-realms of "Spiritual" journals. Ibid for almost anything that comes out of our greco-roman mythological tradition. Ibid for other mythological traditions, generally considered too obscure (they're all obscure). Except perhaps Icharus. Icharus is particularly emblematic of our times, as our planet warms and our wings melt, as we veer closer to the sun.

"the books within the eardrum"

David Leftwich, whose blog Eclectic Refrigerator was a reliable source of superb posts before he let it go into deep freeze about a year ago, wrote this appreciation of a poem in Francisco Santos' Undressing the Night back in Oct. 2005. Get a load of David's nifty collage.

Brian Campbell has been translating Nicaraguan poet Francisco Santos for several years and now has a book of translations coming out from a Costa Rican press. For those of you not heading to your local Costa Rican bookstore this week, Brian has posted some translations and the introduction at Undressing the Night. Here is a sample:

FIESTA

The glass beyond the fiesta
the books within the eardrum
the quotidian in the blood --
and the madman with his dirty fist
comes out of the mineshaft
waving a flower

-Fransciso Santos, trans. Brian Campbell

The line "books within the eardrum” really resonates – it seems to condence into one line the whole aural appeal of poetry, the sounds that unlock like skeleton keys the doors to deep memory. If Santos can do this in one short poem, I can’t wait to read more.

Panne de tout....

Was just settling down to work on some poems last night when the lights and computer flickered and went out. This was hardly surprising, as we had had a minor ice storm with high winds all day. We lit every candle in the house and waited in the silence. Amazing the silence when all our technological devices are shut off at once -- fridge, stereo system, lights (yes I imagine they emit a hum), computer. Occasionally we heard the long, low howl of winter wind around the building, quite spooky in the darkness. We told stories about our childhood. It was like sitting around a campfire. After a good hour, it became clear that this panne de service would last quite a while. I picked up a phone to call a friend, but curiously enough the line was dead, too. It was getting cold in the apartment -- there was nothing else to do -- so we crawled under our comforter to wait it out, and fell asleep. Suddenly around ten pm. we were awakened by a banging on our sliding back door. Two firemen were standing on our fire escape, shining powerful flashlights through the glass. I slid the door open, still rubbing my eyes. Monsieur, on est désolé de vous déranger, mais il y a une fuite de gaz, faut évacuer toute'suite... Seems a there was a major gas leak, a main was broken somewhere underground, but it would take hours to locate it. In the meantime a whole street had to be evacuated. We fumbled around in the darkness for our shoes and coats and scarfs and gloves, I tried to find book to read ... only managed to lay my hand on my Dictionary of Poetic Terms, an absurd choice in this circumstance. The firemen lead us down the stairs, holding our arms because the steps were covered with sheets of ice. On the street, there were several fire trucks, a tangle of fire hoses all over the pavement, a small crowd standing around the police car and yellow cordon at the end of a street. Hanging in the air -- but only intermittently, between the gusts of wind -- a distinct odour of gas. Was I imagining it? (But no -- a neighbour smelled it -- or imagined it -- too.) C'est comme dans une film, I heard a man say. Like a film. Funny how everyone caught in an emergency in this society imagines the scene taking place on celluloid. If there's an underground film industry, it's the one taking place in our heads. Anyway it was soon clear this could take all night; we called up a friend, who fortunately was in, hailed a cab and spent the night at his place. (I imagined news reports of a mushroom cloud over our street; it remained shut till 6 am; the electricity stayed off until shortly before I wrote this.)