After Reading Too Much Shields and Atwood

The other day, this came into my inbox, and made my day:

Hi Brian,

I thought your poem in the latest TAR was delightful. It's one of the few literary works that truly meets the criterion of "needing to be told." I'll be sharing it with friends and colleagues over the next few weeks. I'm sure many will be doing the same. It's going to be a classic.

Cheers,
Paul Headrick

That's got to be the first letter of appreciation -- or feedback of any kind -- I've ever received for a poem published in a journal. Usually publishing poetry is, as Don Marquis put it, like dropping a rose petal into Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Paul Headrick, it turns out, is a fiction writer and English professor at Langara College in Vancouver BC. In the ensuing correspondence -- where we discussed the merits of the poem -- he said he'd be doing his best to publicize the poem, maybe get it reprinted somewhere. It's great to have an ally in the realm of academe. Only after publishing a first draft of this post did I discover that his coming across my poem could hardly be a surprise: it so happens he's a fellow contributer to issue in which it appears. Anyway, here it is for all and sundry:

AFTER READING TOO MUCH SHIELDS & ATWOOD

I am a man of few words.

My name
a monosyllabic
grunt:

Bruce, say,
or Matt or Joe
or Jeff.

You: immense,
surrounded by crockery pots
and children,
cookery books
and washing on the line.

Though I pay the bills,
bring home the proverbial bacon
I’m a whirling asteroid to your Jupiter,
an errant electron spinning round
your gravid nucleus.

Even yet, you wonder why
I need it so much:

why I slip my hand up your nightdress
(that you’ve gathered round yourself, for protection)
with, “If you’re willing, Mother.”

Is it five thousand times now? Ten thousand?

Why that constant urge to thunder and let loose?

When I proposed
it was in Greason’s Hardware,
automotive parts:

“Say we get married, eh?
I make a good wage.”

Today you make a new recipe for me
-- Magpie Pudding --
and when I come home from the gravel pit
my tender, male mouth drops,
my eyes express confusion and surprise,
I eat in silence, then read the paper.

For I am a man of few words.

A monosyllable.

A John, you could say.

Grunt.

Local scene...

LEAGUE OF CANADIAN POETS (W)RITES OF SPRING
POETRY READING/FUNDRAISER

Le Depanneur Cafe
206 rue Bernard W.
Montreal, Quebec
google map

Sunday March 25
7:30 pm - 10 pm.

$5 suggested donation

Featured Readers: Kelly Norah Drukker (2nd place winner of the 2006 CBC Literary Award, Poetry), Carolyn Souaid, Maxianne Berger, Brian Campbell, Stephen Morrissey, Carolyn Zonailo, Ian Ferrier, Angela Leuck, and others.

Music: Paul Serralheiro (jazz guitar/trumpet)

General public open mike

May this event kick off a spring of revivified creativity for you all!

_____________________________

Post script, March 29: This turned out to be a highly enjoyable event for all who turned out (18 or so, not bad considering it's Montreal + the first time I put on one of these things). For me, standouts -- besides myself (but clearly I'm biased here) -- included Kelly Norah Drukker, whose writing reminds me of Roo Borson's at times, and Maxianne Berger, whose quirky, whimsical sensibility always captures my interest. Ian Ferrier turned in a good performance accompanied by Paul Serralheiro on guitar. The man behind the cash bar, it turns out, was an award-winning slam poet named Carl Bessette, who put on quite a show in the open set with a masterly recitation in French.

Layin' my balls on the line

Lately I've been having a riproaring squawkbox discussion with a certain poet and evident firebrand named R.W. Watkins. (The bio says he's in Newfoundland, but my site meter indicates he's writing somewhere from somewhere way up near Churchill, Manitoba.) The occasion was my post commemorating the passing of Artie Gold, a remarkable Montreal poet who I did not have the fortune of knowing or reading during his lifetime. Someone in the comments asked for the cause of death, and when I found a Montreal Gazette obituary praising him as "one of Canada's finest poets" but also stating the cause of death, I posted it simply to answer that question.

This was the flamewar blast I received:

Oh great! Isn't that typical! Even those mediocre assholes who run things at the League of Canadian Poets are suddenly calling Artie Gold "one of Canada's finest poets" now that he's dead!

Twenty years ago, he was just another 'government-funded joke'--someone whose books wound up in our high school library because they were--in the words of one of our teachers--"commie-homo junk that the tax-wasting Canada Council couldn't sell". Just a year ago, I did a search of the internet to discover that he was just another lost name from Canada's poetic past--even folk who once wrote and published with him no longer knew where he was or even if he was still alive.

Poor ol' Artie. I'll never forget his satirization of comic book and cartoon characters in 'private eye', from 'before Romantic Words' (1979); that's one of my all-time favourite humourous pieces by any poet. Ripping off and reading his work from our high school library, I can unmistakenly dub him an early influence on the work of Kent Burt and myself.

The moronic, hypocritical and expedient editors and LCP dictators (who probably never even heard of him--let alone read him--prior to his passing) who now praise him posthumously should have his longest poems forcibly tattooed on their genitalia while driving through mountain country on a gravel road.

--R. W. Watkins (poet, essayist and editor of Contemporary Ghazals)

Thursday, March 15, 2007 12:55:00 AM

Ow! My response is as follows:

Brian Campbell said...

You make my balls hurt with your invective. I'm actually (as of the last few months) the Quebec representative on the LCP national council. I don't know if you're aware of that. I don't make a great to-do of it (i.e. it's not in my bio) because that, in itself, is no great achievement (indeed, could well be taken as the opposite).

Mediocrity abounds everywhere...but so it does among the LCP's detractors. For my nuanced views on the worth and absurdity of the League, check out my post of June 23, 2005.

I just cut and pasted that bit from the Montreal Gazette to to answer Lunamoth's question. I don't know who wrote it. I make it plain that I didn't know AG myself, but then I was disconnected from any sort of "poetry scene" myself for a good ten or twelve years. A few days after this post I found an AG poem I very much liked, and posted it, for the betterment of the world. Read with your eyes, man.

If AG was "government funded" (joke or not), if he was published by Vehicule, it could be that the LCP had something to do with it. If I let you use my blog as your ranting platform, it's because your 3rd paragraph is both an impassioned testiment of his worth and contains some valuable info. But spare us the venom. It doesn't do anybody any good.

Thursday, March 15, 2007 2:50:00 AM

Mr. Watkins epistled back thusly:

"Spare the venom"...? Oh, Brian, Brian, Brian...THAT is one of the biggest problems inherent in Canadian poetry (and the arts in general) today: too much incest and not enough venom. No healthy arguing or the occasional drunken bar brawl means no competition, and no competition means the same old boring junk, year after year after year after year. It's so typical of an over-mannered country like Canada--so Marxist and extreme in all the wrong areas. Oh, how I miss Mordecai Richler--our last major author who could compete in every way with the American writers who came out of the '40s and '50s! The fact that poets now have to give readings in smokefree pubs and coffee shops tells me everything I need to know about the Canadian approach to the arts: In a state where health and longevity take priority over Dionysian self-sacrifice, one must come to expect that seminal work of any great value and integrity will be rather short in supply.

As for the LCP and the Canada Council, I used to be an associate member of the former, and I received funding for a solo volume of ghazals I wrote back in '99-'01 from the latter. I soon abandoned the former once I realised that it served very little real purpose, other than as a self-congratulatory institution--a fine place where (mostly) third- and fourth-rate poets can take solace in each other's mediocrity (things haven't changed much since F.R. Scott mocked such collectives back in the '40s and '50s). As well, I was disturbed by the fact that LCP members were always smiling in newsletter photographs--as if life was indeed good under Stalin/Tito/Mao, and their progress reports to the Canuckistani Council of Ministers--in the form of pointless, state-praising poems and accounts of Canada Council funds deployment--would state as much. The LCP also appeared to cater to free verse authors exclusively--I have a feeling that the majority of its members could not work in a closed form and compose a proper sestina or ghazal in a month of amphetamine-fueled Sundays, so lacking are they in true poetic talent. They seemed content to remain merely harmless, government-funded hacks--Bukowski and Atwood imitators who haven't a clue what Bukowski was all about, or how average Atwood was at her poetic zenith. When the first issue of my seminal Contemporary Ghazals journal was published a few years ago and promoted in the LCP's newletter, the fact that not one single member responded to its existence told me everything I needed to know about the 'lofty' visions of the LCP and the sad state of Canadian poetry in general. If it wasn't all so damned pathetic, it would be truly laughable. Thankfully, the more serious poets south of the border were more receptive, thereby making the project a worthwhile little venture after all.

As for the Canada Council--a good and worthwhile idea once upon a time--the problem lies with the manner in which projects are selected for grants, and the manner in which the selection committee is appointed in the first place (a process which, apparently, no one is willing to properly divulge). If authors/artists (once they had fulfilled eligibility criteria) were to have their names drawn at random, lottery style, for available grants, then I might have some faith in the system. As it stands now, it's just another case of "it's not what you know, but who you know". And, of course, there's always the matter of socioeconomicpolitico compromise: How can I be taken seriously as an independent and/or radical voice when I'm ultimately receiving funding from a federal government, with whose extreme-left and/or extreme-right ideals I may take issue? In regards to my own grant-awarded project, I decided to put the finished volume on the back burner indefinitely. The manuscript has never been sent out for consideration, even though many of the poems in it have been published in various places over the years. Someday, I might publish it myself.

To be blunt, Brian--and you know this as well as I do--the vast, vast majority of poetry (and increasingly other literary forms) being published by established houses and high-production magazines/journals in Canada today are the 'adult contemporary' or 'easy listening' of the verse world. In fact, I'm amazed at how books of all types being published here in Newfoundland have come to resemble nothing as much as tourist brochures--a lucrative investment, don't you think?--funding authors and publishers who will (unwittingly in many cases?) serve to combine/equate the arts and tourism industries. Very, very tricky. No Paris-in-the-'20s or NYC-in-the-'50s will be happening in Canada any time soon--one can rest assured of that. In fact, I have literally fallen asleep while reading many such books and journals from across Canada, and when it comes to my reviews (whether for the journals/zines I am directly involved with, or others from around North America), I rarely find myself covering poetry volumes that aren't either self published or published by small collectives these days. Frankly, whenever I see "published with the assistance of the Canada Council" on page 3, I start to cringe a little; my doubting mechanism is rarely (and sadly) proven invalid.

So that's my take on it, Brian. Thus lieth within the want--the need--for piths and venom.

One more thing: I'm trying to put together a little internet poetry project that kind of relates to some of the themes I've just dealt with above. If I can get enough people interested, and get it off the ground, your opinions might be valued. So watch this space....


--R. W. Watkins--

Sunday, March 18, 2007 3:39:00 PM

Actually, my estimation of this fellow RW went up tenfold with this articulation of his views. My missive in response:

Brian Campbell said...

You provide a lot to respond to -- but this time, I agree almost completely with what you say. This is healthy dialogue.

My real objection to your previous "venomous" post is that you made my balls hurt, and unfairly I think.

Venom is good, if intelligently directed at the right targets. As this last missive demonstrates. (But I agree that is not always easy: sometimes an outburst is needed to clear the air, as seems to be the case here.)

I think this dialogue shouldn't be consigned to the comments section but should be posted and readily accessible on Google. Do you agree? But let me wait a few days. I like the look of my guitar up there; I don't want to push it down into netherland just yet.

P.S. The receiving of grants or publishing support from government or corporate foundations always presents a quandary: how hard (and when) to bite the hand that feeds you? It seems ridiculous to refuse any such support when it comes from a relatively reasonable body like the Canadian government... but one still has to reserve the right to denounce hypocrisy and injustice when the need arises. Keep me informed about your project.

Sunday, March 18, 2007 4:37:00 PM

The discussion continues, so if you want to read more, go here.

Eduardo has amazing news — this and that.
Sometimes pure talent does go places. I'm looking forward to this guy's first book. Click on the label below to see what I mean.

Another article on the "Who Killed Poetry?" theme -- this one by DW Fenza. Poetry dies a thousand deaths -- or is it reborn through a thousand reincarnations? I ask this in the present tense, because it seems routine, a thing of every day. Anyway I make note of this contribution to the ongoing discussion, as this forensic work seems a specialty of mine.

My first truly high-end guitar

Today I walked into Archambault on St-Catherine and picked up my first truly high-end guitar, a Takamine EC132SC Acoustic/Electric Classical, pictured here. Actually I had gone there earlier in the week to buy strings for my old guitar, then made a detour into the guitar room, found the high-enders (that is, guitars for over a thousand dollars) in an almost impossible-to-find corner near the cash, took this one down from the rack, and immediately fell in love with its sound. This is so rare, I tell you.* Today I swallowed hard and bought it. It's comparable in sound to my old guitar, a soft, warm-sounding mahogony & cedar Yamaha classical that retailed for maybe $450 20 years ago. This one though is richer with more high end (treble). Even with the cutaway (which usually reduces volume by about 30%), it has more resonance than the Yamaha, due to its rosewood construction. The main thing though is that it's so much more playable, as my old guitar through gradual warping has developed irreparable high action (strings far from the fretboard) making it harder to play.

Anyway, I spent the evening noodling around, playing more effortlessly than ever, discovering new licks, new possibilities. It's like wearing a new eyeglass prescription for the first time -- everything so much clearer. My playing is instantly more expressive than ever before -- I can give more to the vocals, everything. I had no idea how much I was hampered by that other guitar. (Which nevertheless, for most things, was not that bad...only there comes a time when "not bad" is not good enough!)

For anyone who plays at all well, I can only recommend a professional, high-end instrument. It makes things so much easier. Even for a beginner, to avoid discouragement, a good instrument is a must: the kind that provides 90% of the ease and sound quality for, say, half or even a third the price of the best. We always pay so much more for that final 10%! But by the time you get to the point where that extra 10% makes all the difference to how you want to sound, you'll have a good, precise idea on what instrument to lay down all that extra cash.

* Maybe steel string players have an easier time finding the guitar for them. The North American acoustic guitar market is almost overwhelmingly steel string, leaving pretty slim pickings, even in large stores like Archambault, for people like me who happen to prefer, for their own music making at least, the feel and sound of nylon. (Lo contrario in Spain or Latin America.) But then for steel string players that may mean there are more bad choices out there to confuse them...

The Traditional Japanese Book

My partner & I made these yesterday at an all-day bookbinding workshop on The Traditional Japanese Book. Fun! Click on the photo to get a closer look.

Like a Sponge, or rather, Ponge...

Francis Ponge

Just finished The Dictionary of Poetic Terms -- the first dictionary I have ever read from cover to cover (and very likely the last.) As I wrote here, it was a highly enjoyable read. Now I do indeed know everything there is to know about poetry. No need to read more, write more, or blog about it here -- ha ha, of course, not true. Indeed, as a parting shot, as if to purposely highlight my ignorance, in a lengthy entry on Vision (metaphorical sense), the dictionary made reference to one Francis Ponge (whom I had never heard of), whose The Voice of Things exemplifies a type of vision that "elevates and makes sublime lowly objects." This aroused my curiosity. I looked him up, and found some very interesting exerpts here. It seems he wrote prose poems -- a form that I've been writing in over the last couple of years (examples here and here). In The Voice of Things, his focus is on objects -- a potato, an orange, a cigarette -- so closely and accurately described that they do indeed become magical, totemic. Here's a visual interpretation of his prose poem Rain. Quite an experience! I ended up ordering a translation and the French original. I also ordered H.D.'s Selected, cited under Vorticism. I've wanted to read more H.D. for years.

I Studied Love by Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai

A friend of mine sent me this poem to share:

I STUDIED LOVE
by Yehuda Amichai
Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

I studied love in my childhood in my childhood synagogue
in the women's section with the help of the women behind the partition
that locked up my mother with all the other women and girls.
But the partition that locked them up locked me up
on the other side. They were free in their love while I remained
locked up with all the men and boys in my love, my longing.
I wanted to be over there with them and to know their secrets
and say with them, "Blessed be He who has made me
according to his will." And the partition
a lace curtain white and soft as summer dresses, and that curtain
swaying to and fro with its rings and its loops,
lu-lu-lu loops, Lulu, lullings of love in the locked room.
And the faces of women like the face of the moon behind the clouds
or the full moon when the curtain parts: an enchanted
cosmic order. At night we said the blessing
over the moon outside, and I
thought about the women.

A very fine piece of writing -- it conveys the experience of longing & connection through the partition in orthrodox assemblies. I love these lines:

And the partition
a lace curtain white and soft as summer dresses, and that curtain
swaying to and fro with its rings and its loops,
lu-lu-lu loops, Lulu, lullings of love in the locked room.
And the faces of women like the face of the moon behind the clouds
or the full moon when the curtain parts

Such a beautiful sensual contrast, the soft summer dresses in that hard, subdivided monolith of a "place of worship". The wordplay of lu-lu-loops might be the translators' work. Or maybe there is a fortunate correlation to such fantastic sound-play in Hebrew.

Tho I don't know Hebrew, my guess is that poet should should have gotten rid of "an enchanted cosmic order". Same old thing: an abstract concept already implied in the image. Look at the words themselves: so dull in their naming as to achieve the opposite of the enchantment they are trying to evoke.

This is only the opinion of a certain hubristic hudibrastic non-he-brew Editor (me).

TAR/CBC

Heavy snow today as a storm beat its way across Eastern North America -- my street looked like this again, no need to take another picture. Nevertheless, the mail arrived -- found my two contributer's copies of The Antigonish Review (issue #148, containing one poem by yrs. truly) under a big white mustachio of snow in my mailbox. Fortunately, they had shrinked-wrapped the magazine not one, two, but three times -- though I almost tore the reviews in half trying to rip through all that plastic. Will post the poem at a later date, if the The Antigonish Review doesn't. (I notice, though, TAR rarely posts poems on its site... practically all material posted there consists of reviews and fiction.)

***

The CBC broadcast exerpts of poetry winners tonight -- gave them eight minutes each -- and no, the poets did not read, but rather prim, polished actresses. I still think it would have been more interesting to hear the poets themselves, at least (well, especially) on the awards program. The reader of 1st prize winner Moira Cook's Walker in the City sounded like she was practicing for an elocution competition, all those precious syllables so loud and crystal-clear and gushily dramatic. Cook's writing, though, suggests a breathless delivery: it expresses a raw, exuberant delight in words, beginning with some very vivid weather images very Canadian. I transcribe from a tape, using // for caesuras in the actress' delivery:

a stringent day in early April when all the angels have been let out of their cages//the wet blue beak of morning, sky skidding on ahead, or flying, the sky//flying laundry// shunting cirrus back and forth//sky swirving its tracks, boing, boing, rubber as a ball // highing// the bluish bit of hash (?*) at the centre of a jaunty girl's jaunty eye//"kaloo kalay" arias she out // but soft, away

Arresting and fun... but boing, boing, rubber as a ball? I had the impression after this that the narrative got bogged down with a lot of similarly extraneous detail, verging on incoherence. (Forgiveable vice, perhaps...) All those gloves & mittens... one "numbered five and a half", and "gathering in all the world's soiled places where she's too long stared herself down." Another line brings back the unifying motif: "A walker in the city stoops and strides, blush, blush, away". Is the Walker one of those metal supports old people use? Clearly not! Anyway, it's got some quirky, intense, & interesting language. I'll give it that. I would have to read the whole thing to see how it how it hangs together.

The selection read of the 2nd place winner, Kelly Norah Drukker, was a more sombre affair about silk weavers of Leon. A few lines, at random from the tape:

the merchants eyes, round as black sous take in the redness of my hands, the darkness of the room in which we work and live, the slow fire of the loom, burning our thoughts to crimson ends. Our children learn the spectrum slide from red to mauve before they know words. We pluck patterns like birds from the air, and fasten them with strings.

I like a number of images here which leap, as it were, from the darkness: especially those patterns "plucked... like birds from the air".

Neither of these is exactly everyman verse, the kind of plain n' simple Kooser-ish writing one might expect from a public broadcaster competition. Actually my own writing was not that far away, in some respects, from these. And this competition, it should be noted, has never really gone for that. I suppose I should give them credit there. It would have been interesting though to see total contrast in style: one cryptic-elliptic-hypercomplex, the other the extreme of plain & simple. Perhaps I ask too much.

*yes, the actor pronounced hash, not ash, which would seem to make more sense. Unless the girl is smoking dope -- very un-CBC!