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!

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.

I'll be continuing my Easy Reading Poets series, which I left off last summer, with a post on Gwendolyn MacEwen. But I won't be identifying them in the post titles as such -- only in the labels below. Earlier Easy-Reading Poets included Sharon Olds, Robert Creeley and Billy Collins. But the novelty has worn off, easy-reading qualities have been discussed, and now it just sounds stupid.

Easy Readin' Poet #3: Billy Collins

I wrote about this guy before, and this is what I said:

Accessible, charming, brilliant. A romp. If humour columnists Josh Freed (Montreal Gazette) or Gary Lautens (Toronto Star) wrote poetry, this is how they would write. Actually, I find a lien to Italo Calvino. In particular, Mr. Palomar.

I was talking, by the way, about his 2002 new & selected, Sleeping Alone Around the Room. I enjoy the once-through, a few poems the twice-through, but three times, well... comparisons come to mind of eating candy floss. This ex-Poet Laureate, though, is too easy to diss. Here's a personal favourite:

PURITY

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

Now I sit down at at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes
in language light as the air between my ribs.

Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage
and speed through woods on winding country roads,
passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

Easy Readin' Poet #2: Robert Creeley

Famous for pared-down poems wherein every word, every syllable counts (and usually in more ways than one), Creeley is nevertheless an easy read. I ordered his Selected shortly after he died in 2005, and started reading it in earnest last September. (Death and big prizes are the only mainstream PR poets get, and I must admit I'm as affected as any). I haven't finished yet -- set the book aside after reading about two-thirds of its 350-odd pages -- but for a while I was reading and savouring one poem after another during waits for buses, short subway rides, coffee breaks and even commercials on The National and The Daily Show. Considering how fragmented our attention spans have become, poets like him make me wonder why more folks don't read poetry these days. But then, most people, I'm afraid, really don't like to think that intensely, even if only for a few minutes.

Speaking of that commercial -- or rather anti-commercial -- connection, here's a quote from an obit in the Guardian:

Rejecting the language of a mass America lost to "gray emptiness, bled out in congealing dollars and the victim of its own static habits", he sought value in "the intimate, familiar, localising, detailing, speculative, emotional, unending talking that has given my life a way of thinking of itself in the very fact and feeling of existence. God knows one wants no end to that ever."

The most oft-quoted poems are the epigram-like ones -- those that fit snugly at the end of a newspaper column. See, for instance, the poem at the end of that obit -- a favourite of mine. Here though is one in a more relaxed mode. When you title a poem "The Moon", you'd better do something damned original with it. I think Creeley succeeds here.

THE MOON

Earlier in the evening the moon
was clear to the east,
over the snow of the yard
and fields---a lovely

bright clarity and perfect
roundness, isolate,
riding as they say the
black sky. Then we went

about our businesses of the
evening, eating supper, talking,
watching television, then
going to bed, making love,

and then to sleep. But before
we did I asked her to look
out the window at the moon
now straight up, so that

she bent her head and looked
sharply up, to see it.
Through the night it must
have shone on, in that

fact of things---another
moon, another night---a
full moon in the winter's
space, a white loneliness.

I came awake to the blue
white light in the darkness,
and felt as if someone
were there, waiting, alone.

Reflections on the post of the other day

R.W. Watkins, in the comments on last Thursday's post on Sharon Olds, pointed out that Olds is a "theme-dependent" rather than "quote/line-dependent" poet. It got me to thinking of a course devoted to theme-dependent poets -- their rhetorical devices, their memes, the ways in which they affect the reader. I'm sure, through systematic study, a special attentiveness could be acquired that could enhance the memorability of theme-dependent poems, even their lines. I'm also sure someone (probably not a few) in academe have thought that up. Or maybe this idea is still up for grabs? I am not in academe, have not been for many years...

It's interesting, too, how so many of the "unforgettable lines" I mentioned in that post fit into a rhyme scheme. Rhyme, of course, is an aide-memoire; the line, however, has to be good in itself.

In the rooms women come and go,
speaking of Michaelangelo.

Easy Readin' Poet #1: Sharon Olds

Strike Sparks, Sharon Olds' selected, was one book I'm glad I ordered: earlier this year I whipped through it in a matter of days. Her poems, cumulatively speaking, are simply a great read: "fire in the hands" Michael Ondaatje puts it in back cover blurb, commenting further on how "with roughness and humour and brag and tenderness" she "carries readers through rooms of passion and loss." (I quote him because, well, he puts it so well.) A series of poems on the death of her father carry a kind of momentum that reminded me of a page-turner novel, hard to put down. And yet... and yet. What I came away with was a series of remarkable reading experiences, but not a single memorable line. And no desire to re-read, not for a long while. (When I do re-read, I'm put off -- it's like reading yesterday's news.) I'm reminded of something journalist Carl M. Cannon said in a recent article in the Atlantic concerning ex-Pres. Bill Clinton (I happened to be reading this article around the same time):

"...it wasn’t easy to cover Bill Clinton. For a lot of reasons. For one, covering his speeches isn’t as simple as covering another president’s speeches because his quotes aren’t that good. He’s articulate, but he’s not eloquent and he reminds you of the difference between the two. I’d come back from an event and think, “Boy! That event was great! Clinton was great, the audience was great…” But then I’d look back to my notebook and realize, “Well, there’s not much there, not much usable.”

Will poetry critics eventually come up with a similar assessment of Sharon Olds? In poetry, the linguistic bar is much higher than in public discourse: there's no question Sharon Olds is eloquent, but is her level of eloquence, vis-a-vis the standards of poetry, the equivalent of mere articulateness in the political sphere?

This is one question concerning a number of "easy-reading" poets I'll be featuring here. Just what is "true eloquence" in poetry is open to debate, but I'd say it consists in unforgettable lines, lines so striking and fine that they dig immediate roots in the subconscious and are on people's lips for years (centuries) to come. I think of Marvell's "The grave is a fine and private place/but none, I think, do there embrace", Blake's "Tyger, tyger burning bright/in the forests of the night/what immortal hand or eye/dare frame thy fearful symmetry", Whitman's "I loafe and invite my soul/I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass", Eliot's "Let us go now, you and I, when evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table", Yeat's "What rough beast slouches toward Bethleham to be born?", even Irving Layton's "Your figure, love, curves itself into a man's memory." (Any faults here are mine: proof though is, I'm quoting from memory...)

I think, though, I'll get out of the way, and let the poet speak for herself, leaving you to decide. Here's one of my favourite poems of hers from the collection I just mentioned...

The Race

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark brown moustache told me
another airline had a nonstop
leaving in seven minutes. See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you'll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes, and ran, the bags
wagged me from side to side as if
to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then
run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor,
and then I took a deep breath, I said
goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit it into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle's eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people's hair was shining, they were
smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light,
I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge, I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.