For many, year-end means a moment of reflection, and the appearance of
lists, lists and more lists. Calling anything a “best of” is an obvious
misnomer, but there are still books that are so good that they’re difficult to
ignore, and impossible to not recommend. I’ve received and picked up numerous
poetry books by Canadians and other, and thought it might be worth compiling a
list of the Canadian titles that really stuck out, over the past calendar year.
Here are sixteen poetry books that came out in 2012 by Canadian writers
that I would consider worthy of further attention, listed in no particular
order:
1.
Jenna Butler, Wells: In Edmonton poet,
editor and publisher Jenna Butler’s second trade collection, Wells
(Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2012), she “draws on her own
experiences of her grandmother’s disappearance into senile dementia to
reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form” (according to the press release).
Disappearance narratives in the form of poems rarely work, but the dream-like
quality of Butler’s long poem write the straight lines long enough they bleed. Wells
reads less an interest in Butler attempting to document every losing detail
than explore the haze, the misty places between knowing, doubting and
disappearing.
The kitchen smelt often of quince. The hoary fruits inedible unless
cooked, whereupon they resolved into a spring-pink jelly.
Inevitably, all other scents would be underwritten by tea. The
Darjeeling your mother was so fond of, your father’s chicory coffee, a taste
he’d developed during the War. How your mother tried to break him of it, that
coffee, its scent bitter and deeply medicinal. He’d tell her, Habits aren’t
horseshoes; they can’t be thrown so easily.
He came back from the War overwritten with translucent patches, the scar
tissue gleaming as though he’d been drizzled with molten glass. Wherever the
mustard gas had touched, it had burned, clear through the wool tunic and out
along his limbs like marsh fire. When the sunlight found him now, it did so
gingerly, his skin coming alight in silver, the scars blazing. As though, in
stripping everything away from him, the gas had somehow given him this armour.
He no longer rolled up his sleeves in the garden as he hefted the spade,
worried that someone might be moved to pity. Your father came back from the War
armoured inside his own skin. Against everything.
Even his own family.
Even you. (“Home”)
As Butler’s previous collection, Aphelion (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press,
2010), explored the structure of the ghazals, Wells (named for the town
of Wells-next-the-sea, England) explores the structure of the prose-poem, and
the prairie narrative stretched out as long as a line can follow. Arranged in
poem-sections, the poem-fragments hold up as a series of family photographs
either blurry or apocryphal, and write the prairie sentence/long line with
exquisite grace.
You used to be able to talk around the gaps, find words that were right
enough, with acrobatic deftness. Now your tongue trips, mind falls flat like
marram grass in a sea gale. Your leaps of logic confound even you, leave your
listeners coughing into their hands, frantic for distraction.
You loved this beach once. The wind, the way it rips off the sea on a
blustery day, what it drives up onto the sand. Whelks, polished stones, gull
feathered battered like spindles. Bottle glass, bright colours scarified,
filmed over. The same look in your eyes now when you turn to me, unsure, not
wanting to ask. (“Wells”)
This volume, also,
appears to be one of the first in the “Robert Kroetsch Series,” named for the
late Alberta and University of Alberta Press author who died last spring in a
tragic automobile accident. I wonder at this, pleased with the acknowledgement,
but wonder why it was kept so quiet, and even now, seemingly barely-told or
announced, but for a line or two in their catalogue?
2. Barbara Langhorst, restless white fields: Saskatchewan poet Barbara Langhorst’s
first trade poetry collection, restless white fields (Edmonton AB:
NeWest Press, 2012), as the back cover tells us, responds to a “violent
personal tragedy,” made clearer in the couplet “there are no kind words for
this / my father put a bullet in her brain and a shotgun to his chest”
(“MENSTRUL CUP”). Just as American poet Beth Bachmann
wrote through grieving the murder of her sister by their father in her poetry
collection, Temper (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2009), Langhorst writes out an exploration of the actions and consequences of
her own tragic events, and the spaces it leaves. restless white
fields is a collection that writes through the dark,
constructed to explore conclusions, comprehensions and redemption. The poems in
the collection might not all be directly about this, but are coloured by such.
GALL
there is such intimacy with the body in pain that one can come to crave
a pot of custard a trivial drop of pursuit a warm dish of tikka masala
to ignite
the death projecting incarnation near pique that a lot of fat produces
an encounter with an ontological sensation in the gallbladder not
dissimilar
to those who dare to hang themselves know that to increase orgasmic
intensity
the irregularity of false love of success determines potency through the
liquor
of settled stomach or the heat of bursting screaming breathless belly
one comes
to feel the martyrs and their self-flagellation
Closer to home than Bachmann, Langhorst’s book
reminds of Lamentations (Trout Lily Press, 1997), a first collection of
poems by now-Winnipeg poet Charlene Diehl-Jones. Built out of a sequence of
prose-poems, her collection focused on the loss of her first child. Books
spawning from awful trauma are extremely difficult to work through in a way
that any reader might want to engage (I can think of a few examples—that I
won’t name here—of a poet requiring not a publisher but a therapist, resulting
in the most awful and self-absorbed of texts), and Langhorst’s poems write
through trauma and come through the other side. It is no accident, I would not
think, that dedication at the front of the collection is “for love.”
last autumn’s fall expedition to the graveyard our chickadees went wild
for my
students the romantics’ dead thoughts chanting confusion all through the
lane
of the yellowing elms this year’s fashionistas their connected
hundred-dollar
dresses become distraught with the cool west wind but they have dirt
on the mob as we sit beside the monks reading shelley’s
ode to the unified wish for
a cold climactic change of heart (“BELOW THE WIRE ii”)
Langhorst’s restless white fields is a
collection of dark undertones, which by itself don’t make it a dark or
pessimistic book, although it might possibly be a necessary book. constructed
in five sections—no kind words, bellum, the persistence of memory, exiled
hearts and blue placenta—Langhorst’s poems are highly aware of the proper use
of space on the page, stretching long lines in some pieces, or spaces patterned
across the page in others, stretching couples that run the length of margins
and prose-poems that wrap up, curl so very nicely. Langhorst’s poems are an
enviable expression and exploration of structure and highly mature rhythms, and
a book that would be difficult to not see on award shortlists
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
i slept better before you
learned to kill
anxiety that perfect cure
now i share szumigalski’s
fear of knives i cannot stand to see
flustered chickens
popped in cones
heads thwacked off pre-cordon bleu
it takes so much rage
to learn
to love
to squeeze
a cupboard moth
immortal birds they fly at us
their suicide my potent fear
of being
god’s beetle
in leonard cohen’s hand
i slept better before you learned
to kill
3. Lise
Downe, This Way: I’ve long been
enraptured with the quiet confidence of Toronto poet Lise Downe’s poems, and
feel rewarded in my patience through the publication of her long-awaited fourth
trade poetry collection, This Way (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2011).
THE INFLUENCE OF COMPLETE DARKNESS
In the dusk of a November evening
somewhere in the mid-seventeenth century
nothing is concealed or conveyed.
There is, simply
a concentration of sunflowers.
As the world turns, they turn
from pathos to persuasion
guided by the radiant light.
Two fresh puddles insert themselves
and are read as a dark eclipse.
Nothing hinders them from soaking through.
Perhaps a fish detects them before disappearing
its far-off murmur a mutter now
sounding something like an inscription
on a Japanese fan by Totki Baigai:
“Outside the city walls there’s an odd fish.
I don’t know its name.”
Downe is a poet of big ideas and phrases,
exploring the possibilities that poems allow in such small spaces they become
impossibly large. This Way follows her collections, Disturbances of Progress (Toronto ON:
Coach House Books, 2002), The Soft Signature (Toronto ON: ECW Press,
1996) and A Velvet Increase of Curiosity (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1992),
each carefully and thoughtfully constructed collections of sharp, smart poems.
The poems in This Way create not a signpost to a single
direction but a series of directions, and possibilities in ways that make Downe
seem a meditational language poet, blending considerations that aren’t often
intertwined. Structured with three sections and opening poem, “THE INFLUENCE OF
COMPLETE DARKNESS,” the second section, “Small Mysteries” writes a sequence
that seems to articulate the collection as a whole:
The volatile contents itself
like a sphere with the world inside.
One understands immediately
what the space allows.
There is no other word for it.
This novelty notwithstanding
all the conformity that was needed
to show that it, too, is continuous.
What very much compels about this collection,
and Downe’s work, overall, is in how the book is constructed, from the single
poem opener, to a sequence of fragments to a section of individual poems, to
close with a sequence of haiku-like three-lined koans, resonating like packed
bits of wisdom disguised as fragments, disguised as knowledge.
You can’t seriously expect that a story
based on something overheard might serve
as a point of departure. Oh evening, speak.
4.
Nelson Ball, In This Thin Rain: In Paris, Ontario
poet Nelson Ball’s poems, every word is essential, and, as editor Stuart Ross
said at the recent Ottawa launch of Ball’s newest trade poetry collection In
This Thin Rain (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2012), even the slightest edit
could make enormous changes. As the back cover attests, “compressed
meditations” might be the best way to describe Ball’s compact poems on his
immediate, composing pieces on birds, trees, death, rain, colour and
bookshelves. Ball began publishing in the 1960s, and was editor/publisher of
the infamous Weed/Flower, publishing important early works by William Hawkins,
George Bowering, Victor Coleman, Anselm Hollo, bpNichol, John Newlove, Carol
Bergé, David W. McFadden and a number of others. As a writer, his own works
include publications from 1965 to 1971 produced by Weed/Flower, Ganglia Press
and Coach House Press before a gap of twenty years, during which he was
involved in other activities, predominantly building up his bookselling
business.
Together
In the low breeze
two trees squeak
Since he returned to publishing in the early
1990s, he has published a small stack of items through presses small and
smaller, from the trade collections With Issa: Poems 1964-1971 (ECW
Press, 1991), Bird Tracks on Hard Snow (ECW Press, 1994), The
Concrete Air (The Mercury Press, 1996), Almost Spring (The Mercury
Press, 1999) and At The Edge Of The Frog Pond (The Mercury Press, 2004),
as well as numerous smaller publications through Curvd H&z, MindWare,
fingerprinting inkoperated, Letters, Rubblestone Press, above/ground press and
Laurel Reed Books. There is a packed simplicity to Ball’s poems, more happening
in his sharp densities than anyone could have imagined possible, and his
influence has been seen since in a number of poet’s works, including the late
Toronto poet bpNichol, Ottawa poet/bookseller jwcurry, Toronto poet/publisher
Jay MillAr, Mount Pleasant, Ontario poet/publisher Kemeny Babineau and Toronto
poet Mark Truscott, each attempting their own sharp densities from Ball, saying
as much as possible with the very least.
Walking
Early
October, mild
walking
at The Ponds
sunny
no clouds
breeze
enough to make
trees
restless
as
I am
some
leaves
are
falling
For the past decade or so, Ottawa poet Seymour
Mayne has been producing a number of what he calls “word sonnets,” attempting a
brevity not nearly as clear, dense and elegant as the poems of Nelson Ball,
and, much like Montreal poet Leonard Cohen composing eighty verses to boil down
to a final four or five, Ball’s compositional process is a lengthy, detailed
one of carving, slow and patient and considered.
Anomaly
Cement
angels
Part of this book has the added layers of losing
both his wife, the artist Barbara Caruso, and his mother during composition,
and both women are evident in various shades of the text, such as the small and
graceful poem “Colours,” subtitled “thinking of Barbara.” Another part
of the collection that intrigues is part of the author’s “Notes and
Acknowledgments” at the back, which might shed further light on Ball’s
compositional process:
Since writing the poem “Reprieve”, I’ve found “rooves” as an alternative
plural of “roof” in two large dictionaries and one shorter one. It appears in
the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (6th edition, 2007) and
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (updated to 2002), and,
oddly, in the Gage Canadian Dictionary (1983). “Rooves” doesn’t appear
in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary [microprint]
(1971) nor in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2nd edition,
2004) nor the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (11th
edition, revised, 2006). The Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage (2nd
edition, 2007) by Margery Fee and Janice McAlpine gives “roofs” as the accepted
plural. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th
edition, 2007) gives only “roofs”. It’s interesting that concise dictionaries
are created by omitting not only main entries, but also variant plurals. My
survey was informal and far from complete.
It was interesting, also, that the morning I
began to slowly work through Ball’s new collection, an envelope from Quebec
poet D.G. Jones arrived in the mail, carrying a few new poems. The comparisons
are evident, as both are senior poets known but not as well known as admirers
would like, and both poets are revered for their quiet modesty, sharp and
sudden line breaks, and the density of their thoughtful, uncomplicated brevity.
Obituaries
Lately
I’ve been reading obituaries
don’t quite
know why
lives are
always ending
always
5. Erín
Moure, The Unmemntioable: Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s new
poetry collection, The Unmemntioable (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2012)
continues a number of threads in her work over the past few years, from
translation, border-crossings and her increasingly-constant companion,
collaborator, foil and hetronym (in the Pessoa sense) Elisa
Sampedrín. In The Unmemntioable, Moure includes a study of Sampedrín alongside her own grief, taking her mother’s ashes to (as
the back cover writes) “the village where her maternal family was erased by war
and time. There, watching E.M. through the trees in a downpour, an idea came to
her: she would use E.M. to research the nature of Experience.” The nature of
experience, as the book explores it, is multi-faceted, and somehow complex
enough that it actually becomes more readable. How does that happen?
My intention was just to write at the desk in Bucureşti, but this
notebook paper turns into a plant again damp with sap and fibre and breaks the
nib. Perfumes anarchic tendency and a way with words, fallen down on crested
birds.
“The smell of hay at the look of god”
the pen writes.
“We wept our gifts for you, dear mother, our treasures. Waking up in the
night and wringing out the shirt. Even then, the tumor was growing in the
blood.”
(Tomasz’s shadow bent long from the doorway to the forest, but it’s just
the noise of darkness and the gate banging shut in wind)
This notebook is arresting sleep (lying face-down in a pool of snow).
When I look up, a siren, and the light of the ambulance flashes off the walls
at it streaks down Matei Voievod in the dark…. but who does it carry? And
repeatedly? E.M.? Has she eaten a peanut again?
Over the course of
Moure’s trilogy of poetry books O Cidadán
(Anansi, 2002), O Cadoiro, poems
(Anansi, 2007) and O Resplendor (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2010), as well as
her Little Theatres (Anansi, 2005),
where we first met the writer and translator Sampedrín, Moure has worked
increasingly complex book-length collages of essay-poems, lyrics, arguments,
questions and prose-lines, all while adding layers and nuance to Elisa
Sampedrín. It is as though Moure works hard to diminish or even erase the
narrator/author, even while building up the hetronym of Sampedrín. And why is
Sampedrín so argumentative in this collection? We’ve seen Sampedrín be
argumentative before, certainly, challenging the narrator in all sorts of ways,
but this collection almost sees Moure’s hetronym downright hostile in places.
Exactly what is happening between the narrator and hetronym, two elements of
the author herself? It would seem that, although the questioning is sometimes
harsh, the collaborations remain.
I’ve decided to take E.M. for my experimental subject. She’s here and
she’s a pest; she might as well serve some useful purpose. And she has an inner
forum, and recalls an infancy, an infans before speaking.
As for me, I am better off without either.
Where Moure’s
previous trilogy focused on “the citizen,” her new collection, The Unmemntioable,
turns the same gaze sideways, writing out her mother’s Ukrainian background
quite specifically, and exploring how the experience of this particular citizen
and her forebears produced the woman that Moure knew as her own mother.
If anything, it’s the fault of reading. When Chus Pato’s poetry appeared
on my desk, I decided to give up writing poems. I moved to Bucureşti to see if
I could free myself from this crisis of experience, this excision of language.
Then I saw Erín Moure in the park
at a café table, looking at me. Why did she come here?
What does she know
about experience? Her mother tongues resist all attempts at a technical
language.
Is it that she has
no mother tongue?
Today, I refuse to
be pinned down to an identity. Right away, I want to betray it.
Through her
mother’s death and the exploration of her and her family’s history, the blend
of narrative, fragment, language and translation weave throughout in a
remarkably natural and fluid way, all of which could be boiled down to Moure’s
interior monologue. Scribbled down in moleskins while travelling, the book
concludes with what, on the surface, reads like a prose memoir of travel. These
are sketches possibly even composed in that café in Bucureşti, perhaps, writing out and through
the geography of her mother’s family that read as deep, meditative and as
personal as, say, Brian Fawcett’s Human happiness (2012) or Susan Howe’s
That this (2011):
Dear
Chus: everything I had dreamed turned out to be made of paper. The skin was an
organ that suffered in silence the rays, the scourges, the cuts of trees and
medicine. In Hlibovychi in 1922, the war was over but the repressions
escalated. Predeceased by her father Oleks, now with more children, my
grandmother Anastasia emigrated with Tomasz in 1929, to NW14.72.9.W6. Riding
down the south side of the mountain, the side with a road, the smallest
daughter, my mother, went to school.
Forderung.
“We must press forward to the schools.”
In
the innermost core of blinded love, with is and must never be realized, a woman
is trying to open her eyes to see.
* *
*
Though
my mother is gone, her face still claims me. In the morning I write wearing her
cancer hat. I wear her Western belt to Whitehorse. In my pocket, she stands at
the summit cairn in Wonder Pass with her friends the nurses. They wear anoraks
and sunhats. Maybe one day, as she did, I will wear her blue ribbed hat, the
knitted one, as hair.
Moure has composed
a book that furthers her ongoing explorations in language, translation and
identity as well as writing out a tribute to her mother and her mother’s
history. “A mother is the unmemntioable boundary / that can never
come fully clear.”
6. Natalie
Zina Walschots, Doom: Love Poems for
Supervillains: For her second trade poetry collection,
Calgary-turned-Toronto poet Natalie Zina Walschots give us Doom: Love Poems
for Supervillains (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2012), produced with
illustrations by the illustrious Evan Munday, wisely published in the midst of
a season of Big Summer Blockbusters in American film. It’s been said by actors
over the years that it’s far more interesting to play a villain than a good guy
(is this why Walschots wrote poems for supervillains as opposed to a collection
of poems for superheroes?), and, for comic book fans, we owe quite a debt to
John Byrne, who brought depth and dimension to Doctor Victor von Doom during
his lengthy run on The Fantastic Four in the 1980s.
Lady Deathstrike
with body modification
all flesh become sheath
skin enrobed
widen to skeletal gauge
labial tissue stretched
a bat’s veiny wing
you give every metal detector
a fat dermal punch
laced with adamantium
exhale god’s wind
breath a typhoon
taut body torpedo
blood boiling jet fuel
each tip thrums fuse
What is it about supervillains? One could say
that a book of poetry on comic book characters, especially by a woman writer,
is quite subversive, but perhaps not in the same way it would have been, say, a
decade or two ago (I’d say I know as many female as male comic
nerds/geeks/enthusiasts these days). Subversive less so as well, given how
mainstream the big company comic books have become over the past twenty years,
especially in mainstream American film (Paul Davis did a lovely ECW Press title
a number of years ago on the 1960s Marvel Universe I’d recommend, if you can
find it).
In her poetry collections so far, from Thumbscrews (Montreal Q: Snare Books, 2007) to this current book, Walschots
composes from a combination of concept and content, writing poems that explore
a particular subject or idea, with this one focusing on an array of past and
present supervillains from Marvel Comics and DC Comics. Not that all on her
list are even currently considered supervillains (but have all been throughout
their histories), which even draw on their complexities, as, for example,
Magneto and Toad are now with the X-Men, Deadpool currently works with the
X-Men wetworks team, X-Force, and Quicksilver teaches at Avengers
Academy. Still, most villains are never straightforward, and the best of them
are those who ride nuance, complexity and even contradiction (Magneto being a
fantastic example). And Walschots’ subject-work follows in the tradition of a number of
recent book-length works of poetry writing from seemingly-unlikely sources,
including Alessandro Porco’s porn-poems, The Jill Kelly Poems (Toronto ON: ECW
Press, 2005), Lisa Robertson’s use of the scientific language of weather in The Weather (Vancouver BC: New Star
Books, 2001), Michael Holmes’ poems on professional wrestling in Parts Unknown (Toronto ON: Insomniac
Press, 2004), Rachel Zolf exploring the dehumanizing language of office-speak
in Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach
House Books, 2007) or M. NourbeSe Philip writing out legal language to humanize
an inhuman story in Zong! (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2008). And,
given what is happening throughout the X-Men/Avengers titles currently, her
poem on the late, lamented Dark Phoenix might even be timely:
Dark Phoenix
frail cipher
white dwarf burnt out to a cinder
a chain reaction relit your core
our friend has gone nova
reborn a firebird
red and luminous
gobbling light
a single eyelash
could light this cathedral
wreathed in lava
gold and pearl gone molten
a wretched and crawling heat
a rosary rendered down to ruined stars
your universe is expanding, my friend
neither Kepler nor Brahe
could bring you back to us now
I light these standard candles
cry beeswax
mouth your luminous name
Walscots composes
poems set as sketches, or quick character studies, writing poems on many names
both big and small, including Doctor Doom, the Joker, Lex Luthor, Magneto,
Electra, Lady Deathstrike, Ra’s al Ghul, Doctor Octopus, Bullseye, the Green
Goblin, Deadpool, Sinestro, General Zod, Clayface, Harley Quinn and Dark
Phoenix, as well as sections on various comic book geographies. The book is
sectioned into five, from “Rogues Gallery: Domination” (male villains),
“Stronghold” (countries and other similar locations), “Rogues Gallery: Girl
Fight” (female villains), “Bondage” (prisons and other similar locations) and
“Rogues Gallery: Destruction” (darker male villains). Her two poems for Joker
play against the two sides of his character, from the predominant view of the
character over the decades, to the much darker view presented in the infamous
graphic novel, The Killing Joke, and the terrible, terrible things he
did to Batgirl/Barbara Gordon that left her confined to a wheelchair.
Joker
The Killing Joke
cleverness a cleaver
slit tine grin
in the serrated rape
trap teeth squeak maestro
voice box a soup can
sinew strung rung
to rung with vertebrae
crackling in the gruesome
toymaker’s cheek
smile navel to nose
uncoils fat lips
and drools
steaming tongue
this body made mouth
Throughout the collection, Walschots leaves me
with a number of questions. Is the Atlantis the DC or Marvel version, and why
is the “General Zod” seemingly for the version portrayed in Superman 2
as opposed to the comics (unlike the version from Smallville, which
seemed reduced than previous incarnations). These poems really do feel like
sketches, as she writes in the last part of the poem “Deadpool”:
deep within the viscera
you laugh to scratch
your mirth is subcision
bloody and precise
Sharp as hell, but her Deadpool poem (ignore the
version from the X-Men Origins: Wolverine film) somehow doesn’t capture
the characters precise and outlandish madness. And I wonder, with two poems for
Mastermind and but one for Mr. Sinister, is she giving the former too much
credit, and the latter, not enough? Still, this is a fun and precise
exploration of characters through poems, and a worthy collection. The only
disappointment is knowing that there are so many more illustrations Munday did
for the collection than appear in the final book. Whatever became of them?
7. Marcus McCann, The
Hard Return: Over the months
since his first trade collection, Soft Where (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere
Books, 2009), former Ottawa poet Marcus McCann’s gymnastic poems have become
nearly bulletproof, composing lines one can bounce both quarter or a round off.
His second collection, The Hard Return (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press,
2012), one of the final season of Paul Vermeersch’s tenure as poetry editor
(before heading off to Wolsak & Wynn) writes of dislocation and location,
writing the tension between a series of opposite positions. The density of
McCann’s lines are incredibly packed, and move at lightspeed, nearly
light-headedly so.
Prayer
To
be read aloud in unison
Non-proprietary
methods of composition:
collaboration,
enmeshment, mutually assured
instruction,
Hail Mary, heightened sense of self.
Shoulder
to shoulder, odd phalanx of bowled-over
lover-friends-lovers.
Cosmic spirals of communication,
retuning,
junk talk, yammer, here is a voice
and
we are using it.
Here
is a voice and we are using it.
Loose,
jangly, not-quite-unison,
Discording.
Us in a nighttime parking lot,
song-spilled,
gin-singed, stab-slatted, yonder-longing
sketching
on the side of a convenience store
that
we are rattled. We use our hands sparingly.
Rickety
wicker of our common selves.
Brittle,
inhibited, possessive, jealousy ours,
especially.
Us or a common alternative supplied.
Our
shares in publicly traded company
indeterminate
and valuable. Pleasingly left
guessing
in the futures market.
In The Hard
Return, McCann writes poems that pilfer and magpie from just about
everything that surrounds, reshaping them into his own fantastic entities, and
include commentary and critique on human interactions as well as the failure
and confusion of those interactions. His poems are nearly those of Montreal
poet Jon Paul Fiorentino’s, but with a denser line and far less pessimism. This
is no Alpha or Beta Male but an eye that rakes and rages, processes swirling
with comprehension. One of the threads through the collection is the critique
somehow in the titles alone, a series of poems that lift lines from other
sources, his “Twenty-Two Toronto Poets Wake up on the / Bathroom Floor and
Discuss Their Hangover,” “Twenty-Two BC Poets Use Orgasm As a / Metaphor for
Belonging,” and “Twenty-Two Ottawa Poets Fail to Agree about / the Morning”
(all of which list in the colophon the poems and poets borrowed from for each
piece, in order of appearance). The Toronto poem begins:
It
is spring over the porcelain bowl
and
needs total silence. It carries you
hacking
the day into shape on the phone, there is still no
water
and erotics
to
show I was prepared to die. Here, orange
stares
at the grief-plunge.
I
call myself every bad word I know.
How does he
manage to boil so much down into such small spaces? He even includes a poem for
leaving Ottawa for Toronto, “Town in a Long Day of Leaving,” the title poem to
a small chapbook originally self-produced in a give-away run around the time he
left. A great believer in the power of chapbooks, a number of these poems
appeared previously in various chapbooks, including the works Heteroskeptical
(Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2007), Town in a Long Day of Leaving
(Ottawa ON: The Onion Union, 2009; above/ground press, 2009) and The Glass
Jaw (The Onion Union, 2010), but a handful of the chapbooks he’s produced
over the years. You know there’ll be more.
Poem for a Precious Chapbook
If
spine is sheep, a fold
is
a fold.
If
spine is a wallet, fold
is
a billfold
If
spine is gimme one good reason, fold
is
twofold.
If
spine is a puzzle, fold
is
baffled.
If
spine is smothering grandma with a pillow, fold
is
her, muffled.
If
spine is a whip and harness, fold
is
a blindfold.
8. Nicole
Markotić, Bent at the Spine: It has been a while since a poetry collection by writer, editor and
critic Nicole Markotić, and the publication of Bent at the Spine
(Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012) furthers an investigation into the sentence that
began in her two previous poetry collections – Connect the Dots (Toronto
ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 1994) and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets
(Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 1998) – as well as through two novels – Yellow
Pages: a catalogue of intentions (1995) and Scrapbook of My Years as a
Zealot (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008). Her prose is fantastic,
and Yellow Pages, a novel about silence, is one of my favourite. Much of
her work as a poet focuses on the prose poem, and she is one of the few
Canadian writers exploring the form, a variant on what some others such as
Jonathan Ball and Jason Christie have been more recently exploring.
“No such thing as a prose poem”
mumbled
the Cyclops. shining her black leather eye patch. hard plastic mimics cement.
trial children leap the ladder. rig construction tumbles into the valley of
faraway. yearly postcards line the ceiling. goes to show how many pairs of
boots fit into one box. x-rated continues his morning breakfast to read that
crocodiles have no tongue. except when he looks inside one there brags the
rogue organ. not tied or mangled just limp and jaded and only slightly extinct
the
font fades and 14 pages blew out the side window. well isn’t that the way we
harbour plot-line? each glottal stop opens the throat. treat me to a new
typeface or send metre back to the morgue. each flyleaf remembers its
copyright. true. each stammer confesses to grammar health
heroin
could contradict this story or you could pretend these words belong to the same
sentence twice. every time you save your breath, Hypothetical Barbara takes a
bath
In her essay, “New
Narrative and the Prose Poem,” she writes: “My interest in this form begins at
the level of the sentence.” It reminds of a fragment of an interview with Lisa
Roberson I keep quoting (by Kai Fierle-Hedrick in The Chicago Review
51:4/52:1, spring 2006): “I’m really a gentleman collector of sentences. I
display them in cabinets.” In the same essay, Markotić writes:
I
am interested in a dialogue about “new” narrative, which is perhaps not so much
new, as newly theorized. Many prose writers do not consider themselves fiction
writers, yet at the same time are not really part of on-going poetics discussions
which, for the most part, do not focus on narrative. Although I also write
prose fiction, I consider my prose poetry and other alternative,
interdisciplinary, and innovative sentences to be a neoteric prose that both
challenges and expands language boundaries.
For
me, the prose poem is a poetic strategy embedded within the structure of
narrative, and a feminist response to patriarchal language and forms. By
embracing both prose syntax and poetic disruptions, the prose poem defies
conventional linear grammar and refuses to satisfy my desires for either poetry
or story. My desire is for so much more than causal, linear, rational and
persuasive normative sentences. In my novel and in my poetry, I try to live
between the prose of narrative and the fulfillment of the habit of fiction.
Carved into a
series of structurally-themed sections, the first sequence/section, “Big
Vocabularies,” jangles and sparks with a crackle and pop, as the opening of the
four-poem piece begins:
Indoor
windows peek over haze, throw the role of doorway
into
fixed jeopardy, burst the remedial bubble. Shaganappi
doesn’t
fizzle; Shaganappi doesn’t
Link
the vast grammar quirk
West
of the coulees, the river jogs, the hoodoos idle, the
poem
immobilizes
Highways
curve into psychoanalysis, heal the road, heed
shoulders,
divorce wild game, plant citizens
If,
in deo, a cheese-grater replaces the blender, do you waffle
the
deco art?
Some of the
most striking pieces in the collection exist in the section “Widows and
Orphans,” which also appeared as a chapbook with Vancouver publisher Nomados in
2004, a collection (if recollection serves) of poems that bounced off titles
taken from overheard conversation (such as the piece above, “No such thing
as a prose poem,” where you can easily hear the jagged bounce of Paul Celan
influence). Riffing off found lines in a blur between poem and story, the
pieces as much respond to the title/line as bounce clear of the line, going far
further afield. Throughout the collection, her cadence and lines shift, altering
punctuation and breath-lines, holding only to the consistency and purposes of
each section, and each poem, itself. The section “guests” plays with the
structures and content of various poet friends and/or mentors, writing a
variant on George Bowering’s Curious (Toronto ON: Coach House Press,
1973), as well as a number of recent threads through his poetry since. Some of
her subjects include Bowering himself, as well as Robert Kroetsch, Margaret
Christakos, Dennis Cooley, Fred Wah, Susan Holbrook, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré
and Phyllis Webb, among others. Circling the referential, the best of these
poems work deeper into a reaction and response to the writers and their works.
Webb Ghastlies and Anti-Ghastlies
Dear
Phylly: What follows is a sort of rant, a champagne-laden, bowl-shaped, opal
and naked harangue. Alongside you, not hurtling. They say you are solely a
woman, and that you write poetry that doesn’t mess up the universe. They’re
wrong: Pauline still reads the books you haven’t yet written. She’s plotting to
reinvent herself as D-eye-anna with an “I” and to change the course of Canadian
coffin texts. You refuse to publish because you refuse to write. So they say.
How am I to respond? What imitation? What emulation? You write of the “Baby Ex
Machina” as if we recognize that baby, as if the Machina is never In.
someday, your autobiography will explode and I shall become ugly. If lucky. You
once said an animal cannot forever on them on them on them? Will I? Pumping
blood, your Venus fly-trap undercover spider opens a ventricle. A spy spied. By
whom? you may ask. By the useful. By the dozen. By the sliver of the
zinc-plated satellite. Sometimes I hear you writing in between the inbetweens.
Because after condemned flames, what? Charlatans, rogues, the usual muse
stand-ins. I won’t listen, but Pauline keeps reading with my fingertips.
9. Mark Goldstein, Form
of Forms: I’m intrigued by what Toronto writer and designer Mark Goldstein says he
learned by Vancouver writer Betsy Warland in the acknowledgements of his third
trade poetry collection, Form of Forms (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012):
“who taught me how to breathe the line.”
I began this book in the fall of 2002. Initially, it was entitled From
Shore to Shore. And it was so named when I traveled to Sage Hill in the
summer of 2005 to work on the manuscript with Nicole Brossard, who gave me the
courage to continue writing it. Winter of 2006, I workshopped the text in
Toronto with Betsy Warland who taught me how to breathe the line. From 2009
until pre-publication in 2012, I shared it with my generous and supportive
editors, Phil Hall, Jaclyn Piudik and Nick Drumbolis. And so this book became Form
of Forms. (“Acknowledgements”)
The long poem/book Form of Forms has a
generous amount of breath-space, something that few Canadian poets really
understand how to use properly, but for notable exceptions such as Warland,
Sylvia Legris and the late bpNichol. Such an amount of space to breathe in a
poem is a rare quantity, and Goldstein’s poem understands not only breath, but
the space required to hold and release that same breath.
there
is
a yearning
for that
which is
feared
a feeling
Stretching out into poem-sections—“Creation,”
“Preservation,” “Destruction” and “Quiescence”—Goldstein’s Form of Forms
is highly charged, and the poem composes its own breakdown before attempting to
re-assemble, through both form and content. Mark Goldstein, we learn, is
adopted, and attempting to reconcile exactly what that might mean for who he
is, who he was, and possibly, who he might have been. There are directions
pointed to of attempts to learn, many of which are thwarted through various
agencies, or provide simply not enough information, or the answers he may have
been seeking. Dislocation: the entire collection/poem is built upon it. The
topic of adoption, being the child of adoption and seeking out that empty space
is certainly an emotionally-loaded one, but the work itself is understated,
responding and recording, even sketching out a kind of calm.
start with a lie
“adoption is
natural”
(it goes
without
saying)
a sequence of telling
the simple
child
may believe
everyone
“adopted”
This is Goldstein’s third trade poetry
collection, after the volume After Rilke (BookThug, 2008) and Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (Toronto
ON: BookThug, 2010), and Form of Forms merely reconfirms Goldstein as a
poet of book-length projects. Composing his first trade collection through the
lens of Jack Spicer and Rilke, and his second through the lens of Paul Celan’s Atemwende,
both collections are thematically built, and move through the work of other
poets, both removing the author, and centring the author through a particular
kind of camouflage. In Form of Forms, Goldstein has composed a poem
through the lens of his own doubling, writing against that as-yet-undiscovered
part of himself, making it difficult to hide, but easy enough to distract, or
even self-create. There’s a passage by Jeanette Winterson I seem to be quoting
endlessly lately that seems to apply here as well:
Adopted children are self-invented
because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very
beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently,
like a bomb in the womb.
It’s almost as though
he has been moving further towards a comfort with a particular kind of
grounding through being groundless. As Goldstein wrote in the acknowledgments
of Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath: “One would like to feign accuracy
where there is none […]. In exhausting this hope, we need no longer circle the
poem seeking rest having accepted its groundlessness.” Form of Forms
struggles with the narrator’s sense of self (can we presume the narrator and
the author share word for word all?) but ends up creating that self through the
process. This is Goldstein not only composing his Form of Forms but as a
reformation, after too many questions have not yet been answered. In the end,
for both poem and the sense of the narrator’s self, structure must come from
within, the most heartbreaking and uplifting conclusion Mark Goldstein’s Form
of Form knows only too well.
10. Glen Downie, Left for Right: I’m intrigued by the new poetry collection by Toronto
poet Glen Downie, his Left for Right (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2012), a
collection of prose poems blended in with the very short (or, “postcard”)
story. It was wise to include the poem “Seasons” on the back cover, as it is
one of the sharpest in this collection of short pieces, but for so many other
poems, the sharpness isn’t quite there, in lines that require further
tightness. Perhaps it’s a matter of style, and my own insistence in wanting
most of these poems carved in half so the fingers might cut, on lines so tight
you could bounce a quarter off. I wish for the difference between a good prose
poem/short story and a prose that cuts down to the bone. Does all writing
require blood?
The Queen
Among powers and principles, we are less than Luxembourg or
Lichtenstein. Our privy council meets in the privy; our cabinet in a cabinet.
And she is the infant monarch of this, the smallest country in the world. She
rules with the tiniest iron fist; her every utterance, a royal decree.
It’s her father’s role
to carry her throughout the realm to receive the adoration of her subjects, and
indeed, she is revered wherever she goes, especially for her courage during the
recent hostilities. Our constitution is still unwritten, and it’s not clear
what it may mean to the State when her aging porter can no longer carry her. We
have never had a queen before, and will never have another – so belovéd is she,
we cannot conceive of succession.
Some of these, such as “Seasons” are alone worth
having gone through the entire collection, but so many others are good, and
only that. Am I simply demanding something out of these pieces other than what
he is offering? The best of these are quite spectacular, yet others fall
half-flat. And yet, this book just wouldn't let me go. Still, it would seem as though Downie is capable of great things,
and there are pieces in this collection that would make you believe it. You
just have to find them.
Seasons
Certainly there are more than four. Breton says fifteen or so. Arp says
it’s winter every Monday. The Inuit say there are six, including those that
contain the small material for winter and for spring. When you look at me as
you do now, that is a season. That look contains the small material for joy,
another season that comes and goes unpredictably throughout the year. I hope
when I die it will be in a season of joy and that you will circle the date on a
calendar as having been the longest day.
11. Gerry
Gilbert, COUNTERFIET PENNIES: There most likely
aren’t too many titles by the late Vancouver poet and publisher Gerry Gilbert
(April 7, 1936 – June 19, 2009) in print anymore, with the exception possibly
of the chapbook PERHAPS (Toronto ON: BookThug, 1999) and the reissued Moby
Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004), but the enthusiasm for his work
appears to have steadily increased over the past few years. Since Gilbert died,
a tribute blog appeared, with regular updates, and there are more references to
him online that one might think, for an author who barely published through
trade form over his last two decades. Now, thanks to Vancouver poets Lary
Bremner (publisher of Obvious Epiphanies Press), Carol and Jamie Reid, who went
through Gilbert’s archive, we now have access to his COUNTERFIET PENNIES
(North Vancouver BC: obvious epiphanies press, 2012) as a free pdf download.
During the early 60’s in Vancouver, Gerry
Gilbert was part of an informal grouping of “downtown Vancouver poets” with
John Newlove, Judith Copithorne, Maxine Gadd and Roy Kiyooka, less a group than
a ying to the yang of TISH. With a healthy distrust of editors and
(seemingly) publisher, Gilbert’s expansive ouvre appeared in trade form with
great effort, as he infamously refused to have his work edited. He even turned
down the opportunity to be in a series of selected poems that Talonbooks
produced around 1980 (others in the series included bpNichol, Daphne Marlatt,
George Bowering and Fred Wah). As Frank Davey wrote about Gilbert in From
There to Here (Erin ON: Press Porcepic, 1974):
Gilbert’s experimental world is that of most men alive in these decades,
mundane, trivial, thoroughly non-spectacular – enriched only by the easily
missed miracles of animals, plants, the weather, or intimate human gesture. He
presents this world in the way in which it impinges on him: a puzzingly
discontinuous flow of broken images. “AND”, the title of one of his books, is
the usual Gilbert conjunction, since it implies no logical structure or
relationship. To Gilbert, experience is endless non sequitur.
As Davey suggests, Gilbert’s writing was an
endless, singular line of ephemera, miracles and “intimate human gesture,”
documenting the entirety of what he saw, felt and did, taking the Frank O’Hara
“I did this, I did that” poem to its extreme. Dated 1996 to 1997, Gilbert’s COUNTERFIET
PENNIES is wonderfully reproduced exactly the way the author intended,
scanning directly from the mass of binders that filled his small apartment.
There is the strangest kind of detail in Gilbert’s work, knowing that his work
was composed of a single, straight, life-long line, one that readers only saw
in the comparatively briefest parcels.
The way he said it to
me, that I didn’t remember but we’d met years ago, put me on the defensive
right away, smelling trouble. He got my number alright. I’m so beat I can
barely play along enough to read the paper; or want what I really want; or
really want what I want. As my voice gets fainter, I pile on the wisdom; bore ;
ing. If you know what this means, you must have read it already.
There aren’t many copies of Gerry Gilbert works
available out in the world anymore, but I’m sure if you want to read further of
his works, I’d recommend jwcurry’s Room 302 Books in Ottawa as the best place
to begin.
12. Sarah Pinder, Cutting
Room: After years of self-published chapbooks,
predominantly through her own bits of string press, comes Toronto writer Sarah
Pinder’s first trade poetry collection, Cutting Room (Coach House Books,
2012).
Praising and Disparaging the Functunal
This
is how a string of ghosts appears in your inbox,
and
this is how you answer each of them,
always, little sails.
I’ve long been a
fan of the cool clarity of her lines of poetry and prose, and the graceful
chapbook publications she started producing in Montreal, and now from her base
in Toronto, including thanksgiving (2006), Garden, Gardener: poems by
Sarah Pinder (2008), Do You Like What You See? (2009), The
Beautiful Province (2009), ‘My things, my grand-mother’s things’
(2009), Pearls Before Swine Flu / This Is Plague City (with Dave
Proctor, 2009), THE RYE HOUSE, a suite (2010), COLLAPSE (2011)
and Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination (2011). There are plenty
of others, I’m sure. Given that a number of these small publications also
included selections of short fiction, might there also be a collection of short
stories in the works as well? In Cutting Room, it appears as though
Pinder has hammered a selection of her previous work into a larger structure,
and the shift is compelling, shaping the collection into a sequence of
sections, some of which themselves exist as small sequences. In the first
poem-section, “Fuel,” she writes:
in
a red state, spell out the lesson here, map out the power
and
water, or the rising lawn to disappear in
some
fresh atlas, the new record.
practice
wearing details yourself,
ghosted,
twinned to a lighthouse.
movement
in the dark requires geometry or optimism, a hand
along
plaster, counting pockmarks.
In their
previous form, published as small chapbooks, Pinder’s poems existed in
self-contained units, and the larger portrait of her writing opens the
possibilities considerably. Her poems are sharp, lovely shapes that require
deep attention, writing the detritus of the small and even dark moments of
family and the domestic, living and existing in the spaces between scenes.
Pinder is also one of the few I’ve seen who really comprehends what is possible
with the short poem, removing sentiment and even action, shaving down to the
bare bone. Her poems are odd, quirky, and utterly charming, and include shades
of Richard Brautigan surrealism, Nelson Ball’s brevity and Stuart Ross’
absurdity, albeit with her unapologetic eye. Compared often to small films, her
poems exist on the knife-edge between being bulletproof and shattering
entirely, presenting a kind of vulnerability that gains strength through the
telling. Later on in the collection, the section “Rye House” exists as a
collage of short, sharp pieces that accumulate themselves into the shape of, if
not a narrative, a portrait of a particular family.
Son-in-Law Tony at Home, Sept 1973
Before
he embarrasses himself
with
the axe.
After spending years watching her work through
the structure of the short chapbook, I’m intrigued to see how she continues
through the space of the full-length work. Still, Pinder’s strengths come
through in her smallness, boiling down lines to fit the magnificent “Two suites
after Frances Bacon,” or the sharp scenes she manages to create from a mere
handful of lines, each one striking as hard as the previous.
The End Times
The photocopier is a good place to think
about avoiding the doctor.
Hunched here, crushing the spines of paperbacks
while thinly heaving, I don’t want anyone
listening between my shirt and lungs,
except for maybe you.
13. Camille Martin, Looms:
In
her fourth trade collection, Looms (2012), Toronto poet Camille Martin
continues her book-length accumulation of poems-as-collage, twisting and turning
seemingly unconnected ideas into a single, coherent thread. These are poems of
exploration, not always conscious or concerned about where they might end,
allowing for a fearlessness that permeates the entire work.
Right now is what dwindling feels like, despite
the mulberry outside my window steadfastly
anchoring its taproot. The new century counts planets
that might support rooted beings and ravenous
predators.
But stardust piles up on lines connecting dots
in constellations, blurring them into nebulae.
Shapeless
experience waffles between concrete and abstract,
accounting
for the popularity of horoscopes, especially when
Jupiter enters
Aries and we vacillate, like volcanoes heaving ash
before the pyroclastic flow, collapsing before
tsunami, dwindling
until the next cycle. I abstractly shake dew from ripe
mulberries.
Or I lie down, gazing at shivering green tracery
non-existent
a couple of months ago and just as soon to vanish.
A more or less concrete cup of coffee balances on my
belly,
wobbling to the diastolic and systolic rhythms of my
heart.
In an interview
posted November 17, 2011 on Open Book: Toronto, she talked about her
then-forthcoming Looms as a collection structurally built as an
extension of her previous, Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2010):
It’s interesting that book projects can seem to take
on a life of their own and evolve into what they “want” to be despite original
intentions. Before I started the poems in Looms, I had just published
100 sonnets exploring various approaches to the ancient tradition of the
14-line meditations – in the case of Sonnets, meditations on the nature
of self, memory and cognition.
Wanting to write longer poems but still under the
spell of that book, I started writing double sonnets. But the poems soon broke
out of that too-restrictive mould and began telling strange stories that are
often dream-like in the sense of being multi-layered and making unexpected
shifts. They are still concerned with questions about self and other and about
the nature of human thought. However, in Looms I began delving into
narrative in relation to the formation of identity from many different and
constantly shifting stories.
The image of a loom represents, to my mind, the idea
of the complex, interwoven narratives that form the evanescent fabrics of
perception and memory.
Martin composes
“loom” as a weaving, suggesting the motion of looping and swirling a myriad of
threads that wrap through and into each other, and her poems do exactly that,
written as a series of dream-like movements that continue to riff until each
poem concludes. In sixty-two poems, she references windows, nursery rhymes,
coffee, dreams, bird migratory patterns and mockingbirds, but the poems are
less about the specifics than the movements themselves and the lyric
accumulations. She writes of “the tempering passion of mercury,” about how “a
tiny pronoun gestates under a full moon,” and of “ukulele seas where mist
coalesces.” There is such an expansiveness to Martin’s Looms. The poems
exist in that magical place where words, images and ideas collide, creating
connections that previously had never been.
Gliding through arteries you arrive naked
and vulnerable at the brink of a cliff. An oracle
dares you to roam faraway lands to learn
whether ballooning junk status can foster social
cohesion or whether Oedipus really needed
to know. Indifference is a country where trees dream
of primitive cells parading to the common ancestor
from which flora that would later look good
on someone’s mantle branched off. Here, a twitch
is a cup waiting to spill. If your evolution begins
at the finish line (which it won’t,
but that’s not the point), jump from the cliff
down a hole to the other side of the earth
and start over again naked and vulnerable
at the brink of a cliff.
14. Elizabeth Bachinsky, I Don’t Feel So Good: On the back cover of Vancouver poet Elizabeth
Bachinsky’s new poetry collection, I Don’t Feel So Good (Toronto ON:
BookThug, 2012), it says:
I Don’t Feel So Good is comprised of material selected from the
handwritten journals and notes of Elizabeth Bachinsky (1986-2012). Lines and
passages were selected by the roll of a die and appear in the order the die saw
fit. In blending confessional and procedural techniques with disjunctive
chronology and random chance, this book explores and exacerbates possibilities
of the narrative mode both within the text and for the reader. Not so much
“written” as “received.”
I admit to cringing a bit at the catalogue copy,
pulling away from the seeming-preciousness of such a self-conscious
construction. Just how aware is the reader meant to be of this construction
while pouring through the book, the fourth trade title so far by Bachinsky (the
back cover also notes a fifth, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History,
due out in 2013)? Still, I like the visceral confessional fragments of the
book, built as a single, extended poem out of these breaks, pauses and
sentences. There is something about the connect and/or disconnect between the
fragments and the construction that shifts the perception of the work. Are we
meant to read the connections as arbitrary and random, or the entire collection
as a broad canvas, representing the depth and breadth of six years of the
author’s life? There is such an anxiety to the poems, the journal-fragments
that make up I Don’t Feel So Good. What exactly is this long series of
fragments seeking to map?
The other day when I said “I didn’t do anything” I didn’t really mean it
that way. I really wasn’t feeling very well. In fact, I haven’t been feeling
very well at all lately!
_____
On the day in question, it was my intention to wake up early and clean
the house. I had also wanted to do some writing. For whatever reason, I
couldn’t get up. I mean I really couldn’t. Instead I walked around in a kind of
daze. I tried very hard to get out of this state, but it didn’t happen. I knew
things needed to get done. I got so overwhelmed by everything: bills,
appointments, deadlines, my loan, the bathroom, laundry, kitchen, the cat,
dinner, reading homework, the dread of Starbucks. So instead I stayed in bed
and watched TV. I just couldn’t do it. I wrote a poem.
There is such
an anxiety, and one of the most common words in the collection is “don’t,”
echoing a pessimism as an undercurrent, however temporary it might be, from “I
really don’t want to hear about peoples’ days.” (p 10) to “Don’t make me have
to show my body.” (p 11) to “I don’t like anybody more than anybody; I just
like some people / more than others.” (p 31). Towards the end of the
collection, the slight uplift of a passage that includes: “The ending was
killer. So sad! // But also very happy. // A happy sad ending!”
One could
argue, of the procedural, if two words or lines are side by side, does it
matter how they got there? Just how important is the awareness of her structure
for the process of reading this work? If I Don’t Feel So Good is
salvaged from journal entries, it joins an interesting list of other recent
Canadian poets who have produced similar kinds of works, including Lisa
Robertson’s Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (Toronto ON: Coach House
Books, 2009) and George Bowering’s His Life (Toronto ON: ECW Press,
2000). On the other hand, in her confessional, Bachinsky’s work in this
collection is more akin to, say, New York poet Rachel Zucker, or Toronto poet
Lynn Crosbie, delving into and exploring a particular brutal honesty and
openness, unafraid of whatever dark places might be revealed. In many ways, I
Don’t Feel So Good is Bachinsky’s way of reconciling two previously
distinct and separate threads of her published work, from the confessional
aspects of her
Home of Sudden Service (Gibsons BC:
Nightwood Editions, 2006) and god of
missed connections (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2009) with the
procedural of Curio: grotesquest & satires from the electronic age
(Toronto ON: BookThug, 2005; second edition, 2009).
Once while sitting on a bus I thought, this is one of many moments. When
I get off this bus, I will step into another life. Narrative, fiction, helps us
make sense of our lives. Born, lived, died.
In that order, we are travelling across the Burrard Street Bridge
_____
On the bus, A little boy sings happy birthday with his father into an
iPhone. The iPhone gets it. Then it’s gone.
I Don’t Feel So Good is a
risky work, a kind of highwire act between seemingly opposing strains. An
interesting and compelling book, there remains something about the collection
that feels unfinished, somehow, as though the fragments remain, for the most
part, fragments, unable to entirely cohere into a singular unit. Despite that,
I’m fascinated by the direction Bachinsky’s writing appears to be going,
blending the procedural with confessional strains. One could easily say that
everything she has produced so far has led up to this, and the evolution of her
writing is one that is worth following closely.
15. Laura
Broadbent, Oh There You Are I Can’t See
You Is It Raining?: Now that Montreal publisher Snare Books has become
an imprint of Invisible Publishing, it puts a different spin on Montreal writer
Laura Broadbent’s first poetry title, Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It
Raining? (2012).
A.
Your task is to smell the morning and there’s nothing wrong with what
you’re wearing and your hair’s just fine so notice the wild staccato and sinew
of sound from the loud to minute brush of dry grass there is no violence or
distraction let’s say it’s lightly snowing and every snowflake has the power of
an extraterrestrial crystal palace of monumental healing and light so who cares
if your decisions have been correct. No you, no you, no you.
B.
Selected by Toronto poet Sachiko Murakami as winner of the sixth annual
Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, Broadbent’s Oh There You Are I
Can’t See You Is It Raining? unfortunately holds the position of being the
last independent title by Snare Books. At least under Invisible, at least, the
press will still exist, albeit in a different form, which is certainly
preferable to the press disappearing entirely. Does anyone recall such Canadian
presses as Ragweed Press, Gutter
Press or Red Deer College Press (who produced the magnificent “writing west”
series)? All gone, for many different reasons, well before their time.
XII.
She looked over to me looking at her and said I need a fire ceremony to
burn all my old love letters. I told her that could be arranged. I told her
I’ve burnt all the love letters I’ve ever received. Except for hers. Which will
probably get burned one day too, she says. I told her, probably, but so will my
corpse. She laughed without smiling. (“Men In Various States”)
Broadbent’s collection is constructed out of a
series of section-suites, each stretched out across a series of single canvases
that stitch together into a tight collection of lyric fragments. Composed in
section-suites, the book includes “Between A and B” and “Culled,” the second of
which appears to include the remainder of the collection, four smaller
section-suites: “Suite 1,” “Suite 2,” “Suite 3” and “Men In Various States.”
There is something about the sharpness of Broadbent’s lines that really appeal,
and the range of styles that move throughout the collection, showing a larger,
longer comprehension of the line, the sentence and the entire book, very much a
single unit constructed out of pieces. Her work has a questioning certainty to
it, one that asks as much as it gives. The last three sections of “Suite 3”
read:
[18]
Art school students’ projects are parties.
Be on guard for the projects of art students.
[19]
Men like when my whole body
is ostensible.
[20]
Remembering things
is an invitation to drowning.
16.
Sandy Pool, Undark: From Calgary writer
Sandy Pool comes her second poetry collection, Undark (a blewointment book / Nightwood Editions, 2012), a
follow-up to Exploding into Night
(Guernica Editions, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s
Award for Poetry. The eighth title in Nightwood’s blewointment book series, she
includes this brief note at the opening:
In the early 1900s, thousands of women between the ages of eleven and
forty-five were employed painting glow-in-the-dark watch dials for soldiers and
civilians in both Canada and the United States. Under the guidance of the
paint’s innovator, Sabin Von Sochocky, they kept their brush points sharp by
“pointing” the tips of the brushes with their lips.
Several years after leaving the plant, these women developed a variety
of mysterious medical conditions, including completely necrosis of the jaw,
severe anemia, intense arthritic-like pains, and spontaneous bone fractures in
the arms and legs. A few of the former workers became lame when their legs
began to shorten. When the women visited doctors, some were told it was
syphilis that was causing their symptoms. Sabin Von Shockocky was forced to
remove his own thumb due to necrosis, and eventually died of radiation-induced
anemia.
Though many women tried to sue the company, the lawsuits were largely
unsuccessful. Many of the women died before receiving compensation. The final
demise of the US radium dial-painting industry did not come until Canadian
production was halted in 1954, and the extraction plants in Belgium shut down
in 1960.
There aren’t that many poetry books that can
claim a glow-in-the-dark cover, and one can only presume (and hope) that
neither process nor result are the kind of toxicity depicted inside. Pool
subtitles her work “An Oratorio,” suggesting the collection is operatic in
scope.
1916
Next time you fumble for a switch, bark
your shins on furniture, wonder vainly what time it is
because of the dark—remember Undark.
Today, thanks to constant laboratory work
everyone can benefit from this
most unusual element. Twenty-three
years ago, radium was unknown. Today,
it serves you safely and surely. You must
ask yourself this: what would you like
to see in the dark? Fishing lures? Clocks?
Buckles on bedroom slippers?! Most assuredly you do.
Undark takes care of the dark, so you don’t have to.
You may ask plainly: does Undark contain real radium?
Of course it does.
Pool’s Undark
exists with a cast of characters, “Dramatis Personae,” including Sappho,
“Radium Women,” “Chorus,” and the scientist Sabin, writing out very much a
score of operatic proportions. “Undark” also appears as a character, reciting
and repeating lines from propaganda, as does the character “Hatsepsut:
(1508-1458 B.C.) foremost of noble ladies, fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth
dynasty of Ancient Egypt.” Undark
unfolds and stretches out through a sequence of alternating voices and styles,
composing a lyric narrative of fragments, each of which further an accumulation
of story. Throughout the collection, the years (which make up either part or
all of poem titles) progress as a series of strands from 1905, 1910, 1919,
1916, 1912, 1458 B.C., 1921, 1917, 1458 B.C. and so on, with each page
including, instead of page numbers, a countdown of days, hours and minutes to a
final demise.
Nox, New Jersey:
1998
Beyond the range of the human ear
the cemetery clicks into being.
The earth groans. Each one to herself.
Silence. Rather, they whisper.
Skeletal lace, the larynx.
Worms undoubtedly disturbed
by the echolocation. Women
are speaking. To have lived
is not enough. They have to
reverberate like elbows
poking through undergrowth.
The rate of pulses rising
to terminal buzz. Women
like whale music, singing
under the newly mowed lawn:
lick tick lick tick
lick tick.
To be dead is not enough.
The Doppler shift of history
buries them deeper. Geiger
counter clicks into being.
What Pool composes characters, a chorus and
lyric asides that merge into an entire performance, providing voice for those
who have previously been voiceless. As she writes in her “Notes and
Acknowledgments” at the back of the collection, she includes “found text” from
Anne Carson’s Fragments of Sappho
(2008). Given that one of the characters in the collection is called “Nox”(“a
striking dark-featured woman in her late sixties, reminiscent of Marie Curie”),
one can’t help but conflate the character slightly with Carson’s subsequent on
grief and her brother’s death, Nox
(2010), especially given the poems underneath the character’s name, such as
“Nox, Lucerne: 1905” or “Nox, Newark: 1919.” This work is a striking
performance of grief and compassion, sung as an acknowledgment of those who
suffered at the hands of progress. As “Nox” says in the two-line final poem:
Nox, Epilogue
Since then, I’ve hated
the dark. I never turn off the lights.
Born in Ottawa,
Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa.
The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction,
he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2011, and his most recent titles are
the poetry collections Songs for little sleep, (Obvious Epiphanies,
2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), A (short) history of l.
(BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street
(Moira, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and
publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer
Mulligan), The Garneau Review (www.ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen
seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds)
and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (www.ottawater.com). He
spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the
University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and
other notices at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
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