The Transgressive and the Fantastical: Elizabeth Bachinsky and Sara Peters

      Elizabeth Bachinsky's The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, by Nightwood Editions, and Sara Peters’ 1996, by House of Anansi Press, ask more from their respective audiences than casual reading. These books demand participation from readers. If you are looking for poems bound together with easy observations, or a familiar jog through a personal lyric, you will come away disappointed. Both Canadian poets attempt to do quite the opposite: to undomesticate the world, to set things on fire with their minds, to rattle the cages of readers and by doing so, to reinvigorate the imagination.

Bachinsky’s book begins with the lines “I can see now that I once was quite feral. / Getting older was my education in becoming civilized” from the poem “You Know What Readers Like”. This is an apt description for how a reader feels when reading her poems for although the point of view is decidedly personal, the “voice” in her poems displays a powerful self-awareness suspicious of where it finds itself. Bachinsky’s book is rife with images of urban sprawl and superficiality—googling blondes, Telly Savalas, Nails salons, Venice Beach—all of which are treated by the poet as memento moris of a western civilization in decline. A popular culture that has become a plastic church.

This cocktail of high and low culture might be dismissed by others as mere ‘cool-hunting’, Bachinsky angling for a kind of bohemian sophistication, except for the fact that the wilderness intrudes in many of the poems. There is a picture postcard-worthy lake that is actually only three feet deep and choked with ragweed. A mountain rises in the distance above a passing train full of commuters. The speaker in another poem rides her thorough-bred horse through an empty subdivision where there are “no trees, just a razed cow field / where developers built and we moved in.” This poem ends with the lines, “my big dark horse, waiting / for me to come on back / outside” which implies nature on the ragged fringes, living outside society’s frame, is a place of spiritual renewal.

Take, for example, her poem “The Spider’s Alphabet” which appears in its entirety below:

The Spider’s Alphabet

Once in rural Japan my good friend Allan joined a fascinated throng

   in watching a white spider meander across a market square,

a white spider whose body was fat as a man’s hand whose slender

   legs tested the earth as a woman’s might test the surface of a lake

mid-May—then it moseyed. And when I first moved from the city

   to the woods outside Vancouver, I evicted two from my laundry

room, an old married couple, bodies each a good inch long, grey-brown.

   They were pissed. They lived without a web. They were hunters’

the whole length of their basement window replete with corpses:

   fat blackflies, millipedes. A real nice set-up. I screamed!

But all summer in the press room, I have watched a thin brown thing spin

   webs behind the type cases. And I have thought of E.B. White,

his Charlotte, and what I would do with my Charlotte after she,

   feeling safe, spun her pale yellow sac near the small window

that opens onto your derelict English garden. I watched the sac hatch

   and for weeks afterwards I found spiderlings among the liagatures.

We worked together. Me, dissing type while the little ones wove

   through the alphabet. Now—the wolves who stalk through

my house at night?—they keep my tabby entertained.

   In the day, I leave my windows open, and my doors. Yet how

pest-free my house remains! Some nights I dream of eight eyes and wake

   to unexpected cash. Strange. This fall when I move back to

the city with its silverfish and exorbitant rent, I think I will summon

   spiders. It is best to live with them. To let them into the house.

By Liz Bachinsky

There is so much to love in this poem — the white spider and the fascinated Japanese throng, the move between the city and the woods, the allusion to E.B. White’s Charlotte's Web — all of which implies a connection to nature is important because it resets or awakens the imagination. This is certainly how I take the meaning of the last lines where the speaker says, “Strange. This fall when I move back to / the city with its silver fish and exorbitant rent, I think I will summon / spiders. It is best to live with them. To let them into the house.”

     What Bachinsky places squarely in her cross-hairs in The Hottest Summer in Recorded History is not only urban-planning run amok but the gentrification of consciousness. Just when readers find themselves getting too comfortable in a poem, out come the bull-whips and the tiny wooden armadillos, the hobbled horses and the jimmied keyholes, the plastic paparazzi playsets and the zombie finger puppets. 

     Elizabeth Bachinsky uses her bursting lyricism and wide-ranging eye to seek the borders between the feral, i.e. the wild, and a recycled culture so obsessed with its own past it is unable to create any new meaning.

     Sara Peters also wants to make her readers uncomfortable in her new book 1996, but she does this more directly, employing an overtly surrealist approach. ”As a teenager, there are several ways to get your parents’ attention. / Only one of these ways is to set things on fire with your mind.” So begins Sara Peters’ poem “Mary Ellen Spook” and it quickly sets her readers on pins and needles for her poems work against easy observation.

     Like Bachinsky, Peters creates tension between things familiar and fabulous, leaving her readers feeling unfixed and detached. There is a dream-like quality to many of her poems. In “Bionic”, a twenty-two year old brother believes he is bionic and is looking after a senile mother whom he dresses in a t-shirt that reads, “I kill everything I fuck // I fuck everything I kill.” In “Your Life as Lucy Maud Montgomery”, a menacing Ann of Green Gables makes an appearance carrying a butterfly knife. In “Camden 14”, a boy sets himself on fire in the middle of a neighborhood.

     Reading her poem “Cryptid” below, it becomes clear how Peters employs surreal imagery to create a dream-like atmosphere, both transgressive and distorted, in order to shake up her readers.

Cryptid

You saw her once, at Margaree Harbour,

when you were a three-year-old boy called Oscar.

While you staggered over the sand,

slippery with SPF 50,

your parents humped on the beach towel,

to Lou Reed singing “Sweet Jane.”

Lipless, lidless, five slits in her throat,

her rosy larynx furled in and out.

You laughed at her boa: seaweed, rusted forks.

She tore up a starfish, swallowed its points.

You offered, as truce, some Sun-Maid raisins.

She spread out, to amuse you, all forty fingers.

Finding you gone, your father sprinted over the sand

(long-legged, in one Birkenstock)

While your mother stayed right there!, sat on her heels,

gasping into a brown paper bag.

Later, your parents noticed the salt taste of your skin,

called you their potato chip.

Your mother combed sand from your hair,

your father found beach grass in your bed.

Now they sleep to the sound of rogue waves crashing. Dreaming,

they pick their way through dying jellyfish

to find you waiting (not for them) behind a rock,

content amid the iridescent quivering.

By Sara Peters

Immediately, readers are swept into this dream-like scene with the use of the second-person pronoun transforming them into a three year old boy named Oscar. The parents dry-humping on a beach towel, the eerie lilting guitar and dead-pan bluesy voice of Lou Reed singing “Sweet Jane”, the sea-creature with her boa of seaweed and rusted forks, all of these images evoke the poem’s chimerical fantasy, which reminds me here a little of a poem by Larry Levis “Inventing the Toucan”.   

     It is as if Peters, distrustful of mimicry or imitation of any kind, fears her images will fade into a poem’s background, becoming mere wallpaper, so awakens or ignites her audience’s attention by allowing her poems to participate in the fantastical and the surreal. 

     Sara Peters’ large-minded speculative vision is not interested in a carbon copy world of appearances, but in the “throbbing interior” of her imagination.

     Stanley Plumly has said, “Resemblances are our masks for meaning” but both Bachinsky and Peters never let their readers get too comfortable with such masks. Please pick up Elizabeth Bachinsky’s The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, published by Nightwood Editions, and Sara Peters’ 1996, published by House of Anansi Press, at your local bookstore. 

Larry Levis “On Accessibility”

“I wasn’t consciously trying to make anything accessible, nor was I trying, on the other hand to be obscure or priestly, as the Modernists tried to be. I have nothing against being accessible. I think there’s certain pleasure in that—the poems being vulnerable to being understood. A lot of young poets don’t want to be understood, because they feel that when they’re understood, they’re dead. But I think that fear only comes from criticism—the vast inhibition they get from reading critics who, because they can understand something, simply decide not to deal with it. I think it’s very difficult to deal with a fantastically complete, utterly accessible lyric by Thomas Hardy, which already says everything it intends to say. It defies criticism. It says Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler, sure, come ahead, say what you have to say: I’ll make you look hopeless.

Donald Justice comes to mind in this way. He wanted to write a poem so completely that the only thing he could say about it that would be accurate would be its recitation. Larkin thought that, too. You’ll find very little high-powered criticism about Larkin. You can’t do it. His poetry is too shrewd, too cunning, too mean. Scrupulously mean as Joyce said. Now I like that….as a method in art. Not because I have anything against criticism, which is unavoidable and necessary and as natural as breathing…But to make a poem that absolutely declares everything, one that has no hidden resources or anything—I mean, that’s another idea, you see.”

(from an interview Leslie Kelen conducted with Larry Levis in Antioch Review; Summer 90, Vol. 48 Issue 3, p. 284, 16 p)  

Poetry Month and Spring Books 2013

     Poetry month is fast approaching and I am already thrilled by the fine selection on offer from Canada’s poetry publishers this spring. 

     I am eagerly anticipating the full slate of new collections published by Nightwood Editions this season. I have started reading Elizabeth Bachinsky’s The Hottest Summer in Recorded History and Sara Peter’s 1996, published by House of Anansi press, and a blog post about both of these lovely books is starting to take shape. 

     Russell Thornton has a brand new collection Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain with Harbour Publishing that I am keen to dig into, and Tim Bowling’s Selected Poems is out in hardcover which is a terrific achievement from one of Canada’s best poets. Afloat by John Reibatanz, For Display Purposes Only by David Seymour, The Civic-mindedness of Trees by Ken Howe and A Nervous City by Chris Pannell will round out the rest of my spring reading list.

     As for my own scribbling, I wish I was writing more poetry at this time of year, but teaching and being a father keep me occupied. I hope to finish my poetry chapbook Invaders sometime in late summer, and a manuscript of essays I have been gathering together over the last couple of years is in the final stages.

     Finally, the poet Barry Dempster was kind enough to ask me to be part of a Canadian Poetry celebration at the Richmond Hill Public Library on April 6 from 1-4 pm. Barry and I will be reading along side fantastic poets John Steffler, Susan Gillis, Maureen Scott Harris, and Susan Glickman. It should be a fun afternoon.   

Sue Sinclair "On Criticism"

The Canadian poet Sue Sinclair is this year’s Critic in Residence for CWILA or Canadian Women in the Literary Arts and she has written a compelling essay entitled “A Philosophy of Criticism”. She suggests a critic is someone who invites others to consider a work under review, rather than a person who is simply an arbiter of taste. In the essay, she discusses the need for longer format reviews which quote liberally from any book under consideration so readers can actively engage with the writing, make their own judgements as to whether or not they agree with the critic, and thus not be consigned to the lesser role of spectators.

Here is an excerpt: 

"I see the critic as someone who serves both past readers of the work and its possible future readers, as well as the writer. In a sense the critic also serves the artwork in that she takes up its invitation, engages with it. But it’s the writer I’d like to focus on for a moment. Some people think that the critic is not there to serve the writer in any capacity. But given that the writer, if he reads a review of his work, will likely be more affected by it than anyone else, I think it behooves the reviewer to consider the effect she may have on him. Some think that the writer is best served in just the way the reader is: by the critic’s truthful response. I agree. But there are different ways of telling the truth: it can be done indifferently, it can be done as a slap in the face, or it can be done kindly and with a—perhaps implicit—acknowledgement of the effort that every writer brings to their work. My experience is that the first two approaches can hamper or harm the writer and that the last one can help the writer to rise to the difficult occasion of public criticism. Not everyone thinks that truthfulness and kindness can coexist. Creating the space in which they can coexist is difficult, but I’ve seen it done. And I’m for the challenge. It’s work taking on."

Time Matters

     If metaphor is consciousness making a connection between two disparate things, time is consciousness building a connecting line between what has happened, what is occurring now, and what is to come in the future.

     In his essay entitled “To Think of Time”, David Baker maintains time is, “an immaterial measurement of the relationships of material substances; and – this is important – it is an entity wholly of our own making”(235). I think most lyric poets already have some a priori understanding of how time permeates a poem, and choose to manipulate time for their own uses.

     I would imagine it has something to do with all poetry having a sense of line or measure, and if time is anything, it is a measure of our lives. But when poets bend or twist or rearrange time inside their poems, time no longer enacts a true chronology, does it?  Time, in fact, begins to look a lot like metaphor.

     This is because how time acts upon us, and how time is organized inside a poem are two different things. The former is a product of rational discursive thought processes, the left-brain thinking, patterning empirical information, creating a chain of events in chronological order, helping us to make sense of what we see, while the latter explains what the imagination sees; it is a consequence of right-brain thinking. Time is tamped down, stretched out, cut apart, and knotted together in just such a way to evoke a particular emotion or idea or image.

     The one is a measure of matter; the other an instrument of revelation.

     In poetry, why this is stems from a feeling time does not play fair, or in some way steals from us. Although a useful survival and patterning tool in our daily lives, time in literature most often reprises the role of the barbarian horde at the gate, which is to say a sinister force we cannot hope to withstand. Check out a poem like “Sonnet 64” by William Shakespeare that takes as its subject time’s onslaught, and the existential terror this provokes:

When I have seen by Time’s felled hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outward buried days,
When sometimes lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.”

In this poem, the speaker bears witness to time as a destroyer of worlds. Time is cast as the main villain who “will come and take my love away”, leaving the speaker to despair that nothing of value, not beauty, not civilization, not even art has lasting significance. This, of course, is a much played-on theme in poetry, and so does not require too much bearing out, but it does high-light the emotional turmoil time creates when it is viewed exclusively as a material measurement. If time leads us only to our graves, what are poets to do?

     The answer seems to be to step outside the normal flow of time by changing how time works inside a poem. As an instrument, or a product of the imagination, time mimics two processes vital to lyric poetry: myth-making and metaphor. In his essay “To Fashion the Transitory”, the late American poet Hayden Carruth argues,

“Because men and women exist both in and out of time, they possess against time’s depredations, an existential advantage that is unique (discounting angels): the abilities to remember and to dream. By these means they create their own time”(20).

The obvious question here is, what does it mean to create one’s own time? Well, by allowing the imagination to dream, to remember, to draw up from the great repository of our memories, to make its own connections, new possibilities and new understandings are created which make life more meaningful. Or as Carruth himself so eloquently puts it in his essay, “life is fabulous, and in the individual experiences of it the great events are enacted again and again, so that meaning is perpetually reinforced”(21).

     This is myth-making in its plainest form. Time in poetry is not a linear graph, or a straight chronology, but a kind of personal map: one that reveals not the territory, but the person holding it. This is why the meditative poet finds himself thinking about a time he ate a wormy crap-apple off of a black skeletal tree on a lonely hill when he was eight years old, or the lyric poet remembers a half-forgotten incident from her university days which, twenty years later, appears suddenly charged with meaning.

     The imagination recognizes time does not simply deteriorate; it resonates too.

     It is this apprehension of past, present, and indeed a possible future, all bound in a single moment, which reveals precisely how time resembles metaphor. Poets connect image A with image B, or mix some half-veiled distant memory with the now of a particular poem in an attempt to muster new knowledge. Both are examples of metaphorical thinking.

     Lyric time, or the poet’s time, is the theme of Tess Gallagher’s essay “The Poem as Time Machine” where she considers an argument that poets fold memory and the present moment in on each other because it generates rich creative possibilities. She writes,

“This conception of time as an atmosphere, as the ‘now’ of the poem, which Paz calls ‘the Historical Now’ or ‘the Archetypal Now’ is what I would like to call ‘the point of all possibilities.’ By this I mean the point at which anything that has happened to me, or any past that I can encourage to enrich my own vision, is allowed to intersect with a present moment, as in a creation, as in a poem. And its regrets or expectations or failures or any supposition I can bring to it may give significance to this moment that is the language moving in and out of my life and my life as it meets and enters the lives of others”(107).

Is time the atmosphere of a poem?  A point of possibilities? For many poets, I think it is, albeit it is not so easy to reconcile the past with the present moment, or for the matter, the next moment about to be born.

     An example of a Canadian poet who merges past and present, time and metaphor, is Alex Boyd in his latest collection The Least Important Man. See what Boyd does with time in his poem “Someday the Men with Hats Will Go”, and notice how time ripples back and forth between present, past and future:

Someday the Men with Hats Will Go


Someday all the old men in hats will go,
they already slow motion down streetcar steps
the forties, cigarettes, black and white wars
swimming behind them. They line up patiently
to get last passports in offices, wait behind youth.
They take receipts, pause to leak out the words
All the best to you, and step into oblivion.
I look for something different all the way home.
The snow is tired, deep in contours of the brain,
finally now evaporating to liquid, so much theft
a natural part of the world – the fact that I have
my father’s eyes, my body the next edition,
walking the earth in different places, impure
from smoke that went from his lungs to mine
before he quit in 1977, another detail I wrote
down after another dinner with him. This spring
my father will be seventy-four, yet another step
higher on the ladder and I cannot tell you
how much I am afraid of that red day, unlike
any other, when I’ll sail along rails alone,
when he evaporates, when both of them
will be gone, my voice or ankle part of a model
with no origin, the factory now demolished.
What will be left, but some kind of liquid dream,
the hope of knowing a father again, the two of us
back as birches. No more distances, I want
many long thin fingers in winter, holding his.

By Alex Boyd

This poem begins with a speaker observing old men in a passport office, which sets him thinking about loss and his own childhood memories of a father smoking. Next, he rushes off into the future, and speculates about an afterlife where both he and his father exist only as trees. It is a meditative poem, a personal myth, making loss palpable and, paradoxically, life more tolerable.

     Boyd’s poem reminds me of another essay entitled “Meditative Spaces” by Eric Pankey for it exemplifies what Pankey says is a primary function of meditative poetry: a preoccupation with shaping time. He writes:

“The meditative mode attempts to slow time down, to hold it still, to condense it or stretch it or twist it, without diminishing its vitality or preciousness. The gradations of time hot-wired into the medium of language allow the now, the then, and the to be to be put under the greatest pressure.

The meditative poet is not so much interested in rendering sequential experience, but in attending to the past, the present, and the conditional future as if a trinity embodied as one, as if a single moment, a single point on a plane”(145).

Time as the single moment, or single point on a plane, is the same “point of possibilities” Gallagher mentions, and Boyd uses this idea to trigger his metaphorical thinking.

     In another of Alex Boyd’s poems “For One Second at Midnight”, time is not simply the engine the words of the poem flow through, it is also the main theme. In it, Boyd emphasizes time by weaving a number of images into “a second” of his reader’s life.

For One Second at Midnight


You’re in a doorway between houses, able to spot
the slurries that hold it all together, only able
to say Um, only now aware at this time the dead
tie a thin rope to everything, and pull. The second
has a particular grain, clear as crystal we might say,
if we thought to say it. For a second at midnight
anything is possible – you dated the cheerleader
or the quarterback, and pigeons know everything.
It’s a window of opportunity, full
of luck, death and spirits – all superstitions are true
for a second, but few know that’s the moment
to blow out your birthday cake, or throw salt over
the devil on your shoulder. As for me, for a second
I came close to inventing the device you wear over
your throat to call in sick and sound like hell, no need
to see office supplies at least one day. For a second
at midnight the world is like someone right in front
of you who stops walking, turns, laughing, lighting up,
but then gives a shit about getting out of your way.

By Alex Boyd

This poem crushes past, present, and future all into one second after midnight where “anything is possible”. Things exist both in and out of time. The reader is reading the poem in real-time, or as time happens, but is also experiencing the poem’s time, or time as a measure of the imagination. The speaker calls this paradox “a doorway between houses” from which images emerge to make sense of a single moment, and if we are lucky enough, to change it.

     What is most interesting to me about metaphor and time is how they are, at once, a measure of change, fashioned from the fleeting nature of our lives, and yet simultaneously, both are products of our invention. To my mind, Canadian poet Alex Boyd blends time and metaphor with great fluency so they illuminate each other. If you enjoyed Alex Boyd’s poems, seek out The Least Important Man by Biblioasis Press at your local bookstore.

Stephen Dobyns “On Taste and Aesthetic Judgement”

I have been lamenting for years it seems the narrowing of what defines excellence in this country as a handful of angling critical voices keep making claims for a new cosmopolitan poetry which reads to me like shorthand for poems displaying decorous or ideosyncratic language, formal traditional elements, abstruse imagery, little real human emotion or strong narrative aspects, and a morbid disdain for the first person. 

This is not to say some very fine or even great poems have not been written from such a perspective, for indeed they have, but why the nagging belief any poems written outside such a confined purview or “lens” are slight and without merit? Does this not say more about the critic’s own aesthetic, his or her own tastes, than it does about how well a different kind of poem functions as a poem?

This is what I had been thinking about recently when to my delight I discovered Stephen Dobyns’ book of prose Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry where in his essay “Moral Inquiry” he tackles these issues with characteristic level-headedness. Listen to what Dobyns says about the difference between taste and aesthetic judgment which for reasons unknown to me, is still the subject of a lot of confusion in this country, and any attempt to question why this is the case is apt to get you labelled a critical relativist by the “bow-tie” set. Dobyns contends in his essay:

“To tell the difference between taste and aesthetic judgement it’s necessary to define what constitutes a “successful poem” in such a way that some elements belong and some do not. Critics and reviewers attempt to control the definition of that X. If X is not present, says the critic, then it is not a successful poem. Half a dozen years ago, a reviewer in Poetry magazine lambasted an anthology edited by Garrison Keillor entitled Good Poems. The reviewer found the poems simplistic; to his mind they offered no complexity in either form or content. Dozens of contemporary poets were represented, as well as Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, Hopkins, Blake, and other poets belonging to what used to be called the canon.

The reviewer tried to present his personal taste as aesthetic judgment and failed. The poems in the anthology were all immediately accessible, had strong narrative elements, and reflected Keillor’s taste. What Keillor saw as qualities, the reviewer saw as shortcomings. He saw the poems as middlebrow and pointed out that many great poems are not immediately accessible and are formally more interesting. What he wasn’t willing to admit was the field of poetry is vast enough to encompass both types, and what he was complaining about was their motivating concept, rather than how they were written, because, after all, they were written exactly as the poets wanted“(202).

It is this idea that somehow a poet’s motivating concept can be isolated, diagnosed as malignant, and thus whole poems or books dismissed, which I find particular troubling and business as usual here in Canada. It stacks the deck in favour of the taste-makers, which I suppose is the whole point. Culling the herd.