TABLE MUSIC

Mark Jarman’s “Black Riviera”

2012-01-20T19:09:00.000-08:00

Mark Jarman’s poetry has always had a strong religious influence, partly a consequence of growing up the son of a preacher, for his work wrestles with larger questions of belief and illumination. I’m thinking especially of his books Unholy Sonnets and Questions for Ecclesiastes, which mine the fertile territory of devotional poetry without parroting any particular faith. The overwhelming feeling one finds in those books is a reverential view of our all too frail human existence, where the question posed is not whether God exists, but why has so much of our humanity been shaped by a religious impulse to seek some higher power in the first place?

I believe Jarman answers this question in a thoughtful essay “Poetry and Religion” from his book The Secret of Poetry when he says: “the religious impulse in poetry endures; many poems being written today show that urge to be tied to or united with or at one with a supernatural power that exists before, after, and throughout creation” (13).

If you look past that word religious, Jarman is simply saying the impulse toward the sublime or the transformative or the transcendent – whatever you wish to call that sudden release from the ego – manifests in many different guises as it does in one of his earlier poems "Black Riviera": a stirringly beautiful narrative poem ostensibly about a teenage Jarman and his friends buying hallucinogens from a street-level drug dealer in a slick black car, but the poem marks the site of a powerful spiritual awakening too.

Black Riviera

for Garrett Hongo

There they are again. It’s after dark.

The rain begins its sober comedy,

Slicking down their hair as they wait

Under a pepper tree or eucalyptus,

Larry Dietz, Luis Gonzalez, the Fitzgerald brothers,

And Jarman, hidden from the cop car

Sleeking innocently past. Stoned,

They giggle a little, with money ready

To pay for more, waiting in the rain.

They buy from the black Riviera

That silently appears, as if risen,

The apotheosis of wet asphalt

And smeary-silvery glare

And plush inner untouchability.

A hand takes money and withdraws,

Another extends a sack of plastic—

Short, too dramatic to be questioned.

What they buy is light rolled in a wave.

They send the money off in a long car

A god himself could steal a girl in,

Clothing its metal sheen in the spectrum

Of bars and discos and restaurants.

And they are left, dripping rain

Under their melancholy tree, and see time

Knocked akilter, sort of funny,

But slowing down strangely, too.

So, what do they dream?

They might dream that they are in love

And wake to find they are,

That outside their own pumping arteries,

Which they can cargo with happiness

As they sink in their little bathyspheres,

Somebody else’s body pressures theirs

With kisses, like bursts of bloody oxygen,

Until, stunned, they’re dragged up,

Drawn from drowning, saved.

In fact, some of us woke up that way.

It has to do with how desire takes shape.

Tapered, encapsulated, engineered

To navigate an illusion of deep water,

Its beauty has the dark roots

Of a girl skipping down a high-school corridor

Selling Seconal from a bag,

Or a black car gliding close to the roadtop,

So insular, so quiet, it enters the earth.

The poem begins with the rain’s “sober comedy” and a small knot of teenagers, the young Jarman among them, waiting anxiously to buy “light rolled in a wave” from “a long car / A god himself could steal a girl in.” The black Riviera itself is a mystery cloaked in “smeary-silvery glare and plush inner untouchability”, whose enigmatic qualities make it an appropriate substitute for God.

In the second stanza, the car appears silently out of nowhere to bestow a fleeting sense of grace – a plastic sack of drugs in lieu of holy communion – upon these young men, but the ritual is more than enough to enlarge how they see the world.

This is where the poem reveals itself to be a secular non-Christian parable but one profoundly concerned with spiritual yearning. The poem moves deeper into this metaphysical realm as the young men take the drugs which allow them to see ”time / Knocked akilter” or when dreaming of love inside the “little bathyspheres” of their bodies, to imagine :

Somebody else’s body pressures theirs

With kisses, like bursts of bloody oxygen,

Until, stunned, they’re dragged up,

Drawn from drowning, saved.

In fact some of us woke up that way.

These last two lines are interesting because of the double entendre hinging on that word saved which clearly implies a spiritual experience and extraordinary change, but the young men are saved from what exactly? The quotidian? Mere boredom? Self-centeredness? More drug-use?

I think what I like most about this poem is Jarman does not explain what that salvation looks like and lets readers come to their own understanding. What is clear, however, is the boys are now left with a vision of a transcendent reality, one which questions their finite selves and view of a temporal world. This is the great beauty of this poem: it is charged with religious feeling while remaining profane. If you enjoyed “Black Riviera”, please seek out Mark Jarman’s latest collection Epistles published by Sarabande books at your local bookstore.

On Winter Cranes

2011-11-20T08:15:00.000-08:00

I think of Winter Cranes as an homage to an invisible world. A world I take on faith and try to apprehend daily as if the divine, or some over-arching pattern, or those answers to the questions of who I am, or what is my purpose, could be found if I just took more time to look for them.

I suppose I could be called a lapsed romantic for my poems are elegies to the world as it should be lived. Not as it is lived. It comes down to my anxieties really and an inability to accept my lot in life.

I share what Theodore Roethke once called “a longing not for escape, but for a greater reality”; however, such longing is also tempered by a knowledge that any connection, any feeling of transcendence, if it does come in one’s poetry at all, is always fleeting.

Praise and mourning. These are the twin subjects of my poems. I want my experiences, my perceptions, my memories; in fact, my whole life to be changed, made meaningful, by shaping such inner observations in a way that they are made permanent fixtures. In death, Ansel Adams become those mountains he loved so dearly for we still gaze upon his photographs today. To me, he is a colossus of the imagination. I want nothing less than that for my poems but, at the same time, my poems mourn the naivety of such an idea.

Thomas Lynch “Walking Papers”

2011-11-01T10:28:00.000-07:00

I was living in Seoul South Korea teaching English to kindergarten students when my American room-mate gave me a copy of Thomas Lynch’s book of essays The Under-taking: Life Studies From The Dismal Trade. I had never heard of Lynch before, as this was long before I came to a book-by-book appreciation of his tremendous skills as a master elegist and a genius of blank verse, but those essays stuck with me. Perhaps this was because I was still ploughing through my first manuscript writing poems akin to small epitaphs to my own estranged childhood in Southwestern Ontario.

All I knew about Lynch was that he was an under-taker from a small Michigan town, and an American poet, but his cogent thoughts about the lessons the living take from the dead were a revelation. In an essay entitled “Mary & Wilbur”, Lynch accounts for people’s impulse to memorialize by saying:

“We need our witnesses and archivists to say we lived, we died, we made this difference. Where death means nothing, life is meaningless. It’s a grave arithmetic. The cairns and stone piles, the life stories drawn on cave walls, the monuments in graveyards, one and all, are the traces left of the species before us—a space that they’ve staked out in granite and bronze. And whether a pyramid or Taj Mahal, a great vault in Highgate or a name on The Wall, we let them stand. We visit them. We trace the shapes of their names and dates with our fingers. We say the little epitaphs out loud. “Together forever.” “Gone but not forgotten.” We try to reassemble their lives from the stingy details, and the exercise teaches us something about how to live” (117).

Lynch is talking here about the covenant the living make with the dead—the need to remember so we may, in turn, be remembered—but he could just as easily be talking about poetry which has traced these grand themes with its own fingers too.

What I like about Lynch’s prose, and his poetry for that matter, is his nostalgic eloquence but also the ever-present mindset of the small town undertaker. A dispassionate voice that never preaches, never sentimentalizes, and reminds us there are some things in life from which there can be no deliverance.

Take, for example, this poem called “Oh Say Grim Death” from his most recent collection Walking Papers published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Oh Say Grim Death

No doubt the Reverend Ainsworth read from Job
Over the charred corpse of the deacon’s boy
To wit: “Blessed be the name of the Lord”
Or some such comfortless dose of holy writ
That winter morning after the house fire
Put all the First Congregationalists
Of Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire
Out weeping and gnashing, out in the snow
Whilst the manse at Main street and Gilmore Pond Road
Blazed into the early Thursday morning.
God’s will is done as often without warning
As with one. Either way, Revere His laws
Is cut into the child’s monument
To rhyme with a previous sentiment:
Cease, Man, to ask the hidden cause. As if
The answers ever were forthcoming. So
Little’s known of young Isaac A. Spofford—
His father, Eleazar, his mother, Mary,
His death on the thirteenth of February
In Seventeen Hundred Eighty-eight.
A brand plucked from the ashes reads the stone
Of Rev. Laban Ainsworth’s house; which frames
The sadness in the pastor’s burning faith,
In God’s vast purposes. As if the boy
Long buried here was killed to show how God
Makes all things work together toward some good.
And yet the stone’s inquiry still haunts:
Oh say, grim death why thus destroy
The parents’ hopes, their fondest joy—
Or say, instead, grim death destroys us all
By mighty nature’s witless, random laws
Whereby old churchmen, children, everything—
All true believers, all who disbelieve,
Come to their ashen ends and life goes on.

What can one say when calamity strikes and our children meet untimely ends? A burning faith in God or the shaking of one’s fist at “nature’s witless, random laws” will accomplish very little. Whatever your belief system or lack of it, death simply does not care, for no one thing will bring back the promise of a child that has been taken too early to his grave. This is what the poem is saying. Why did this happen? Because. And life goes on.

This is not to suggest everything is quite so gloomy in Lynch’s essays and poetry for every death is also a solid affirmation life is for living. Life can be taken away at any moment. The question then becomes how to live? I will let Lynch himself answer that question from another of his remarkable essays called “All Hallow’s Eve”:

“Revision and prediction seem like wastes of time. As much as I’d like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. Here is how the moment instructs me: clouds afloat in front of the moon’s face, lights flicker in the carved heads of pumpkins, leaves rise in the wind at random, saints go nameless, love comforts, souls sing beyond the reach of bodies” (148).

If you enjoyed the poem “Oh Say Grim Death” and the essay excerpts by Thomas Lynch, please pick up his latest collection Walking Papers and The Undertaking at your local bookstore.

Ted Kooser on Too Many Poets

2011-10-21T05:38:00.000-07:00

"A noted contemporary poet and critic has said we ought to keep poetry a secret from the masses. Another, the editor of a prestigious anthology of poetry, said that each nation ought to have no more than a handful of poets. Both sound pretty elitist, don't they? Well, we'll always have among us those who think the best should be reserved for the few. Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there's a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you're writing your poem,there's one less less scoundrel in the world. And I'd like a world, wouldn't you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I'm certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don't think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say "We loved the earth but could not stay." (5) - Ted Kooser from The Poetry Home-Repair Manual

Launch of Winter Cranes and Other Poetry Readings

2011-09-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

My new poetry collection Winter Cranes published with ECW Press has come back from the printer and it is gorgeous!

All interested parties are invited to come celebrate its launch with me on Thursday September 15th at 7:00 pm here in Waterloo at Words Worth Books. I will be joined that night by special guest Joe Denham who will be reading from his debut novel The Year of Broken Glass published by Nightwood Editions.

If you cannot come out to my Waterloo soiree, I will also be reading from my new book in Montreal on Sunday September 25th with Mary di Michele at Sparrow (5322 boul. St. Laurent).

In Toronto, I will be reading at the Pivot Reading series on October 5th with Jessica Hiemstra Van der Host, and as a special guest of my good friend Carleton Wilson who will be launching his poetry collection The Material Sublime on October 18th (Upstairs@Aquila 347 Keele St. Toronto at 8pm).

As I have done very few readings over the last five years, I am looking forward to meeting some new friends and reacquainting with some old ones. Please do come out and say hello.

Winter Cranes

My wife saw birds pass over the frozen pond
and wondered aloud if they were cranes
desiring proof of their corporeal existence
to mark them as either a tangible reality
or a fantasy born of some lack in our lives.
Their wings beat exultantly, blossoming,
a wild spume of feathers backlit by morning sun
so they looked like more than just creatures
but symbols ferried from myth or poetry
to satisfy my wife’s wishes or my need to place
a few lines down upon the blank white sheet
of this morning’s latest offering of snow.
I said they were only herons. The same ones
from last summer come back a little early
guided by an instinct, a faint signal, hard-wired
in their brains to the earth’s magnetic fields
allowing them to navigate their way here
each year to stand like sentries, silhouettes
against the pond’s grey light, if only to teach us
how even patience can be a kind of violence.
“I want them to be cranes, “my wife said again
a little more forcefully this time so her words
were now a truth or a sacrament of experience
fully grasped, making us hungry for the dynasties
of the past we believe such birds emerge from
like after-images of a dream only now recalled.
“I wish they were cranes too”, I said, watching
the pair descending towards the farthest end
of the pond where the ice was the thinnest,
the city hardening its shell in the background
still waiting for the winter storms to come.

By Chris Banks

The Great Leap Forward : Matt Rader and Nick Thran

2011-08-23T07:51:00.001-07:00

What people like to call poetic attention for me is the great leap forward of imagination captured in language. This is something hard for young struggling poets to comprehend and which I believe cannot be taught. However, it can be learned through daily practice and a little faith.

Matt Rader and Nick Thran are terrific Canadian poets who already in a very short span of years have grasped the intangibles of poetic attention. Their most recent books, Rader’s A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over The River Arno and Thran’s Earworm, have not left my bedside table since they were published last Spring for each one demands re-reading.

Both Rader and Thran pay close attention to their subject matter often making the speakers of their poems commentators or witnesses who wish to remain somehow in the background. However, paradoxically, their speakers are also the makers or inventors of the poems, fabulists who mine elegy and experience, anaphora and sweeping associations to quilt a vision of a conditional, patch-work world, one underlaid with a fundamental awareness that any glimpsed pattern or created order is momentary.

These poems are memorials not only to a world that is constantly in flux – people and things coming in and out of existence – but memorials to the very flow of human thoughts, which are also fleeting. A typical example is Matt Rader’s poem “Music” which is the opening poem from his new book:

Music

I awoke on Veteran’s Day in the United States
To blue skies and a republican Cali sunshine
That made the whole town of McKinleyville
Appear lit from the inside, as if it were its own
Source of light, as if it still heard the sad music
Of its first name, Minor, and heard the minor
Third Mckinley sang when he was shot through
The stomach and the pancreas and the kidney
At the Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York
In nineteen hundred and one. We were talking
Poetry, my friend and me, and what happened
To the lake in Blue Lake after the Mad River
Was leveed and how McKinley was the last
Veteran of the Civil War elected President,
How he died of gangrene because the surgeons
Had been forced to operate by reflected sun-
Light and could not find the bullet. We talked
As we drove the back roads of Humbolt County
About our faith in the persistent wellspring
Of meaning and sang along with Springsteen,
Headed north to the tall trees at Prarie Creek,
Past the beachhead at Trinidad and the casino
And the Orick gas bar, past the present moment
Into our late afternoon beer at the Fieldbrook
General Store where we sat in the dimness
And recalled things that happened long before
Us like the redwood forest and the salt marsh
In Humbolt Bay, like the Pan-American Expo
Where the first x-ray machine was on display
And President Mckinley reached out to shake
The hand of a man carrying a pistol concealed
By a hankerchief. “All my people are larger
Bodies than mine,” my friend quoted Agee,
“By some chance, here they are, all on this earth.”
These are the facts as I know them. Mckinley
Died from a lack of light and the assassin
Was executed by electricity on State Street
In Auburn, New York, on the traditional land
Of the Iroquois Confederacy, two weeks before
A wrecking crew razed the Temple of Music.

Matt Rader memorializes many things in this poem: the assassination of the 25th president of the United States, the leveeing of the Mad River, the birth of a redwood forest; the dissolution of the Iroquois Confederacy; the razing of the Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York and even a late afternoon drive with a friend discussing the persistence of meaning in the face of collective losses that can never be rightly tallied.

It is a kind of eulogy to human experience, but it is no Vale of Tears either, for the thread which holds all these items together is the speaker’s capacity to create meaning; in fact, to insist upon it, even when most often the blunt instruments of words and an indifferent world resist such attempts.

Just as the speaker’s friend quotes Agee saying “All my people are larger bodies than mine”, so too is this poem larger than the sum of its own parts for what it is after is nothing less than to communicate something that lies outside of itself, and yet is at the heart of human experience, which is the mind’s capacity to make a leap towards meaning which gives life its dignity and triumph.

Likewise, Nick Thran approaches the same questions of meaning and poetic attention in his poem “Earworm”, which is also the title of his most recent poetry collection, but he appears more hesitant to bestow any lasting significance to his words in case they distract him from what he seeks which is to describe the great leap forward itself, the precise moment, when out of the imagination’s din, images are born into language.

Earworm

So there’s likely a more accurate name
for the glow of a deer’s eyes in the dark.
For the hunger that drew a python in Florida
to swallow an alligator whole. For the aura,
the swell just before the gut burst.
For why you’ve been staying up late at night
on a search engine, looking for all of the possible
names for a lump at the back of your nostril.
For the name of that girl who sold you a pill
from the basket of her bike, and rode off while
her fairy wings flapped in the breeze. And a name
for that breeze. Repetune, ohrworm,
the last song stuck in your head
which became something else. And for what else?
For not being able to say the one thing
that might have kept you from continually falling apart.
For discovering late. For replaying the video clip
of Joltin’ Joe Carter’s ninth inning blast
in the ’93 series. For the sound when the ball
hit the bat, and everyone knew they’d won
before it left the park. And for the white noise
that isn’t white noise, but a poor translation of what
the blood tries to say. And what the blood tries to say.
For the feeling of never wanting to leave the party
and then having to leave. For the ache in your legs
when you should have cabbed home, but decided to walk
and the walk was too far. But you had to keep on—
Earworm, Little One, chugging along, traveling towards a name.

The nagging tune stuck in the head of Thran’s speaker is the sibilant voice of the mind, the white noise of thought and image and imagination venting through the bedrock of human awareness, trying to explain why things are and why we do the things we do.

Unlike in Rader’s poem which is a kind of monument to life’s fragility and to the redemptive qualities of poetry to make life meaningful through its retelling, Thran’s speaker is more ironic in his attempts to formulate meaning for he knows he must use words which are for him, “a poor translation of what / the blood tries to say”.

If there is a common denominator in Thran and Rader’s poems, it is how they both seek to enact what Dave Smith has called, “the deep reverberations of living” (253). The seriousness with which both poets go about this task is shown not simply through the sundry tools of wordsmithing, but through faithful attention to thought and image, giving each poem its active sense of a mind feeling and thinking in time. If you have enjoyed these poems, please pick up copies of Matt Rader’s A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over The River Arno and Nick Thran’s Earworm at your local bookstore.

Kim Addonizio “Describe This”

2011-07-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

Kim Addonizio writes in one chapter called “Describe This” from her book Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within that, “Description is important because it’s evidence. One meaning of evidence is ‘outward sign.’ In a trial, physical objects may be entered as evidence, as proof. To follow through on ‘I can’ is to say: This happened. There is an Irish proverb: ’The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.’

I have been reading Addonizio’s poetry for a number of years and surely one of the things I love about it is her technical mastery of description. Bold, street-savvy and molto sexy, her writing is exhibitionistic and fearless in a way that other writing only tries to be, and underneath it all, her impeccable tailoring skills shine through as if every loose thread were cut away with a straight razor. For example, look at what she does with one of the most Xeroxed of poetic images, the human heart, in this poem from her most recent book Lucifer at the Starlite published by Norton:

My Heart

That Mississippi chicken shack.
That initial-scarred tabletop,
that tiny little dance floor to the left of the band.
That kiosk at the mall selling caramels and kitsch.
That tollbooth with its white-plastic-gloved worker
handing you your change.
That phone booth with the receiver ripped out.
That dressing room in the fetish boutique,
those curtains and mirrors.
That funhouse, that horror, that soundtrack of screams.
That putti-filled heaven raining gilt from the ceiling.
That haven for truckers, that bottomless cup.
That biome. That wilderness preserve.
That landing strip with no runway lights
where you are aiming your plane,
imagining a voice in the tower,
imagining a tower.

Delight, experience, and isolation are communicated so expertly in the first three lines of this poem that the reader forgets momentarily that this is a poem about the human heart – that throne-room of human longing and self delusion - a cliche poets have been snivelling about since they first put pen to paper. But here Addonizio makes the image new again which is no small feat. I especially love how she communicates hope, desperation, vulnerability and trust in the last few lines, “That landing strip with no runway lights / where you are aiming your plane, / imagining a voice in the tower, / imagining a tower.”

The way Addonizio employs description in this poem is very much the same idea Mark Doty articulates in his book The Art of Description when he says,

“What we want when we describe is surely complex: To solve the problem of speechlessness, which is a state without agency, so that we feel impressed upon by things but unable to push back at them? To refuse silence, so that experience will not go unspoken? To be accurate (but to what? the look of things, the feel of being here? to the strange fact of being in the face of death?)? To arrive at exactitude in order to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world, in order to give those words to someone else, or even to just savor them for ourselves?” (9)

The best descriptions in poetry are always savory, but Addonizio seems to hold firmly to the belief that they must also be audacious and adventuresome, shaking up those ideas or objects they are attempting to explain, or translate, with a little razzle-dazzle. In her title poem “Lucifer at the Starlite”, Addonizio takes on the decline of western civilization and late-stage capitalism post-Enron and 9/11 by making the hero of her poem, Lucifer, just another splashy irresponsible corporate leader addicted to greed at the expense of the impoverished and the environment:

Lucifer at the Starlite
--after George Meredith

Here’s my bright idea for life on earth:
better management. The CEO
has lost touch with the details. I’m worth
as much, but I care; I come down here, I show
my face, I’m a real regular. A toast:
To our boys and girls in the war, grinding
through sand, to everybody here, our host
who’s mostly mist, like methane rising
from retreating ice shelves. Put me in command.
For every town, we’ll have a marching band.
For each thoroughbred, a comfortable stable;
for each worker, a place beneath the table.
For every forward step a stumbling.
A shadow over every starlit thing.

Besides being a beautifully conceived sonnet (and a clever allusion to this old chestnut), this poem describes the essence of what has happened in the last ten years to America. It offers itself up as proof of the chaotic collapse of financial institutions, the global war on terrorism, and the growing disparity between rich and poor. In Addonizio’s world, that rough beast slouching towards Bethelehem is nothing more than Citigroup or perhaps Rupert Murdoch. This is a poem “not of direct statement but of direct evocation” to paraphrase something Denise Levertov once said.

Description demands poets take the limits of our language and bend them until they take on, not so much the exact colour and shape of our shared world, but the revelation of it. Kim Addonizio’s own pleasure in describing that world is obvious in Lucifer at the Starlite.

Jim Harrison “Thickets”

2011-07-12T04:39:00.000-07:00

From poetry’s early progenitors like Rimbaud, Keats, Whitman, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Basho to our more home-grown elder poetry statesmen like Leonard Cohen or Al Purdy who went on walkabout, sometimes for years, and wrote about it famously in their books, there is something intractable and alluring about a poet’s desire to hit the road. Of my friends in the poetry community, many gleefully pack every year, boarding buses or trains, in order to go off for a few stolen weeks – or if they are especially lucky – a few stolen months on various writing sabbaticals.

Usually these retreats take place in far-flung destinations like the Banff Center in the mountains, or a small monastery in Saskatchewan, or a real honest-to-god castle in Scotland, or a writer’s colony in Mexico. The more isolated, off the beaten track, and remote a location is, the more utility it has for a writer looking for a place to write.

For myself, I only really learned to write after living in Seoul, South Korea for a year by myself and taking just two poetry books with me. Less being more. Such thoughts make me think of Jack Gilbert’s fine poem “Gift Horses” from his book The Great Fires where he writes “He lives in the barrens, in dying neighborhoods / and negligible countries. None with an address. / But still the Devil finds him. Kills the wife / or spoils the marriage. Publishes each place / and makes it popular, makes it better, makes it / unusable.”

This idea of utility in the wilderness is a romantic notion and is largely responsible for poets and writers making for the hinterlands just off the main map. In his essay “The Road” from his book Off to the Side, Jim Harrison offers reasons for why those in the writing community often find themselves north of elsewhere:

The easily perceivable motive is more life rather than less, and the simple historical fact that we lost a certain exuberance when we began to squat rather than wander. We arm ourselves early with quasi-wisdom to support our heart’s urgings. I remember my dad’s consternation when I quoted William Blake, “Still water breeds pestilence,” though he was indeed sympathetic to my “seeing the world” before I got married and settled down. (149)

This sounds about right to me. In my experience, isolation forces a person open. It pulps your life’s experience, and makes you vulnerable in ways that remind you life is not the slough of mundane thoughts seeking to distract you from seeing the world’s plenty. Life for a poet or a writer requires acute attention or as Roethke once wrote: “A poetry of longing: not for escape but for a greater reality.”

I think this is the view Jim Harrison was speaking of in the essay I quoted from earlier and which he masterfully fashions into the following poem from his collection Saving Daylight:

Patagonia Poem

Here in the first morning sunlight I’m trying
to locate myself not by latitude 31.535646 N
or longitude 110.747511 W, but by the skin
of my left hand at the edge of the breakfast plate.
This hand has the skin and fingers of an animal.
The right hand forks the egg of a bird, a chicken.
The bright yellow yolk was formerly alive
in the guts of the bird waiting for the absent rooster.
Since childhood it has been a struggle
not to run away and hide in a thicket and sometimes
I did so. Now I write “Jim” with egg yolk
on the white plate in order to remember my name,
and suddenly both hands look like
an animal’s who also hides in a remote thicket.
I feel my head and the skull ever so slightly
beneath the skin, a primate’s skull that tells
me a thicket is a good idea for my limited
intelligence, and this hand holding a pen, a truly
foreign object I love, could with its brother hand
build a shelter in which to rest awhile and take
delight in life again, to wander in the moonlight
when earth achieves its proper shape, to rest looking
out through a tangle of branches at a daylight
world that can’t see back in at this animal shape.

I suppose what first needs to be said about this poem is that the exact location in which the speaker finds himself, at least in the purely geographical sense, is not significant. In our brave new world so obsessed with GPS satellite technology, a technology that can unwittingly lead a driver off a bridge that is out, or tragically cause an older couple to be stranded in the mountains of Nevada, the exact longitude or latitude is immaterial.

The important thing is what happens inside him in that location, the mindfulness or sudden awareness that stems from walking up a dirt path, or crossing a ridge-line, or in this case having breakfast in the first morning sunlight in a place which was until that morning new and foreign to him.

It is the foreignness of the place, the costume of one’s daily life stripped away, that allows the poem’s speaker to be more attentive and to unclutter, defragment, his consciousness. It is only by placing himself in a landscape that is wholly indifferent to him, one that, in fact, has forgotten that he is there, which ironically allows him to begin to see himself anew as he does in the next section of the poem where he begins by studying his hand:

This hand has the skin and fingers of an animal.
The right hand forks the egg of a bird, a chicken.
The bright yellow yolk was formerly alive
in the guts of the bird waiting for the absent rooster.
Since childhood it has been a struggle
not to run away and hide in a thicket and sometimes
I did so. Now I write “Jim” with egg yolk
on the white plate in order to remember my name,
and suddenly both hands look like
an animal’s who also hides in a remote thicket.

Harrison’s idea of thickets, natural shelters where animals tend to hide, is enlarged in this section to include that human drive to escape into the wilderness, into the remotest regions where the world forgets us, and in that forgetting, reforges our connection to nature, and by extension, to ourselves.

This is not to say one always needs to be alone lost in the barrens, surviving only on a diet of wild rabbit and berries. Harrison hints at this in his essay when he says, “Gradually my definition of thickets came to include distant anonymous motels in remote towns and cities”(145). Harrison wants to get away from the ruckus of modern life, with all its morose addictions to mindless consumption, and find a place where a person can be made to feel vulnerable and attentive. That is all.

Isn’t this why poets and writers pack planes, trains, and automobiles each year on their way to Spain, or some cabin in Muskoka, or a writing retreat in the BC Gulf islands? It replenishes the spirit and one’s ability to write?

I like to believe so and so does Jim Harrison as he ends his poem with the belief that although we are the only animal who laughs and weeps, we are still only an animal, subject to the normal passage of time and mortality, looking for a place to stare “out through a tangle of branches at a daylight / world that can’t see back in at this animal shape”.

The Grand Community of Canadian Poetry

2011-04-09T11:29:00.000-07:00

“Despite its bloodlessness, the tradition of literature is a grand community and, much as I envy the happy and the young, I doubt they have as good a one.” (244) This sentence was written by Paul Goodman but I have excerpted it from an essay Hayden Carruth wrote in 1982 entitled “Paul Goodman and The Grand Community”. Unfortunately, the idea of a grand community within the Canadian Poetry circle has largely gone unrealized because of the bickering and back-slapping that has afflicted much of the discussion between Canadian poets online, and has been found too often in our more prominent journals.

For my part, I started this blog with the intention to shine a light on some of the influence-peddling and invisible ties between poet-critics who were busily trumpeting one aesthetic stance over another while castigating their fellow poets who were doing other work. I have tried to speak honestly and openly about such matters, even when it was unfashionable, or when I was told the “blow-back” of such talk would certainly negatively impact how people perceive me. I was asked by one person did I really want to poke the bear? I did this all because I wanted poets to stop resurrecting garrisons and have the ability to engage in authentic conversations, allowing for the free play of mind and heart, without such talk being co-opted by a handful of voices.

Then this week an announcement George Murray has launched a new poetry site called New Poetry which is meant to help tear down these garrisons and to build bridges between the members of our fractured community. At first, I was suspicious of George’s motives because when I was calling for more accountability and critical stewardship late last year, and being publicly pilloried for it, George was skeptical of such change. I don’t know what has changed for him but obviously it is for the better.

I was not asked to join his new editorial board but a whole host of other people were. Some of those people are what I would call the usual suspects while other faces make me excited to see what fruit this new site will bear. If poets are willing to put down their swords and pound them into ploughshares, then I whole-heartedly support such an endeavour. Hopefully, this is a sign of authentic change and a movement towards that grand community everyone wishes for and can envision.

I quoted a little statement Philip Levine said in his essay “Two Journeys” before on my blog, and doubtlessly I will do it again because it is something I need to be reminded of, and I believe needs to be said aloud. Levine says, “I believe the truth is we form a family with other poets, living and dead, or we risk going nowhere”.

As for myself, I believe if we break good faith with our colleagues then we have no one else to blame if we find ourselves muttering poems to an empty room. I am not sure if I will continue this blog. It appears to have served its purpose.

Words for Young Canadian Poets

2011-03-31T12:36:00.000-07:00

Since National Poetry Month is only a day a way and since I’m now starting to think of myself as an old curmudgeon, I thought I would like to start things off with what little meager advice I might offer to young Canadian poets starting out. These are the nuggets of wisdom I would have liked someone to say to me back when I was in my twenties and first starting to write my own poems.

1) Aspire to be more than a contributor page.

2) Revising poems is like panning for gold. It won’t make you rich but delight in the few shiny grains.

3) Throw off the bondage of the fashionable. Seek your own poetry.

4) Unlike the hard coin of one’s lines, the sprezzatura of one’s personality cannot be banked on.

5) Revelation and restlessness are most often unhappily married in poetry.

6) Be neither tyrant nor toadie. Both are affectations.

7) The lesser the talent, the louder the voice.

8) A poem should be honest, true in some way, or else it is all wiring and no circuit.

9) Do not mistake arrogance for determination.

10) A poem should surprise and not explain.

11) In poetry, you may glimpse the universe but only through a keyhole.(for G.M.)

The Poet’s Table: Poetry and Food

2011-03-16T07:42:00.000-07:00

Octavio Paz said, “Poetry is one of the ways to make a reconciliation between the body and the mind” which is something I believe in fervently and try to exercise on a daily basis but an appreciation of food is also a practical way to unite the burdens of consciousness with the appetites of the flesh.

Whether it be enjoying something as uncomplicated as a pint of porter and a pound of mussels on a small patio in Lunenburg Harbour as I did last summer in Nova Scotia, or devouring Ontario pheasant and fois gras on cranberry kasha with Earl Grey jus, paired with a smoky glass of Italian red wine, as I savoured last month at Opus restaurant in Yorkville, food is an immediate, all-encompassing pleasure.

A mansion with many rooms. One that resides next door to poetry.

At least, this is what I found myself thinking about after my wife Teresa and I ended up with a few stolen hours sans toddler yesterday and were able to enjoy a nice lunch together at a quiet little restaurant.

We both had the Croque Madame after seeing it listed on the menu: a classic grilled sandwich made with toasted brioche, shaved ham and a fried egg topped with Hollandaise sauce. For the rest of the afternoon, I walked around with a smug smile on my face thinking about my lunch and how food, like poetry, plays on our all too human emotions.

Teresa and I are definately foodies. We have a butcher where we buy all our meats. Throughout the summer months, we get a produce box delivered once a week from a local farm to our front door so we know the vegetables we are eating are grown right down the road from us.

Of course, what we do not know is what will be delivered and in what quantities which is part of the whole charm of the farm box. My two year-old daughter loves opening the box and discovering basil, purslane, a bag stuffed full of peas, zucchini and tomatoes.

Inevitably, when my wife and I talk together about vacationing or traveling, food more often than not plays a major role in the planning of our trips. We both lived in South Korea where we taught English and it is there that we developed a taste for foreign food and travel.

In my own memory’s larder, I associate each place where I have been with a specific type of food: Greece is huge gyros stuffed with french fries bought from street vendors and cold bottles of Heineken. Cuba is swordfish, cold shrimp and calamari salad and paella. Rome is pasta with Amatriciana sauce and red wine. That is life.

We cook too. In the last few weeks, Teresa has made egg-plant parmesan, chicken paprikash, and Thai green curry. Although I am not as skilled as my wife, I can turn out seafood linguini in white wine sauce, a pork shoulder roast in a grainy mustard sauce, and lemon and dill stuffed red snapper.

Cooking is natural aromatherapy and whenever I find the blues overtaking me on a rainy weekend, I pull out the Joy of Cooking and make a shopping list. Three hours later, the house smells magical and I have had the pleasure of cooking something new.

Since we live an hour and a half away from the Niagara wine region, my wife and I also make frequent forays into wine country, usually coming home with a box and a half of wine bottles from a half dozen little vineyards.

Like poetry, food and wine should be about discovery, taking seemingly disparate ingredients—fish and lemon, mushrooms and demi-glace, guacamole and orange supremes— and combining them to release underlying associations.

Think of it as the ordinary transmuted into the extraordinarily flavourful.

In fact, I distrust most poets who take no interest in the food they put on their dinner plates or the wine they pour into their glasses. To my mind, if your idea of cooking is popping in lean cuisine into a microwave, your poetry most likely lacks savour too. Every poet should know his or her death-row last meal.

For me, it is ojingo bokum, an unpretentious Korean dish of sautéed squid and vegetables in a spicy red pepper sauce served with white rice, and a bottle of Thirty Bench Red.

Just as poetry should be both the meal and the utensils, so should be any discussion of food. As Joyce Carol Oates has said, “When poets write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.”

The Beautiful Fires

2011-03-01T15:58:00.001-08:00

Here is a wonderful broadside of Jack Gilbert's poem "The Great Fires" I purchased last month. The run was limited to only 40 numbered copies with original calligraphy by Julio Granda. This 12 X 17 inch serigraph is silkscreen printed in 7 colors on Okawara rice paper by Jon Ahlen. The typeface is Optima Medium-Bold. The print is signed by the artist and the printer. Always a favorite poem of mine, I now have another reason to smile every time I read it.

My Most Anticipated Film

2011-02-16T18:34:00.000-08:00

I just discovered this trailer for a documentary based on the life of the American poet Larry Levis whose poetry collections have been my constant companions for the last several years. The film is entitled "My Story in a Late Style of Fire" after one of Larry's poems and is directed by Michele Poulos. This documentary has very quickly risen to the top of my list of most anticipated films. If anyone knows where I might view this film or purchase a copy of it, please do let me know.

Rare Public Appearance

2011-02-01T07:56:00.000-08:00

I will be doing a rare public reading this coming Sunday February 6th at Hamilton’s Lit Live Reading Series where I will be sharing the stage with other poets Jim Johnstone, Chris Pannell, R. W. Megens, Kildare Dobbs and David Seymour.

Besides reading poems from my first two collections, I will be reading some poems from my forthcoming book Winter Cranes which will be published next fall.

The event starts at 7:30 pm at the Sky Dragon Centre, King William Street, Hamilton, ON.

I hope to see you all there.

The Memory of Memory: Some Notes on Imagery

2011-01-23T10:05:00.000-08:00

Images can be private or public but if they are any good at all, they reveal some underlying nature within us. I remember being nineteen, for instance, and reading Gwendolyn MacEwen’s signature poem “Dark Pines Under Water” and being so taken by its famous imagery evoking the Canadian Shield country of my youth, a terrain of lakes and moraines and wilderness, something I knew intimately from spending my summers in Muskoka.

I’m not sure I really understood the poem as a young man for, truthfully, I think I was much more taken with the speaker’s vatic lyricism, a frustratingly ineluctable quality present in all of MacEwen’s best work, but decades later it seems to me what this poem actually does with great ease is call into question the relationship between poetic imagery and the world at large:

This land like a mirror turns you inward 
And you become a forest in a furtive lake; 
The dark pines of your mind reach downward, 
You dream in the green of your time, 
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.  

Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for 
Although it is good here, and green; 
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness, 
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.  

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper 
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper 
In an elementary world; 
There is something down there and you want it told.

Early in the poem MacEwen contends that what we identify as the image in a poem is not merely a mental picture, but something much deeper, more akin to an archetype. It sets up this argument in the first stanza where MacEwen writes “This land like a mirror turns you inward / And you become a forest in a furtive lake; “ which suggest a few possible readings. There are the pines fallen into the water, or if you prefer, the reflections of pines cast upon the water, but then, by extension, there are also the pines we see reflected within our minds which are pure image. A representation of the world outside ourselves.

But unlike mimesis, or mere correspondence, these images are also the essence of what they represent. It is this quality, the idea that images touch upon some special inherited knowledge deep within our minds, that MacEwen interrogates in the poem’s conclusion when she writes ”There is something down there and you want it told.”

Donald Hall basically sets out this case in a brief essay entitled “Notes on the Image: Body and Soul” where he says “’Spirit and image’ meant ‘ soul and body.’ But ‘image’ has come to mean precisely not-body, not-X, because the image is an imitation or a copy of X. From a copy or representation of a thing, the word can then move to mean the essence of a thing; therefore ‘ image’ comes to mean ‘spirit,’ which began by being its opposite”(143).

I suppose this is why imagery is such a tricky thing to talk about since our definitions of what images are and what they do often break down upon closer inspection. Images interject themselves between the world out there and the mind’s capacity to ascertain our experience of that world.

Words may make up the sinews of our language, but imagery is most definitely its spirit.

Perhaps this is why poetic imagery and memory are so closely linked for poets as they both represent a kind of eddying thought, sustaining energy. On the one hand, they describe things and phenomena, i.e. objecthood, but they also mean something beyond themselves—or, at the very least, there is a nagging feeling they do because of their recurrent nature.

Just as memories, the ones we discard and the ones we keep, define our identities--our sense of who we think we are, as friends, lovers, sons, brothers--so do the sundry images that make it into our poems define how those poems look out upon the world.

Despite these trace similarities, imagery and memory are not exactly alike either for there are important distinctions to be made. In an essay called “Image and Emblem”, the American poet Stanley Plumly tasks himself with just such a critical exegesis:

The image, as form and idea, is not interested in the rhetoric of the past or even in the mimesis of memory; it wants to be new knowledge, it wants to penetrate the future—it wants, at the very least, to be the memory of memory. That is why its preferred medium is space rather than time: the whole point of the figure is to try to ascend the limitations of the linear—that unbending line of direct communication with the past—and move into the focus of the singular, kinetic moment when the truth and the shape of truth are all true at once. (214)

I like that phrase ‘the memory of memory’ because it pinpoints for me what imagery is supposed to do in a poem. It reveals something within ourselves, whether that be a special set of associations or correspondences or new knowledge as Plumly suggests, but interestingly enough in the best poems what it reveals changes with each reading. In this respect, I think poetic imagery most resembles archetypes.

This is the reason why when we read a poem about someone’s specific life experiences regardless of the subject matter, if the imagery is doing its job, what we take away from it is a strong feeling that although the images may be startlingly fresh, untried, revivifying, there is conversely something ancient, familiar and recognizable which makes the poem true. In another one of his essays “Autobiography and Archetype”, Stanley Plumly acknowledges this ambiguity when he writes: “Archetype is the machinery through which autobiography achieves something larger than the single life; and autobiography is the means by which archetypes are renewed”(154).

I think this is what MacEwen’s poem “Dark Pines Under Water” is addressing when she places the focus not on her own named experience but that of “the dark pines” appearing in the minds of her readers as they read her poem, leaving them to puzzle out the koan-like last line: “There is something down there and you want it told.”

Falling in Love with Poetry: A Bird’s-eye View

2011-01-08T20:11:00.000-08:00

(The essay below is one I wrote for the Summer/Fall edition of The New Quarterly (number 91) in 2004 as part of their "Falling in Love with Poetry" essay series. I was going through my bookcases and came across my copy of The New Quarterly and thought it was high time to revisit this essay. Enjoy!)

As I sit at my desk writing about poetry, that befuddling word which contains so much territory—so many untranslatable thoughts, ideas, and emotions which I still don’t have any proper definition of—I look out my window at a couple of small birds. They are swooping in and out of a metal grate, up near the roof, on the side of my neighbour’s house. They are feeding their young, whom I cannot see, but I do hear, as they chatter incessantly, from morning until night. The parents are swooping in and out of the grate, attending to the hungry mouths within, but when they are not feeding their babies, they are sitting on the side-mirror of my car, staring up at the grate. This strikes me as a particular satisfying metaphor for a discussion of poetry: for poetry is the world you see and the world you don’t, the one that is visible and the one, although hidden, which calls out to you.

I write upstairs in my one and a half-storey brick house, mostly on computer, but I do carry a notebook with me, mainly to record titles and ideas for poems, or the blessed few stray lines which come to me fully formed and intact. I write mainly in the morning, tinkering with words anywhere for two to five hours a day, depending on how well a poem is working, or how obsessed I am with the idea of finishing a particular piece. As I am a teacher by profession, I write on weekends during the school year and nearly everyday of my summer holidays. I don’t get much writing accomplished during the school year because teenagers, on the whole, are what I would term “energy vampires”. This is an irrefutable fact. Any high-school teacher will tell you so. I do, however, write extensively over the summer months because they offer two things to my mind that I feel are essential to any poet: time to think and, perhaps more importantly, time to read.

Like many, I began writing poetry in high school at a time when I had already moved several times across Ontario and I was feeling, as many teenagers do, rather jaded, disconnected and out of sorts. My family was living in Stayner, and my growing sense of myself was deeply at odds with my rural surroundings, which consisted mainly of hockey booster club punch-ups, country and western truck dances, and marathon bush parties. But it was there in a high-school classroom where I was first introduced to poetry by the way of an NFB film on the Canadian poet Earle Birney. My first impression of Birney was that he was rather old, and I honestly don’t recall paying too much attention to what he was saying, until he started to read. It was the reading that caught my interest. It was this voice that came from him, and from beyond him, what the Mexican poet Octavio Paz has coined the other voice. Whatever its name, there was something about the quality of Birney’s voice, as much as the content of his poems, that strongly resonated with me as a teenager. I began to seek out other Canadian poets; specifically those few poets I found in my tiny high school library, poets like Layton, Cohen, and Atwood, and not surprisingly, I was soon writing my own poems.

Later I moved to Guelph, where I wrote a great number of bad poems and read them rabbit-scared at open mike nights on campus. After a few years of scribbling poems furiously, I moved to Montreal to do a Master’s degree at Concordia University. There I ran smack dab into the red pen of Gary Geddes who taught me a great deal about the study of poetry, and my own limitations as a poet. My poems were still not very good but they were getting better. Knowing my poems were still not very good, however, was a hard sobering lesson, one I imagine all young poets have to face up to eventually, if they are to get better. For me, at that time, I could hear what all poets hear—that dark personal music percolating up from within, what the poet Dennis Lee has called cadence or “the living flux that poems rise out of” (31)—but somehow I could not transmute it into words, or at least, the right words yet.

What’s changed the most for me in these past twenty years is my overall dedication to the writing of poetry. I read more widely and more carefully. If my skills have grown, it is because I have become more intuitive and patient over the years. I certainly have a stronger sense of craft, of what craft is, but I also write more honestly about my life. If I had to characterize my own writing, I would say I write predominantly in three distinct veins: the personal lyric, the narrative, and the meditational modes. Simply put, I write lyric poems to express complex emotional situations; narrative poems to explore an idea, or a feeling (spinning a good yarn while I’m at it, I hope); and meditational poems to ask hard questions of my surroundings. But all of my poetry, in one form or another, is really just an attempt by me to come to a closer understanding of my life—to hear, in my own words, that other voice I first heard back in a high school classroom years ago.

Octavio Paz said, “Poetry sings of what is happening; its function is to give form to everyday life and make it visible. I do not claim that this is its only mission, although it is the oldest, most permanent, and most universal one” (133). Other poets may write for other reasons, but this is certainly why I write poetry. So let me perhaps leave off with the few words of advice that I have gleaned over the course of two decades of writing, and rewriting poetry. Reading a wide swath of poets and poetry is essential to becoming a better poet, as is a knowledge of formal technique, but I won’t say it is everything. A poem should not just be a ransacking of words. A good poem, if it is a good poem, may use assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme in considerable ways, yet these are only the joists propping up a poem’s deeper emotional or ideological centre. Where exactly this centre lies is often unknown, or at least shifting, which leads me back to those little chattering birds outside my window.

As a poet, I am constantly trying to articulate what lies just outside on the periphery of vision; to put into words the world I see and the one I hear—that place where the other voice resides. And perhaps it is this seeking, as much as any amount of reading, or study of craft, that has taught me the most of what I know of poetry today. As Paz states: “All poets in the moments, long or short, of poetry, if they are really poets, hear the other voice. It is their own, someone else’s, no one else’s, no one’s, everyone’s. Nothing distinguishes a poet from other men and women but those moments—rare yet frequent—in which, being themselves, they are the other” (151).

Further Reading

Dennis Lee. “Poetry and Unknowing” in Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays and Interviews edited by Tim Liliburn (Kingston: Quarry Press, 1995).

Octavio Paz. The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).

Ansel Adams “Moonrise, Hernandez”

2011-01-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year everyone! 2011 is already shaping up to be a banner year for Canadian poetry as I am very much looking forward to new poetry collections from Ken Babstock, Mark Callanan, Matt Rader, Anita Lahey, Jacob McArthur Mooney and Nick Thran in the coming twelve months. For my part, I aim to keep posting essays here at Table Music and hopefully will start to add in some poetry reviews of my own. In the meantime, here is a poem I wrote about Ansel Adams’ iconic photograph “Moonrise, Hernandez” which was taken in 1941.

The Only Picture of Hernandez, New Mexico
in the Smithsonian Institute

A man and his son driving on Highway 84, a two lane black-top
thirty miles from Sante Fe, pull over onto the shoulder, noticing
the moon’s face poised over the snow-capped Truchas mountains;

the darkness falling over the tree-lined banks of the Rio Chama
flowing down to meet the Rio Grande, the smell of sage, burning
pinion, its woodsy fragrance, rising from the chimneys of houses

in a village sitting beside a church, a graveyard full of white crosses.
He sets up his tripod on the roof of his car, the light failing him
so he must work quickly, fumbling with lens filters, film holders,

all the variables and unknowns, estimating the moon’s luminosity,
exposure times, shutter speeds, while shadows consume the daylight
where the adobe church, a monument, stands illuminated at dusk

glowing from within. The white crosses flush, no longer ornaments
but part of the spirit’s nomenclature. Heaven and Earth conjoin
at the back of the man’s retina, a cloudbank hovering magisterially

as he snaps the photograph trying to pull back the shutter again,
but the light changes, the impetus fades, and the world is suddenly
only the world again. Weeks later, he improvises in his darkroom

half-tones of feeling, dodging and burning in areas, making the sky
endlessly dark, the sagebrush a mural of silver, the village empty
as in a child’s dream. He uses sleight of hand to extract a confession

from the land, teasing out light and darkness, so it speaks quietly,
poignantly, like a revelation. Nothing is forever but looking deeply
at the world, as it was made over fifty years ago, through a lens

ministers to man’s hope for redemption although none is coming,
for the man who took this picture has gone into those mountains
so completely he has become them. Who knows if a town existed,

or if anyone had ever lived there, until in the darkness of his room
he placed the moon to look over it, light moving through the crosses,
making us believe, if for a time, it is possible to outlast the night.

By Chris Banks

Edward Hirsch’s “Execution”

2010-12-30T11:38:00.000-08:00

Above my computer desk where I sit and do the lion-share of my writing hangs an essay written by Gregory Orr called “The Making of Poems” which has strongly influenced my thinking about the uses of poetry. I try to read lots of essays about poetry, and recently have endeavored to write my own poetic commentaries through this blog, but where Orr’s essay differs from most prose written about poetry is in the simplicity and insistence of his message.

He writes in his first sentence: “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.”

God knows no poet in the current climate in Canada would write something so revelatory and unfashionable for fear of internet finger-wagging, but deep down beneath our stony demeanors and gold-plated bullshit detectors, I think most of us still believe in the ultimate truth of this statement.

We would just never say so on the record.

Indeed, that word surviving has become troublesome in Canada because of its all too obvious associations with Margaret Atwood’s landmark study of Canadian literature Survival published in the 1970’s. The words survival and surviving have become a kind of shorthand for a prescriptive new generation of critics to dismiss something as purely sentimental, plain, or uninspired.

Now, I am not suggesting that poems that are clearly sentimental, plain or uninspired are nowhere to be found. Look anywhere in Canada, or the world for that matter, and you will find poems that span the whole spectrum from self-indulgent twaddle to self-effacing ostentation being written and being written badly.

However, I suppose what I am saying is that despite the various peregrinations Canadian poetry has undertaken in the last four decades, and no matter how aestheticized or self-divided the debate has become in recent years, poetry’s openness to human experience and its ability to translate that experience into something meaningful should never be forgotten. We forget this truth at our own peril.

Despite what some others would have us believe, reading a poem is not simply a surface tallying of technique, as there is always a shared emotional aspect to any worthy poem. At least, this is what I intuit from any poem that stays longer with me than the time it takes to read it.

Take for example, a poem by Ed Hirsch I first read in his book The Night Parade several years ago and can now be found among the pages of his new and selected poems The Living Fire which came out with Knopf earlier this year (click this link for a terrific interview with Hirsch).

For several months after purchasing Hirsch’s new book, I found myself thumbing through its pages looking for the poem “Execution” printed below:

Execution   

The last time I saw my high school football coach 
He had cancer stenciled into his face 
Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate 
Drawings on the chalkboard, small x's and o's 
That he copied down in a neat numerical hand 
Before practice in the morning. By day's end 
The board was a spiderweb of options and counters,  
Blasts and sweeps, a constellation of players 
Shining under his favorite word, Execution, 
Underlined in the upper right-hand corner of things. 
He believed in football like a new religion 
And had perfect unquestioning faith in the fundamentals  
Of blocking and tackling, the idea of warfare 
Without suffering or death, the concept of teammates  
Moving in harmony like the planets — and yet 
Our awkward adolescent bodies were always canceling 
The flawless beauty of Saturday afternoons in September,  
Falling away from the particular grace of autumn, 
The clear weather, the ideal game he imagined. 
And so he drove us through punishing drills  
On weekday afternoons, and doubled our practice time, 
And challenged us to hammer him with forearms, 
And devised elaborate, last-second plays — a flea- 
Flicker, a triple reverse — to save us from defeat.  
Almost always they worked. He despised losing  
And loved winning more than his own body, maybe even 
More than himself. But the last time I saw him 
He looked wobbly and stunned by illness, 
And I remembered the game in my senior year 
When we met a downstate team who loved hitting 
More than we did, who battered us all afternoon 
With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing 
And power, with deadly, impersonal authority, 
Machine-like fury, perfect execution.

There is much to love about this poem: the hard-shifting rhythms, the keen perceptions and the perfectly lucid imagery. But this is not why for me I find the poem sufficiently affecting. It is also the intensity of feeling and reverential treatment of Hirsch’s own life experience, the elegizing of an old high-school coach as a subject of monumentality, which affirms the poet’s life as meaningful and the poem, an act of self-creation, as his only defense against the “impersonal authority, / Machine-like fury” of reality and death which are constantly attempting to annihilate him.

It should be said that part of poetry’s undeniable currency is in the connection it creates between poet and audience. This poem is no exception, of course, as is it reminds me of my old high-school vice-principal Ken Leyshon who was also the school’s football coach. I heard later that he died of cancer in his retirement which was troubling for me as he was the single-most physically fit person I had ever seen.

To quote from the same essay I began with, Gregory Orr writes: “An additional miracle comes to me as the maker of poems: Because poems can be shared between poet and audience, they also become a further triumph over human isolation.” I believe this unequivocally after twenty years of attempting to write poems, but I understand that others do not see it quite this way and wish to keep art separate from reality out of a belief that it makes it easier to judge a poem’s merits. To them, I say again: the writing of all poetry is personal and reducing it to mere aesthetics is empty rhetoric. A poet who truly wishes to introduce either the beautiful or the ugly, the profound or the problematic, into a poem can only do so by adding his own personal experience and private feeling to impress the language.

Basho from The Knapsack Notebook

2010-12-21T07:04:00.000-08:00

“Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown. Like delicate drapery, it may be torn away and blown off by the least breeze. It brought me to writing poetry many years ago, initially for its own gratification, but eventually as a way of life. True, frustration and rejection were almost enough to bring this spirit to silence, and sometimes pride brought it to the brink of vanity. From the writing of the very first line, it has found no contentment as it was torn by one doubt after another. This windblown spirit considered the secularity of court life at one point: at another, it considered risking a display of its ignorance by becoming a scholar. But its passion for poetry would not permit either. Since it knows no other way than the way of poetry, it has clung to it tenaciously.

Saigyô in poetry, Sôgi in linked verse, Sesshû in painting, Rikyû in the tea ceremony—the spirit that moves them is one spirit. Achieving artistic excellence, each holds one attribute in common: each remains attuned to nature throughout the four seasons. Whatever is seen by such a heart and mind is a flower, whatever is dreamed is a moon. Only a barbarian mind could fail to see the flower; only an animal mind could fail to dream a moon. The first task for each artist is to overcome the barbarian or animal heart and mind, to become one with nature. “ (53)

Translation excerpted from Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems & Translations by Sam Hamill published by Shambhala press.

A Tale of Two Legacies

2010-11-03T20:20:00.000-07:00

If you have a poetic bent and you are so inclined, I urge you to donate to two worthy fundraisers. I recently donated some money to the Al Purdy A-frame Trust which is attempting to preserve the house Canadian poet Al Purdy built near Ameliasburg, ON on the shores of Roblin Lake where he wrote most of his over thirty poetry collections. The building needs to be upgraded to current building codes but the long-term hope is that the property will be given an Ontario Heritage designation and an endowment will preserve the property as a poet-in-residence retreat. I am, quite frankly, a poet because I discovered Al Purdy's poems when I was sixteen so making a donation was an easy decision for me.

Another worthy fundraiser The Merwin Conservancy is strikingly similar to the A-Frame Trust in that it, too, is attempting to preserve the house and property of another poet W.S. Merwin. The Merwin Conservancy mission statement reads as follows: “Preserving the living legacy of W.S. Merwin, his home and palm forest, for future study and retreat for botanists and writers. Nineteen acres of over 800 species of palm lovingly planted by Merwin over 30 years; and a home that reflects the cultural richness and sustainability practices of one of America’s most honored poets.”

Like Al Purdy, W.S. Merwin helped to design and build the house that sits on his property where he has chosen to write poetry for over thirty years. Both men also decided early on to be poets first and foremost without compromise.

I have donated money to both causes because the words of both of these poets have made me think about the world differently. A simple reason perhaps but one that suits me fine. If you are sitting on the fence about donating funds, please consider this passage about philanthropy from Lynne Twist found on The Merwin Conservancy’s online donation page:

“Everyone wants to contribute their money to make a difference in the world-whether they have only a few Indian rupees or Zambian kwacha or they have millions of yen or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Philanthropy at any level enables people to get back in touch with that relationship with money. In philanthropic interactions, we can return to the soul of money: money as carrier of our intentions, money as energy, and money as currency for love, commitment and service; money as an opportunity to nourish those things we care most about.” – Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money

Larry Levis "The Sacred Home"

2010-10-06T18:35:00.000-07:00

I have wanted to write a post for some time about the power of place, its amplitude and special relationship to poets, as this is of concern in my own poetry. For instance, the landscape of Stayner, On, insinuates itself in many of my poems which is strange when you think I lived there for only four years before going off to university. Why not Bancroft where I lived for eight years? That country north of Belleville?

Certainly I have wonderful memories of those times and experiences, but it was my teen years where I first began to feel separate from my surroundings, and to think about my own special individual position with regards to the rest of the world. In other words, this is when, for me, the incipient writer was born, and yet, it was still a time of relative ease where actual responsibilities were few and far between, something of vital importance if a place is to act as both a spiritual and a physical touchstone for one’s poetry. Larry Levis, whose own poetry is woven together by consciousness and place, wrote a fascinating essay called “Eden and My Generation” where he addressed the aesthetics of place in modern poetry:

This involvement with place, from Romantic and modernist poets to the present, has come in part I think because a poet wants to locate himself or herself somewhere, to be “a man (or woman) speaking to men (or women)”; it is also a way of testifying to the demand and limitations of lyrical experience, to say “I was the man, I suffered, I was there.” The lyric wishes to be antidogmatic, nondidactic, honest. Williams articulated the idea this way: “It is in the wide range of the local only that the general can be trusted for its one unique quality, its universality.” And “the local” is that vestige of the “oceanic” which Freud says we carry within ourselves, withered, out of childhood. And it is there, in the place recalled by the poet, the sacred home.” (47)

I highlight this excerpt because it calls attention to both the local and the universal, and how they become conjoined through a poet’s attempts at locating his experiences, with all the insoluble problems of his specific historical existence, as Auden would have put it, in some place that is considered both sacred and secular to him. I am thinking of a Canadian poet like Al Purdy whose poetry was naturally drawn to place and places, especially Roblin Lake where in July of 1957 Al and Eurithe Purdy built a tiny A-frame cottage where they lived for 43 years. Take, for instance, the end of his much loved poem “Roblin’s Mills”:

Those old ones
you can hear sometimes on a rural party line
sometimes
when the copper wires
sing before the number is dialed and
then your own words stall some distance
from the house you said them in
lost in the 4th concession
or dimension of wherever
what happened still happens
a lump in your throat
an Adam’s apple half
a mile down the road
permits their voices
to join living voices
and float by
on the party line sometimes
and you hang up then
so long now—

The speaker here excavates the past by describing personal autobiographical details of Roblin’s Mills, struck suddenly by the difference between how things are and how things were, and perhaps still ought to be, which testifies to his own feelings of alienation and isolation from the sacred place of his childhood. A later poem entitled “Roblin’s Mills [II]” is a variation on the same theme as Purdy tries to reconcile the protean nature of place with the nostalgic landscape of his memory:

The black millpond
holds them
movings and reachings and fragments
the gear and tackle of living
under the water eye
all things laid aside
discarded
forgotten
but they had their being once
and left a place to stand on

Here, he uses the image of the millpond as an eye; however, it is not the eye that stares blankly outward, but the one that stares inward, containing all the contradictions and materiality of a past that bears little or no resemblance to his individual present. No other poet in Canada worked so well and so long in this tradition, with perhaps the notable exceptions of John Newlove and Patrick Lane, than Al Purdy whose poetry dominated the Canadian landscape in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Purdy was perhaps a victim of his own wild success because his poetry spawned open imitation which led to an awful lot of “post-card” poetry written about place in Canada that was superficially decorative— I am thinking of the faintly picturesque over the truly profound— which later made it attractive for Purdy’s critics to throw his work into the same category.

The American poet Hayden Carruth also bears witness to the natural world and the need to locate one’s self within it, but his poetry is not always so autobiographical. One of my favorite poems of this kind by Carruth is the poem “Abandoned Ranch, Big Bend” which casts its alienated human figures as the dispossessed without any connection to the land their forbears once tirelessly worked:

Abandoned Ranch, Big Bend

Three people come where no people belong any more.
They are a woman who would be young
And good-looking if these now seemed
Real qualities, a child with yellow hair, a man
Hardened in desperate humanity. But here are only
Dry cistern, adobe flaking, a lizard. And now this
Disagreeable feeling that they were summoned. Sun
On the corrugated roof is a horse treading,
A horse with wide wings and heavy hoofs. The lizard
Is splayed head down on the wall, pulsing. They do not
Bother to lift their binoculars to the shimmering distance.
From this dead center the desert spirals away,
Traveling outward and inward, pulsing. Summoned
From half across the world, from snow and rock,
From chaos, they arrived a moment ago, they thought,
In perfect fortuity. There is a presence emerging here in
Sun dance and clicking metal, where the lizard blinks
with eyes whetted for extinction; then swirling
Outward again, outward and upward through the sky’s
White-hot funnel. Again and again among the dry
Wailing voices of displaced Yankee ghosts
This ranch is abandoned to terror and the sublime.
The man turns to the woman and the child. He has never
Said what he meant. They give him
The steady cool mercy of their unreproachful eyes.

There is a presence emerging in this place “where no people belong any more” and the three characters, who appear to comprise a typical nuclear family, feel as if they have been summoned to testify to the savage beauty of a National Park. Nonetheless, the poet also notes this presence is emanating outward from the ruins of an old ranch, “the dead center” as he calls it, which has been swept clean of humanity and which gives the male character in the poem some pause as if he felt for the first time his own mortality come upon him.

For Carruth, this is the sacred home for people can still feel that deep-seated “oceanic” connection to nature early pioneers who came before them must have felt when they first looked upon and settled this desert region. However, he is also careful to emphasize the consequence for separating ourselves from the natural world has been a tremendous fall from grace for humankind:

Again and again among the dry
Wailing voices of displaced Yankee ghosts
This ranch is abandoned to terror and the sublime.
The man turns to the woman and the child. He has never
Said what he meant. They give him
The steady cool mercy of their unreproachful eyes.

Here in the poem’s conclusion, the image of the abandoned ranch is a powerful reminder that whatever reverence or sanctity visitors may feel when they first come to this place is interrupted by "the wailing voices of displaced Yankee ghosts" who testify to the theme of exile in the poem as Carruth believes the cost of separating ourselves from the natural world has been a collective loss for humanity.

I could go on to talk about other poets and other places but I think I will simply end here. As Larry Levis says in the same essay, a place in poetry “is often spiritual, and yet it is important to note that this spiritual location clarifies itself and becomes valuable only through one’s absence from it. Eden becomes truly valuable only after a a fall, after an exile that changes it, irrecoverably, from what it once was” (44).

Alfred Corn’s “The Poem’s Heartbeat”

2010-09-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

I have been neglecting this blog for far too long and now that a new semester at school has been safely launched and is heading out to sea, I thought I would write a little post about Alfred Corn’s beautiful little book The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody put out by Copper Canyon Press. Lacking the fustiness and impenetrability of a technical manual, Corn’s book is extremely rare as it is highly accessible with a wealth of anecdotes, connecting the study of prosody to the way we walk or to waves breaking along a shore-line. I bought this book as I have been meddling with syllabics lately, a subject Corn devotes a whole chapter to in his book, but it is interesting to note that as a teacher of prosody he also has plenty to say about the orthodoxy that disallows free verse or unmetered poetry:

“In free verse’s favor is its imposition of little restraint on the process of direct utterance. Language can be caught at its most spontaneous, with the implication that unconcious forces were more important in producing the poem than conscious ones. Strained syntax, words chosen for rhyme alone, padding out of lines so as to fill out the metrical count, or undue cutting away at the natural texture of speech can be avoided. The implicit stance behind every unmetered poem is that the author found this particular form of expression under no other constraints than the desire to follow where feeling and expression led, without bowing to preconceived, abstract formats devised in earlier eras and under a differing set of conditions from those that gave rise to the present poem. This comes close to saying that imposition of abstract form in a poem always comes at the cost of entire sincerity and authenticity.” (152)

As the above excerpt affirms, this is a great book that sets out a well-balanced argument for the study and appreciation of poetic rhythm in all its myriad forms. I also just bought The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach and The Art of Description by Mark Doty both by Graywolf Press and will be diving into those two books just as soon as I get a chance.

Dave Smith's "Near The Docks"

2010-08-18T06:06:00.000-07:00

Dave Smith is featured over at one of my favorite blogs How A Poem Happens this week. I have been a long-time admirer of Dave Smith’s poetry, having collected everything he has ever written, and he has been a tremendous influence on my own poetry in recent years. I think he is a bona-fide genius when it comes to metaphor but listen to what he has to say about the importance of narrative in his poetry:

"All poems are narratives. Some more, some less. If that is controversial, I add this: the older I have come to be the more I understand that the quality of any poem lies almost entirely in the quality of its story, how compelling, how weighty, how memorable. The best poets tell the best stories. Simply that."

If you haven’t read any of Dave Smith’s poetry, I recommend getting The Wick of Memory as a sampler but my favorite collection by far is Smith’s Goshawk, Antelope which has been a touchstone for my latest poetry collection Winter Cranes which will be published by ECW press in the Fall of 2011.

The League of Extraordinary Critics

2010-07-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

Canadian criticism is in crisis mode right now and, as always, provocateur Zach Wells is at the epi-centre of it all. Andre Alexis wrote a polemical essay entitled The Long Decline for The Walrus Magazine about all the things he sees plaguing Canadian criticism at the moment: personal attacks and collegiate vitriol standing in for “book reviews”, the incompetence of reviewers who rely on subjective opinion rather than critical thought, and he lays the lion share of the blame at critic John Metcalf’s feet for inspiring a self-aggrandizing rhetorical style in younger critics who do not possess the same depth of knowledge as him.

There is a whole lot to chew on in this essay, and I am not sure I agree with everything, but it does articulate many things my colleagues and I have been thinking about for some time.

What is perhaps not surprising is that Zach Wells, having felt stung as he always does in such circumstances, wrote a satirical rejection letter as if Andre Alexis had first submitted the essay to CNQ magazine. He posted this response on the CNQ blog where it has spawned a “casserole of ridiculousness” as Jake Mooney has rightly pronounced on his blog Vox Populism.

It is not so much that Andre Alexis is entirely right but that the Sons of Metcalf, having gathered, are now linking arms and shouting in unison “You’re entirely wrong Mr. Alexis”. You know, like a whole tribe of critics who do not want to listen to anyone but themselves. I had already written in a previous post about the inherent dangers of aesthetic tribalism attaching itself to critical culture in Canada and here we are six months later with this wonderful public squabble with the participants proving Alexis's point and my own.

People can make their own judgments but this needs to be witnessed to be believed.

Envoy at the Crossroads

2010-07-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

Three years ago I was asked to give a speech and a one-day workshop for the Edmonton branch of the Canadian Authors Association which I felt obliged to do as a teacher and because I took a number of creative writing workshops in university that helped me along my path to becoming a poet. I don’t advertise myself as a workshop instructor because my life is such that I do no have a lot of time to conduct them, but when I am called upon I feel a duty to lead them.

I think such workshops do not necessarily help people to write better, but they do teach people how to read poetry and they can provide resources and knowledge which may inspire people to undertake the long apprenticeship to becoming a serious poet.

I suppose what I find most striking about meeting people who have taken my workshops or else showed up at one of my readings because they read one of my books is how some of them look upon me with that eager lighted look which suggests they think I might have some special knowledge to confer upon them, or perhaps it is more they think they can use me as a key to unlock something within themselves. I don’t know. All I know is that after 24 years of trying to write poetry, I find myself at a crossroads asking what have I learned about the writing of poetry? The truth is I am not sure.

Certainly, I have learned something of craft, the economy of language, the musicality of words, etc. I have absorbed a great deal of poetry and poetic influences from many countries. I know what I like and what I do not, and I can articulate reasons for these preferences.

But writing a poem is still an exhausting task for me. Where will poetry take me and in what direction in the coming years? The path, as they say, is uncertain. However, I am still hopeful, or perhaps naïve, enough to believe that wherever poetry might lead me, people will understand the language I speak.

Here is a comprehensive list of 25 books in no particular order that have helped me to learn the difficult lingua franca of poetry:

1. Reluctantly by Hayden Carruth
2. The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo
3. Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio
4. On Poetry and Craft by Theodore Roethke
5. Best Words, Best Order by Stephen Dobyns
6. The Other Voice by Octavio Paz
7. Vis a Vis by Don McKay
8. The Friendship by Adam Sisman
9. A Poet’s Guide to Poetry by Mary Kinzie
10. Argument and Song by Stanley Plumly
11. Claims For Poetry edited by Donald Hall
12. Keats by Andrew Motion
13. Selected Poems and Letters by John Keats
14. The Weather of Words by Mark Strand
15. The Verse Book of Interviews edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki
16. Imagination in Place by Wendell Berry
17. Off to the Side by Jim Harrison
18. The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser
19. The Secret of Poetry by Mark Jarman
20. So Ask by Philip Levine
21. The Gazer Within by Larry Levis
22. Poets Teaching Poets edited Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryan Voight
23. Hunting Men by Dave Smith
24. The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens
25. Poetry and Consciousness by C.K. Williams

W.S. Merwin Appointed Poet Laureate of the United States

2010-07-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

A hearty congratulations goes out to W.S. Merwin who has been appointed Poet Laureate of the United States by the library of congress. His latest book The Shadow of Sirius won the Pulitzer prize for Poetry and can be purchased here. If you would like to send a personal congratulations to W.S. Merwin, Copper Canyon Press has provided the following link. His appointment is exciting for me as I have been thinking a lot about something W.S. Merwin said in an essay first published in 1956 but can be found in the more recent anthology Don’t Ask What I Mean: Poets In Their Own Words edited by Clare Brown and Don Paterson. His words, written over fifty years ago, are just as relevent today here in Canada:

"I think one of the dangers of modern poetry has been a tendancy to become inbred. Its small audience enhances the danger. It even seems possible for some poets to write as though critics, even particular schools of critics, were a fit and sufficient audience for poetry. I used to read all the articles in which critics kept working out reasons to prove how necessary and useful they are; but I don’t read those articles, or indeed critics, any more, and I can’t remember what the reasons were, even if I try very hard.

The other, main roots of my dislike, I suppose, are a distrust of generalization and abstraction; and a superstitious unwillingness to dissect the goose whose eggs, whatever their metal, are vitally important to me.

Which leads me to one of the few general statements I feel safe in making about poetry. It is a mystery. It is a metaphor of the other mysteries which comprise human experience. But like some other mysteries, it gives us a feeling of illumination…..I think of it as a way of using what we know to glimpse what we do not know."

-W.S. Merwin, Green with Beasts 1956

The Silly Wars About Free Verse

2010-06-10T16:36:00.000-07:00

I have been rereading Donald Hall's excellent collection of essays Breakfast Served Any Time All Day and stumbled upon this gem where Hall talks about the all too familiar practise of undermining legitimate free verse by calling it "prose" which is still business as usual here in Canada:

"When a critic takes a lined poem and prints it as prose, in order to show that the poem is inferior, he tells us nothing about the poem. A reviewer in the Hudson Review tried to denigrate poems by Charles Simic and John Haines by printing them as prose. Such a critic reveals that he is ignorant or disingenuous. Back in the silly wars about free verse, toward the end of the First World War, American critics who wished to prove that free verse was only prose took poems by Ezra Pound (or Amy Lowell) and printed them as prose. 'See,' they said triumphantly, like the man in the Hudson Review, 'it’s only prose.' They only proved that they had no sense of the Line." (45)

-Donald Hall from the essay “Journal Notes”

Writing Season

2010-05-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

Sorry for my slow response to the updating of my blog recently but it is a busy time at work getting ready for end-of-the-year summatives. I also have to move everything out of my classroom for there is a major renovation happening at my school, the upshot of it all being I will have a classroom next year with windows. Natural light. I have taught high-school for a decade in what amounts to a box with fluorescent artificial lighting which, believe me, does wonders for one’s mood, and writing, in the dead of winter.

This Spring my wife and I have also been busy with outdoor gardening projects and planning for a basement renovation that is scheduled to begin next week, and, of course, June marks the beginning of my writing season.

Because I have two months off each summer, this is when the majority of my poems get written. My goal every summer is to write, at the very least, ten strong poems which is how my books get written.

If I write six or seven poems over the course of the school year, fine. But it is in the summer months that I make my bones as a writer because I can concentrate on my writing for several hours each day. When I have the luxury of time, I tend to read more and to take greater risks in my writing. I think most writers do.

This is all to say I am hoping to write more and post less in the next few months. Blogging is something I like to do in my writing down-time but not as a replacement for writing poems. I am still planning posts on Philip Levine, Dave Smith, Larry Levis, among others but these will appear more sporadically in the coming months. In the meantime, here is another picture of a prized broadside from my collection.

(W.S. Merwin’s “Returning Season” illustrated and designed by Dean Bornstein. Signed by Merwin. Size: 12.25 inches wide by 9.25 inches long. You can get your own copy here).

Griffin Awards 2010: Nationalism Is So Passé

2010-05-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

With only a few short weeks left before the Griffin Poetry Prize Readings and the announcement of the winners in both the International and Canadian categories, I thought it apropos to write a post about its significance in the contemporary landscape of poetry awards and its impact on the public’s perception of poetry. For my money, the Griffin prize is recognized, at least amongst poets, as the most prestigious award a poet can be nominated for here in Canada, and not simply because of the large purse attached to it, or the red carpet gala parties, but because I would argue it is not a nationalist award at all, but an award that celebrates regionalism and internationalism in poetry.

This difference may appear slight but it is worthy of attention when, for instance, you place the Griffin Prize along side the Governor General's Awards. Where the Governor General's Awards have become an angry hornet’s nest of poetry commentators who every year decry the judge’s choices of nominated books – often hijacking the whole purpose of the award as a celebration of Canadian poetry, and turning it into a public spitting match involving self-righteousness and victimhood, indignation and insult – the minor eddies and ripples the Griffin Prize stir up are quite tame in comparison.

As for a clear explanation for why these awards are received so differently by our own community of writers, I do have some ideas.

Canadian poetry is regionalist at its very core; it grows out of a particular geography, a definitive sense of place, but because our country is so vast, and the people and the landscape so different from region to region, one poet’s native soil is not the same as another’s. Certainly, the early poetry of Canada is regionalist in nature, but population trends have changed over the last fifty years. Huge numbers of poets live in major urban centers now, and as their ties to the outlying places, smaller communities, where they grew up begin to diminish, so too does the regionalist impulse in their poems.

Other poets who have lived their entire lives in big cities have been conditioned by their own psychological makeup and relationship to place that nature poetry, for instance, is trivial, or rural motifs are anachronistic, because it does not speak directly to their own experience, or how they perceive reality to be.

This is by no means a criticism but it does explain why poets in urban centers appear more self-conscious of themselves as poets, and thus place form over content, standards of selection over subject matter, and opt for the purely surface effect or set pattern over any coherence of feeling, or emotional discoveries, when judging the worth of a poem.

However, the problem arises when one tries to define the national imagination of our poetry. What constitutes excellence in Canadian Poetry? Aye, there is the rub.

Honestly, I do not think it is possible to identify the national imagination of our poetry, and in fact all such projects have failed in the past, for such a notion does not take into account that Canada is a country of many different regions that are geographically and culturally distinct from one another, so there is no one privileged standard of excellence we all agree upon.

Despite our shared history with England, Canadian English resembles more its Southern cousin American English. In his essay “Notes On Free Verse”, Stephen Dobyns explains that American English “has no model like Oxford-Cambridge English that rises above regional differences and imposes a consistent rhythm upon the language” (114). This is equally true here in Canada. So what does this have to do with the impact of The Governor General’s Awards and The Griffin Prize on our nation’s literature?

I would argue that The Governor General Awards is promoting an outdated, ill-conceived version of nationalism which is really only an elaborate ruse while The Griffin Prize is simply promoting excellence in poetry, both in Canada and abroad, thereby side-stepping the whole nationalism trap altogether. Nationalism, by its very nature, is a magnet for fundamentalism which is why it attracts the noise-mongers and the power-players in our community who are of the mistaken belief that if they can just win, whatever that means, they will have exercised some control over the nation’s tastes when, in reality, patterns of influence are much wider than that. Such persons can no more impose their tastes upon a country, or the canon for that matter, than King Canute could hold back the sea.

Frankly, this is why The Griffin Prize has it over the GGs. It is not attempting to lasso the Canadian poetic imagination. It is not seeking to posit one aesthetic stance over another. Its primary goal is the promotion of excellence in poetry, both in Canada and internationally, and bring it to the attention of the public. I think the international judging panel consisting of one Canadian judge and two Non-Canadians also helps to foster this image.

Where the Governor General’s Awards aim to define what is excellent in Canadian poetry by safely establishing its borders, which is a mug’s game if you ask me given our various geographical regions and multicultural make-up, the Griffin Prize looks at the whole global economy of poetry to find there are many types of excellence in poetry, and such excellence transcends the boundaries of different countries. If I had to define excellence in poetry, I would say it is very close to the definition given by Donald Hall in his essay “The Unsayable Said” where he asserts, “Poetry by its bodily, mental, and emotional complex educates the sensibility, thinking and feeling appropriately melded together” (5).

Perhaps this is a whole lot of words over two very different award ceremonies but this essay does seek to understand why so many friends of mine rub their heads and steel themselves at the mere announcement of the Governor General’s Awards shortlist and, by the same token, seem so much more cheerful and full of goodwill whilst standing in line for their tickets to the Griffin Readings. Poetry should be a celebration.

As for awards in general, the stakes are always small. They do not guarantee a career nor do they guarantee a continued readership. Speaking from my own personal history after winning several awards, and after being nominated for a whole host of others, awards are a fickle business. Luckily for us, poets do not write poems to win awards. My favorite poetry award, by far, is the Griffins Lifetime Achievement Award. A lifetime of writing poetry? Yes, that is something worth celebrating.

Linda Gregg’s “A Thirst Against”

2010-05-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

I received the latest issue of Poetry Northwest last week which to my delight had three new poems by Linda Gregg nestled amidst its table of contents. This was fortuitous as I had already been thinking about writing a blog post about her poems for the last several months. My favorite poem from the new issue is about the poet Jack Gilbert and I have copied it out in full below:

Love Song

Jack is weakening day by day.
I saw him on the other side
of a river climbing out.
Almost naked. His underpants
stuck to his body.
Doing this by himself.
I carried his once perfect
body up the bank
to a new kind of safety.
He was cold. He was alive
by will and passion.
And the intelligent animal
he is. Light overhead.
Not our favorite kind.
I thought at the end of his list
of reasons was wanting
not to leave me alone, knowing
the not being here anymore.

Everything that matters in Linda Gregg’s poetry—the ecstatic beauty, the dramatic loss, and quiet restrained language–all are found in these lines. I remember having a discussion with another poet friend in Waterloo several years ago about Linda Gregg. I was of the mind that she was a tremendous poet while my friend was skeptical about her overall worth as if her poems were “all singing but no song”.

I imagine Gregg’s poetry has inspired this kind of debate throughout her long career: on the one hand there are those who champion her personal poems interwoven with Greek and Classical references as large-minded inquiries into the nature of experience, while on the other side there are those who put forward the counter claim that such stripped-down language, personal revelations and literary allusions are the stock and trade of a poet who is simply affecting a voice. A sort of poetic ventriloquism.

For myself, I think her poetry, the way it sets its own philosophical demands in relief against the simple diction of its highly compressed sentences, some of them no more than mere fragments or phrases, courts such debate purposefully. Take for instance, her well known poem "A Thirst Against" which can be found in All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems published by Graywolf Press in 2008.

A Thirst Against

There is a hunger for order,
but a thirst against. What if
every time a flower forms in the mind,
something gives it away to time?
Leaf by petal, by leaf. As if the soul
were a blotter of this world—
of the greater, the wetter, the more
tired, the more torn. All singing,
but no song. Hamlet darker than night.
And poor Ophelia less than the flowers
she wore. Both lost. One dead,
the other to follow soon.
One too heavy, one too frail.
Both finding themselves among the fallen.
Each time I think, it is here
that God lives. Right around here,
in this terrible, ruined place
with streets made desolate by neon,
in midwinter and freezing winds.
In these Chicago avenues.

To my mind, this is a poem that carefully demonstrates the large ambition and enigmatic qualities found in all of Gregg’s best poems. In the opening lines, the poet acknowledges the self seeks connection with the world but, at the same time, is deeply suspicious of order because the countervailing tension that arises between these two modes of thinking creates spaces within a poem, and by extension our lives, where one may find transcendence amid the ordinary.

In her essay, Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric, Joan Aleshire mentions how the Greek lyric poet Pindar prized a quality called Kairos in poetry, or the ability to set “opposite points of view against one another before making a summation or resolution” (37). Gregg’s attempts at reconciling opposites places her in this same tradition which gives her poem its authority and propulsive force.

The poem as I see it becomes a justification for the way we live and experience our lives. We seek connections with the world, with something larger than ourselves, even when it seems futile to do so, for Gregg seems to be asking what other choice are we given? She proposes at the beginning of the poem:

What if
every time a flower forms in the mind,
something gives it away to time?
Leaf by petal, by leaf. As if the soul
were a blotter of this world—
of the greater, the wetter, the more
tired, the more torn. All singing,
but no song.

Here, the question posed is what if we are simply the sum of our thoughts and there is no higher purpose to our lives? What if our life’s experience is in fact “all singing, / but no song”? The next section of the poem answers this question by darkly alluding to Hamlet and Ophelia, two beloved characters who came to the conclusion that life was essentially for naught and their oppressive thoughts led to much personal suffering and tragic consequences for both of them.

Hamlet darker than night.
And poor Ophelia less than the flowers
she wore. Both lost. One dead,
the other to follow soon.
One too heavy, one too frail.
Both finding themselves among the fallen.

If we are not to find ourselves among the fallen, we need to believe in or serve some higher purpose within our lives, even if that means the great looming despair that surrounds our certain extinction and likely insignificance meets us at every turn. The ending of Gregg’s poem seems to underscore this idea for the reader:

Each time I think, it is here
that God lives. Right around here,
in this terrible, ruined place
with streets made desolate by neon,
in midwinter and freezing winds.
In these Chicago avenues.

It seems, for Gregg, God is in the details but so too is the awful insufferable fear none of us will be redeemed. If you like Linda Gregg’s poem "A Thirst Against", you can find it in her book All of It Singing: New and Selected poems published by Graywolf Press.

April is March Madness

2010-04-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

I have to say I have been taking great pleasure in the variety of titles that this year’s National Poetry Month has on offer so far. I have bought John Steffler’s new book Lookout which I have been enjoying when I’m not nose-deep in my good friend Paul Vermeersch’s new book The Reinvention of the Human Hand. Both gentlemen launch their books along side Dionne Brand's Ossuaries at the Dora Keogh in Toronto on Monday April 19 at 6 pm. I will be in attendance so do come by and say hello.

Yesterday, my copy of Mark Callanan’s Sea Legend came from Caryl Peters at Frog Hollow Press and it may well be the prettiest chapbook I own. Other books I have yet to get my hands on are Triny Findlay’s new collection Histories Haunt Us, Ray Hsu’s Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon and Jim Johnstone’s Patternicity, all from Nightwood Editions.

I still have not found time to finish reading Kay Ryan’s The Best of It and Edward Hirsch’s The Living Fire but nevertheless I walked into Wordsworth Books the other day and ordered Philip Schultz’s The God of Loneliness, C.K. Williams’s Dust and The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass.

This coupled with the entire back poetry catalogue of Kim Addonizio I ordered from Abebooks should keep me well stocked with things to read for the next several weeks which reminds me I still need to pick up Kate Hall’s book The Certainty Dream by Coach House Press and…...

Kenneth RexRoth’s “Growing”

2010-04-03T16:24:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about the San Francisco poet Kenneth RexRoth who so eloquently, poem after poem, collection after collection, was able to trace the connecting lines between psyche and kosmos which he saw as fundamental to human experience.

In an essay called “Poetry and The Self: Reflections on The Discovery of the Self in Early Greek Lyrics”, Renate Woods talks about how Heracleitus from his study of Greek lyric poets, began “to see the intensely felt as more compelling than external appearance and to discover the soul as an inner realm with its own dynamics” (105).

This is an idea that put me in the mind of Kenneth RexRoth whose own strongly held beliefs placed the apprehension of reality, through the twin condensing lenses of poetry and love, as being key to his own evolving consciousness and spiritual awakening.

A perfect example would be his poem “Growing” which is about the strong feelings of self-realization and enlightenment that stem from the pure act of loving someone else, but it is also about the necessities of contemplation and shared love between two people in a century that was for Rexroth marked by unprecedented human violence. I include the poem in its entirety below:

Growing

Who are you? Who am I? Haunted
By the dead, by the dead and the past and the
Falling inertia of unreal, dead
Men and things. Haunted by the threat
Of the impersonal, that which
Never will admit the person,
The closed world of things. Who are
You? Coming up out of the
Mineral earth, one pale leaf
Unlike any other unfolding,
And then another, strange, new
Utterly different, nothing
I ever expected, growing
Up out of my warm heart’s blood.
All new, all strange, all different.
Your own leaf pattern, your own
Flower and fruit, but fed from
One root, the root of our fused flesh.
I and thou, from the one to
The dual, from the dual
To the other, the wonderful,
Unending, unfathomable
Process of becoming each
Our selves for the other.

By Kenneth RexRoth

This poem begins in an unlikely way for a love poem as it seems to ask how do you allow yourself to be vulnerable, the very thing so necessary if you are to love another or to contemplate the meaning of one’s life, when the specter of death haunts you? Rexroth, a conscientious objector during World War II, wrote this poem when he felt, as so many other writers and artists did at the time, caught between two devastating world wars and the ever growing tensions of a cold war which might possibly produce a third. That cultural paranoia finds release in the lines: “Haunted / By the dead, by the dead and the past and the / Falling inertia of unreal, dead / Men and things.”

The remedy for such cultural and historical despair it appears for RexRoth was love and deep contemplation of one’s surroundings. It is this discovery that creates a powerful sense of hope rescuing the poet from the meaninglessness of existence, or “the threat / Of the impersonal”, and admits him into “the closed world of things”.

Donald K. Gutierrez has already mentioned about another one of RexRoth’s poems (Time Is the Mercy of Eternity), “that one crosses the traditional and arbitrary line between subject (the "I") and object (the "it," Other, World) and, becoming part of one’s surroundings, transcends their and one’s own partialness towards an exalted clarity”.

The next section of "Growing" contains just such an exalted clarity: the lucid vision, the erotic images and the near mystical qualities that earmark the best of RexRoth’s poetry for it seamlessly blends the poet’s appraisal of his self and his beloved with that of nature. He asks “who are you?” which refers both to himself and to the object of his affections, but then quickly moves from a celebration of individual identity as reflected in nature, “…one pale leaf / Unlike any other unfolding,” to the transcending of individual identity through sexual union:

All new, all strange, all different.
Your own leaf pattern, your own
Flower and fruit, but fed from
One root, the root of our fused flesh.

It is the immediacy of sexual love that proves, at least for RexRoth, the underlying connection of all things which culminates in the final lines of the poem:

I and thou, from the one to
The dual, from the dual
To the other, the wonderful,
Unending, unfathomable
Process of becoming each
Our selves for the other.

From the I to the dual to the other, hope springs eternal. In his foreword to The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth published by Copper Canyon Press, Sam Hamill states RexRoth believed “that love is the sacramental expression of hope and responsibility”. This is what ultimately saves the world from the “Falling inertia of unreal, dead / Men and things” allowing an individual to grow.

River Rock Press Broadsides

2010-03-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

Well, I have spent the last couple of days printing broadsides in the basement and after solving a myriad of technical issues, I think they turned out quite nice. Printing on a Kelsey Excelsior is very labour intensive and quite a fitness workout—look for my new video “Rock Solid Abs Through Table-top Letterpress Printing“ (marketed towards late thirty-something middle-aging poets who are sagging around the middle) coming to a store near you! Anyways, these broadsides signal the completion of all my printing projects for the near future as it is time for me to get back to writing poems. On another note, Paul Vermeersch has conducted a little interview with me about being a novice printer over at Open Book Toronto. Enjoy the photos below!

This is a broadside I did for Carleton Wilson who is the editor of both of my books and who published my first chapbook Form Letters under his Junction Books imprint so it was with great pleasure that I was able to return the favour. I cannot take any credit for the design of the broadside as Carleton is a graphic designer by trade and the poem itself is about typography amongst other things so it was natural that he also do the design. For whatever reason, this poem was difficult to print all at once so I ended up having to cut up the plate and print it in separate runs. The typeface is Garamond PremrPro printed 8½x11 on Canson Edition paper and limited to an edition of 50 copies.

This is a broadside of Adam Getty's poem "Cain's Song" which appeared in his poetry collection Repose by Junction Books, and imprint of Nightwood Editions. Adam is one of my closest friends and I value his opinions on all things poetry. I found myself deep in the weeds with this one and really struggled which might have been the type-face I chose as some digital type-faces do not lend themselves to photopolymer printing as well as others, but also the rollers would not meet the areas of the plate I wanted to ink in red without lots of extra fiddling with the taping on my rails. For whatever reason, the printing gods were not smiling on me. The typeface is Granjon-SC on Canson Edition paper and limited to an edition of 50 copies.

This is a broadside of a poem I did for my best friend Paul Vermeersch which will appear in his upcoming fourth collection of poems The Reinvention of the Human Hand out with M&S this Spring. This was the easiest time I've had with a printing project thus far which I'm thinking had to do with the paper I used which was Rives - it prints like butter! I had only a slight problem with getting the title to align properly with the rest of the poem but my wife Teresa came to the rescue. I had to do three seperate runs with this one which took about five hours. The typeface is BaskervilleOldFacSCD printed on Rives paper and limited to an edition of 50 copies.

Paying Homage to the Pantheon: A.F. Moritz’s “The Straggler”

2010-03-18T07:17:00.001-07:00

Poets do not invent themselves out of whole cloth; they are students of poetic composition who toil away, night and day, at their craft for many years. For the truly dedicated ones, this will last a lifetime. “Eternal apprenticeship is the the life of the true poet,” as Theodore Roethke once remarked and it is a particularly pithy observation for introducing A.F. Moritz.

Both apprentice and teacher, it is hard to pinpoint what exactly characterizes his poetic style for that style has changed so often over the course of seventeen books. His tone is both complicated and passionate, his images both allusive and emblematic, his pacing both discursive and disciplined.

To read Moritz is to read many things— the surreal, the philosophical, the classical. Indeed, there is always a lot of English lurking behind his English which gives his poems their sense of high seriousness and unmistakable authority. Take, for instance, his poem “The Straggler” from his book Night Street Repairs published by Anansi press. This is a poem I find myself going back to all the time because of its pantheistic respect for poetry’s precursors:

The Straggler

It was when they all had vanished in the valley
of individual velleity that he lost them.
It was when he trailed them from an eager distance,
observing from rock ledges or high grass.
It was later when he saw them casting pots
a little differently each in the manufactory.
It was when they sang their massive denial subtly.
It was when he heard each celebrate one thumbprint
baked in the innocent clay. It was when he smelt them
cataloguing infinite many hues of umber.
It was when he felt the horn of the mighty hunter
faint in trembling coverts blossoming endlessly.
It was when a sudden edge cut the sobbing leaves,
when the vessels all were smithered by a hammer
and there were Blake and Homer, that he found them.

The spiritual undertaking in this poem—the squandering of individual possibilities; the desire for atonement and redemption through art—puts me in the mind of the prodigal son, albeit this is a non-Christian myth substituting poetry's fore-fathers for religion. The poem begins with the lines “It was when they all had vanished in the valley / of individual velleity that he lost them” suggesting that the reckless disregard of an individual’s freedom to make one’s own choices in life, to suppress and not act upon one’s personal desires, is a waste, even a sin, for it leads to solitude; an over-hanging sense of spiritual desolation that leaves one in the wilderness.

Atonement, it seems, comes through the making of art as Moritz writes, “It was later when he saw them casting pots / a little differently in the manufactory. It was later when they sang their massive denial subtly. / It was when he heard each celebrate one thumbprint / baked in the innocent clay.” How I read these lines is that poetry is about individual making—indeed, the word comes from the greek word poesis or ‘to make’—thus the “casting pots each a little differently” and the celebration of one’s “thumbprint baked in the innocent clay”. The line “they sang their massive denial subtly” appears more gnomic and lends itself to a few possible interpretations. The massive denial might be the choice not to cast pots or to make art as ‘imitation’ which is what you would find in a manufactory, but also it might be read as the refusal to subordinate one's artistic production to the demands of larger society.

The poem swerves again with the introduction of “the horn of the mighty hunter” which is both the clarion call of our own mortality, Death hot on the heels of the incipient poet, but also the powerful voice of the Imagination “blossoming endlessly” once it is heard.

Lastly, redemption comes when “the vessels were all smithered by a hammer" suggesting all one’s models for poetic composition must be done away with, at some point, if one is to write one’s own poetry and be counted among the pantheon of poets, not crushed beneath it.

As Wallace Stevens said," After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption" and certainly I take this to be the theme of Moritz's poem. If you found yourself enjoying A.F. Moritz’s poem “The Straggler” as much as I do, please pick up Night Street Repairs or his more recent Griffin award-winning collection The Sentinel , both by Anansi press.

A Nature Poem...of sorts

2010-03-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

Field Studies

“This is not a poem,” the smart dressed man with the slide rule said
as we walked across a field full of gold bees nosily excavating pollen
from the bursting flowers. Clouds were casting long shadows over
distant hills. “I assure you this is a poem,” I said, plucking a blade
of grass and watching the brittle light eat away at its green interior.
“That is nonsense,” the young man said. His brow weighed down
by too much knowledge, and not enough pure intention. “This is
a sentence,” he said, “Where is the line?” “The line is here,” I said.
“It is just a different kind of line.” At that moment, birds began to
sing and the two of us began to meditate on some deep remembered
past, bird-songs rising, and falling, and circling back to the hidden
sources we draw our lives from. “There is no such thing as a prose
lyric” the middle-aging young man said, measuring with his slide rule
a nearby branch to see if he could calculate, in syllables, its corporeal
existence. “Poetry is abundance,” I told him. “Listen to the river and
the birds and the wind. In that plenitude, that fullness, even Time
is suspended.” “There is no river, no birds, no wind, and no trees,”
the man said, touching his fingers to the scarred bark of a large tree.
“That is partly true,” I said,“These are only innuendoes”. Mistakenly
he thought I was making fun of him, and not to be outdone, the man
stomped the ground and said, “All is prosody”. “All is paraphrase”, I
calmly reminded him. “But there are no line breaks,” he said. “But
there are line continuums” I repeated. Finally, becoming a little testy
he stammered, “Nothing is happening here!” “Ah, but poetry makes
nothing happen,” I said quoting Auden back to him which is when
he grew silent, started to mutter to himself, and taking his slide rule
in hand, fell to the ground and began to measure each blade of grass.

By Chris Banks

From My Top Shelf

2010-03-10T16:41:00.000-08:00

Here is another favorite prized book from my collection. This one is a small chapbook by the American poet Dave Smith who writes some of the most rigorous and imaginative narrative poetry I have ever encountered. His poetry is ruefully meditative, at times, while in other instances, tenderly poignant, and able to integrate one man’s unblinking poetic conviction to witness life as it is lived with a capacious sense of the American Southern conciousness.

His poetry is distinctly American and I envy him for it as we Canadian poets are still engaged in that wonderful enervating argument about what constitutes good poetry in this country.

I love this chapbook for Smith’s poetry, of course, but also the time and care that went into its production. I wonder why more Canadian presses are not producing such lovely little books as objects of art. The answer I’m afraid probably has something to do with cultural despair and the mistaken belief that the poetry buying public’s appetite for such beautiful little chapbooks has atrophied. Poetry books have become more shiny, more glossy, and, ultimately, more disposable which is a shame.

This chapbook is a first edition in hand-sewn wrappers with illustrations by Barry Moser.

It was published in 1981 by Tamarack Editions and limited to an edition of 300 copies. Another 36 copies were bound in cloth.

Consciousness and Sense: Chris Hutchinson and Sue Sinclair

2010-02-28T10:46:00.000-08:00

At the very heart of what I love about poetry is its attempts to capture in a truly authentic way how we make sense of our lives. Primarily as I see it, this involves issues of identity, experience, and consciousness with our imaginations being the fulcrum the rest of these mental processes rest on in a good poem.

For me, I like poems that mediate between one’s empirical experience of what is real and one’s awareness of a self at one remove, a self that processes all thoughts and emotions through the imagination. Whether you view the imagination as the mind’s holy ghost, a faint whisper of word and image, or more cynically, as cognitive feedback produced in the brain due to overloaded sensory equipment, the imagination teaches us how to paradoxically disassociate from ourselves, while also generating new associations from this same sense of detachment which overall give us a stronger feeling of connection to the world.

It is in its special role as an intermediary between our interior selves and the larger chaos of modern life that poetry, or at least good poetry governed by the imagination, most nobly mirrors and mimics how consciousness works.

These themes I explored a little in my last book so it should be no surprise why I am drawn to poets and poems that delve into similar terrain. Two terrific Canadian poets who play in the metaphysical realm and practical philosophy are Sue Sinclair in Breaker and Chris Hutchinson in Other People’s Lives both by Brick books.

In an interview he did recently with Alessandro Porco for Open Book Toronto, Hutchinson wrote that, “perhaps this is the crux of the collection: how language, which might be the closest thing we have to telepathy, haunts the no-man’s land between interiority and exteriority, between self and other. Although the book is ostensibly ‘about’ a whole host of things: sidewalks; cockroaches; cities; Aeolian harps — I think it’s really about this liminal space where the weird abundance of the imagination pushes out into, or even back against (as W. Stevens suggests) reality (if such a thing exists).”

What Hutchinson is talking about in terms of language and imagination above is very much what C.K. Williams addresses in his book Poetry and Consciousness when he says, “poetry moves through our perceptions and our mind to a place beyond either, a place which participates concretely in both consciousness and sense”(133). A good poem of Hutchinson’s that illustrates the relationship between consciousness and sense is his sonnet “Homeless” from the first section of his book:

Homeless

You weren’t here, the morning light
inside the mist-hazed park where mushrooms
flared like fleshy bells. I almost believed
my mind had grown tendrils and bloomed.

Old women disguised as crows stuttered past,
jigging upon the sleeping city’s hip bone,
flirting between the horizon and beer cans
coated with the aspic glow of moonstones.

Drunk, you slept here once, then withdrew—
your mind a sticky as a wound, reopening.
Poor pupil of homelessness, you never knew
delirium could become your dwelling—

Yes, a place of twisted hues, of doubled sight,
But a house just the same, built of light.

After reading this poem, I thought of Tu Fu and what he said about “a blood-stained spirit has no home”. Like much Chinese poetry, Hutchinson introduces the sorrow that comes with human existence amidst nature’s indifference in the first stanza when he writes “You weren’t here, the morning light / inside the misty hazed park where mushrooms / flared like fleshy bells.” The use of the second person also helps to create this sense of distance and isolation. But then in the second stanza , what saves the narrator from despair is the influence of the imagination bumping up against nature’s indifference, generating its own images, like old women “disguised as crows” and beer cans that take on “the aspic glow of moonstones.”

The third stanza reinforces that the poem is a reflection on intoxication, on the loss of ego and the feelings of heightened consciousness that attend it; however, at the time, the poet did not recognize his experience as anything transcendent for afterwards his mind was “sticky as a wound, reopening” and says “Poor pupil of homelessness, you never knew / delirium could become your dwelling—“. It is only in retrospect the relationship between consciousness and sense is elevated for in the final couplet the poet writes “Yes, a place of twisted hues, of doubled sight / but a house just the same, built of light.”

Consciousness and sense are also exalted presences in Breaker by Sue Sinclair as are language and the imagination. How Sinclair differs from Hutchinson is that she takes a less narrative and more lyrical approach, one that more directly tries to apprehend the transcendent amid the ordinary through the intensity of her gaze. Take, for instance, her poem “Joy” which figures in the third section of her new collection:

Joy

Everything leafs out as though in praise.
Beaky water lilies rise from the pond’s stirred muck.
The imagination calls to the world, its inflected echo
coming back to us as light rippling on the back of the real.
Who can say what goes on in the darkened room
from which these idle green days emerge; for all we know
being here might be another kind of absence, a hole
through which our lives come pouring as we fade slowly
in another world. But this world is the one we know,
the one we hold onto, filling ourselves with its visible truths.
We work through the hours, always too few,
packing them into our greedy bodies. Yet we fall prey
to the occasional twinge, hear faintly at our backs
a thrumming, like the bowstring of a shot arrow.
And that sound is what clinches it, our love of this place,
its thin blood penetrating to our very quick.

In this poem, Sinclair sublimates the concerns of the self and looks wholly on the world as it “leafs out in praise” for if this is all we have beyond ourselves, it is only through a concentrated engagement with the world that we are rescued from the despair of human existence, or quoting Tu fu again, the fate of the ‘homeless ghost.’ As Sinclair tells us, it is the imagination that “calls out to the world, its inflected echo / coming back to us as light rippling on the back of the real”. Again it is our imaginations, generating images and associations on the flip-side of our sense, that give us a feeling of greater intimacy and connection with the world, and thus greater ease with ourselves.

Nevertheless, even though our imaginations provide us with a strong sense of connection to a world “we hold onto, filling ourselves with its visible truths”, Sinclair reminds us that our imaginations are not enough to make us forget what awaits us for we still “fall prey/ to the occasional twinge, hear faintly at our backs a thrumming, like the bowstring of a shot arrow.” And yet, for Sinclair, it is this sense of our mortality that “clinches it, our love of this place” and pushes us to seek greater connections to a world beyond ourselves through our imaginations.

There is much more to both of these Canadian poets than I have time to share with you. If you liked these poems, I urge you to go pick up Chris Hutchinson’s Other People’s Lives and Sue Sinclair’s Breaker, both by Brick books.

Poetry: An Education (Part Three)

2010-02-15T07:48:00.000-08:00

Great teachers are not necessarily systemic thinkers.
The very act of teaching is against this.
-Theodore Roethke

What I learned as a student I have learned also as a teacher, and the most important lessons have been an acceptance of one’s failures and a willingness to take risks.

Philip Levine in my last post suggested teachers do very little but that is not always true. There are teachers who do make a difference. Perhaps it is not every day or even every term as Hollywood movies would lead us to believe but they are there. Teachers who cast a wide net over the inherited traditions of our modern poetry and weave a series of connections back and forth between poems so as to guide their students to the writers that are right for them. Teachers who are both selfless and unapologetic about challenging their students’ thoughts on what constitutes good poetic practice, and who push their students past their points of resistance to cut a line or a stanza out of a poem to see the actual being of a poem take shape.

It is my belief creative writing teachers can cultivate within their classrooms a sense of community, collegiality and criterions of excellence.

Such a teacher was Theodore Roethke who was by all accounts a brilliant teacher who taught several students — Carolyn Kizer, Richard Hugo, James Wright, Jack Gilbert, Tess Gallagher, and David Wagoner – who went on to have notable careers as poets. Carolyn Kizer’s foreword to Roethke’s book On Poetry & Craft conveys both Roethke’s famous passion for teaching and the rigorous demands he would make on his students:

“Roethke was an extraordinarily rigorous critic, and if you couldn’t take it, you didn’t learn much. For example, he said the real test was that every line of a poem should be a poem. That’s about as tough as you can get. I apply that to my own work and sometimes just throw up my hands. But I find it’s extremely useful in getting rid of connectives, passive constructions, surplus adjectives, and words that don’t have any particular energy in them.” (5)

And later from the same essay:

“One of Ted’s greatest attributes as a teacher is that none of us who studied with him write at all like Roethke. If Ted caught any of us imitating him we never did it again. He would tease us mercilessly.” (9)

Even Philip Levine who says teachers are not as important as the mix of students in a writing program left an impression upon his students, especially Larry Levis who entered his classroom at eighteen and went on to become a lifelong friend. Levis in his homage to his teacher and friend, “On Philip Levine” found in his prose collection The Gazer Within, speaks about what made Levine such a talented teacher of creative writing:

“What still strikes me as amazing, and right, and sane, was his capacity to share all that energy, that fire, with those around him: students and poets and friends. The only discernible principle I gathered from this kind of generosity seems to be this: to try to conserve one’s energy for some later use, to try to teach as if one isn’t quite there and has more important things to do, is a way to lose that energy completely, a way, quite simply, of betraying oneself. Levine was always totally there, in the poems and right there in front of me before the green sea of the blackboard.” (28)

Whenever I feel like I’m sinking in the muck and dreck of marking, paperwork and bureaucracy that attends all teachers at certain times of the year, this is the passage that returns to me, again and again, seemingly of its own volition, as if to remind me teachers do make a difference in the lives of their students.

Poetry: An Education (Part Two)

2010-02-06T08:33:00.000-08:00

Creative writing programs are much maligned as writer-processing factories. Young talented people go in the front doors and come out two years later as Stepford automatons writing prepackaged stories and poems. Such programs breed art for easy consumption and short attention spans. Writing with a short shelf life. Or so the conventional wisdom goes.

I’m not sure why everyone beats up on creative writing MFA programs as they do. I understand the arguments against them but at a time when undergraduate students are surging into business programs at universities and colleges at record rates instead of taking a liberal arts education, maybe creative writing programs are not such a bad thing. Instead of breeding an atmosphere of success, I think they teach students about failure, something they desperately need in this era of hovering parents and children exiting high-school with a worrying sense of entitlement.

Certainly, my own experience with creative writing at the university level taught me about failure. I took a few undergraduate courses in university with a few kind professors who didn’t really teach me anything about how to write, and after reading poems in local bars at open mic nights for a few years and getting a few poems published in small publications, I moved to Montreal and did a Masters degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University.

It was there that I learned to accept my short-comings as a writer. I had several professors with a real generosity of spirit, people like Robert Allen and Gary Geddes, but who also possessed the pluck to tell me when I was writing complete shit. I remember calling up Gary Geddes who was my thesis advisor at the time, and telling him I had three new poems to show him, and he responded, “Great! Meet me at my office at 10 am and I’ll pull out my chain-saw”. Hardly, a warm fuzzy.

If my professors were being cruel to be kind, my fellow students could be equally discriminating. There were real standards demanded in the workshops I took and my classmates were quick to point out any faults in poems I submitted for workshopping. I think we learned just as much from each other sitting around a table drinking pints at the Stanley Pub talking about the poets we were reading, inside and outside of class, as we did from any of our professors. I left that program three years later with a Master’s degree, a failed manuscript under my left arm, and an implacable understanding of what good writing demands of a person.

Blood, sweat, tears. And, yes, a pound of flesh.

The American poet Philip Levine, a gifted creative writing teacher himself, has given his thoughts on post secondary creative writing programs in his prose collection So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews. He suggests it is the students themselves, and their capacity for failure, and not the teachers at all, which are necessary for a creative writing program to work:

“I’ve taught at a great many schools, taught poetry writing now for twenty-five years at Fresno State, Brown, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Vassar, UC Berkeley, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Tufts, and from all that experience I’ve learned something remarkable. The best student poets I’ve encountered were not at Tufts or Princeton or Brown; they were at Fresno State and UAB, the two lousiest schools I’ve taught at. The worst poetry writing students were at Princeton….. ……We know that everyone who tries to write poems fail at first: Keats failed, Rilke failed, Hart Crane failed, why aren’t you going to fail? My students at FSU would never weep in class. They might say, ‘Fuck you, Levine,’ but never would they weep. Why so many wonderful poets from this funny little school in central California, all of whom came as local youngsters to college, not a single one recruited—Larry Levis, Lawson Inada, Gary Soto, Roberta Spear, David St. John, Luis Omar Salinas, Greg Pape, Glover Davis, Sherley Williams, Herb Scott, Kathy Fagan, Leonard Adame, Ernesto Trejo, Jon Veinberg, Robert Vasquez, and more I’m forgetting. It’s not because of the teacher. We know how little a teacher can do. These poets could accept their failures as poets, and as people, learn from them, and go on.” (44)

I understand all of the arguments against creative writing programs, that they abase poetry by reducing it to classroom chit-chat and endless questions of technique, that they bury the sublime under an avalanche of exercises, but they also teach a fundamental truth that with writing comes failure. And if one leaves a creative writing progam and does not publish a book, nor develops a more durable writing style beyond what they were taught at school, that is hardly the fault of the creative writing program. That fault lies with the individual alone.

W.S. Merwin’s “River Sound Remembered”

2010-01-27T16:07:00.000-08:00

“Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that. They say this is. In the nineteenth century one would have said that what compelled us about them was a sense of the eternal. And it is something like that, some feeling in the arrest of the image that what perishes and what lasts forever have been brought into conjunction, and accompanying that sensation is a feeling of release from the self. “(275)

This passage from an essay called Images by Robert Hass is perhaps a strange way to introduce “River Sound Remembered” by W.S. Merwin, a poem I have read countless times but on the other hand it localizes what has always drawn me to poems which place at their center robust, transformative, world-shaking imagery. By this, I mean images connecting the physical to the metaphysical in a poem. I think this is what Hass suggests by the use of the word ‘eternal’ in the above excerpt and certainly I take this relationship, that strange affinity between imagery’s terra firma and the quiddity of poetic inspiration, to be the topic of Merwin’s poem:

River Sound Remembered

That day the huge water drowned all voices until
It seemed a kind of silence unbroken
By anything: a time unto itself and still;

So that when I turned away from its roaring, down
The path over the gully, and there were
Dogs barking as always at the edge of town,

Car horns and the cries of children coming
As though for the first time through the fading light
Of the winter dusk, my ears still sang

Like shells with the swinging current, and
Its flood echoing in me held for long
About me the same silence, by whose sound

I could hear only the quiet under the day
With the land noises floating there far-off and still;
So that even in my mind now turning away

From having listened absently but for so long
It will be the seethe and drag of the river
That I will hear longer than any mortal song.

What is so interesting about the way this poem begins is Merwin never describes the river itself. It is almost entirely absent and yet it clearly is the dominant image. The poem starts with the roar of the white water heard, at first, close by, and then later from a distance, until it becomes a white noise in the background of the poet’s consciousness:

That day the huge water drowned all voices until
It seemed a kind of silence unbroken
By anything: a time unto itself and still;

This last line sets the sound of the river apart from our every day temporal experience. It is part of the metaphysical realm, “a time unto itself and still”, which flows beneath the rest of the lines to follow, making the poem an engrossing meditation on the nature of human consciousness, imagination, and poetic inspiration.

The next few stanzas develop these themes further through Merwin’s desolate images of a human landscape empty of significance:

So that when I turned away from its roaring, down
The path over the gully, and there were
Dogs barking as always at the edge of town,

Car horns and the cries of children coming
As though for the first time through the fading light
Of the winter dusk, my ears still sang

Like shells with the swinging current, and
Its flood echoing in me held for long
About me the same silence, by whose sound

I could hear only the quiet under the day

Here, ironically, it is the poet’s imagination, specifically his memory of the river’s rushing, which is more real and vital to him than the world he sees and experiences. That imagined sound of the river, its metaphysical pull, is felt beneath the images of “dogs barking as always at the edge of town,” and "the cries of children coming as though for the first time through the fading light”.

Merwin further develops the river’s babel, its siren-like undertow of significance, through his extraordinary attention to sound and rhythm in the poem. The quiet recurrence of vowel sounds, especially all those long O sounds strung together throughout the poem and his quick shifting between assonance and consonance, generates the slow churning eddies of the poet’s mind wrestling with mystery, and by mystery, I do not mean mumbo-jumbo.

I take mystery to mean what the poet does not know, and here specifically, he asks what special power does the sound of the river have for him? The answer he finds is that it becomes a metaphor for the enigma of poetic inspiration.

It represents poetry’s percolating significance and the power that inheres in words themselves. This meaning can be gathered in the concluding lines of the poem:

So that even in my mind now turning away

From having listened absently but for so long
It will be the seethe and drag of the river
That I will hear longer than any mortal song.

That inner persistence represented by “the seethe and drag of the river” which the poet says “I will hear longer than any mortal song” is what calls to mind the use of the word eternal by Hass earlier. Here, the poet’s apprehension of the river’s sound, its presence within his imagination, is given a special place of importance over his immediate experience of the world. It is the imagined river's deep rumble that soothes and comforts the poet against what Wallace Stevens has called “the pressure of reality”.

If you like W.S. Merwin’s poem “River Sound Remembered”, you can enjoy it for yourself in his New and Selected poems Migration published by Copper Canyon Press.

Poetry: An Education (Part One)

2010-01-26T16:28:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago Jake Mooney hosted a terrific discussion on his blog Vox Populism about how best to teach poetry and when should it be introduced into a student’s education. As I had just arrived home from a vacation and had to prepare lessons for three classes, I withheld my thoughts on the matter but I thought I would share them now for I have a lot to say about the teaching of poetry, and of creative writing in general.

First of all, I am high-school English teacher which is a noble profession increasingly hampered by government PR campaigns disguised as education initiatives, moldering textbooks, dwindling photocopy budgets, administrations whose hands are tied by financial statements and board office directives; student IEPs, class medians, parasitic AP courses from the States, and a general lack of consensus between teachers when there is finally some money to make new changes. All of these factors place pressure on individual teachers and English departments to rubber stamp each student’s success and get them through that tattered copy of Lord of the Flies one more time.

Why do many English teachers in high school not take the time to teach their students poetry? Honestly, it is most often because their plate is already full.

This is not to say some teachers don’t go rogue and clear up some space for poetry in their classroom schedules. They do. I am one of them. However, you still have to teach the kids a full slate of prose, short fiction, novels and drama, doing the same major assignments the other sections of the course are doing, so usually a poetry unit falls in the get-to-know-your-teacher first two weeks of a class or in the dead-zone leading up to exams.

With younger grades, I tend to introduce poetry in two ways: through fun activities like relay ghazal-writing contests, Sound Poetry Olympics, group chapbooks, etc. and through some minor analysis of Canadian poetry that emphasizes sound, structure, imagery, and meaning.

With my senior grades, I have them write poetry research essays or I bring in poets that I know like Adam Getty and Paul Vermeersch who have always been a tremendous success. Years ago when Paul still smoked, I remember a few students gleefully running into my classroom after encountering him in the smoke-pit. They asked, are you a teacher? Taking a drag off his cigarette, and not looking at them, Paul said no. They asked, are you a narc? A mature student or something? Still not looking at them, Paul answered no. They asked him who was he? What was he doing there? Crushing his smoke and finally turning to look at them, Paul said he was a poet and then walked into the building. For the next seventy-five minutes, my students sat glued to their chairs listening to Paul read his combustible poems and, more importantly, they loved it! Such moments can do more to inspire a lifelong love of poetry than any teacher.

Lastly, if I have done my job properly, I have students sign up for the Writer’s Craft course I teach which is only for grade 12 students. Taking Writer’s Craft from “Banks” as the students call me has become a badge of honour for students exiting high school and majoring in English at university. In this course, students complete a short story, a one act play, a children’s book, a group school newspaper with a one week turnaround, a magazine article, a Canadian poetry presentation, a five poem chapbook (complete with a lesson on pamphlet stitch hand-binding), a contemporary fiction author study (minimum two novels), as well as a final writing project of their own design worth 20% of their final mark.

When I teach the poetry unit in Writer’s craft, any student who can write me a glosa gets a 6% bump to their overall mark for his or her poetry chapbook. When students hear the “glosa challenge” as it has been dubbed, they begin to smile, extra marks dancing in their eyes, and ask me why. I tell them writing a glosa will teach them more about writing poetry in three weeks than two years of undergrad creative writing workshops. When they come back with their glosas completed, most of the poems excellent, they look at me with a haunted knowing look that says 6% is nowhere near enough of a mark boost or a pay off for the amount of time, thought and effort expended while writing their poems. Well, that is the lesson kids.

I have been teaching poetry and creative writing to kids for ten years now and I’ve been lucky enough to teach many talented students who have gone on to university to become aspiring editors, poets, journalists and writers. My approach has always been the same: make it fun but make it also writing intensive. That way kids hopefully come out of high school with a love of literature but also a grounded understanding that there are no short cuts to good writing. It takes a lifetime of work.

(Part Two on University Creative Writing Programs coming soon!)

What Do You Do With Such People?

2010-01-24T16:50:00.000-08:00

I came across an essay by Joyce Carol Oates on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence called “Candid Revelations: The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence” which was originally published in the first issue of APR in 1972 but republished in the same publication in January/February 2008. Given the ongoing nature of discussions surrounding poetry reviewing on this blog and elsewhere, I thought I would share an excerpt of what Oates has to say about formalist critics who approached Lawrence’s poetry solely through their own blinkered expectations of what poetry must be:

But critics, especially “New Critics” and “Formalist Critics” have not understood this: that there are many kinds of art, that there may be a dozen, a hundred ways of writing, and that no single way is perfect. Lawrence was exasperated by, but not deeply influenced by the stupidity of his critics; but it may be harder for us, reading an essay like R.P Blackmur’s “Lawrence and Expressive Form” (in Language as Gesture, 1954), to restrain our impatience. Blackmur states that Lawrence is guilty of writing “fragmentary biography” instead of “poetry.” It would have been unthinkable to imagine that the two are not separate….? need not be separate….? And what does “poetry,” that elusive term, somehow punitive term, mean to Blackmur? If we read farther we see that his definition of ‘poetry’ is simply his expectation of what poetry must be, based on the poets he has evidently read, and judged worthy of the title of “poet.” One needs the “structures of art,” which are put there by something Blackmur calls a “rational imagination.” All this suggests that the critic is in control of what is rational, and if one investigates far enough he learns that this critic is unhappy because Lawrence the “craftsman” did not often enough silence Lawrence the demon of “personal outburst.” Lawrence leaves us, therefore, only with “The ruins of great intentions.” I mention all this because it is symptomatic of academic criticism at its most sinister, since it assumptions are so hidden that one can hardly discover them. But when you do discover them, you are sickened: for you see that the critic is punishing the poet for not being a form of the critic himself, a kind of analogue to his ego. How insane! But it is an insanity that passes for rational discourse, “objective criticism”: a colleague of mine one stated that Moby Dick is a “failure” because it does not “live up to” the form of the “novel.” What do you do with such people?

From My Bookshelf

2010-01-22T16:08:00.000-08:00

My copy of the January/February issue of American Poetry Review arrived in my mailbox yesterday and with it, eight new poems by Hayden Carruth to my delight. The first poem "In Memoriam" grapples with a friend's death in 2005 and so thoroughly captures the seizures of fear and loss people feel when they lose someone so necessary to how they conceive of the world that these same lines might have applied to anyone in the poetry community who loved Hayden Carruth's writing and was surprised to hear of his passing last year:

He died. I saw his obit in the Times, and I felt
A sort of deflating gasp in my lungs, and I knew
As I had not before how lonely this life has
Become and is becoming. Tobias is gone,
And the hurricanes rage. Please, somebody. Please.

Accompanying the poems in the issue is an essay about Carruth's poetry entitled "One of Us: The Poetry of Hayden Carruth" by Ted Solotaroff which is also well worth the price of the magazine. I have been a huge fan of Hayden Carruth for the last half dozen years and have gathered a reasonable miscellany of his broadsides and poetry collections in that time. Below is a picture of his attractively done volume The Oldest Killed Lake In North America published in 1985 by Salt-Works.

This first edition is limited to 400 copies handset in Baskerville & Garamond types, treadle-printed on classic laid text, hand-sewn in classic wrappers with Grandee endsheets. Titles of poems appear in blue.

Computer Bytes The Dust

2010-01-16T06:35:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone. My Mac mini quit this week which is why I have not posted anything new. The hard-drive had a colossal failure. All my music, wedding photos, and new manuscript are gone. Fortunately, I have most everything backed-up. I've really only lost a couple of new poems that are still just in junk drafts stages which is perhaps just as well. Anyhoo, I have a new computer winging its way here from the Apple manufactory and should arrive sometime Monday afternoon. Once I am up and running again, you can expect new posts on Sue Sinclair, Chris Hutchinson, W.S. Merwin, Linda Gregg, Jim Harrison and many, many more.

The Blogosphere versus Print Magazines

2010-01-10T18:16:00.000-08:00

I use to think of poetry blogs as a bunch of little fiefdoms from which poets proclaimed to the world their own genius or toadstools for the toadies among us to cozy up to writers or editors they thought might help further their own careers. I admit these preconceived notions are the main reasons why it took me so many years to start blogging in the first place. However, more and more, I am seeing the poetry blog, at least here in Canada, as the true marketplace of ideas. No more the spotty-faced teenage brat, the blogosphere is finally growing up.

More than just a place to staple-gun every positive review, pat on the back or passing remark someone makes about one’s poems, poetry blogs are eliciting real discussion amongst poets in a way that I have never seen before and, more importantly, I am noticing actual changes, shifts in our thinking about poetry. The internet is the great equalizer and no one voice, or group of voices, can dominate. Everyone is allowed to have their say, no matter how many choruses of mook pedants try to shout one down. You need only look at the recent hullabaloo about reviewing in Canada. Others and I have begun to raise our voices calling for a reexamination of what constitutes poetry reviewery in this country, something that is long overdue.

For instance, I wrote a piece about the dangers of aesthetic tribalism attaching itself to critical circles, for it often leads to the positing of one aesthetic stance over another under the guise of critical stewardship when really it is nothing more than personal bias or transparent agenda-setting, and was promptly denounced a critical relativist by those who have a stake in maintaining the status quo.

However, there have been many positive offshoots and ripple effects that have sprung up from these hot-topic discussions and lines drawn in the sand, the most notable being Sina Queyras’s sweeping compendium of reviewers on reviewing over on her own blog Lemon Hound which is currently garnering widespread praise here in Canada and the United States.

Where before many of my friends looked southward to U.S. publications for their poetry criticism because the readership in Canada was too small, and much of what passed itself off as “no-bullshit-hard-nosed criticism” was more often tied to a few small presses and power politics, there is now an optimistic feeling that things are finally changing for the better.

New voices are entering into the mix via the blogosphere, and hopefully many more voices are still to arrive in the coming year.

Indeed, it is my belief that poetry blogs have the advantage over print magazines in their ability to influence how we think and talk about poetry. More than just a series of inter-connected “dead letter offices” full of hyper-links, the real benefit of the poetry blogosphere is bloggers creating their own content and readers sharing their feedback. Sure there are still the self-aggrandizing “me” blogs and shameless attack blogs, but substantial poetry blogs that offer a diverse array of literary criticism, interviews, essays and social commentary are on the rise. What is more they are starting to determine what poets are talking about here in Canada.

So what are the print magazines to do? How can they keep up with the rapid exchange of ideas and commentaries offered by poetry blogs if they only publish three or four issues a year? Twice a year? I daresay it is a losing battle for them as poetry blogs are community-building in a way print magazines can only dream of being.

I suppose print magazines do not have to worry themselves too much just yet, for many still see blogs as virtual soapboxes, but with the rise of online poetry magazines such as Northern Poetry Review and Encore Literary Magazine, they might have some real cause for concern in the future. I can say unequivocally I still love print magazines and I am not willing to give up on them just yet. I subscribe to many both in Canada and the United States. The top shelf in my office is crammed to overflowing with dog-eared literary journals, their pages marked for reference or further reading.

However, I am not interested either in supporting literary magazines that purport to be national in character but are run more like club-houses or condescend to a readership which is by and large other poets. I can only imagine the days of such magazines are numbered.

Jason Shinder's "Eternity"

2010-01-04T19:02:00.000-08:00

Well, I am back from the holidays and I having been reading Jason Shinder’s poems from his book Stupid Hope with much enthusiasm these last few days. Like many, I have a fondness for clever, audacious imagery, the kind of images that shake up your world and leave their impression so thoroughly upon your imagination that you bear their watermark in your memory. Notice, for instance, the dazzling opening lines of Shinder’s poem “The Alder Tree”:

When I think of how my mother shut down—

like the water fountain in the town square when the cold
months come—time is the nervous eye of the rat in a jar

in the laboratory of the mad scientist who everyone

goes out of their way to avoid.

How anyone can make such disparate images adhere to one another is beyond me but Shinder manages this feat with extreme delicacy in this collection of poems which was published post-humously after Jason Shinder passed away earlier last year.

The afterword written by the book’s editors – Sophie Cabot Black, Lucie Brock-Broido, Tony Hoagland and Marie Howe — explains Shinder obsessively revised and reworked his poems and the results are often tender, ironic, wistful and revelatory.

As I am a teacher by profession, I often begin teaching poetry to my students with a definition coined by the poet and essayist Stephen Dobyns who said in the preface of his book Best Words, Best Order that “a poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms”.

Up until a few months ago, I had not an accompanying poem I felt fully illustrated or illuminated the truth of Dobyn’s statement to my satisfaction. That is, until I read Jason Shinder’s poem “Eternity”.

Eternity

A poem written three thousand years ago

about a man who walks among horses
grazing on a hill under the small stars

comes to life on a page in a book

and the woman reading the poem,
in the silence between the words,

in her kitchen, filled with a gold, metallic light

finds the experience of living in that moment
so clearly described as to make her feel finally known

by someone—and every time the poem is read,

no matter her situation or her age,
this is more or less what happens.

I find this a wonderfully adept little narrative poem and, as such, I am not going to say anything else about it as I think it speaks for itself. As the poet and critic Mark Jarman has stated so eloquently in his essay “Narrative Beauty”, “If there is a story to be told in a poem, narrative is the river it rides on. As lyric beauty is in the singing, narrative beauty is in the telling.” (174)

I urge you to go out and buy a copy of Jason Shinder’s Stupid Hope for yourself as it deserves many readers and many readings.

Happy Holidays

2009-12-23T14:17:00.000-08:00

I am taking the next two weeks off from blogging here at Table Music. I would like to thank everyone who has visited this site and participated in its discussions. My initial reluctance to blog was entirely unfounded as I have enjoyed many lucid conversations, both public and private, with new friends from across Canada and from south of the border.

In the spirit of the holidays, here is a poem of mine called "Darkening" from my unpublished manuscript Winter Cranes. It was included on the long list by A.F. Moritz for the anthology The Best Canadian Poetry 2009 after also being picked as an editor’s choice poem by Peter Richardson in Arc Magazine’s 2008 Poem of the Year Contest. I hope you enjoy it and I will see everyone in the new year.

Darkening

The simple joy of riding with good friends
in a car coming back from a barn dance
on the edge of a great lake in mid-March,
driving through falling snow on blizzarding
country roads, past farms, silos, cattle barns
recessed in deep shadows as Stand By Me
spills from the radio. But on that night,
our car hit black ice, and skittered across
the road’s slick surface like a water-bug
twenty odd yards, before coming to rest
in a snow-bank beside an old farmhouse.
A man appeared out of the dark, walking
down his laneway. He asked if anyone
was hurt. Were we okay? Seeing the car
was undamaged, he said he could tow it
out with an old tractor. I remember that
night walking up the road, a hundred yards
or more, in the moonless dark, without so
much as a flare or a flashlight to wave down
passing cars, wondering why my friends
and I had survived the crash. Wondering
why I was not dead. I can still see myself
standing impatiently, wind barrelling
across fields, over snow-fences, the wind
licking raw the flesh beneath my jacket
trying to hail the drivers of three cars
not bothering to stop, not quite certain
whether they saw a figure half-glimpsed
in the helixing snow at that late hour,
a messenger risen up from the ground,
to warn them of some impending hazard
until too late they found an old tractor
upon the road. And what I remember
of that night will not call back anyone
from the past. Not the vehicles swerving
to carve a wide groove in a winter field
crusted with thin ice and eddying snow.
Not the old man on the tractor cursing,
his breath rising, a white scar, mixing in
plumes of diesel smoke in the chilly air.
Not even my younger self whom I see
standing roadside like an apparition
as he turns his body to stare back down
the dark hallway of a moment ago.

By Chris Banks

Poets of the Year

2009-12-22T19:08:00.000-08:00

Last week, the American poet Edward Byrne, whose excellent blog One Poet’s Notes was the inspiration for my own, chose W.S. Merwin as his Poet of the Year. For over fifty years now, W.S. Merwin has published nearly two dozen collections of poetry and twenty books of translation. His latest book The Shadow of Sirius published by the remarkable Copper Canyon Press won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

If I were to choose a Canadian poet worthy of the distinction Poet of the Year, I would have to say A.F. Moritz would be my choice. Having written sixteen volumes of poetry, including The Sentinel which won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize, Al is one of the most generous poets you are likely to find in Canada. His considerable knowledge of all facets of contemporary poetry makes him a gifted teacher and a demanding poet to read.

In addition, Moritz was at the editorial helm of The Best Canadian Poetry 2009 published by Tightrope Books. His essay prefacing this new anthology is meticulously conceived and is a pleasure beyond the fifty worthy poems he chose to include within it.

When I spoke to Al back in October, he told me he had been traveling almost every weekend to some poetry event or other, both in Canada and abroad, since winning the Griffin prize back in the spring.

Honestly, I cannot think of a better ambassador of Canadian poetry for 2009.

Poetry and Intention

2009-12-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

Last month, I wrote a piece about aesthetic tribalism in Canada as I see it, and how such a mentality is actually dangerous when introduced into our poetry criticism, for if we are to expect other nations to take an interest in the poetry produced in Canada, the aesthetic stances of our nation’s critics need to be pushed aside and a more objective approach that takes into consideration a poet’s intentions needs to be adopted.

To my mind, we have far too many critics dismissing books under review based not on the poetry’s substance but on the poet’s style.

Zachariah Wells, a critic who puts the Neo in New Formalism, and several of his more ardent supporters followed hard on that initial post of mine with a willful misreading of the word “intention” suggesting I wanted critics to somehow divine a poet’s thoughts which they see as being divorced from the actual poetry.

To help him and others who apparently think intention and objectivity are mutually exclusive terms that cannot be applied to the analysis of poetry, here is a thoughtful piece aptly entitled “Poetry and Intention” by the American poet Mary Kinzie excerpted from her book A Poet’s Guide To Poetry (an essential resource for any serious poet):

“When we appreciate style as the subtle medium of sense, we can see how the way works are written also discloses the meanings these works of art intend. Meaning in poetry is imbedded in the saying.

Such meaning in poetry does not just happen: It is the product of a trained writer’s strength, all of which in one way or another is formed and fueled by intention. In art, it is only by intending a saying, with all of its effects of meaning, that a work in words can become a coherent piece of literature. Similarly, it is only by imagining how artistic intention grows through the work that a reader can get inside it” (34).

Poetry criticism should not be about the imposing of one aesthetic style over another, or one reviewer’s attempts to franchise his own set of poetics across a nation as if it were just another fast-food commodity. This cheapens all poetry and creates an atmosphere where literary magazines in Canada begin acting as mouthpieces for a few small presses who in turn publish those poets affiliated with those same magazines creating one giant feedback loop. Their audiences are essentially themselves.

Our criticism should be larger than that. It should not be the shallow pool of tribal politics.

As Kinzie states, to think about the intentions of a poet is one of the most important tasks for the contemporary reader for it rejoins “meaning to its fashion of saying” (34) which, any way you slice it, is an integral part of writing criticism.

The Holiest of Holies

2009-12-15T17:07:00.000-08:00

Well, at least to me it is. This is a broadside of Philip Levine’s poem “What Work Is” by Clamp Down Press. It features an original wood engraving by the artist Michael McCurdy. This is most definitely the crown jewel of my broadside collection. I bought it last summer from Bert Babcock and it arrived safe and sound at my home in Waterloo, ON shortly thereafter. Both the artist and the poet have signed it. I am hoping to get it framed over the holidays.

(This is number 90 of an edition limited to 225 copies)

Envy Of Other People’s Poems

2009-12-13T15:56:00.000-08:00

As I said when I began this blog a few months ago, my purpose for starting it was to write about those poems by other poets that have always haunted me, that have wrestled with my own imagination, especially those with daemonic images I have carried with me for a long time out of their originating poems so I find I am never quite free of them.

Such poems are a “gift” as I talked about in my last post, but they can also be a burden if one finds himself lucky or unlucky enough to be a poet too, for there is always that spur of suggestion pricking the back of one’s intent, making it all too tempting to model one’s own poems on the inimitable, ineluctable qualities of another poet’s voice.

If one is serious about poetry, envy of other poets’ poems is unavoidable. This is how it should be.

However, if a poet merely apes or emulates another poet’s writing style and “clears [no] imaginative space” for themselves, that envy which sometimes leads to inspiration more often leads to modern derivatives. A culture of knockoffs. This is the premise of Harold Bloom's landmark work of poetry criticism The Anxiety of Influence.

I think part of the reason I have begun to talk candidly about other poet’s poems on this blog is to help me examine how much influence they may have had on my own writing. Certainly, one American poet whose poems have affected me abundantly is the poetry of Robert Hass, and one poem in particular from his latest collection Time And Materials has inspired this post. It is entitled, aptly enough, “Envy of Other People’s Poems”:

Envy of Other People's Poems

In one version of the legend the sirens couldn’t sing.
It was only a sailor’s story that they could.
So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed
By a music that he didn’t hear—plungings of sea,
Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds—
And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,
Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing
the awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn’t sing.

By Robert Hass

Not one to shy away from difficult subject matter, Hass goes right to the source and spring of all Western poetry: The Odyssey. But what makes Hass’s poem so enjoyable, quietly authentic and able to withstand the crushing weight of Homer’s legacy is the swerve he introduces into his poem through his creative misreading of the original source material.

In Hass’s version of the myth, the talismanic voices of the sirens are only a sailor’s story. It is the influence of other imaginations, and not the sirens themselves, which is the true agency of transformation in the poem. This is the harrowing music Odysseus must resist by lashing himself to his mast, and by extension, if we are to read anything into Hass’s choice of title, it is also the awful song modern poets must strain against in order to avoid having their poetic aspirations dashed upon the craggy rocks of an earlier poet’s genius.

If you are like me and find yourself a little jealous of Hass’s “Envy of Other People’s Poems”, pick up his latest collection Time and Materials published by Ecco.

Make Ready For Your Gifts

2009-12-06T16:22:00.000-08:00

Last week, I was struck by the fervent admiration of Jacob McArthur Mooney’s championing of Deanna Young’s book Drunkard’s Path published by Gaspereau press on his blog Vox Populism, especially his concluding sentence which compares Young’s book “like a gift to a friend, as secret and personal as handmade soap. You remember such a gift, you feel compelled to.”

I found this idea of particular interest because I was already planning to do a post about the “gift economy” of poetry as described by Robert Hass in the video below which has had me thinking for well over a year now and has inspired at least a few poems in my new manuscript.

More than just another incarnation of the media-fueled bromide “paying it forward”, which suggests by its own words an economic exchange, a tallying of obligations based on what a person receives from others, the gift economy of poetry Hass is talking about in the video suggests there is no counting. No tallying. Poets simply write because somewhere along the line they were “gifted” even if they do not remember the exact circumstances.

It is this idea that put me in the mind of Mooney’s post, but also of a poem by the American poet Gerald Stern called "The Red Coal" from his book of the same name (and which you can see and hear him read here). As the poem is rather long, written in iambic tercets, and as I wish to keep my blog within the boundaries of fair use, I will quote only excerpts from Stern’s poem starting with the first section:

The Red Coal

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember
what it was like in the spring of 1950
before the burning coal entered my life.

I study my red hand under the faucet, the left one
below the grease line consisting of four feminine angels
and one crooked broken masculine one

and the right one lying on top of the white porcelain
with skin wrinkled up like a chicken’s
beside the razor and the silver tap.

I didn’t live in Paris for nothing and walk
with Jack Gilbert down the wide sidewalks
thinking of Hart Crane and Apollinaire

and I didn’t save the picture of the two of us
moving through a crowd of stiff Frenchmen
and put it beside the one of Pound and Williams

unless I wanted to see what coals had done
to their lives too.

I think this first section of Stern’s poem is interesting for a few reasons. First, it invokes the growing burden of personal mortality as the poet examines his own hands in the kitchen and sees what both time and poetry—that catalyzing agent of change and knowledge represented by “the red coal” in the first stanza—have done to his life.

Secondly, the idea of poetry's gift economy is also woven into the poem’s dialectic here through Stern’s inclusion of Hart Crane and Apollinaire, Pound and Williams, who were gigantic figures in the younger poet’s imagination, and via their legacy the poet suggests “the burning coal entered my life”.

What is fascinating about this first section of the poem is that Stern acknowledges, yes, poetry is that rarest of gifts, as when he describes his lifelong friendship with Jack Gilbert, but he also seems to be asking himself whether he and Gilbert have been “gifted” in the sense Hass means it. Or is something else going on? He answers this question in the middle of the poem:

The coal has taken over, the red coal

is burning between us and we are at its mercy—
as if a power is finally dominating
the two of us; as if we’re huddled up

watching the black smoke and the ashes;
as if knowledge is what we needed and now
we have that knowledge. Now we have that knowledge.

In these lines, poetry is certainly a gift but it comes at the price of knowledge, and as our oldest surviving stories and myths can attest to, once knowledge is gained, we sometimes feel wretched for it can never be returned. In this sense, poetry or “the red coal” as Stern calls it, a clever reference to the classical Prometheus myth, is both a gift and a consequence. It is the language beneath language. What gives us a brief glimpse of the underlying pattern of our lives. It has the power to shape our experience providing us with exuberant joys but also well-deep sorrows for in the concluding lines of the poem Stern maintains it is the tears he is left with, most of all, as if this is what poetry had in mind all along:

what all along, the red coal had
in store for us as we moved softly,
either whistling or singing, either listening or reasoning,

on the grey sidewalks and the green ocean;
in the cars and the kitchens and the bookstores;
in the crowded restaurants, in the empty woods and libraries.

As Wendell Berry reminds us,"To lose the scar of knowledge is to renew the wound". This poem reminds us of that scar. If you like Gerald Stern’s poem "The Red Coal", you can find it in his book This Time: New and Selected Poems published by Norton.

Dave Okum's illustration of "Tafelmusik"

2009-12-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

My friend and colleague David Okum is one of my favorite people. He teaches high-school fine arts and media studies full-time while also managing to produce several graphic novels each year, most recently for Oxford University Press. But that is not all. Do you need a wall-sized oil painting of the Battle of the Planets characters to hang behind your sofa in your livingroom? A steam-punk laser gun with working laser? A flux capacitor with sound effects? If so, Dave is your man.

I swear he does not sleep. He is like a Terminator sent back from the future, not to take away mankind’s last hope, but to bring an appreciation of graphic design and comic book art to the huddled masses. He has also published several how-to draw comics books that have found readers across the globe. Anyways, his new year’s resolution last year was to produce a drawing a day on top of his other art commitments and recently he completed a really fine illustration of my poem “Tafelmusik” which appeared in my last book The Cold Panes of Surfaces. I love it and I thought I would share it with you. (Click on the image below to see the detail)

More River Rock Press Broadsides

2009-12-03T16:25:00.000-08:00

Here is the second broadside I designed and printed with my basement 6 x 10 Kelsey Excelsior last summer. The poem is called “Seeking Solace” by my wife Teresa Dunat-Banks and is from her award-winning chapbook Resident Alien published by Believe Your Own Press. This broadside turned out much nicer than my first one as it printed beautifully on the Canson Edition paper I purchased almost immediately with minimal trouble-shooting. I used the photopolymer plate-making services of Boxcar Press again to make the plate for this poem and was impressed how easy it was to register with my Boxcar Base that locks up easily in my Kelsey’s chase.

“Seeking Solace” A hand-printed broadside by Teresa Dunat-Banks (5 ¼ in. w by 10 in. h) typeset in Perpetua in a limited edition of 50 copies.

Open Season On The Real

2009-11-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

Tim Bowling is a Canadian poet with extravagant gifts of association, high-powered technical dexterity, and a rich effortless voice all his own which have served him well over the course of eight volumes of poetry. His poetry is both regional and international in scope for he is equally comfortable talking about fishing for salmon in the Fraser River or writing eloquently about Thomas Hardy’s personal life, or even elegizing a forgotten collector of books, Harry Elkins Widener, who died with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, a man now the subject of the title poem in Bowling’s latest collection The Book Collector.

In his poems, memory, loss, and celebration all share bunk-space together, but always he goes back to poems about the Fraser River in British Columbia which appears to be a particular source of inspiration for Bowling. Although some poetry critics have viewed this repetition of subject matter as stasis, this is an inadequate view of Bowling’s private obsession with the Fraser River for it acts as a personal symbol or triggering subject for him.

It represents the ethos of his poetry; one that makes all those other poems he writes on different subjects possible. It helps to trigger his need for words and to create his inner life as Richard Hugo once remarked about such recurrent images an individual poet uses in his essay “The Triggering Town”:

Your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words. When you are honest to your feelings, that triggering [subject] chooses you. Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life. The relation of you to your language gains power. The relation of you to the triggering subject weakens. (15)

If you follow Hugo’s way of thinking, it is precisely because of Bowling’s continued private love affair with the Fraser River that ironically enables him to leap off into unknown poetic territory and to write all those other poems of his on diverse subjects. Although I love many of Bowling’s poems about the Fraser River, I thought I would veer away from its importance in his oeuvre by looking at “The Childhood Wall”, one of Bowling’s new poems from his collection The Book Collector:

The Childhood Wall

A child climbs the childhood wall
unscrews the glass eyes from
the mounted pheasants and mallards
and plays a game on kitchen tiles
over which a mother’s shadow
seeps like a tide. The stakes
are the rest of his life. For now,
he’s winning. His wild eye gazes
through the manufacture of the world
and sees another world – a man
at a desk who’s trying to rise
above the burnishments
of hunted autumns. The man
wants to see death as it is
to a child – remote, intimate,
the firelight in the glass eye
of the flocks a vitality
from the heart of flight.
Child’s play. Man’s work.
The bird the gun is always raised at.
Among the approximating instruments –
open season on the real.

What first came to mind after I read this poem a few times was the contrast of different worlds— the boy playing with the glass eyes of the stuffed birds and the taxidermist trying to approximate life—that coexist simultaneously within its lines. It is this overlapping of worlds which put me in the mind of an essay by Stanley Plumly called “The Abrupt Edge” where Plumly talks about the phrase the abrupt edge taken from ornithology to mean the edge between two different types of vegetation so birds have the advantage of “living in two worlds at once”(6). Plumly extends the idea into the realm of poetry by suggesting the abrupt edge is a doorway between endless juxtapositions:

The edge is the concept of the doorway, shadow and light, inside and outside, room and warlde’s room, where the density and variety of the plants that love the sun and the open air yield to the darker, greener, cooler interior world, at the margin. It is no surprise, then, that the greatest number of species as well as individuals live at the edge and fly the pathways and corridors and trails at the joining of the juxtaposition. (6)

In Bowling’s poem, the juxtaposition of two different worlds, the real and the imagined, is what creates its strong tension and dramatic underpinnings. It begins with the boy playing with the glass eyes of the birds on the kitchen tiles while his mother’s presence looms large nearby:

A child climbs the childhood wall
unscrews the glass eyes from
the mounted pheasants and mallards
and plays a game on kitchen tiles
over which a mother’s shadow
seeps like a tide. The stakes
are the rest of his life. For now,
he’s winning.

The phrase “childhood wall” in the first line immediately signals to the reader this is a recollection as do the lines “The stakes / are the rest of his life. For now, / he’s winning.” The idea of the abrupt edge, however, enters the poem in the next section as one of the glass eyes becomes the doorway through which this child sees the man whose hands first mounted these birds as trophies:

His wild eye gazes
through the manufacture of the world
and sees another world – a man
at a desk who’s trying to rise
above the burnishments
of hunted autumns.

This is where the element of transcendence arises in the poem as the boy imagines this other man as an artist trying to recreate the warm-blooded vitality of life from the cold matériel, the inertness of death. For the man to accomplish this task, however, he must see death as the child does, which is to say he must not recognize it; for instead, he must be negative capable, to borrow a phrase from Keats, and imagine amongst the birds “a vitality from the heart of flight”:

The man
wants to see death as it is
to a child – remote, intimate,
the firelight in the glass eye
of the flocks a vitality
from the heart of flight.

The juxtapositions that make this poem so remarkable—the child’s innocence and wonder versus the man’s dedication to his art; the stuffed bird as a symbol of life versus the always raised gun as a symbol of death—are made acute in the poem’s conclusion.

Child’s play. Man’s work.
The bird the gun is always raised at.
Among the approximating instruments –
open season on the real.

It is these several juxtapositions of different worlds which creates what I see as the abrupt edge in this poem. Or to put it another way—it is by using that image of a boy playing with glass eyes on the kitchen floor and then having the boy imagine the hard determined work of the taxidermist elsewhere that Bowling shows poetry for what it is, an act of transcendence, by declaring “open season on the real” in its last line.

If you enjoyed the poem “The Childhood Wall”, please pick up Tim Bowling’s latest volume of poetry The Book Collector published by Nightwood Editions.

“A Science of Subjectivity” by Christian C. Thompson in the APR

2009-11-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

Christian C. Thompson has a fascinating essay called “A Science of Subjectivity” in the November/December 2009 issue of the American Poetry Review. Thompson begins his essay with the following paragraph:

The standards for measuring numerical precision are not the same as those for judging literary accuracy. In ‘The Serious Artist,’ Pound says, ‘You can be wholly precise in representing a vagueness.’ This paradox is an example of an area of experience in which only forms of non-numerical expression are capable of precision. It is an instance within the domain of emotion. The numerical scientific method can measure physiological responses to different kinds of emotion, yet it cannot evoke emotion itself. Only the artistic manipulation of non-numerical images, symbols, or sounds can reproduce emotions. The forms of communication within the arts are not purely mathematical yet that does not mean their methods are not scientific.

Has your curiosity been piqued? Why don’t you go out to a newsstand or your local bookstore and pick up a copy of the APR for yourself? I especially love the concluding sentence of Thompson's essay: “The poet is a scientist responsible for expressing truths the other sciences are not capable of revealing.”

The Fiddlehead No.451 Autumn 2009

2009-11-23T16:04:00.000-08:00

The autumn issue of The Fiddlehead, Atlantic Canada’s International Literary Journal, arrived at my door last week and I have to say I’ve been spending a lot of time with it ever since.

I think Ross Leckie, Jesse Ferguson, James Langer, and the whole staff are doing a terrific job. The American poet Norman Dubie, already a favorite poet of mine, has five poems inside.

Likewise, the Canadian poet Blaise Moritz, whose debut poetry collection Crown And Ribs I have enjoyed since it first came out two years ago, has two new sonnets in the magazine.

I also like poems in the issue by Shane Neilson, Hillel Schwartz and Paul Tyler, the latter two being new poets to me I had never heard of before. The international aspect of the magazine is also a big draw for me since I am already a wide reader of American poetry.

If you do not have a subscription already to The Fiddlehead, I would strongly urge you to get one based on this issue.

Brian Palmu Responds To Why He Snarks Books

2009-11-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

Brian Palmu, poetry reviewer for Canadian Notes & Queries (where Zachariah Wells resides as the poetry reviews editor), writes “what the hell is wrong with some malicious fun? Gawd!” in a defense of why he snarks books.

Louise Glück’s “In The Plaza”

2009-11-19T20:23:00.000-08:00

“It is so obviously the most miraculous thing to do” responds Louise Glück to the question of writing poetry in the short documentary film series The Poet’s View put together by the Academy of American Poets ( a great gift, by the way, for that "hard-to-buy-for-poet" in your family). I picked up her new book A Village Life published by FSG the other week and a few days later another copy of it arrived in the mail. It seems my good friend and fellow poet Paul Vermeersch had bought it too and finding it a “warm, open and generous collection”, he sent me a copy of it in the mail at his own expense. Good guy, that Paul.

In an earlier essay called "Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric" in Poets Teaching Poets: Self And The World, Joan Aleshire repudiates those who tagged Glück earlier in her career as “a confessional and idiosyncratic subjective poet” by explaining Glück “is interested in ‘gospel,’ not in ‘gossip,’ the experience itself, not the literal details.”

Aleshire goes on to talk about one of Glück’s more well known poems Mock Orange, calling it “an argument between two parts of the self: the one that needs to believe—in love, in union with another; and the one that knows such belief is self-deception, but will go on being deceived.”

This started me thinking about a new poem called “In The Plaza” from Glück’s new collection A Village Life. Here is the poem in its entirety:

In The Plaza

For two weeks he’s been watching the same girl,
someone he sees in the plaza. In her twenties maybe,
drinking coffee in the afternoon, the little dark head
bent over a magazine.
He watches from across the square, pretending
to be buying something, cigarettes, maybe a bouquet of flowers.

Because she doesn’t know it exists,
her power is very great now, fused to the needs of his imagination.
He is her prisoner. She says the words he gives her
in a voice he imagines, low-pitched and soft,
a voice from the south as the dark hair must be from the south.

Soon she will recognize him, then begin to expect him.
And perhaps then every day her hair will be freshly washed,
she will gaze outward across the plaza before looking down.
And after that they will become lovers.

But he hopes this will not happen immediately
since whatever power she exerts now over his body, over his emotions,
she will have no power once she commits herself—

she will withdraw into that private world of feeling
women enter when they love. And living there, she will become
like a person who casts no shadow, who is not present in the world;
in that sense, so little use to him
it hardly matters whether she lives or dies.

That same tension found in Mock Orange between sex and its resulting unfulfillment, the longing for union and the awareness that such union is never truly possible, situates itself again in this poem, but here Glück, in the role of omniscient narrator, conceives of a young couple in a plaza within her fictional village to play out this struggle between human desire and human folly.

In the poem’s beginning, the man is gazing at the young woman who is completely unaware of his interest in her which is the main source of her sexual allure and power over him:

Because she doesn’t know it exists,
her power is very great now, fused to the needs of his imagination.
He is her prisoner. She says the words he gives her
in a voice he imagines, low-pitched and soft,
a voice from the south as the dark hair must be from the south.

Glück lets readers know through her spare, almost clinical regard that the young woman will eventually “recognize him, then begin to expect him” and later “after that, they will become lovers”. This is when the young woman will lose her uniqueness, her great power over the man, for such a union, the consummation of desire, comes with a price—a lessening of one’s self:

she will have no power once she commits herself—

she will withdraw into that private world of feeling
women enter when they love. And living there, she will become
like a person who casts no shadow, who is not present in the world;

It is her separateness from the young man that he actually covets; her unconscious mind wholly unaware of his conscious assessment of her. It is the young woman’s essential mystery that he yearns to possess, that holds him prisoner, but once this is gone, shortly after he has possessed her, she becomes “so little use to him / it hardly matters whether she lives or dies.”

In Louise Glück’s poetry, sex and love are viewed as abandonment, the surrender of the self, but tempered by the knowledge that such surrender is always momentary, never lasting. In her essay, Joan Aleshire makes an interesting statement about the earlier poem Mock Orange but she could just as easily have been talking about this new poem: “The longing for union combined with the knowledge that union can’t be truly achieved makes the poem’s argument acutely complex and dramatic.”

If you liked this poem, treat yourself to Louise Glück’s new collection A Village Life.

William S. Burroughs, from "A Review of the Reviewers"

2009-11-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

"Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. (...) such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? (...) 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition."

- William S. Burroughs, "A Review of the Reviewers"

Reviews Editor of Quill & Quire Steven W. Beattie Responds To My Question of Book Reviewing Ethics But Not To The Question Of Tribal Poet-Critics

2009-11-15T15:53:00.000-08:00

Steven W. Beattie has responded to my questioning the ethics of reviewing over at Quill & Quire, the magazine he edits for, after a debate turned nasty in the comments section of Bookninja between myself and Q&Q book reviewer Zachariah Wells. The post "On Reviewing" was about a potentially serious conflict of interest between a reviewer George Packer who allowed his personal disagreement with an author Mark Danner to enter into his review of Danner’s new book Stripping Bare The Body: Politics Violence War which appeared in The New York Times Book Review.

I agreed with the blogger Moby’s original post that book reviewers as journalists must approach the books they review both critically and objectively. Mr. Wells then made the derisive comment that an objective review is plot summary. After pressed further, Mr. Wells responded to Packer’s review of Danner’s book by saying, “why is there this burden of neutrality placed upon the review as a work of journalism?”

I found this to be an incredible bald-faced statement.

When I suggested to Mr. Wells if he does not believe in objectivity or ethical standards for book reviewing, then I would certainly like to hear from those magazine editors (Steven W. Beattie, Anita Lahey, Dan Wells) he writes reviews for because I now have serious reservations about his abilities as a reviewer for those magazines, his response was typical: ”Well, I have serious doubts about your ability to write poetry in this or any other country, so I guess we’re square on this ‘important … topic,’ dude. Toodles.”

To Steven W. Beattie’s credit, he has not taken his response to the level of ad hominem or defamation, although I do believe he has misrepresented what I originally said in my post (which for the record, you may read here) for I am not in favour of critical relativism of any sort. In fact, I think negative reviewing does have its place. What I am against, however, is poet-critics writing negative reviews as a kind of ‘terra-forming’ process to acclimatize the Canadian poetry landscape to one more hospitable to the type of poetry they themselves write or to satisfy a personal vendetta. This smacks of opportunism and conflict of interest. Anyways, I am more than happy to grant Steven W. Beattie his right of reply. This, of course, being the ethical thing to do in these circumstances.

Behold! The Evil "I"!

2009-11-12T12:23:00.001-08:00

Every so often, I come across friends of mine or poet acquaintances who take on certain aesthetic stances which appear, at least to me, to be self-limiting or antithetical to how poems are really composed. Some will no longer write poems about poetic composition, or about place, or childhood, or gardens, or for the purpose of this post, the use of the personal pronoun “I”. Everybody is free to use whatever means that works for them but I think this kind of talk can be dangerous when it takes on an all-or-nothing orthodoxy.

I am more apt to agree with Margaret Atwood when she writes, ”I don’t want to know how I write poetry. Poetry is dangerous: talking too much about it, like naming your gods, brings bad luck…you may improve your so-called technique but only at the expense of your so-called soul.”

Thus at the expense of my so-called soul, I will simply state that for me writing in the first person point-of-view is a way to project my consciousness into a poem. It is a single grain of “the real”, what Richard Hugo might have called a known quantity in which all of the wonderful unknown quantities may collect around in a successful poem. If a poem is simply autobiography, then it is a kodak moment or a mere confession. However, if the “I” in the poem seeks to enlarge the self through thoughtful contemplation of a place or a person or a time period, something other than itself, then the “I” really acts as a “we”, and the poem suddenly takes on greater historical and cultural significance.

One of my favorite American poets Jack Gilbert talks briefly about the suspicion that has grown up around the usage of the first-person point-of-view in poetry in a fantastic interview in the January/February 2009 issue of the APR:

“And this whole absurdity about doubting the ‘I’ in poetry I don’t understand at all. The ‘I’ is the source of communication of things that matter. At least, that’s what I feel. I want to trust the speaker of the poem. It’s like biting into gold, to see if it’s true metal. Poets work by insight, not by cleverness. If not through inspiration, then through intuition.”

Needless to say, I am in complete agreement with Jack Gilbert about the use of the "I" in poetry. There is still gold in them hills.

Small Is Beautiful

2009-11-09T19:57:00.000-08:00

Poets do not appear to be writing as many small lyric poems in Canada as they once did, probably out of a misguided notion that such poems are slight and without substance, or out of a fear they will be pounced upon, which is a terrible shame because they can be really quite lovely. The best small lyrics can be carried around in your head all day to be puzzled over like a riddle, or held up against the light like a polished gem.

In his essay Ritsos and the Metaphysical Moment, American poet and essayist Stephen Dobyns pinpoints what makes a small lyric poem truly excellent is the metaphysical connection it creates between what is known and what is unknown. Take, for instance, his consideration of the poem “Triplet” by Yannis Ritsos:

As he writes, without looking at the sea,
he feels his pencil trembling at the very tip—
it’s the moment when the lighthouses light up.

For Dobyns, the lighting of the lighthouses “is neither rational nor scientific. It is not governed by what we might think of as logical systems of cause and effect. It suggests a series of sympathetic affinities and a sensitivity to these affinities on the part of the poet.” He calls this metaphysical moment the introduction of a “mystery” but he could just as easily have described it as that aspect of the imagination or subconscious which suddenly enters a poem. Dobyns explains that this mystery “is communicated with the ripple effect of a stone dropped in a pond” and I quite agree.

One of my favorite poems that works like this one is by the fifteenth century Zen master Ikkyu as translated by Stephen Berg:

this ink painting of wind blowing through pines
who hears it?

For me, this poem ripples forward through time creating a metaphysical moment that connects the ancient poet to our present. The mystery he introduces is the larger question he poses which widens to include all poets who have ever felt "the intense profound sharp longing to make a true poem", as Roethke once described it.

Another favorite short lyric poem is by the American poetry master Hayden Carruth who passed away last year. He wrote many, many poems in every imaginable form including some marvelous haikus like this one:

Hey Basho, you there!
I’m Carruth. Isn’t it great,
so distant like this?

This poem always makes me smile because it is so full of the poet’s obvious delight but a real seriousness too. In contrast to Ikkyu’s poem, Carruth’s poem ripples backward to catch Basho unawares and they smile mischievously at one another across the great expanse of time. The metaphysical connection in this poem collapses past and present, influence and tradition, so that two poets can momentarily talk to one another as equal participants in poetry. How wonderful.

Lastly, one of my favorite collections of small lyrics is Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences by Jan Zwicky published by the terrific Gaspereau Press. Take, for instance, the ‘sympathetic affinities’ created in this poem:

Small Song

It’s the first lesson, loss.
Who hasn’t tried to learn it
at the hands of wind or thieves?
Yet my heart grows old
not knowing. Things:
their fragility, their faithfulness.
Who will love you now?

If loss is indeed the first lesson, what saves the poet from the deeper sadness that human existence is finite and our lives impermanent? The answer is the fragility and faithfulness of things. The poet has grown old having not learned loss because the writing of poetry is also an act of renewal. Things may fade from one’s life but ultimately the imagination brings new things to take their place. The question posed at the end of the poem “Who will love you now?” ripples out to include everyone and invokes what happens at the moment of writing. The poet has asked a question of the imagination and is waiting for an answer. This is the metaphysical moment. The world of sympathetic affinities. I imagine it to be the moment the lighthouses light up.

Aesthetic Tribalism in Canada

2009-11-05T16:25:00.000-08:00

In the July/August 2009 issue of the American Poetry Review, Tony Hoagland wrote a provocative essay about Dean Young and his emulators which has started me thinking about the various poetry camps we see here in Canada. In a section of his essay called “Followers”, Hoagland writes, “We are living in a time of poetic explosion; the university creative writing systems have not just trained a lot of young poets in literary craft, they have fermented these young artists in a broth of language theory, critical vocabulary and aesthetic tribalism, which the age apparently demands.”

It was the phrase “aesthetic tribalism” which jumped out at me because we are seeing this on a number of fronts here in Canada: the new formalist movement, the experimental avant-garde set, the smart-alecky surrealists, and, of course, the shadowy cabal of lyric-narrative poets which have been apparently running everything, including the CBC, since the 1970s. I jest.

In some ways, I think aesthetic tribalism in Canada is just an outgrowth of the old garrison mentality, a catchy term first coined by Northrop Frye. Today, poets choose their “forts” not based on place but based on the like-minded people they find within them. They serve as communities and communities are necessary to all poets.

I think where the real problem lies, however, is when there is little or no interaction between these various groups. I say this for once the doors of these gated communities are thrown open, the more partisan among us panic. Seeing the world outside as either indifferent or entirely hostile towards poetry, they form a kind of press gang mentality looking for fellow initiates or sycophants, cannabalizing all those who dare not agree with their point of view.

This is especially of concern when this becomes an entrenched attitude as it has been in recent years amongst some reviewers. Most poetic forms are arbitrary and anyone who attacks or trivializes another poet’s work for not working within the same set of poetic conventions or formal restraints as themselves is either a propagandist or a pretender. Such talk simply propagates the pointless form versus content argument. Reviewers should be asking of every poetry collection they read what is the intent of the poet? How well have they used image, language, metaphor, thought, musicality, emotional sensation to embody one’s consciousness within a poem, or to unfold one’s human experience, or to manifest a desire to transcend one’s circumstances, or to break down the barriers that exist between one’s private life and the world at large?

Whatever the goal is of the particular poet, I think it is the duty and responsibility of any reviewer to understand how the poetry is working before passing judgment on its merits. That way, even if a book is reviewed negatively, the review will serve as a dialogue and not merely as a shallow denouncement.

We need more honest reviewers in this country who will read poetry, all poetry, with this kind of high-minded seriousness. What we do not need is anymore influence-peddlers or favour-traders or ass-kissers. We get the critical culture we demand of our critics, and of our magazines, for that matter. Besides, there are no winners when aesthetic tribalism attaches itself to critical circles. Look at any anthology from thirty years ago and you will see how quickly literary reputations die and fade away.

Ultimately, aesthetic tribalism is a useful term to describe a series of smaller communities found within the larger poetry community in Canada, but as a nationalist pursuit found within the book reviewing status quo, it is about the homogenization of literary culture, and robs poetry of its natural tendencies toward innovation and change.

Russell Thornton's "Brothers"

2009-11-01T16:38:00.000-08:00

I first came to the poetry of Canadian poet Russsell Thornton through a poem called The Beginning of Stars from his wonderful book A Tunisian Notebook published by Seraphim Editions. I find the ending lines especially lovely:

The body is the wine flask and the wine;
the lover is the veil on the beloved’s face.
And what we hide within, and hides from us
through all our hours of light, seems dark, and yet,
now in the dark as in the one centre
of the fusions that are stars, is pure time,
when the bodies we are wake in their day,
and we taste that day’s wine, that endless beginning
of nameless fate, when we give ourselves up
to our lives, and enter another life.

This poem evoked in me that wonderful mixture of awe and envy that the more bold among us would call inspiration. Since that first encounter with his poetry, I have come to know Russell Thornton as a poet who writes some of the most skillfully crafted lyrics in Canada, poems that seek to transcend realism, but also a writer of expansive, longer-lined “story” poems which remind me a lot of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese. Take for instance, Thornton’s poem Brothers which first appeared in his book House Built of Rain published by Harbour publishing.

Brothers

One spent nights on the junior high school roof.
My mother had kicked him out when the police told her
he was selling drugs, and before that, selling tires
he stole from gas stations. One stole a teacher’s car
from the senior high school parking lot at lunchtime,
got a case of beer, and drove around drunk all afternoon,
then smashed the car’s front fender when he reparked it.
One threw a Molotov cocktail into a teacher’s home
when the teacher accused him of copying an essay.
The same one beat up his P.E. teacher. One beat up
the leader of a gang. With that gang after him,
he started his own gang, he himself its only member,
and wore a red bandana and red old lady’s jacket
to school every day. No one along the gauntlet
that had been set up to stop him touched him.
Each one headed to “alternate school.” A year or two,
and the school was the bar, the drunk tank, jail.
But each one changed, and turned himself around.
Here we all are, suddenly in our mid and late thirties,
with everyone fooled. Clean-living, clean-looking,
all of us successful and good middle-class boys.
One a CEO, one a president of marketing…all
with pretty partners, nice cars, nice paid-for houses.
And smilers and jokers around a dinner table.
Until something comes out after a beer or glass of wine
too many, a note in a voice, and we are all there in a row
and looking to either side of ourselves at each other,
trying to see the thing looking out of our faces
as out of cold, dark trees it stands at the edge of
yet blends in. Each of us knowing it is there, each of us
ready to kill it, even when we know it is one of us—
though none of us knows which of us it is, only
that it is there and it is a lone, long-absent animal,
starving and afraid and ready to kill, and our father.

In an essay called “In Search of the Real Thing” from his book of essays Hunting Men, the American poet Dave Smith asks “Is there, then, a ‘real thing’, a poem independent of vagaries and fashion, a poem that fuses the felt life and percolating significance always shadow to life’s events, a poem in which the self stands forth like Whitman stating ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there’? The poem of the ‘real thing’ will have to embrace the moving targets any man or woman is in time.”

I think this is exactly the kind of poem Russell Thorton is writing here. He takes readers deep inside the felt experience of his life and if there is a moving target in the poem, it is the implacable voice of conscience and awareness, diligently sifting facts and memories, trying to create or, at least, to restore a pattern of significance that will make this poem somehow true, that will make it, in fact, “the real thing”.

In the beginning lines, we learn the brothers as teenagers engage in all manner of self-destructive behaviour – selling drugs, getting drunk and stealing cars, throwing a molotov cocktail into a teacher’s home – as if it were this undercurrent of anger and rage, and not family ties at all, that connects them. This behaviour changes, however, for the boys are able to make the difficult transition into men later in life with their moral characters intact:

But each one changed, and turned himself around.
Here we all are, suddenly in our mid and late thirties,
with everyone fooled. Clean-living, clean-looking,
all of us successful and good middle-class boys.

But what about that “percolating significance always shadow to life’s events” Dave Smith was talking about earlier? Thornton hints it is still there breathing, lurking on the peripheries of the mens’ shared history in the lines:

Until something comes out after a beer or glass of wine
too many, a note in a voice, and we are all there in a row
and looking to either side of ourselves at each other,
trying to see the thing looking out of our faces

It is only in the poem’s conclusion that we discover what this percolating significance actually is along with the poet: “ that is there and it is a lone, long-absent animal, / starving and afraid and ready to kill, and our father.”

I can tell you unequivocally this poem is the “real thing” because I have read it many times to troubled boys in my classes who find themselves feelingly impersonated within its lines. To say they like this poem would be an understatement. They are changed. Please go seek out Russell Thorton’s books The House Built of Rain and The Human Shore, both published by Harbour Publishing.

The Academy of American Poets Audio Archive

2009-10-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of the Academy of American Poets audio archive which contains hundreds of live recordings. I have bought several cds of favorite poets from Philip Levine to W.S. Merwin to Louis Gluck and I play them regularly in my vehicle as I go to and from work.

What strikes me most about each of these recordings besides the sheer excellence of the poetry and the delight of listening to the voices of poets I hugely admire, is the care in which each of these poets is introduced to an audience. Whether it be Gregory Orr introducing Larry Levis or Stanley Plumly introducing Philip Levine, each of the hosts goes well beyond a simple run-down of the poet’s biography or bibliographical information but contextualizes why each poet is important and clearly expresses what it is about the poetry itself that is remarkable and unique.

I guess what I find both refreshing and rewarding about this type of introduction of a poet to an audience is that the poetry, not the person, takes center stage.

I think we do see this kind of care and precision here in Canada at the readings for the Griffin Awards, for instance, but I would love for this idea to migrate outward to other reading series across our country. It would go along way to thawing relations between poets with different sets of poetic concerns and as a consequence, we as a nation would benefit from our poetry being taken much more seriously by all poets in our community - something I believe needs to happen first if we are to expect other countries to take our poetry seriously too.

If you would like to purchase cds from the The Academy of American poets, please order them here.

John Koethe's "From The Porch"

2009-10-26T18:42:00.000-07:00

Every small town I have ever lived in, and I have lived in several, was divided by a Main Street. Every time I think of Stayner, ON, the town I grew up in as a teenager, the first lines of “Proem” by Mark Strand come to mind: “’This is my Main Street,‘ he said as he started off / That morning, leaving the town to the others,“.

I remember feeling back then as if life was happening somewhere else in larger cities to people far more interesting and heroic and cultured than me. I couldn’t wait to move away. That is why I find the presence of that town, that childhood landscape, over and over, so peculiar in many of my poems.

In a book of essays called The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo, he contends that all private poets have certain triggering subjects “which ignite your need for words” and he uses the example of one’s hometown.

Larry Levis clarified this idea further in a brilliant essay about place and childhood in which he very astutely suggests the lion’s share of English poetry since Milton has been “preoccupied with the loss of Eden” and that poems about childhood landscapes compensate for a dramatic shift in our poetry away from this very public myth to a private one. Our hometowns, the places where we grew up, stand in for “Eden” and, if they are good poems, testify “not merely to private loss, exile and knowledge, but to a collective and generational loss, exile, and knowledge.” In essence, it is because we can never go back to those places as they existed that we write the poems that we do.

Here is a poem by John Koethe from his book Falling Water that captures this very idea:

From The Porch

The stores were bright, and not too far from home.
The school was only a half mile from downtown,
A few blocks from the Oldsmobile dealer. In the sky,
The airplanes came in low towards Lindbergh Field,
Passing overhead with a roar that shook the windows.
How inert the earth must look from far away:
The morning mail, the fantasies, the individual days
Too intimate to see, no matter how you tried:
The photos in the album of the young man leaving home.
Yet there was always time to visit them again
In a roundabout way, like the figures in the stars,
Or a life traced back to its imaginary source
In an adolescent reverie, a forgotten book—
As though one’s childhood were a small midwestern town
Some forty years ago, before the elm trees died.
September was a modern classroom and the latest cars,
That made a sort of futuristic dream, circa 1955.
The earth was still uncircled. You could set your course
On the day after tomorrow. And children fell asleep
To the lullaby of people murmuring softly in the kitchen,
While a breeze rustled the pages of Life magazine,
And the wicker chairs stood empty on the screened-in porch.

- John Koethe

The poem opens with some fixed details or knowns about the town Koethe grew up in, “The stores were bright, and not far from home. / The school was only a half mile from downtown, / A few blocks from the Oldsmobile dealer.” These images are the initial glue that holds the poem firmly together but rather quickly Koethe moves away from them allowing his imagination to take flight which helps to create the immense distance he is looking to introduce as when he says, “How inert the earth must look from far away: / The morning mail, the fantasies, the individual days / Too intimate to see, no matter how you tried:”.

Next, he reminds readers that this poem is a myth, perhaps not a public one, but a private one as profound as any of classical mythology, which he makes a connection to in the following lines, “Yet there was always time to visit them again / In a roundabout way, like the figures in the stars, / Or a life traced back to its imaginary source / In an adolescent reverie, a forgotten book— / As though one’s childhood were a small midwestern town / Some forty years ago, before the elm trees died.”

Finally in the poem’s conclusion, Koethe acknowledges that although he can faintly hear the familiar voices he associates with that period of his life, those people and those times are gone, “To the lullaby of people murmuring softly in the kitchen, / While a breeze rustled the pages of Life magazine, / And the wicker chairs stood empty on the screened-in porch”. If you enjoyed this poem, please pick up Koethe’s latest book Ninety-fifth Street published by Harper Perennial.

TNQ and The Literary Type

2009-10-24T06:54:00.000-07:00

The New Quarterly has started their own blog called The Literary Type and people like me are just now starting to discover it. The New Quarterly has always been a magazine dedicated to publishing new and established Canadian voices. They publish a lot of poetry, short fiction and essays that speak powerfully about what it means to be a writer in Canada, and some work which occasionally infuriates me, which in truth is probably an indicator of a well-rounded, even-keeled literary magazine. I think the editors are doing a really great job which is why TNQ is one of several Canadian magazines that I subscribe to regularly. Check out their keen new t-shirts which I am still meaning to pick up for my wife and myself.

The Pope of Hess Village

2009-10-21T19:38:00.000-07:00

My good friend and Hamilton poet Adam Getty has a reading tomorrow night in Toronto, part of Edward Nixon’s livewords series, which I will be attending. Adam is one of the first readers of all my poems and his thoughts on Canadian poetry are always lively. Both philosophical and provocative, his latest book of poetry Repose is an exploration of how employment impacts our lives and our freedoms. Adam will be reading along side Sonja Greckol and Blair Trewartha. The address is Sage West, 924 College Street and it is from 7:30-10:30 pm at night. Don’t miss it!

Towards The Within

2009-10-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write a little note about how much I enjoyed Don Domanski’s essay “Poetry and the Sacred” in Arc 61 that came out last year. The ideas of mindfulness and of poetry as a transcendent act are concerns found in my own work, especially in the poems from my last book The Cold Panes of Surfaces, but such ideas can sometimes fall on deaf ears.

Nowadays, poets of my particular vintage divide their time between writing poems and puffing themselves up on their web pages, or padding their CVs, or else writing the now ubiquitous snark, see here and here, that tears down the work of some senior poet in this country, the mythological implications of such attacks, it seems, totally lost on them.

It is also disheartening to find so many young people now concerned with only the surface effects of poetry, as if a poem is nothing more than a kind of puzzle or arithmetic equation that can be easily solved by counting syllables or by employing a formal rhyme scheme. What is even more troubling is to see how many are overly concerned with their own sense of prominence. Unfortunately, our culture encourages such poets by telling them it is far better to be a face on a billboard, an image in a magazine, or a name on a page than a flesh and blood person quietly concerned with the long standing relationships between the spiritual and the corporeal, consciousness and reality, imagination and metaphor.

I expect it is no wonder we have raised a generation of young poets now happily posing for photos with microphones in hand and indulging in all manners of poetic trappings without ever exploring in any truly meaningful fashion those hidden sources that animate our lives and our poetry. In fact, a good many of them would ridicule this very idea for it has become quite fashionable to do so.

River Rock Press Broadsides

2009-10-18T16:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I am turning forty this year so for my mid-life crisis, I elected not to buy the El Camino to “soup-up” in my garage or to start training for an Iron Man triathalon but to invest in a small reconstituted letterpress from Don Black Linecasting. Perhaps not as macho as the first options, but infinitely more practical.

Here are a few pictures of my Kelsey Excelsior 6 x10 and a broadside of a poem I wrote and printed on it called “The Old Life”. I’m not using hard type because it is too expensive and I do not have the space in my house for a large letterpress shop. I’ve opted instead to go with the photopolymer plate-making services of Boxcar Press. I bought a Boxcar Base that fits easily in my Kelsey’s chase and it has allowed me to design my broadsides using Quark without limiting me to fonts, font sizes, or spot illustrations. As I am not planning to do a lot of printing, this was easily the best option for me as the photopolymer plates ink beautifully!

Sorry about the picture quality but I still need to run out and get a tripod. Broadside projects looming on the horizon include poems by Adam Getty, Carleton Wilson and Paul Vermeersch. I also plan to hit up Todd Boss and Al Moritz for a broadside if they are game.

Chris Banks, our hero and co-proprietor of River Rock Press, printing up broadsides in the basement.

"The Old Life" A hand-printed broadside by Chris Banks (4.5 in. h x 8.5 in. w) in a limited-edition of 50 copies.

Madrid

2009-10-18T06:04:00.000-07:00

Taking a cue from Edward Byrne’s wonderful blog One Poet’s Notes, which offers crackerjack analysis and recommended readings on contemporary poetry, and from Lemonhound’s ongoing guest blogger series on how poems work, I have decided to post my impressions about poems I have especially enjoyed over the years. For starters, a poem I find myself thinking about all the time is Reginald Gibbon’s “Madrid” which I found in his new and selected poems Sparrow. I first read this poem three or four years ago but I often go back to my bookshelf to seek it out as it still haunts me. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Madrid

Through stone portals and under colonnades
into the old central plaza in cold December
came gypsies and outcasts with green branches.

They had broken off boughs of pine and spruce
along their minor routes to the city.
They had stripped copses and groves and plantations.

They camped on the cobbles, they lived in tents and wagons.
They sold the branches and a few small trees; some begged.
Little fires flickered in their artificial forest.

They seemed to have brought with them into the plaza
the stillness they had torn out of the woods,
as if to sustain the peace the city had torn out of them.

Overheard, their voices sounded raw and smoky, used up.
But late, rising above the noise of cars and of children
playing at all hours, there might be a guitar and singing.

Catching my coat sleeve, their beautiful dirty children
improvised intricacies of delay, so as to praise and hawk
the scent of green, so as to implore and beguile.

I was outside their thoughts, I was outside their ways.
We judged each other, I bought the wasted pine boughs.
The children stole my money, I stole their image.
Now we are all outside that time, we are all inside this language.

- by Reginald Gibbons

What I think I like most about this poem, besides its passionate engagement with a foreign city like Madrid through visceral images like “Little fires flickered in their artificial forest”, or its fusion of sound and meaning through noteworthy alliteration like “Catching my coat sleeve, their beautiful dirty children / improvised intricacies of delay”, is its creation of a dual consciousness and its use of time.

First, we enter the poem with the speaker, as if through the speaker’s shared “I” and the shared attention of we, the listeners, the past is delivered up momentarily whole. However, midway through the poem, we become suspicious that the time-fabric of the poem is not a solid unbroken line afterall but a stitch-work of stolen moments as when Gibbons writes “They seemed to have brought with them into the plaza / the stillness they had torn out of the woods, / as if to sustain the peace the city had torn out of them.” It begins to feel as if these gypsies, and the speaker, exist outside of time’s confines.

These suspicions are confirmed in the poem’s last lines “The children stole my money, I stole their image. / Now we are all outside that time, we are all inside this language.” as it becomes clear this is only a reproduction of time and of feeling. All at once, there is the speaker experiencing the historical moment in the poem but also the mournful voice of the poet elegizing that moment which happened long, long ago. As Tess Gallagher eloquently puts it in her essay “The Poem As Time Machine” in Claims For Poetry: “This is the sadness of the photograph: knowing even as you look, it was not like this, though it was. You stand in the “was” of the present moment and you die a little with the photograph.”

Happy Birthday Hannah!

2009-10-17T05:45:00.000-07:00

Hannah Paige Banks turns one year old today!

"Make ready for your gifts. Prepare. Prepare." - Theodore Roethke

The Contemplative, the Narrative and the Lyrical

2009-10-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

Well, I have reluctantly joined the blogosphere after swearing off blogging for years. I am a luddite when it comes to blogging, wikis, texting, and tweets so you will have to forgive me if I just ease in slowly. Even, my students at school cannot comprehend how I can go a single day, let alone an entire high-school English class, let alone five whole minutes, without ever making use of a cell phone. They look at me with a mixture of pity and bewilderment, as if they really, truly, do not understand how I am able to function without one.

I guess what I am trying to say is that we live in changing times and as such, I feel it is time to start writing about the kind of poetry that first drew me to writing poems. The contemplative, the narrative and the lyrical. Such poems are not always in favour here in Canada but I hope to remedy that.

Honestly, I am not a big fan of blogging so I don’t imagine I will be doing much of it. I have always thought blogging in Canada was more about profile-building than about any real discusssion or dialogue between poets. The early days of Bookninja were promising when it felt like George Murray had invited over a handful of poets from across the country to hang-out in his “backyard internet fort” and talk at length about poetry. I hang out there much less now that the fort has become more of a large mall.

I suppose there are places on the web where people are still openly talking about poetry that delights them. I know Sina Queyras over at Lemonhound is really trying to keep lines of communication running, pointing to favorite poets, poems, and pop culture relics, the very things that give her pleasure, while also handing the reins to guest bloggers from time to time to write about their favorite poets or poems. I think this is admirable. I also appreciate Paul Vermeersch’s blog for introducing poets, especially young people, to books they might not otherwise have heard of and for making strong arguments with real candor for the kind of poems he enjoys reading.

As for my own blog, I intend to use this space largely to talk about those poets and poems, both American and Canadian, I find most beguiling, haunting, worldly, and poignant. I also plan to post some photos of my broadside projects, which I have been printing on my Kelsey 6 x10 letterpress, and a miscellany of antiquarian books and broadsides I have been collecting over the last fifteen years.

That’s it for now. Thanks for stopping by my little fort.