JOSHUA TROTTER: HEARING

HEARING

Mornings after we gave up words, we still loved

to lie and graze the day awake
watching our old chit-chat thatch the street like rain.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon
now the dead grow sound limbs to stand upon
nourished by discourse we once loved.

In their sodden crypts they sigh awake
solitary, listening to the rain
heartened by our lost and rousing homilies—the rain

engaging vacant brains it falls upon
until everyone we love or once loved
is dying tonight or lying still awake

listening, for our sake, as rain rains the dead awake.
There’s something diplomatic about rain
strewing cool phrase upon cool phrase upon . . .

But here I pray that none whom once I loved
has held words they loved from rain; I’m held awake
by heavy sentences the rain might lay upon them.

Language Matters...

Launch of Language Matters Anthology

Interviews and selections of 22 Quebec anglophone poets

Tuesday, Sept. 10, 7:00

Bain St-Michel, 5300 rue St-Dominique, Montreal

I’ll be playing a couple of my songs at this event!

White Collar

A poem of mine is included in The White Collar Book:  Poetry and Prose of Canadian Business Life (edited by Bruce & Carolyn Meyer, Black Moss Press), which appeared on bookstands (virtual and real) just before Christmas.  I cracked it open over the holidays, and found it an enjoyable and engaging read.  Included here are fine poems by contemporaries such as Brian Bartlett, Marilyn Bowering, April Bulmer, Bill Howell, Raymond Souster, Robert Sward, and Priscilla Uppal; a stand-out story by Barry Callaghan, an intriguing and suggestive e-mail exchange by Steven Heighton, plus choice selections culled from the archives of Canadian letters – “My Financial Career” by Stephen Leacock, “The Stenographers” by PK Page, “Five Percent” by Robert Service, and “Annual Banquet: Chambre de Commerce” by AM Klein.  Needless to say, it gladdens me to be included in this company. One eyebrow-raising aspect of the collection is that its foreword is written by none other than Conrad Black – and a humble, well-written piece of prose it is, quite free of his usual overbearing prolixity.

My own contribution to the collection is a dark and brooding pantoum – not strictly autobiographical, although I’ve definitely been through psychological periods like this.  With its two-steps-forward, two-steps-back pattern (the second and fourth line of each stanza becomes the first and third line of each succeeding stanza), the pantoum is such an apt form to express the state of being stuck.    

PANTOUM OF A HIRED MAN

He woke to dawn’s grey tombstone light.

Faces he met that day were a blur.

Each day seemed like any other:

A fidging of channels, all the same. 

Faces he met that day were a blur:

If they said hello, he said hello back.

Fidging of channels it was, all the same. 

Riding on subways, he felt like a number.

If they said hello, he said hello back:

If they asked him how he was, he said, “I feel fine.”

But riding on subways, he felt like a number.

If he showed up or didn’t, it didn’t really matter.

If they asked him how he was, he said, “I feel fine.”

And the wife was good, the kids were great,

But if he showed up or didn’t, it didn’t really matter:

Within him, a strife he could not define.

And the wife was good, the kids were great.

When he wandered into rooms, he wondered why,

Within him a strife he could not define.

All was decided: no need to complain.

When he wandered into rooms, he wondered why.

She was there, they were there; pleasure, and laughter.

All was decided: no need to complain.

He had his papers and tasks, so what was he after?

She was there, they were there, and pleasure, and laughter,

But words like “drag” and “heartache” came quickly to mind.

He had his papers and tasks, so what was he after?

This too would prove hard – oh, so hard – to define.

Words like “drag” and “heartache” came quickly to mind.

Each day seemed like every single other.

Faces he met were always a blur

   As dawn dimmed to dusk: grey tombstone light.

A sidenote:  in earlier drafts line four was “a switching of channels, all the same” – a dull note that never really satisfied, that made the whole poem feel inchoate.  Just tweaking that to the unusual “fidging” seemed to sharpen the poem’s focus, clarify its angst, make it feel finished.

Certain funky aspects of this collection will stretch and challenge some readers' expectations. It’s fair to say that for most of us, the term “white collar” conjures up notions of “office land” – that gauzy realm of work cubicles and corner offices, administrivia, pecking orders, board meetings, and the like.  As per this Wikipedia definition. Most of the works in White Collar deal with just that – but others (including some of the best in the collection) are written about or from the point of view of an ultrasound technician, a foot doctor for the homeless, a GP, a dentist, a creative writing teacher, a piano teacher. Hmm.  Even teaching – is it really white collar work?  When our work overlaps with the office – attendance, marks submission time – it does take on that quality. So, too, with those interminable meetings.  Most teachers I’ve asked, though, find it hard to think of themselves as “white collar workers” per se. Open collar, perhaps?  A profession nearly as old as the notorious “oldest profession”, for most of the last two millennia, it’s been definitely black collar, as in the distinction between “town” and “gown”.  In the broadest definition, I suppose, anything not strictly “blue” could be considered white collar, including a surgeon in his scrubs.  

One poem, Seymour Mayne’s “For the Dentist Who Extracted My Last Wisdom Tooth” gave me pause: does it really belong here? Another – H. Masoud Taj’s “The Domain of the Inbetween” – is a lengthy meditation on the metaphysics of structures: dwellings, walls and the like. One could say that these evoke the psychological/spiritual underpinnings of white collar work. Inclusions such as these do serve, nevertheless, to make White Collar a varied and refreshing read.    

Citizenship Study Misguide

There's an excellent article by Stephen Henighan in Geist on the increased militarism and blatant right-wing revisionism in the most recent edition of Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship, otherwise known as the Citizenship Guide, the booklet that introduces immigrants to Canada.  I was similarly creeped out by it when I last looked at it, in January.  (It's interesting to know what my immigrant students have to study to become citizens.) Other highlights Henighan points out: Medicare is bypassed in a fleeting reference to the Canada Health Act; Tommy Douglas isn't mentioned; the CBC, government aid agencies like CUSO and CIDA, the right to unionize, gay and lesbian rights also vanish. The only two waves of political refugees mentioned are Hungarians who "escaped Soviet tyranny" in 1957 and Vietnamese who "fled from Communism" after 1975, ignoring, of course, the thousands of refugees who fled military dictatorships in Latin America in the '70s and '80s.

As I point out in my comment to the article, the arts are as underemphasized as the military is over-emphasized in the guide – on the one page dealing with Canadian culture, some literary names are mentioned, but all those pictured on the page are sports figures. The only performing artists pictured in the whole guide are an anonymous Prince Edward Island fiddler, and in another small picture, a bagpiper and congo drummer in an open-air market. There is one poem quoted in full in the guide: John McRae's simultaneously magnificent and sanctimonious elegy, "In Flander's Fields". Plus, of course, our National Anthem and God Save the Queen.

Consider the cover of the guide: two pudgy Canadians paddling on the Rideau Canal with the Parliament Buildings behind them, who, in their identical red life jackets and yellow baseball caps, bring to mind the Mackenzie brothers. Other images: the Canadarm (yup! always of service to our big neighbors to the south), a bemedalled veteran, a moose, tulips in front of the parliament buildings, a maple leaf, an altar piece bearing a crucifix (National Assembly of Quebec? not sure here).

As if that’s not enough, the Conservative government has also beefed up the presence of the military in the citizenship ceremony, with members of the military seated on the platform with the presiding judge, standing in the receiving line congratulating the new citizens, even giving a two to three-minute speech.

Overall, the portrayal of our culture in the Guide is not only out-and-out militaristic, but almost unendurably bland…and gives the lie to the Canada I know well.

An Unremitting Eye

My review of Steven Heighton's fifth poetry collection, Patient Frame, is up at The Rover.  A book I highly recommend, by the way.

Carmine Starnino and Christian Bök: The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry

The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry from Kit Dobson on Vimeo.

Christian Bök and Carmine Starmino, says the caption, "duke it out in their discussion of Canadian poetry." I watched this parley, which took place a few days ago, with great interest. If there's any clash here, it's between two writers possessing contrasting psychological/creative styles that need not be as dismissive of each other's creative practices as they have been. The tension between them is palpable -- I don't think they looked at each other through the whole hundred minutes -- but it's intriguing to see how their views are undergoing some process of moderation, and how much common ground they actually share.

Fiona Tinwei Lam

Here’s a book I very much enjoyed this summer: Enter the Chrysanthemum by Vancouver poet Fiona Tinwei Lam. Her poems express powerful, simple emotions with extraordinary clarity and restraint; at times they are written with an almost oriental sense of delicacy, betraying the author’s Chinese-Canadian upbringing (although there is a twist: she was born in Scotland.) Lam handles family and childhood very well; her style and sensibility put me in mind of Li-Young Lee.

Actually, there’s a personal connection with this writer. I met her at the League of Canadian Poet’s Conference/Fest in Vancouver last June, where she was also launching her book. I was immediately impressed by what she read; we later traded books, and have been corresponding. About the relation of her verse with that of Li-Young Lee, she writes,

I love Li-Young Lee's lyrical voice, and his work is a real inspiration. His tone, his style of remembrance differ from mine in that I probably "twist the screw" so to speak in my last lines in a way he doesn't--a different path to insight perhaps. I'd say his poems are more formally "beautiful", and that he makes different use of rhythm and repetition. I probably tend to be more direct, using a super- distilled version of ordinary or even conversational speech, rather than elevated speech.

Below are three favourite poems from Chrysanthemum, posted with her permission.


RAPUNZEL

I want to say Make love to me
but instead, I mention the weather—
after weeks of damp, the air
is as mild as spring’s, the skies
swept clear of cloud.
I’m restless, tired of my tower
of virtue, this higher ground.

I want to say Climb up.
These nights alone,
I’ve made my hands yours,
the gaze of your palms
upon the gaze of my flesh.
You’ve opened me. I’m here,
waiting. Enter
what I’ve let no man enter:
Let us become
first woman, first man
in the garden of our limbs.
I’m eager for your body’s salt.
My hair flows down.


CALL

These days, every hour or less,
a phone call from my mother.

She flails and clutches at me through the line.
Help me. But I can’t drag her out.

I say, it’s alright, it’s alright.
But it’s not and I can’t
stop the dark as it pushes her in.

What’s left of her memory,
a skim of debris
that disintegrates while she flounders.

Words have no arms.
I love you saves no one
and soon I’ll cry too
from what’s gouged away
beneath the soothe and lull
of my voice.

I’ll coax out a blanket of sleep
and tuck it around her,
make her forget the forgetting.

Until the numbers too begin drifting
just out of grasp. Just like the daughter
I will no longer be.


SHOWER

Those mornings we’re together, the three of us
stand in the spray of soft diamonds—sunlight
through glass, and everything sparkling.
You hold our son high in your arms
while I lather him up. Our little otter,
he’s as sleek and slick as when he slid
from my womb. Then I lather you,
foot to thigh, chest to back—the heft and sinew
of what I have loved. You and he both
turn in the warm rain, my universe
of king and prince rinsed to glisten.
When you soap my skin, I live,
become brief silk in your hands, as luscious
as when your desire flowed. Only water
will love me when you are gone.

"Florence" by Barbara Adler -- a powerful videopoem on illiteracy.

Some real poetry, for a change...

FOR PETER, MY COUSIN

The night you died, I heard your cello shift --
a scraping in its corner in the barn.
Alfalfa pillowed it. White breath of pigs
was wreathed around the scroll; the cattle mourned.
For years its neck had rested by your ear.
Your bow across its strings and belly filled
the burlap sacks with apples, dusky tarns
of sound. You listened to that voice until
your marriage. Then she didn't let you play.
Her own voice, hoarse from children, saw you lean
in longing to the shovel, hurl the hay.
She felt your fingers press the strings in dream.
Your heart collapsed too soon -- you died asleep.
Beside you she heard wood and horsehair weep.

--Barbara Nickel, The Gladys Elegies (Cocteau Books, 1997), reprinted in Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, edited by Zachariah Wells, (Biblioasis, 2008). This, belatedly, is supplementary material for my review of Jailbreaks in The Rover. Compliments to Barbara Nickel, Cocteau Books & Biblioasis.

Steven Michael Berzensky (AKA Mick Burrs)

Steven Michael Berzensky (also known as Mick Burrs) I've written about before. Maybe he's the most under-rated poet in Canada. Perhaps this has to do with his (chiefly) free-verse conversational style, nearly indistinguishable -- on the surface at least -- from that of so many practitioners. One week two summers ago I read through his sixth full-length collection, The Names Leave the Stones, poems new and selected, and found it thoroughly engaging. (Funny it should take me so long to write about it...actually this post is from my drafts archives. Life & my swiss cheese memory just intervened.) Running a broad gamut from the personal, political, spiritual and everyday, I find that through it all -- even when dealing with painful, hard subjects -- Berzensky maintains a shining clarity and directness one associates with innocence. Behind that apparent simplicity though, a particularly sophisticated mastery is at work.

To give a taste of what I mean, here's a brief political poem:

STALIN'S HANDS

could raise
vodka glasses
to the ceiling

could move
   bishops
         and pawns
across squares

could crush
     skulls

and then

    caress
a daughter's curls

NB, "bishops/and pawns" should sprawl a little more across the page, to suggest more far-reaching chess moves. "Skulls", too, should be out there a bit, first letter aligned with the last letter of the previous line -- again, to suggest a more far-reaching relationship. Unfortunately, the html just won't cooperate!

Robin Blaser

A nice interview with Robin Blaser here on the CBC. I like what he says about language being a great tradition that greets you with every encounter: all you have to do as a poet -- and reader -- is answer the invitation. (Something like that -- I'm transcribing from my almost illegible scrawl.)

He won the Griffin the other day (for a book by a Canadian poet) for his collected, "The Holy Forest". John Ashbery won the international award. (Nothing succeeds like success, as they say.)

True to form, I've made a comment with links to actual poems & readings that they posted today. As I've said, they should have such links at the foot of the article itself: might even increase traffic through their site. Eventually I'll write CBC management about that.

"Let's talk to the poet, not look at the work itself..."

Here's a letter of protest I wrote to the CBC, in response to their interviews with Don Domanski on the Sunday edition and on their web site's Poet of the Month. I hope it gets posted (well, it did). And for any of you out there who care enough, I encourage you to send letters too. They need waking up at the CBC, and I'm sure it will require more than one voice to do that!

I suppose I should begin by thanking you for giving some media exposure to poets. This, however, is to be expected of a public broadcaster. What I take you to task for is the lack of exposure given to poetry itself. Here, Don Domanski was interviewed for 20 minutes on the Sunday Edition, and not one poem of his was read! And again, on your “Poet of the Month” feature, several inches of space are given to a similar interview, and again, not one poem. This, unfortunately, is not atypical of the CBC nowadays. Do you remember the days when Robert Weaver paid the likes of Al Purdy or Irving Layton to read poems on the radio? That era is long gone. Unfortunately, a poet’s work is not always readily available “at a bookstore near you”.

I have written a missive like this before, and expect I will have to again. The solution is simple: poetry is sound-bite friendly, and a few extra inches on a web page cost nothing to get a sense of a poet’s actual writing, rather than just chatter about the importance of awards and sources of inspiration. But as long as the CBC is more dedicated to the culture of celebrity than culture per se, I’m afraid this simple criticism will fall on deaf ears.

Robin Blaser & Phil Hall

Saw Robin Blaser and Phil Hall read at the Atwater Library last Friday night. (One can catch this reading, along with other Atwater readings, here.) Neither poets I knew particularly well, although from my bookcase I fished out Robin Blaser's Pell Mell, which a friend gave me at about the time it came out in 1988. Blaser, friend of Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan and intimately associated with what has come to be known as San Francisco Renaissance (even after he came to Vancouver and took Canadian citizenship in the early '70s), is now 83, and clearly, probabilities are I wouldn't have a chance to see him again. So I read through 50 pages of his book to get a sense of his style and see if he was worth going to hear read. I liked what I saw, although his work took a while to grow on me. Clearly, Blaser is an academic and rather abstruse at that, but he's not in the slightest bit stuffy. Free-wheeling, whimsical, ethereal ... emphasis on vision, evocation, delight in multiple possibilities, accidental juxtapositions that tend toward hermetic. A looseness of diction I associate with the West coast. Definitely a happy writer. Here's one brief poem I liked, although it is certainly more straightforward and "concrete" than most of what he does:

My Window

of neighbours and pumpkins
and sweeties, private kisses, sky

and wonderful, superstitions

to begin the day, knocking on

wood, rhythmically, musical

breakfasts, soft, boiled,

toasted with currents, intimate

wandering of questions and belief,

the thin skin wanders the adventure

of clothes-off-clothes-on, and

Mattress Mary, across Rock Creek,

out of bounds, summers

There's stuff here about which I wonder whether it belongs: "and Mattress Mary, across Rock Creek"? Could the poem do better without it? (By the way, there are no stanza breaks -- somehow the encoding included them, and I can't get rid of them.)

Many of Blaser's poetic clusterings are gathered under abstract titles: Belief, Anecdote, Romance, The Soul, Desire. Here's The Soul, another poem I enjoyed. Curious that it also features windows and summers.

The Soul

someday, the windows    the transparency
screams      open and zippers

the last minute -- processions -- marriages --
meetings   such rainbows or corners

raindrops--the sound of--which
winds slap or wander

solitude   perfect  agreement
disordered

take it this way or that way
upwards and downwards, sideways
and backwards

reminders of rivers, streets,
sidewalks, the pathways

of whatever form, reforming
a definition backward and outward
of this misnomer--

there it wings, homing, dim
or not, flashes, caught, and
then winters,

a slip of a thing, in and out,
statues and stillness, walks easily

the thigh of the things, between things, golden
and repetitious

surfaces swim, collecting
the depths and inevitable summers of
there-it-is

This poem is particularly successful because it cleverly invokes an heraldic notion of "soul"-- flashing wings, borne aloft -- as locus of being, the "there-it-is", gliding artfully among the flotsam. (On Explorer I discover the stanza breaks -- every two lines or so, are lost: best to look at this post through Firefox.)

Pell Mell is a good title for a collection of such joyful skitterings among seeming (and frequently not-so-seeming) non-sequiturs. These have been amassed with all his other poems into a larger vision called "The Holy Forest", an impressive tome published just last year. (I wasn't convinced enough to shell out for it, but I might...) On stage Blazer was warm but humble presence, if at times too soft-spoken for that microphone. A couple of times a member of the audience served us all by asking to repeat a poem that was just barely audible the first time.

Phil Hall was a good poet to pair up with Blaser, because he is also cerebral and very quirky, but if anything intenser, darker, and given to offbeat and sometimes genuinely funny wordplay. Consider these lines he read from his newly published "White Porcupine" :

self-sufficiency is the worst crime
if what I have to say seems unconnected -- wider!
there is a further from lies than truth

I begged for this fresh day
to run as I have others -- a day that is already a day
to bend out of its spelling into yada yada

the landscape is lined up around the block
to get in to see The Landscape: A Wire Circus

bare coat-hangers tossing their horse heads
triangulating closet leagues & fathoms

giving their harness-bells a shake
where has it gone she gone he gone?

no one humiliates the dead (yeah right)

Perhaps to the uninitiated these lines seem remote, but now I can't read them without remembering Hall's superb reading of them. Hall performed these lines so well -- with the edgiest of inflections and pregnant pauses -- that he had the audience quite cracking up, particularly at the word "wider!": he exclaimed it, jerking his hands apart to make it clear that was urging himself and the reader to be even more disconnected. This singular sense of "wider" is not that obvious on the page, where it could be taken as simply an additional and alternative adjective to "disconnected". (Even that exclamation point doesn't quite make the point.) I should add that Hall's high-pitched voice sharpens those points, and is pretty well perfect for what he has to deliver.

Both Blaser and Hall play with abstractions and arbitrary inclusion in a fashion that goes quite against the grain of what I was saying in the foregoing post on craft, which was, essentially, interrogate those loose ends ruthlessly, cut 'em out. Refreshing and even illuminating that these poets also succeed, in their ways, so well.

A feel-good poetry reading review

Just came back from a poetry reading at the Atwater Library featuring Carmine Starnino and Elizabeth Bachinsky. Both are fine poets and excellent readers, so it was a truly pleasurable experience.

Carmine Starnino went out on a limb and read from new material, some of it so recent he himself wasn't entirely sure it was "lame". Well, whatever lameness it may have had on the page, I didn't catch it, and it definitely had something: drawing upon the triggers of an "unaccountable sadness" as homely as a fencepost or a willow, each object was described with such precision it acquired a statuesque quality. A lengthy prose poem building on the conceit of "working class clouds" took its risks, but yielded rewards: a whimsical (yet peculiarly melancholy) tour de force, it will surely feature in a future collection. Curious that none of his books were for sale, as far as I could see; I would have seriously considered picking one up. Also a significant critic, editor and anthologist, here he gives an excellent interview in the Danforth Review.

Elizabeth Bachinsky leavened the reading with lighter entertainment: a palindrome and some mildly flarf-like poems derived from google searches from her first collection, and narrative poems from her second, including a series about pregnant teens from her hometown, about which she drew laughter with the claim that it was the teenage pregnancy capitol of Canada -- or at least, the town with the highest quotient. Her work was conversational, deft, yet penetrating, and certainly did what it wanted to do, and I can't see anything wrong with that. (Boy, I'm nice tonight, but that's how I feel: my evening teaching schedule doesn't allow me to attend many readings, and I certainly have no regrets about coming out to this.)

The Montreal Anglo poetry scene is so closely knit that in the audience I met several habitués I knew, and indeed didn't even have a decent amount of time to chat with them all. Let's see -- Elise Moser, Angela Leuk, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Raphael Bendahan, Peter Dubé (well, I was just introduced to him), David McGimpsey, and Maxianne Berger were all in attendance. I think I just named about thirty percent of the worthy few that braved the extreme Feb. cold to come to this reading...

Eric Folsom: Northeastern Anti-Ghazals

Although books outnumber chapbooks on my shelves by at least two dozen to one, the chapbook has always struck me as a format most germane to poetry: the intensity of the form lends itself to short draughts. Looking at all the unfinished collections on my shelves, as well as all those I have read in full to which I might return to reread a handful, I could easily say that in every full-length book of poetry, I find a chapbook I could call my own.

Eric Folsom's Northeastern Anti-Ghazals is a chap I picked up at the last League of Poets' AGM in Edmonton. I read the poems with great interest a couple of months ago, and now am rereading them and enjoying them all the more. Especially arresting is the diamond-like particularity of many of those couplets, i.e. observations like:

Inside where I stand, one cobweb on the ceiling
Delicately twists when the furnace comes to life.

or the suggestiveness of

Labouring with love for love, the wedding ring
On the spice shelves while I do the dishes.

... and the frequently mysterious leaps between those couplets.

The Ghazal, according to my Dictionary of Poetic Terms, is a Near Eastern verse form, celebrating love and drinking, composed of 5 to 12 couplets, the last of which contains the author's name. One feature of them is a spirit of intensity and compression that brings to mind the haiku; according to Kate Braid & Sandy Shreve's In Fine Form, traditional ghazal couplets are never enjambed; and in fact were so independent of each other that their order could be changed without damaging the poem.

Eric tells me (we corresponded by e-mail) that the “Anti” part in the title "is a nod to Phyllis Webb, who first used the term to acknowledge that she was really writing a highly westernized version of the ghazal, not recognizable to most Arabic poets, and one might presume Persian, Urdu, or Hindi." (Possibly English haikus could be called an anti-haikus for the same reason.) His poems tend to take the form of understated, sharp observations: drinking is not a primary feature of them, although definitely love figures prominently, in a restrained sort of way; I see no enjambment between couplets, however, and although none of the poems includes his name, many of the poems end with a first-person self-reference.

Speaking of those leaps between couplets, I am reminded of a passage by one Idis Parry quoted in Alan Watt's The Book:

What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience? They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts and events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things... This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods.

In a number of the poems, one is left guessing about why the various couplets are sewn together. In others, a multiplicity of connections is possible. In their cryptic construction, ambiguities abound. Clearly, this is a form that takes risks, but can also bring great rewards. In the following poem, for instance, the reader is forced to shift gears emotionally as well as logistically with the shifts in points of view. It is the mind’s hunger for context that finds an implied narrative in the juxtapositions:


THE WISE

She wore a scent like blue light bulbs,
Wore her coat the way trees wear hills.

After the bloodiest campaign in years,
His heart smouldered like an old cigar.

His eyes put down roots for the first time,
The light of crows in his hair.

Every influence caught her off-guard:
A vaginal infection, the phone calls.

He courted his own grief,
He thought she would be his second wife.

No angry objects on this table,
No jack-in-the-box anger from your lips.

I love your failure to communicate,
I love your naked back facing me.


Each of these couplets, of course, could be a separate epigram: a hallmark of the form. The second one, for instance, could be about Donald Rumsfeld. But considering that the first five couplets shift between a man and a woman, a very intense war between the sexes is set up. The second last couplet is a particularly brilliant one: it can be taken as both a climax of the implied narrative, and negation of the tension, depending on whether one takes it as a command or an observation. Considering the intensity of the previous couplets, and of that image of “jack-in-the-box anger” that quite literally shoots out from the page, it commands attention, in any case; even when one says “there is no anger”, presence of anger is invoked. Similarly the title, “The Wise”: is it ironic? Does it suggest the process these characters must go through to become wise? The denouement is a lovely one, a celebration of beauty, and yet an unresolved tension: it could be taken as playfully tender, or deeply ironic, all at once.

Googling Eric and ghazals, I found this link, where you can read articles by Eric and others about the form, as well as a couple of other poems from the collection, including a personal favourite, "Just Another Yuppie Raising Children".

North-Eastern Anti-Ghazals is (on the surface of it) a plain production on ordinary paper comprising 15 poems; it is, as with all chapbooks, one of those instant rarities. Published by above/ground press in Ottawa, it can be obtained here.

Gwendolyn MacEwen

In my spare hours in TO I read Gwendolyn MacEwen's The T.E. Lawrence Poems, from cover to cover. Suitable, perhaps, to be reading a Toronto poet in TO. While I made my escape by moving six hours down the highway, she did so by traveling and feeding her imagination on more exotic sources. Much of her work draws on ancient Egyptian and other mythologies; this collection, which some consider her best, is a fragmented narrative of the life of Lawrence of Arabia. Long have I admired this poet's brilliance. Her two-volume selected is one of my treasured possessions. She was, for better or for worse (better for her poetry, I like to believe), a poet who lived on the edge: she dropped out of high school at 18 to write, lived by her considerable wits and never looked back at (or forward to) any sort of academic career. Unfortunately, despite her substantial contribution to Canadian letters -- which was recognized through many awards including the GG, inclusions in major anthologies, etc. -- she died alone, poor, of alcohol related causes in downtown Toronto at the age of 46. (Need I editorialize? In Japan, an artist of her stature would have been named a National Treasure.) Below is perhaps my favourite poem in the TE Lawrence collection; because a Google search turned up nothing, I transcribed it here (only approximating, within the limits of my html encoding, the formatting of the lines).

THE DESERT

Only God lives there in the seductive Nothing
That implodes into pure light.  English makes Him
an ugly monosyllable, but Allah breathes
A fiery music from His tongue, ignites the sands,
invents a terrible love that is
The very name of pain.

The desert preserves Him
as the prophets found Him, massive and alone.
They went there, into that awful Zero
                      to interpret Him,
for Himself to know, for He said:  Help me,
I am the One who is alone, not you.  Tell Me who I am.

Camels lean into the desert, lost in some thought
so profound it can only be guessed.  When
Will God invent man?  When
           will the great dream end?
My skin crawls with a horrible beauty in this
Nothingness, this Everything –

I fall to my knees in the deep white sand, and my head
implodes into pure light.

-- Gwendolyn MacEwen, from The T.E. Lawrence Poems

For those who don't know her, here's a small sampling of other poems. If you have only time for one, try Dark Pines Under Water. I won't say any more; just try it.

Tim Lilburn

These three things, religion, philosophy, poetry, seem roughly the same to me; they reach for the same things. At the center of each is a loneliness, a sizable ache for return, for the enjoyment of a larger self where you can roam. And each requires, or calls out, a way of life, a practice or singleness of attention that spreads through a person. All three, by nature, are katabatic; they dream of going deep. I’m not talking about religion and philosophy as solely a series of positions—this sort of thing strikes me as betrayal of what both are—but as the enactment of stretching longing. And prayer, conversation and metaphor with its music, the rooms in which the three respectively live, all give me a similar sort of pleasure.

In Fine Form

Getting back to Edmonton -- I had a good time at Canadian League of Poets' AGM, meeting friendly and intelligent poets, launching Undressing the Night at the city hall, attending seminars, participating in council meetings where I learned of the travails -- in all their Byzantine intricacies -- of running an arts service organization in these funding-tight times.

The most memorable seminar I attended was one on form poetry. It is significant that at least two-thirds of the poets present -- and there were about 75 or 80 in all, by my guestimate -- attended this seminar, rather than one scheduled at the same time on the Poem Made Visual, about video poems, concrete poems, etc. Panelists included Kate Braid, one of the editors of In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry; poet Ted Blodgett, who writes consistently in form, and Steven Michael Berzensky (aka Mick Burrs), who has written dozens of what he calls "liberated sonnets". All of them commented on the paradox of how constraints generate creativity, how student work so often shines within the strictest frameworks, how accomplished poets enter unknown regions under the mysterious momentum generated by these schemata. Kate started compiling In Fine Form when, asked to teach a course on writing poetry in form, she couldn't find an an anthology with Canadian content. She and Sandy Shreve came up with the idea of creating one of their own. They imagined they might compile a small book to show off high calibre Canadian work -- but surprised themselves to find, upon scouring the Canadian poetry section of the Vancouver Public Library, 1400-plus poems dating from the 1800s to the present worthy of setting aside for possible inclusion. A limited call for submissions lead to 1,000 more of what they considered to be high-quality form poems. Then the difficulty would be, as all editors find, selecting a manageable number from this astonishing superabundance.

Clearly a strong interest in form poetry is abiding, and probably resurgent after nearly a century of free verse predominance. (Actually, poetry in strict form -- rhymes, repetitions, incantations -- has been around since the dawn of humanity, and still is in the popular mind what largely constitutes "poetry"; it is free verse that is the upstart.) What these panelists found was that among Canadian poets, there has not been been such strong contention vis-a-vis form vs. free verse as in the US; many Canadian free-forms people, including some of our most flamboyant personalities (Irving Layton, Milton Acorn and BP Nichol come to mind), delve frequently into fixed form with more than creditable results; fixed form is largely viewed as simply another way to create poetry. In the States, polarized camps have come quite literally to demonize each other -- the "Post Avant" vs. the SoQ (to borrow Silliman's terminology), the Language poets vs. the New Formalists.

In Fine Form is well worth buying, by the way. I also have The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Stand and Eavan Boland -- a volume in which, despite Norton's compendious reputation, comparatively few of hundreds of possible forms are covered: just the Villanelle, the Sestina, the Pantoum, the Sonnet, the Ballad, Blank Verse, the Heroic Couplet, and the Stanza along with what they call Shaping Forms, viz. the Elegy, The Pastoral, and the Ode. An additional chapter brings together examples of so-called "Open Forms" without much explanation. In In Fine Form, not only are these categories explained and amply exemplified but also Blues, the Couplet, the Epigram, the Fugue (a term the editors came up with after Robyn Sarah's poem "Fugue"), the Madrigal, the Glosa, Haiku and other Japanese forms, the Incantation, Palindrome, the Rondeau family, Syllabics, Triolet, plus definitions and examples of other forms or modes such as Acrostic, Anglo Saxon, Limerick, Lipogram and Visual. (Funny: they didn't include the Liposuction or the Implant.) The Norton Anthology brings together the most stellar examplars in the language: it's pretty hard to beat Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle, Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, and Theodore Roethke's The Waking as far as villanelles are concerned. For a poet, though, these can be downright intimidating acts to follow. The Canadian anthology is a more varied and approachable: the quality ranges from excellent (some of these selections give those in the Norton a good run for their money) to, well, serviceable. Much of the work by is comparative unknowns; a fair number of the poems by living, breathing peers in the CanPo scene. Thus as a living, breathing, unknown myself, I feel, hey, I can do that too and writing in form becomes a wholly natural, accessible option.

Margaret Atwood at the Bleu

I just came back from Blue Metropolis (Metropolis Bleu) Festival, where I took in an interview of Margaret Atwood by Jian Ghomeshi, host of Q, a new daily arts show on CBC radio. It was a remarkably entertaining and insightful interview. Although I've heard tell of Atwood's caustic wit, it surprised me to discover just how quick-witted and downright funny she could be. (This woman really speaks her mind, and speaks it well - to have that liberty, she pointed out, it's a great advantage to have no boss or grants dependency to make you look over your shoulder.) After icebreaking trivialities that went on long enough that I started to wonder if they'd take over the interview, the discussion got suddenly serious when it veered towards Atwood's attitudes towards mortality, aging parents, and then, cultural politics. If I synopsise some of the things I found she put exceedingly well, I imagine they will sound banal -- i.e. how we are never really prepared for the shock of seeing our parents suddenly rendered helpless by aging, the role reversals that entails, & how the same goes for that final journey: how can we be prepared for what no one has come back to (convincingly) describe? So too with many other unknowns, including the subconscious we live with every day (and night). At the same time, she has always "loved to travel...", ha ha. For a taste of some of her political views, try out this entertaining and frightening article, published in the Globe and Mail three months ago, slamming the Harper governments' cutbacks to cultural promotion abroad, and to culture in general. Atwood still holds to those views, although they're criticised as harsh, feeling that -- although this government does its best to remain inscrutable -- its arts policies are quite knowing and deliberate. In this interview she likened the cutbacks to the NHL destroying its farm teams and thereby sabataging any future hopes of producing more Wayne Gretskys. She pointed out that if it hadn't been for the funding back in the 60s and 70s of little magazines and publishing houses like House of Anansi (which published her first books) and Coach House Press (with which Michael Ondaatje among others was closely associated), Canadian authors of international stature like herself probably wouldn't be where they are today. Probably the Harper government would wish that we fall back on a system of private foundations like we find south of the border, but we have none of America's advantages: no grand-scale corporate philanthropic tradition, which was, after all, begun by a class of robber-barons trying to clean up their tarnished public image. Wagering our cultural future is economically wrongheaded, she argued, considering that the Canadian arts and cultural industries bring in at least $40 billion a year, more than many major industries.

$40 billion a year -- it's hard to know how she (or her info. sources) arrived at that figure. Is it by defining the arts so generally as to include, say, sports, tourism and leisure? Then possibly a much larger figure could be generated -- but it would seem a specious argument, confounding much of that cultural-economic activity with, say, Canada Council fine arts funding and its spinoffs.

Even so, reflecting on the economic spin-offs of my own relatively modest cultural activities, it would be easy to see how one could arrive at a humongous figure, even if one limited the definition of culture to literature, film, music and the fine arts -- & if you included those spinoffs. Two weeks ago, I put on a musical event at a local cafe with three other musicians. We attracted, despite inclement weather, a crowd of about 50 people, who spent a total of about $900 on booze and food. Factor in the costs of transportation -- many took taxis, including the performers -- and we're at over a thousand dollars in spinoffs for the local economy just for that event. A poetry reading with 18 people benefited the cafe at least $200 (including a modest space rental of $40). There were photocopy bills for posters, & LCP handouts. Those 18 people probably spent about a hundred dollars to get there. Multiply that by all the events across the country, including advertising, hotel bills and airfares for festivals, + factor in expenditures on raw materials for cultural activities (photocopies, computers, art supplies, musical instruments & equipment, postage, etc.) + book & CD buying and I'm sure you're well into the billions. (The artists, as always, get a miniscule slice of that pie.)

Of course, regardless of dollar value, the arts -- as she pointed out -- are essential to being human, and cutbacks in that direction could be construed as an attempt to cut back our humanity. Anyway, all very thought-provoking and worthwhile.

Artie Gold Memorial

Went to tonight's memorial reading for Artie Gold at The Word bookstore here in Montreal -- even though, as I've said, I didn't know him. I'm convinced by people's testimonies that he would have been a great guy to know. At least I got to know about the man from those who did. There were at least 50 people crowded into the little shop, many of them standing, including moi; when the entrance way got packed as a rush-hour bus, the owner had to turn people away at the door. A lot of familiar faces from the Montreal Anglo poetry scene: Endre Farkas, Stephen Morrissey, and Carolyn Zonailo, who helped put on the event, along with others from his inner circle; Robyn Sarah, Carolyn Marie Souaid, Elizabeth Robert. George Bowering, a personal friend of Art's, was also there and talked a bit about him. Like another Glenn Gould, Art, it seems, would call friends up in the wee hours and regale them with wildly eclectic monologues -- one said something to the effect that he was the only person he knew who could string together bubblegum wrappers, Picasso's Guernica, Henri Bergson's theory of mind and quasars all in one sentence. His poetry certainly leaps and crackles with that kind of free-ranging oddness. Before the evening was through, there was an open mike and I got to read this poem. (I hadn't expected to read, but I was prepared.) Although the owner, out of decorum, didn't make a big point of it, there were a fair number of Artie Gold books on display; this was a chance to stock up. I picked up before Romantic Words and his selected, The Beautiful Chemical Waltz, reasonably priced at $10 each. Interesting memorabilia on the walls: letters, photos, eviction notices, an elementary school report card saying if he only applied himself, he could do well, and he really should work on his synonyms and homonyms. Here's a link to a memorial piece by Stephen Morrissey with a recent photo. And here's a quote of an AG poem before I'm done. I transcribe for the pure joy of it:

Sun filters through my window
velvet like bat's bellies the shadow it casts
flutter about my room. I share the unrest

the sun is doomed with; the movement
sunup sundown moving around; ground sky ground
its only comfort the habit of its orbit.

We are orbs whatever we do is behaviour
the truth of our moment is too predictable
yet I delight in the sun. it is monumental

in the sky with certainty rising, setting
looking to the greater cycle, there is colour,
a yellow angel pedals about the world.