In
no particular order, here is a list of twenty Canadian poetry titles published
in 2013 that I think require further attention: Jay MillAr, Timely Irreverence; Gregory Betts, This Is Importance: A Student’s Guide to Literature;
David Dowker and Christine Stewart, Virtualis:
Topologies of the Unreal; Jon Paul Fiorentino, Needs Improvement; Shane Rhodes, X: Poems & Anti-Poems; Margaret Christakos, Multitudes; Sandra Ridley, The Counting House; Sadiqa de Meijer, Leaving Howe Island; Jordan Abel, the place of scraps; Dennis Cooley, the stones; Peter Culley, Parkway; Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, Sybil Unrest; Phil Hall, The Small Nouns Crying Faith; Kim
Minkus, Tuft; Paul Zits, Massacre Street; Stephen Collis, To the Barricades; Daphne Marlatt, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now;
Shannon Maguire, fur(l) parachute; Jenna
Butler, seldom seen road; and Sylvia
Legris, Pneumatic Antiphonal.
Somewhere in the world
there is a book.
It’s a book of poems
by somebody, somewhere.
This book sits on a
shelf
filled with other
books.
And in this book there
is
a poem. I’m sure of it.
(“Tasteful Creatures”)
Given
the title of his seventh trade poetry collection, Timely Irreverence (Gibsons BC: a blewointment book, Nightwood
Editions, 2013), Toronto poet, editor and publisher Jay MillAr, who also sells
books under Apollinaire’s Bookshop, “selling the books that no one wants to
buy,” suggests that he writes as though no one is listening, and no one is
reading. This is irelevence, sure, but only and entirely on his own terms. “It
can be difficult to exist as a poet in a culture that generally looks the other
way,” MillAr writes at the back of the collection, in his “Notes &
Acknowledgments.” In this collection, MillAr writes on the intricate smallness
of things, the seemingly-irrelevant things, including poems, poets, amoeba,
geometry, patience and television. Throughout the collection, there are trace
echoes of the plainspeaking meditative essay-poem of David W. McFadden’s Art of Darkness (McClelland &
Stewart, 1984), a cadence and structure that threads through more than a couple
of pieces, including “Another Person’s True Essence,” where he writes: “A woman
writes / overlooking the sea – it is somewhere in America and / poetry has
touched her shoulder gently as she looks out / over the harbor above the city.
She is writing. A man / watches.”
There
is something of the “irrelevance” that MillAr turns on its head, whether
BookThug, the publishing company he runs, recently claiming the mantle long
held by McClelland and Stewart as the “Canadian publisher,” or the fact that
this book has so many blurbs by other writers that less than half of them could
fit on the back cover (the rest are inside). Given his potential audience and
list of admirers (mind you, he claims, for a poet), can he continue to claim to
be irrelevant? Still, MillAr’s poetry very much revels in the quiet of the
everyday, of the domestic, in that William Carlos Williams or Robert Creeley
way of the meditatively immediate, composing short breath-lines into short
poems less geographically located than personally located. It’s as though
MillAr lives in the same way his poems do—quietly, tempered, thoughtful and
considered, with one of the finest examples of such being the poem “BEING A
REVISION,” that blends all of the above, writing:
BEING
A REVISION
Poor Hazel sprained
or broke her foot
swimming –
can’t tell yet, so
she’s hobbling
around behind their
excited frames, within
a
sprained or broken
presence –
she’s hobbling around
it
swimming in the
sprained
or broken frame,
excited
and unknowing, at least
so far
as she follows them
down the hall.
The notes I have
gathered include
only information on the
information.
I decide quietly grids
of technology
are not the wind, nor
are they
the water nor the
earth. They
are the ideas that hold
things still
long enough to consider
them.
We
would be wise to listen.
This book is a heaped pile of mistakes! A small pyramid
of its own, this book of student mistakes is, then, a document attesting to the
personal growth of the thousands of students I have had the wonderful
opportunity to teach. One thing that Lucretius missed in his theory of the
importance of the error, though, despite all of his genius, was the importance
of humour in the process. In my classes, I often start by telling the students
that they might come to their education with the faith that they are
transforming themselves, which requires killing off part of who they were
before. Such intimate change is painful, awkward and often clumsy, and I am
there to help them discover their new selves with some measure of – if not
grace – then support. Of course, all the while they are learning and unlearning
themselves, I am learning and unlearning myself alongside them. So, I am also
there to help them see the humour in the process. We do laugh a lot in class:
sometimes at my mistakes (for, as all opposites attract too many cooks with
rough diamonds in the busy, I take too much pleasure in mixing metaphors and
twisting aphorisms, and often get carried away), sometimes at their mistakes
(though never singled out as such; humiliation is simply not the point of the
game). I have come to learn that laughter and a good sense of humour are
essential tools in learning. You fall, you laugh it off and you try again. And
then when the video appears on Youtube, you laugh at the slapstick spectacle
and grow more resolved to get it right. You can’t laugh if you don’t see what
you did wrong; and you can’t really see what you did wrong unless you can laugh
at the difference.
Collection
as a series of mistakes and errors done by his students, St. Catharine’s,
Ontario writer, critic and professor Gregory Betts’ newest title is This Is Importance: A Student’s Guide to
Literature (Hamilton ON: Poplar Press, 2013). Anyone who has corrected
student papers will easily appreciate this book of odd lines, misunderstood
queries and just plain wrong-headedness that run through this small book, all
lifted from years worth of student papers. I’ve long been a fan of the mistake
and the accident, knowing just how important such are for the creation of new
work, and the possibility for the shifted perspective. There are destinations
that can only be reached by mistake, and Betts seems to understand this,
discussing humour, mistakes and their importance in his lengthy introduction. To
see something different, one must sometimes put words and concepts side-by-side
that have no business being there, and some of these small slips may be
hilariously funny and ridiculous, while others have the sheen of accidental
near-genius, shifting the way a particular writer or work might be considered
(one of my favourite, on Toronto writer George Elliott Clarke, reads: “Clarke
is an Afraidian author.”) Others make absolutely no sense at all. Here is a
small selection of such:
Krapp’s
Last Tape
has to go to the bathroom but can’t. The banana is something to hold on to.
(“Samuel Beckett”)
When Bonanza closed
down, James Joyce left his narrative. (“James Joyce”)
Archibald Lampman fears
that the future could happen again. (“Archibald Lampman”)
Cohen sits at a bar,
revealing personal things about himself, until the reader comes along to
connect to his realness. (“Leonard Cohen”)
Be it his family, his
community, or nature itself; they all wore his adornments. His children were
trophies. (“Margaret Laurence”)
The alphabet has been a
major influence on many poets. (“Profound Forisms I”)
As
a reader, one can approach these lines with absolute delight, perhaps the
entire opposite effect the same lines would have on a professor of literature
discovering the same within a paper by one of their students. The book is
broken up into a series of thematic sections: In the Beginning was Myth,
Definitions I, European Art and Literature (including William Shakespeare,
Jonathan Swift, The Romantics and others), Profound Forisms I, Canadian
Literature (including Susanna Moodie, E. Pauline Johnson, Archibald Lampman and
others), Engendered Profoundisms, Modern Canada (including Lucy Maude
Montgomery, Robert W. Service, Sinclair Ross and others), Contemporary Canada
(including Margaret Atwood, Sheila Watson, The Small Press, bpNichol, Gail
Scott and others), American Literature (including Edgar Allan Poe, Ursula K. Le
Guin and others), Definitions II, Profound Forisms II, One-Offs, Misspelled
Author Names and Definitions III. Betts has been slowly compiling these odd
slips for years, and, removed somewhat from their original contexts, many give
the impression that they could exist within language and/or lyric poetry. There
have been numerous poets who have worked through selections of found and/or
lifted materials to create works, whether the flarf poets, or Lisa Robertson,
selecting and re-ordering lines from her own notebooks to compose new work. One
idea and one phrase bangs up against the other, and somehow creates something
new, and entirely beautiful. Has Betts, through compiling lines from the papers
of so many former students, somehow constructed his most successful collection
of poems?
The Church burning is
funny because we all think like that. You have to laugh at your morality.
(“Stephen Leacock”)
It is questionable
whether the novel has taken place. (“Sheila Watson”)
Some Canadian poets
embraced this ideal and Louis Cabri as well. (“The Small Press”)
Joe and Billy like to
experience each other’s dialogue. The book, however, refuses to show them
talking. (“Michael Turner”)
Helen of Troy used to
date free verse poets, but is now physically constrained. Free verse has no
chance with meaning. The battle between Greek and the Trojans was basically
like the contemporary poets and free verse. Helen, on the other hand, is saved
by math. (“Christian Bök”)
Ironically, she was
born in the same year that her mother gave birth. She was not an active
participant in her birth, that was mostly done by her parents. (“Souvankham Thammavongsa”)
the book
of your coterie
I desire the robbery of
my invention.
Your porcelain eternity
splits the pleasure of my raze
and the golden sides
from my propinquity.5
For example, I cannot
wed the yellow deficiency in bloom.
For example, I devise
the mimic – for fruitless took
my promising boy (oh
odious despite gate)
for example,
and acceleration – the
surface is fleshed out
for example,
a ripe detour (west)
toward a citizen kiss
for example,
blossoms
of aluminum
for example,
the line – etc., bean
dark skull and succor
_____________
5 Nips quick –
a bug link.
Toronto
poet and publisher David Dowker and Edmonton poet and critic Christine
Stewart’s collaborative poetry book, Virtualis:
Topologies of the Unreal (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), constructed in three
sections and a reading list, is a book of responses that become just as much a
three-way conversation. Previous to this, Dowker is the author of the trade
collection Machine Language
(BookThug, 2010), as well as the editor/publisher of the late great Alterran Poetry Assemblage; Stewart is
the author of a number of small chapbooks (through above/ground press, Nomados
and others), and has worked on various collaborations, including an early
collaboration with Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang produced as The Barscheit Horse (Hamilton, ON:
Berkeley Horse, 1993). In their collaborative blend of ideas and language, the
poems in Virtualis: Topologies of the
Unreal work through the abstract, deliberately ungrounded, embracing sound,
and allowing the theories to spark, but the words themselves to propel. “It
went out, and like a woman it was happy.” they write, in the second section,
“Grid Meridian.” An exploration of melancholia is easy enough to negotiate, but
I suspect you might have to have some knowledge of theory to appreciate the
full measure, and the back of the collection includes a list of titles under
“Some Readings” that include works by Giorgio Agamben, Charles Baudelaire, Walter
Benjamin, Jeremy Bentham, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Robert Burton, Roberto
Calasso, Paul Celan, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan and others. As the back
cover writes, “Virtualis: Topologies of
the Unreal is a poetic investigation of melancholia and the baroque. As a
collaborative reading of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Christine
Buci-Glucksmann, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur
Rimbaud, David Dowker and Christine Stewart have created a series of linguistic
interjections that run from the allegorical barricades of the baroque to the
topological confound of the modern, incorporating (for example) Medusa and the
Sphinx, aestivating snails and the alchemy of bees.” Their Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal exists as a conversation and a
continuous thread, as the faded phrase within each poem becomes the title of
the subsequent piece, extending the poems nearly as a kind of call-and-response
that require deep and repeated readings.
clymical
epoch
This is not a séance.14
Escape is not an object.
The habit of synaptics
matters yet still one fumes and stares
and wonders just what
kind of trees are these.
We are gathering
interior circumference.
Flecked bits, motes lit
(dendritic).
Their truth is folded
into bitter distance.
They face that solemn
green arousal with oblique strategies15
of psychic detachment.
_____________
14 “This is a
science.”
15 For
example: “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” Brian Eno and Peter
Schmidt, Oblique Strategies
WICKED
ELOQUENT
Because poetry is very,
very far from –
and those who therefore
thrive insist it remain so
And also contemplative
drones drone
inside cabailist
cocooneries
Not to mention domain
names reserved for only the most
wicked eloquent –
Plus flaccid
fraternities with their
heightened-flaccidity-as-aesthetic-mandate
flail, swing
Most meritorious solder
wand weld torch trophy crooners
croon the comments, the
walls, avoid the wells
And wasn’t this
ambition supposed to be in the writing, not in the
product? In tenor and
vehicle and not in laurel and mantle?
Fuck me. I’m as flail
as anyone
Montreal
writer and Winnipeg ex-pat Jon Paul Fiorentino continues his persona of the
‘beta male’ (although far softer here than in previous works) through his sixth
trade poetry collection, Needs
Improvement (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013), from the cover image of
a mediocre report card (including subjects “trope,” “imagery” and
“self-regulation”) to the subtle thread that stitches his lyrics and
post-lyrics together into an extremely tight and taut collection. Fiorentino’s
poetry is thick with references to misspent youth, the City of Winnipeg,
recreational pharmaceuticals, clinical depression, Montreal and juvenile humour,
and his poetry has evolved over the years into an impressive staggered and
studied post-language lyric. Over the stretch of more than half a dozen trade
titles – including two works of fiction, and previous poetry collections Indexical Elegies (Coach House Books,
2010), The Theory of the Loser Class
(Coach House Books, 2006), Hello
Serotonin (Coach House Books, 2004), resume
drowning (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2002) and transcona fragments (Winnipeg MB: Cyclops Press, 2002), as well as
the chapbook hover (Winnipeg MB:
Staccato chapbooks, 2000) – Fiorentino has learned to play his combination of
dark and flippant tone as less of an overpowering force than a simple and
subtle distraction that actually masks his movement into entirely different subject
matter. I find it interesting that Fiorentino’s poetry has evolved into more
conceptual veins, including the “pedagogical interventions” in the title
section; utilizing manual illustration, satire, appropriation and manipulation,
Fiorentino has widely expanded his ouvre far beyond the once-core of his work
in the prairie long poem, and managed to craft questions far more important
than the answers.
The
visual poems he includes are reminiscent slightly of those by former Vancouver
poet Jason Le Heup a decade or so back, as well as other works through and
around the Toronto Research Group (bpNichol and Steve McCaffery), and blend
perfectly with the rest of the collection. Composing poems both lyric and
visual, the poems in Needs Improvement
attempt to explore, explain and even obscure theory, and even opens with a
quote by Judith Butler: “Neither the Austinian promise nor the Althusserian
prayer require a pre-existing mental state to ‘perform’ in the way that they
do.”
MINIMAL
PAIR: SIMPLETONS
When I said we made a
minimal pair
I was deep in
linguistic conceit
It had nothing to do
with your character
it was strictly
labio-dental
Some
of the poems in this collection previously appeared as the chapbook The Winnipeg Cold Storage Company (Calgary
AB: NO Press, August 2012), including works that focused on mythmaking and
geography, working over, across and through his hometown of Winnipeg, as he
does more specifically in the title poem to the chapbook, included here as
well:
The title of “Winnipeg
Cold Storage Company” poses the question of collective memory and what it means
to say that ‘things might be done with storage’? The problem of collective
memory is thus immediately bound up with a question of performance. What does
it mean for storage not only to store, but also in some sense to perform and,
in particular, to perform what it stores?
In
the colophon of the chapbook, he wrote that “The text from ‘Winnipeg Cold
Storage Company’ is appropriated and manipulated with the most love from Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performance by Judith Butler.” Composing poems as lyric-fragments of
losing, loss and disappearance, as well as a section of report cards exploring
bullying through satire, Fiorentino manages to turn information against itself,
even to the point of working to say nothing at all.
TRINITY
BELLWOODS
Down to my last
lyric
Do you know the word pilling?
It’s a piling on of
fabrications
You wear it well or
wore it
Free-range derangement
commences
as denizens make
strange with tenses and moods
I saw an old cancerous
friend here
who said, ‘I remember
when I used to be creative –
They cut it out of me
all interstitial-like’
Now, the lies and years
are
piling/pilling
I will miss you when
you shun me. I write these
things for nothing
You remain
the best nothing I know
as
may have been grunted
treaty
five
As aforesaid within,
hereunto the hereinafter, thereupon and hereby thereof. That is to say, within
the aforesaid that whatsoever thereto, that is, there whereas within, thereon.
Therein, however, that whereas, hereinafter elsewhere, thereto unless therefor.
That within the that that is that, what soever, forever within the hereby, that
thereupon, there is to heretofore that within. Whereas, that is to say,
inasmuch hereby in that, therefor hereinafter within this. Within therein that
is. Within, that is, thereabout unless thereof—hereafter throughout. And, as
aforesaid, any part thereof otherwise elsewhere or hereinbefore hereby—thereto,
as aforesaid, hereof within whenever. Thereon thereof whatsoever wherever
forever. That is to say, however, therein thereout, therefore within. Whereas
thereof, hereby within. Within the aforesaid, therefor within the hereainafter.
In
his fifth trade poetry collection, X:
Poems & Anti-Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2013), Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes
works to reconcile the clash of histories and cultures, composing poems from
various subjects and issues surrounding Canada’s First Nations peoples,
including conflicts, treaties and appropriations such as the conflict at Oka
and the Indian Act as well as Idle No More and its various public responses.
Given the work achieved through the rise of Idle No More, it would seem Rhodes
was slightly ahead of the curve, attempting to explore and question some of the
structures inherent between two sides in such deep conflict, given that their
language markers and concepts are so vastly different. As he writes in the poem
“sôniyâwahkêsîs,” part of the larger “Preoccupied Space,” a poem that quite
literally has a river of words running through it:
listen to them pounding their nations down
into this dream land
church spires schools land registries
Some
might recall that, a couple of years back, Rhodes made waves by donating the
prize-money he won for his Lampman-Scott Award (the merging of the Archibald
Lampman Award and the Duncan Campbell Scott Award) for the sake of Duncan
Campbell Scott’s tainted history as the Minister of Indian Affairs, thereby
forcing the annual Ottawa poetry book prize back to its roots as the Archibald
Lampman Award. Some might argue a complication due his use of voice, a thread
that came up slightly through his previous collection, Err (Nightwood Editions, 2011), when he utilized the voices of
AIDS patients, deliberately blurring the lines between engagement and
discomfort.
The
book is built up of two sections: “Poems,” which is constructed out of four
sections and a “Notes and Acknowledgements,” and continues from the other side
of the book with “Anti-Poems,” a section made up of the poem “White Noise.” As
Rhodes writes at the end of the second half of the book (which is, technically,
somewhere in the middle):
White
Noise
is composed of material harvested from 15, 283 public comments posted in
response to fifty-five online news articles from the Globe and Mail, the National
Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Sun News, the Ottawa Citizen,
the Province, and the Calgary Herald
over a forty day period between December 20, 2012 and January 28, 2013. All
news articles were in relation to the Idle No More protest movement and the
beginning and end of the hunger strike of Theresa Spence, Chief of the
Attawapiskat First Nations reserve. Idle No More started in Saskatchewan in
November 2012 as a grassroots movement led by First Nations to protest recent
attacks on Indigenous sovereignty, treaty rights, human rights and
environmental protections by the Government of Canada. Adding to this protest,
Chief Theresa Spence began her hunger strike—subsisting on a liquid diet of
medicinal teas and fish broth—on December 11, 2012 demanding, among other
things, a meeting between Canada’s First Nations leadership, Prime Minister
Stephen Harper, and the Governor General of Canada to discuss Canada’s treaty
relationship with First Nations. Her hunger strike ended on January 24, 2013.
There
is something about the book itself that presents a conformity of shape, while
the poems physically cohere to an entirely different set of considerations. The
poems feel uncomfortable within the shape of the book, something that might be
entirely deliberate, forcing the language of one structure into an arbitrary
other. Throughout the collection, Rhodes utilizes a variety of fonts, sizes and
line directions to compose a series of polyvocal poems – visual poems, prose
poems, lists, long poems, etcetera – to articulate, track and explore an
ongoing conflict of generations, filled with Empire, deliberate
misunderstandings and outright racist strategies by the Federal Government
(including by Duncan Campbell Scott himself). How do two sides coincide when
they approach land and space so very differently? As he writes further on in
the poem “sôniyâwahkêsîs”: “you are history
I think / but not the one I was taught [.]”
translation,
treaty
Blackfoot, Blood,
Peigan, Sarcee, Stony
and perhaps Native
American
be inhabitedwithpower
to distrat
overhere!inafterthefact
most
sofullIcan’teatmore beadworkdesign
and unwillinglydefiate,
do overhere!buyoncredit
seed,
release,
pass out,
and yell
high person in
government of CanOpener
the Medicinal herbs
Magpie Queen
and herbdrink
inrapidsuccession pasteverything,
all there! honest,
badname,
and privy
what?evergreenconifer
to land inurved
smallgointhewater to
follow limp,
that
tosaysomethingofnoimportance:
I’m
intrigued at Rhodes’ use of the phrase “anti-poems,” and might question what he
thinks the phrase means, siding one against another, “poems” against its
mirror. Which side is “poem,” and which becomes that which is against? Rhodes’
poems have long held an experimental bent against more formal strategies, but
in this collection, he allows the more experimental side to really flourish,
pushing up against all sides of the printed page. This is a complicated and
deliberately troubled and troubling book, one that hopefully further opens a
conversation that has been so very long in coming.
OBVI
When you’re sick with
fear you’re never sick with, or,
You’re sick with fear
you’re never sick, or,
Sick with fear you’re
never, or,
With fear you’re, or,
Fear is my motherfuckin
best ‘friend,’ jks
(“Weapon”)
Toronto
writer Margaret Christakos is easily one of our most daring, consistently
inventive and deeply engaged contemporary Canadian poets, and has been for
years, bafflingly overlooked for major awards for any of her poetry
collections, eight of which have appeared in print over the past twenty-five
years. Obviously, awards or lack-thereof have nothing to do with quality, but
with her ninth trade poetry collection, Multitudes
(Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013), one hopes that her work can start
receiving the recognition it so badly deserves. Christakos’ Multitudes revels in polyvocal syntactic
play, utilizing repetition, reorder and the abbreviated language of twitter to
engage a poetry of social spaces, ranging from responses to Jack Layton and
Lena Dunham to an engagement with the social and linguistic disconnect of
social media itself. Christakos’ poetry has long explored fractures and
connections, exploring the depths and multiplicities of disconnect, and Multitudes expands on her previous
collections, striking a deep, dark chord at the very heart of how humans
interact, and, at the same time, manage to keep as far apart from each other as
possible. As she writes in the poem “FOUR YEARS IS IT”:
in the morning It is
practically the last consumption of
each day It behaves
like a social life but gradually
erases a social life as
much as it creates on
‘I’ in your third
person
feels you are speaking
to a
‘them’ but day by day
some of us become more
untranslatable about
picking up the phone as if the mirror-glass
Christakos
has played at reworking the language of her own poems within sections in
previous works, pilfering and reordering pieces to twist in and turn around on
each other, and Multitudes appears to
take the structure in a slightly different direction, even as the subtitle(s)
to the collection twists the title itself:
Deilmsttuu
Sedutitlum
Constructed
in nine sections, the first section, the poem “Threshold,” presents her opening
salvo, giving a taste of what’s to come. As the poem opens:
push words into body.
do those words form a
column or spiral?
do those words coalesce
as body
into the body they
conjure?
push words into mouth.
do those words form a
tongue or jetty?
is a probe formed that
touches
the tongue it
entangles?
push words onto mound
of nipple,
onto mounded nipple
jewels.
do words circulate as
honey, as
tentacles that leaven
and stiffen?
There
is an immediacy and an urgency to the entire collection, boiling occasionally
from a frustration that turns to anger, as she writes: “I realized then I was
writing an Atwood poem from 1978. Nobody says how brilliant and mean she was,
how shitkicking. She’d have known what to say, exactly what to do with that
arm.” (“DIRGE URGE”).
DOCK
Wavering on a stoop.
The day doesn’t start yet. Days on end come to a stop. The water is all in the
lake. Level rises, falls, but the lake is itself. Everything alive in the lake
belongs. Anything incompatible immediately ceases to breathe. There’s a limit.
You don’t necessarily
do what is strategic when moths fly into your lips. What if the mouth had been
ajar. What if I’d swallowed that fly. Perhaps I’ll dive under the surface.
I was an old lady in
the first dream. Then I woke to a hotel room with tartar sauce on my little
finger. We’d had supper and fucked. I didn’t feel so old then.
Kids are obsessed with
opening and shutting any door they find, rushing their shoulders through every
portal. What happens that it locks? How will I escape? They spend a decade
deciding which was to run then the walls close in. they’re smart. Days don’t
end when they sleep.
Lake streams around the
rockpoint the way you penetrated me in gladness. Crappy bedspread didn’t
matter. We weren’t looking at the patterns. Wind reverses direction and heads
out to the hillside way over there, by the hospital. That place is full of
windows stuck shut. Bad air. You think twice about going in there for the
X-ray. Maybe you’ll never come out.
The
final section of the collection, “Play,” is “composed in real time” of status
updates posted to Facebook, written quick in short bursts, and accumulate into
an extended poem of twists and quirks akin to the short stories posted on
Twitter by Arjun Basu or Adam Thomlison. One might presume that her chapbook
that appeared last year, from
Tumultétudes: The Chips & Ties Study (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012), a
selection from “Tumultétudes,” a longer work-in-progress, might be an extension
of the new collection, composing a multitudinous study of the tumult and
complexity of home, family and family health issues, with the musicality and
compositional brevity and difficulty of the French étude. When one begins to
work within a multitude, one can encompass everything and all, and the
polyvocality of this new work extends out in all directions, held together as tight
and taut as any highwire. Christakos’ work might be seen by some to be
difficult, or about difficulty, but with such playful ease that it becomes
impossible to not be swept up in her glorious music.
According to and
fittingly – a break
and our pockets fill
with flowers to conceal the smell of dying.
Thus concludes the final succumbing to bloody pomander
and posy.
The only authentic reference
being a ring – a ring of roses
moreover and other than this
covenant
for happiness.
Eventually.
We would have – O, we would have.
(“A General Tale”)
Over
the course of three trade poetry collections, Ottawa poet (formerly of
Saskatchewan) Sandra Ridley has evolved her poems to encompass a particularly
wide canvas. In her third collection, The
Counting House (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), following her previous two – Fallout (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2009) [see
my review of such here] and Post-Apothecary
(Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2011) [see my review of such here] – Ridley manages
pinpoint minutae of a complex thought, extended and stretched apart to reveal
and revel in an incredibly dense gymnastic language on par with contemporary
Canadian poets Margaret Christakos, Sylvia Legris and Christine McNair. Through
this new collection, Sandra Ridley composes silence, a considered hush, and a
tension so taut that it hums.
Falling – not always a
dropping to the ground
construed
as rhyme not death
not a literal fall or
heartbreak
instead (but)
any other form of
respective bending. (“A General Tale”)
Structured
in four poem-sections – “A General Tale,” “Lax Tabulation,” “Testamonium” and
“Luxuria” – the second section “was written as an ekphrastic response to
michèle provost’s art installation, ABSTrACTS
/ RéSuMÉS: An Exercise in Poetry, at the Ottawa Art Gallery. Others who
responded to her work were jwcurry, John Lavery, Pearl Pirie, Carmel Purkis,
and Grant Wilkins. Our material was presented at Ottawa’s artist-run-centre,
Saw Gallery, in early 2010, in cooperation with the AB Series.” The poems in
this collection explore physical space, constraint, and the space of trauma,
nimbly composed within a coiled and considered breath. Ridley is very much a
poet working in longer forms, with the book as her unit of composition, and in
an interview I recently conducted with her (forthcoming in filling Station magazine), she described some of the book’s
construction:
There isn’t much of a landscape in The Counting House and not a strict narrative either. The four
serial poems are centred on the lack of information about courtly affection
gone awry and about the tallying of the gaps that kind of absence makes. The
first section was catalyzed by my reading of interpretations of traditional
English rhymes, as found in the Roud Folk
Song Index—petty epics of
kings, queens and maidens, and the pageantry and pedantry of their unnoble
state of affairs.
The remaining three sections are connected in tone. One was written
via ekphrasis, with me looking through a bifocal lens of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. The second
section is a long poem composed in response to michèle provost’s art
installation, ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉS: An Exercise in Poetry, with that
lens in front of me.
If there is any thematic continuity following from my first two
books, it would come from my obsession with harm—as manifest through seclusion and (re)assertion.
There’s a substantial amount of accusation and denial in the house’s
tallying, and as the text moves through time, the tabulation takes different
forms. The non-story becomes clearer and more like
a reckoning. I was curious about what an accountant’s
notebook might look like in poetic form.
Composing
and colluding the gradients of pleasure and pain wrapped up in harm, Ridley
explores courtly love: “The art of rectifying. Without interruption by the
slightest punishment. Or a whole sequence. / Coercions. Verdicts. Confusions.”
(“Testamonium”). Exploring facts, exclusions, silences and expectations, the
book asks, what does your love do to you, what does it make you become?
When your darling
considers it. It she was concerned with it then. Aware of the sundries.
Details. Despair become a whole history.
She had a lack of
willingness. Insufferable. Her crudest form.
With the same
persistence. She cedes to tendency. Falls with a rigorous ferocity.
Perpetually.
Bitten hands.
Bitten
lip. (“Testamonium”)
The Counting House also has
one of the finest covers I’ve seen on a poetry book in some time, replicating
artwork by Gatineau artist michèle provost. Stitched into three dimensions,
provost’s artwork provide a fantastic physicality to the metaphoric house, so
deftly constructed through the scope of the poems.
Hush
Don’t be scared. Every
airplane is a suspension
of disbelief, a merger
of physics and faith.
Every airplane guides
its housefly tongue
along a curving,
snagless line. Its corridor of earth
is lined with lights.
So don’t be scared:
let that crescendo of
the engines be your trust
that nothing levitates
on algebra alone. Subdue
the sputter of doubt.
The bags are checked,
the brown men shackled
to the ground; their secrets,
pulled like rotten
teeth, are yours.
As is the sky, swept
clean by searchlights, emptied
even of the moon, the
stars.
From
Kingston, Ontario poet Sadiqa de Meijer comes the poetry collection, Leaving Howe Island (Fernie BC: Oolichan
Books, 2013). This first trade collection includes her 2012 CBC Canada Writes
Poetry Prize award-winning sequence, “Great Aunt Unmarried.” I must admit, it
has been so long since I’ve seen anything from Oolichan Books (they produced an
impressive Robert Kroetsch title circa 1980, but I can’t recall much else they’ve
published) that I’d forgotten they even existed. What have they been up to, I
wonder? Constructed out of two sections – the poem/suite “Great Aunt Unmarried”
and “There, There,” a longer section of individual poems – Leaving Howe Island is a rich, deep first collection, one that
manages to hold together through the deft hand of craft, and her attention to
the smallest details. There are far too many similarly ambitious and dense
works that fully collapse beneath their own weight, but de Meijer manages to balance
this out through a considerable lightness. Sometimes she even distracts us with
the pure simplicity of her lines, as she opens the poem “Saint John,” “You say
to the ocean, we’re here.”
Saint
John
You say to the ocean, we’re here.
Windshield frames the
subdued sloshing
of the harbour. Chain
link, guardhouse,
a cruise ship whiter
than seagulls.
Salt and molluscs in
our noses. Hours
down asphalt flanked
with moose-fence,
thin coffee from
lukewarm machines, for this
gray comforter, this
wordless report
of mackerel and lantern
fish,
remote, familiar
strands. A man
in a windbreaker leans
in your window
to ask, where in Ontario? He came here
to retire. Says Sure was a good move.
Scarborough’s
too full of – squints at me, sucks
down the words – Your neighbours
look
out for you here. He nods his cap,
limps smaller in the
sideview mirror.
The engine ticks. Your
grin
is sore. I’m
invulnerable, because
my hand is on my belly.
Five months.
Kicking a jig, elated,
without theory.
The
work that won the CBC Canada Writes Poetry Prize, “Great Aunt Unmarried,” is a
sequence of poems that write using and utilizing a story as opposed to directly
retelling, managing to use the story itself to do something further with the
writing. The story exists as fodder, sometimes backbone, and other times,
completely incidental to the mortar of an impressive sequence thick with
suggestion, inference and history, a deeply tangible imagery and a weighty
language, writing: “Seconds when she flickers / in the lantern of a stranger— /
coarse eyebrows, slow douse / of a grin. I’m a kinder then.” Another part of
the same suite of poems reads:
We went for a drive in
nature. Two of them tied ivory
kerchiefs around their
home permanents while the third
muttered a curse on
vanity, and we folded into a sedan,
automatic for the
rheumatisms. At the speed of a procession,
to the dissolution of
chalk peppermints. Here, the middle
sister
nodded to the shoulder.
Lawn chairs emerged. From the ditch,
the road was hearsay.
Buttercups towered over a far spire.
The three in bifocals,
their hands on the slacks
trembled like the
grass. To the south, the air force was practicing.
Whether that haunted or
comforted them, I couldn’t tell.
On the drive to the
house, the silence had a grander shape,
like a bell that fits
over fields and villages, and schoolhouses
and sugar beets and
people. (“Friesland”)
Deeply
personal, writing on family and domestic matters, the connections and
dislocations of home and away, de Meijer’s poems are playful, serious and considered,
contemplative and high speed, moving quickly and for a long time, linger. I’m
impressed by these poems, and just how quietly mature the collection stands.
How does she manage such tightrope lines?
Let us
proceed
through
the
modern,
to the swarm
of abundance. The world
by now a
high plateau over the varied
woodlanders,
the men of the sea.
First
Nations writer Jordan Abel’s first trade collection, the place of scraps (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) is a stunning
reclamation project. At nearly three hundred pages, Abel’s collection of
fragments, erasures, scraps, texts, visuals and concrete poems, as the press
release tells us, manages to:
[…] re-articulate the
voice of Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer who studied
First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Abel’s ancestral
Nisga’a Nation. But through acquiring indigenous goods to sell to Canadian
museums, Barbeau ended up playing an active role in displacing the very
cultures he strove to protect.
Rather than condemn
Barbeau’s actions and the unfortunate history he created, Abel examines how
history itself comes to be written. Just as Barbeau once sawed through a huge
Nisga’a totem pole to ship by train to Ontario, Abel makes precise incisions in
Barbeau’s canonical text, Totem Poles,
allowing the “scraps” to disperse into multiple, graphic re-presentations of
indigenous ethnography.
Abel’s
erasure picks apart a history of dismantling and a dismantling of history
itself, turning Barbeau’s work, if not specifically against him, back around,
against the damage his dismantling did and his own presumptions. Canadian
ethnographer and folklorist Marius Barbeau (1883-1969) is considered “a father
of Canadian anthropology,” and catalogued a number of cultures within Canada,
from various aboriginal cultures to Quebec’s Francophone cultures,
misunderstanding that practices of removing artifacts and other items from its
native culture was in fact helping to erase the very histories he attempted to
preserve.
The
work in the place of scraps feels
less a re-articulation of Barbeau’s voice than Abel using the building blocks
of Barbeau’s voice and texts that articulate his outright theft of indigenous
goods to articulate those deeply-felt losses, and work toward rebuilding a text
of what had been stolen, including Abel’s relationship to the Nisga’a Nation,
as well as attempting to piece together scraps of his own personal history.
Deeply personal and highly charged, this is Abel, quite literally, reassembling
history through an archaeology of stolen pieces, as well as through Barbeau’s
words and discoveries. Some sections of the collection are constructed from a
paragraph of Barbeau’s text before Abel proceeds to tear it apart, composing a
widely expressive concrete/visual text of artifacts and scraps brought back to
life. “In summary // his,” Abel writes, early on in the collection, or “field /
process wherein / language
readjusts to /// casualty ////
a description of.” Later on, Abel’s explorations run deeper into the personal,
using Barbeau’s texts as a jumping-off point into more intimate territories:
12.06.2008
The poet returns to
Vancouver, his birth city, after a twenty-one year absence. The poet
investigates the last known locations of his father; the poet internalizes the
procedures of the city; the poet exchanges premeditated extrapolations for
physical grandiosity. The city indulges the poet’s weakness for vegetation and
water-adjacent sand; the city believes in the authenticity of beauty and
strategically located totem poles. The poet arranges a meeting with the former
friends of his parents who attempt to explain the truth behind the
theatricality of his infancy. The former friends of his parents give the poet a
wooden spoon that his absent father carved. The poet initiates the suitable
gestures for thankfulness and rotates the spoon over and over in his palms.
Abel’s
the place of scraps is a collection
composed in and through the margins of various histories, forefronting a series
of reclaimed gestures; a book about shared losses, important gestures and
acknowledgment, and rebuilding not only a series of personal and cultural
histories, but personal and cultural memories. The result is incredible.
05.08.2011
Of his own volition,
the poet returns to Toronto, confident that he will be reunited with the totem
pole removed from the Nass River valley by Marius Barbeau. The poet confronts
the admissions staff member at the ROM, explains that he refuses to pay to see
a totem pole that was taken from his ancestral village. The staff member
initiates a lethargic request to allow admission under special circumstances
but is unable to contact any of his superiors. The staff member shrugs, verbalizes
his apathy, and allows the poet into the museum. The pole towers through the
staircase; the poet circles up to the top. The pole is here; the poet is here.
Scotland is they say
\\a hard place
where sounds store in
stones
and stories score on rock
a cryptic story
the dead slammed
open & shut
abandoned quarries the graveyards
littered with stone
jammed with bones
their own quarrels with the neighbours
In
the stones (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone
Press, 2013), Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Dennis Cooley’s fifteenth book
of poems, Cooley appears to have composed an extension of the structures and
themes of his previous poetry collection, correction
line (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown, 2008): a series of lyric fragments that
write out geographic tracings, highlighting hearth and home. Throughout his
published work, Cooley has work through prairie histories, prairie geographies
and family, all the way back to his first collection, Leaving (Turnstone Press, 1980), and expanding to his many other
collections: Bloody Jack (Turnstone
Press, 1984; Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2002), Soul Searching (Red Deer AB: Red Deer
College Press, 1987), Dedications
(Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Press, 1988), This
Only Home (Turnstone, 1992), Irene
(Turnstone Press, 2000) and the recent critical selected, By Word of Mouth: The Poetry of Dennis Cooley (ed. Nicole Markotić;
Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007). The poems in the stones begin in Scotland, and open
up through a play on the word, the image and the idea of the stone, writing
“the rocks scraped by wind and snow / and by later arrivals / rivals for
space,” composing a space entirely constructed out of the semi-permanence of
stone. Through referencing the late prairie poet Robert Kroetsch in one of the
four epigraphs that open the collection, seemingly lifted from one of Cooley’s
own journal entries, Cooley links the
stones to Kroetsch’s own stone hammer from The Stone Hammer Poems
(Nanaimo BC: Oolichan Books, 1975), composing the tool of the stone as a
central point, as well as a building block of civilization itself.
through Saarland my
grandmother’s family
home
dyed in the wool
they were
dyed in the wool
catholics
possibly & they died
in the woods
Bill Wood,
likely
protestant,
good
as his word
did it for
his pals
he did
& they died
& some were damned
& all of them drowned
where the South
Saskatchewan Regiment waded ashore
wadded with
mud & blood
Throughout
the collection, Cooley connects numerous geographies through stone, from “the
leavings / traces of paint shadow lines / left by the Stone Sioux / called
Assiniboine” to some of the history of his hometown of Estevan, Saskatchewan,
writing “on the other stones we read: MURDERED / BY THE RCMP chiselled & removed & / later on a
yellow once again on the grave / stone Beinfait cemetery & went on” to other
stone, writing “centuries later / Napoleon’s armies hauled it up / up it rose
from the ruins of Rosetta / rock out of a frost boil you might think / or
petrified gland [.]” Through Cooley, stone becomes a central image of language,
translation and memory, all composed as a series of extended permanences.
Cooley wanders world histories, pre-history and prairie histories, collaging
short lyric sections composed in a variety of styles that manage to hold
together through the assortment, much in the way he did in his infamous early
work, Bloody Jack. In another section
of the stones, he writes: “Europe is
a series of rockpiles / people live inside. Cave people / then, cave people
still.”
They were here too, the people who set them, the stones,
rose up in their magic of flesh. Were they shocked that they could move and
talk, touch other flesh, feel panic flash and go out? Must have wanted to swim
in it, enmeshed, speckle the dark waters. Knew what it was to be, quick, and
chancing. And afraid.
Must have sensed bodies are flasks you drink from. That
skin stretches over earth, a tattoo of stone, people’s movings, to and fro.
Over the face of the earth. Time closes.
Stones, they must have thought, someone must have, are
the earth’s bones, sloughed. What flesh was set on, tied to, pegged upon, hung
from.
Minerals were earth’s veins—what against the body’s
resistance, they wrote. The earth was one big body, it huffed and ambled,
shuffled and bled. It belched and rolled, breached and heaved. In its wind was
breathing and in rain something else. Small insects eating their way through
the earth, scratching the skin, burrowing into mines. And they fell into the
mind’s depletion, chewed te veins out of the dark and the cold and when sun
struck straightened.
Billions of explosions prowled in storms no one could see
coming and went off bewilderingly inside. Told them stories of how the world
moved in dark and disarray.
Cooley
has long favoured explorations of prairie language and the jagged, staggered
line as well as the large poetic project, including the multiple publications
that fall into his ongoing “Love in a Dry Land” project, such as poems
published in Sunfall: new and selected poems (Toronto ON: House of
Anansi, 1996), to the “Dennis Cooley issue” of Prairie Fire (1998) and
the trade volumes Country Music: New Poems (Vernon BC: Kalamalka Press,
2004) and The Bentleys (University of Alberta Press, 2006). This new
work, the stones, write out what he
has referred to before as his “vernacular prairie.” To consider the poetry of
Dennis Cooley is, among other things, to reconsider space, as well as the
vernacular voice, and twisting of the language through bad jokes and puns,
taking each further than any other poet would. For Cooley, one of his essential
movements is through the line, correct or otherwise, given best voice through
his magnificent essay on line breaks in his collection of essays, The Vernacular Muse (Winnipeg MB:
Turnstone Press, 1987). In correction
line, he composed the line as one to be reworked and corrected, as well as
referencing the actual lines of correction that stretch across the prairies. In
the title poem to correction line he
wrote: “it was at the correction line / they made their mistake / big mistake
you might say,” continuing a narrative of geographic surveys in poetic form,
Cooley writing the same terrain, fielding out his lines from all points in, out
and between his Estevan and Winnipeg. Or, in another piece, referencing both
geographic lines and the poetic line of American poet Charles Olson, suggesting
what would come next, to peer at what lay beyond the surface:
an O pening
of the field
I abandon my self
to a blushing
of precise boundaries,
like where a squirrel
would
step up to snap the
branch
back fast enough
to ride the torque all
the way back,
a walnut under each arm
–
getaway with intent to
spring
rather than English
leave.
It’s why I wear my
shirts backwards
& my jacket is the
color
of the sky.
I’d abandon everything
for a plush spring
with a fat calendar,
every day ringing a
bell
every day floating
in a penumbra of sound
echolocalic lenses
unfurling
coiled batwings flap
as I velociraptor
among rainy streets
& thread
on a knotted length of
fishing line
pinpricks of orange
brick
mixed with holiday
sweat.
You abandon yourself
to the runnels &
channels
of a new boundary,
ankle-deep sliding
thick transparency mirroring
even when disrupted
the thick marine light
located by inference
the waggle of a last
leaf &
two minutes of leaping
edit
is a spray of divided
attention,
your lupine shoulder
dropping
hot science on cold
water. (“A Letter to Hammertown”)
The
concluding volume in Nanaimo, British Columbia poet Peter Culley’s “Hammertown”
trilogy is Parkway (Vancouver BC: New
Star Books, 2013), following the volumes Hammertown
(New Star Books, 2003) and The Age of
Briggs and Stratton (New Star Books, 2008). As the back cover of Parkway tells us, “‘Hammertown’ is
French Oulipo writer George Perec’s invention, an imaginary finishing port on
Vancouver Island that Peter Culley recognized as his own home town of Nanaimo.”
In this alone, it would seem as though Culley’s “Hammertown” works to be a
blending of what he might know of Nanaimo (where the author has lived for most
of his life), and what he recognizes in Perec’s articulation of the fictional
fishing port. In his review of the original Hammertown
in Canadian Literature (#184; spring
2005), critic Ian Rae writes:
This industry is
responsible for the “pulpy sulphur rain” falling on the hometown of Nanaimo
poet and art critic Peter Culley. Inspired by a reference to a village on
Vancouver Island in George Perec’s Life A
User’s Manual, Culley imagines in Hammertown
how Nanaimo might have appeared to the Oulipo poet. Culley does not paint a
realist portrait, but rather seeks to capture “the syntax of place” as Perec
might have perceived it. I doubt that the syntax of either Paris or Hammertown
compels a farmer to remark that “cattle from untasted fields do / bitterly
return,” but overall the collection provides some interesting interpretative
challenges. Given the Perec epigram, one hunts for acrostic-telestics, hidden algorithms,
omitted letters of the alphabet, or some guiding principle for the shifting
subject matter. For example, a third of the collection consists of sequences of
seven-line stanzas, each containing roughly seven beats per line. This form
conveys a sense of rhythm and looks very nice on the page, but in what else the
poems cohere I have no idea. Culley, like Laba, hopes that the tactility of
words and the delirious struggle of the mind to cope with incessant change are
pleasure enough. One may wish to worship with Culley on the “prayer-rug of
faded beach,” but he no sooner introduces this rug than he pulls it out from
under the reader. Dizzy and confused, the reader lands in a world where “speech
or its opposite / flutters the blinds / at the moment of sleep.” In short
bursts this dizziness is quiet pleasing, but longer episodes induce sleep after
all.
Parkway contains a
curious range of poetic responses, including poems after Wallace Stevens
(“Cruel Summer”), for Kevin Davies (“Pause Button”), for Bernadette Mayer
(“November Day”), for Bernd Heinrich (“North by Northwest”), for Theo Parrish
(“Ugly Edit”), for Lary Bremner (“Five North Vancouver Trees”), for Maxine Gadd
(“MAX POWER for Maxine Gadd”), for George Stanley (“Inland Empire”), and in
memoriam Jonathan Williams and Gerry Gilbert (“Sampler”), all of which play off
phrases, lines, titles or structures of those he has dedicated the individual
poems to. Throughout the collection, Culley acknowledges industry, personal
history, social commentary and the eco-poetic, as he opens the poem “Sampler”
with a mention of “The Rural Parkway –
Wooded / is characterized as / the ‘cut through the forest’ / quality created by / the regularity of the forest edge / and by the relative closeness / of the forest to the roadway.” The third
of the eleven-section poem reads:
A newly formatted
raven’s tongue
pops digitally out
& in
of trombone beak
Texas jug band style
but overhead no
newscrawl
no basslines from
inland terraces
or hoots from hominid
heights,
offroad daytrippers
drop
off arbutus cloudtops
badger into a crevasse
midwestern cushion full
stop tree
bent under a towhee
the tread of a
groundwater smeller
rumbles through the
cellar.
Nearly
in point-form, Culley articulates his hybrid, “Hammertown,” writing out a space
created fiction, imagination, history and memory, and one that incorporates
numerous threads and articulations from other writing. The book includes a
cover photo by the author, the piece “Angelus
Novus (for EF),” of what appears to be fragments of discarded/found
materials. In Parkway, Culley blends
and weaves his poems from similar materials, and manages to create something
part memoir, part city-biography and part myth. Whether taken as a single work,
or trilogy as a whole, the project is fascinating, and the work shimmers in and
out of focus like a shifting photograph. Peter Culley has long held an
intriguing position in Canadian writing, and the press release describes him as
a “Kootenay School of Writing hang-around in the 1980s,” allowing him a lengthy
period of being known for his obscurity, and possibly better known by name than
his actual writing. For example: I’ve known of his name for years, but haven’t
a clue what kind of work he doing before this particular trilogy, and can only
hope that the publication of the third book in his “Hammertown” allows his work
to gain a wider audience. I’m curious to see where his writing will go next.
burning as though
accusation is evidence
innocent until proven
filthy
by supremacy’s medieval
darkening
cruise sadistic
missiles
in airspace
internationalized
on prime time tv
set clocks to progress
as capital backpeddles
tainted goods
low dose over the
counter
intelligence on high
alert
reason sold as empty
addiction
to barren media
barrelling dollars per
down the barrel of a
pun
Akin
to the ongoing email call-and-response collaborations of Douglas Barbour and
Sheila M. Murphy – produced so far as Continuations
(Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006) and Continuations 2 (University of Alberta Press, 2012) – is the new Sybil Unrest (Vancouver BC: New Star
Books, 2013) by Vancouver writers Larissa Lai and Rita Wong. As the back cover
suggests, the collection was “Inspired by renga and composed via an email
conversation,” and explores “fresh connections between feminism,
environmentalism, and personal-political responsibility […].”Moving through
western Canada and contemporary culture, the poem writes on social upheavals,
the nature of the citizen, violence and the dangers of capitalism. Utilizing
play and pun, politics and social awareness, the poem-fragments display a
rushing, accumulated urgency that demands the performance, riffing off
contemporary pop and other references like a jazz lingo:
hack hawk
haul ass
where past
wear pants
the posture of packing
cracked patriarchy
shuffled deck dick duck
yes duck the shit
and no i’m not
happy to see you
when my civic
dissonance
proclaims an
upstanding citizen
The
book is broken up into three suites of short fragments, nearly operatic in
scale, the poems are an intriguing blend of the individual works by the two
authors. Larissa Lai, known predominantly as a novelist, authored the poetry
collection Automaton Biographies
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009), and Rita Wong is the author of the poetry
collections monkeypuzzle (Press Gang,
1998) and forage (Nightwood Editions,
2007), each of which utilize variations on what they collaborate on for their Sybil Unrest—short lyric fragments,
social awareness and a cadence that twists and turns and pops. In the
acknowledgements, they write a short piece on the origins of the book (I would
recommend highly going through their write-up in its entirety, but will only
reproduce a section of such, here), that begins:
This poem began in a
renga spirit during the 2003 Hong Kong International Literary Festival. It was
a fraught moment – the beginning of the SARS crisis in Hong Kong and the
American invasion of Iraq which we witnessed through the highly interested
sources of CNN and BBC in our hotel room TV. Attending David Fujino and Aaron
Vidavers playful “july 23/03” at the Kootenay School of Writing later that year
was the catalytic inspiration that actually got this poem off the ground. sybil unrest is a back and forth
conversation conducted by email over the course of several months.
At our first public
reading of the poem at the Kootenay School of Writing, on December 13, 2003,
Fred Wah asked “Where did the ‘I’ go?” “We” gesture towards how the personal
sparks this dialogue. “Ours” is not so much an individualized “I”, but rather a
range of “i”s emerging and fading back as instances that unsettle the
(capitalist) time and space we occupy. As such, the “i”s are not reliable but
trace movement through the long now and constitute evidence of some hopeful
reaching towards friendly coexistence of multiple tactics/perspectives.
I’ve
always been curious about the sheer amount of western Canadian poets who can
manage a language poetry with a social edge (Stephen Collis, Jeff Derksen,
nikki reimer, Maxine Gadd, Louis Cabri, et al), and there is an incredible
crackle and pop lyric to the language here, a musicality that sings and rides
and riffs, rushing along like an onslaught of water. The poem urges, demands
and even calls for action, but provides few answers, perhaps where no easy
answers could exist.
beast within is best
in enemy arms
or canary’s coal mine
tarred and feathered
by the same boss
girl our goodness
while ewes bleat
refusal
we jack the cracker
fm radios the past
post-punked in new
romantic
bombs our harlequin
fingers nimble threads
camels eye the needle
as we eye heaven
on the other side of
complicity
capital beckons sweet
as freedom in a tight
skirt
violence loves desire
as meat loves leer
mammon’s mama-san moves
mountains
holy shock thin veil
for fascination
agape quells what wells
cri de cur of nervous
organism
hankering after rich
man’s bone
Through nearly a dozen trade poetry collections,
Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall’s poems have the durability and devastation of
koans, and the envy of poets who encounter them. Much like the books that
preceded it, his eleventh trade poetry collection, The Small Nouns Crying Faith (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), is
deeply immersed in the world and history, yet contained by neither. The Small Nouns Crying Faith borrows its
title from the poem “Psalm” by George Oppen, himself known as a “poet of
attentiveness,” a quality easily attributed to the more than three decades of
Hall’s work. Oppen’s small poem, originally published as part of the collection
This in Which (1965), opens with “In
the small beauty of the forest / The wild deer bedding down— / That they are
there!” with the fifth and final stanza, that reads: “The small nouns / Crying
faith / In this in which the wild deer / Startle, and stare out.” Reading Oppen
and Hall side by side, the comparisons run deep—Hall composes poems from his
Ontario landscape, shades of his darker past, notes on his literary forebears
(whom he refers to as his “heroes”), numerous artifacts, and could just as
easily reference, at any point, the importance of pausing to listen for deer.
Genealogy
Our expedition followed her cold-tea stare
to chunks of
boiled turnip wrapped in waxed paper in a lunch pail
near camp that first night the shortest verse
in the Bible
was recorded
as her only expletive
*
Hectares from where her breast had proffered
the warmest bottle
was found a
cigarette rolling-machine wrapped in a clown costume
*
On our last out-bound day we came upon Royal
Family clippings
attached to
corn-stalks by bobby-pins all these
items (photos/articles)
we harvested & catalogued except the pins (rusted/discarded) note
little brown
saw-marks in the corners of the stiff ceremonies
*
From Gab’s-Gift-Unsubstantiated
to Skugog
Island an au pair …
Phil Hall has long been a
poet of deep attention, compiling and collecting into an accumulation of poems
that speak of artifacts and smallness, and a humanity rarely lived and
articulated so well in Canadian poetry. This is his first trade collection
since he won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award, as
well as being shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, for Kildeer (Toronto
ON: BookThug, 2011), a collection of self-described “essay-poems,” published as
part of BookThug’s “Department of Critical Thought.” Hall’s
latest collection of what have evolved into “essay-poems” continue to practice
a folk-local, examining the small, local and deeply specific, composing
striking lines and phrases that accumulate into individual pieces, as well as
sections of a far-broader canvas. Somehow, his lines manage to self-contain in
such a way that even a shift in the order might still make the entire
collection no less capable, breathtaking and wise. As he writes in the poem
“Plum Hollow”: “The failure of order is the work / disorder is not the work.” The collection
also includes a small pamphlet-as-insert, “Faith,” a poem-sequence composed up
of words and phrases plucked from the book as a whole, selected and rearranged
to reveal both something new, and something about the entire project.
I would celebrate every detail
now
I have changed my thinking on that
no such thing as not being at sea
the alphabet does not end or
begin
wild yet
this inextricable quickening
Hall’s isn’t a poetry carved into perfect diamond form, but a poetry
whittled from scores of found material to be arranged, pulled apart and
rearranged. The poems are important for what they know, what they ask and
reveal, and they might tell you, if you know to listen.
I
have visions.
I
see colours as birds go.
my
sparrow gaze lifts me up.
I
look. out.
I
don’t need much space, but I want it.
stop
the keypads.
I
am interested in the labour of listening.
becoming
is my extravagance.
It’s
interesting to see Tuft (Toronto ON:
BookThug, 2013), Vancouver poet Kim Minkus’ own love song to her city, existing
almost as a counterpoint to the lyric of Daphne Marlatt’s Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Vancouver BC:
Talonbooks, 2013). It’s also worth noting the Paul Celan influence throughout,
including the Celan quote that opens the collection, “here come the colours,”
and the way the shapes and sounds of Minkus’ words twist and turn, “he pecks at
words / and sneaks loamy garden terms into his breath” (“Bird”), an influence
that has worked its way through a number of Canadian poets, notably the work of
Mark Goldstein, another BookThug author.
The
animals leave the shores of the river. lope down curbs. peer into gardens.
their teeth gnash and sparkle in the reflecting pools of fluorescence. the
creatures that live in their fur and between their toes tangle in the alleys.
the city and the animals flourish – together. coyotes, skunks, raccoons –
nightraiders lull the streets luminescence. when you see the animals you forget.
the city translates.
A former Ottawa resident,
Minkus is also the author of two previous poetry collections 9 Freight (Vancouver BC: LINEbooks,
2008) and thresh (Montreal QC: Snare books, 2009). Her Tuft is built out of an untitled opening
sequence, and seven sections, each of which exist as a single poem-sequence: “Bird,” “TUFT,” “Laneway,” “Machine,” “24 Nonets Written After Reading Edward Byrne’s Sonnets: Louise
Labé,” “Industry” and “Philomena.” Each section of the
collection appears to focus on a different aspect of Vancouver, writing
individual points on the Vancouver grid in an exploration of language and
space. As she writes in the poem/section, “Machine,” “Take a ride through the
machine of my city // each tower machine // waits for its moment,” later
writing in the “Industry,” “random middles live in our cities // between
difficult and capital // over that system as a whole // the best middles revert
to agriculture[.]” Very much a poet aware of and responding to contemporary
social justice, Minkus’ poems in Tuft
explore the boundaries between written language and physical space, and
personal versus consumer space, such as the clutter,
debris and billboards of “Laneway,” or a literary Vancouver represented by
Edward Byrne, and his Sonnets: Louise Labé (Nomados) [see my review of
such here]. The twelfth of these “nonets” reads:
Irreproachable those phrases
in the margins
enforcing something delicious
a sweet note or sound
from my lips to your mouth
plain pitiful
a sad ending or song
give me something whole
instead of grief an exit
silence – ecstasy
Hers might be a love song,
but one that doesn’t shy away from the occasional critique, writing her way
across the margins, whether the billboards of “Laneway,” or in “Industry,”
where she writes “honest desire strains our escalated privileges[.]”
the form of the fact
production,
distribution, repair
auction
houses, tamed vapor, burnt orange taxis
fixed
high speed agriculture
instead
of one warehouse artist
metalworkers
our
gardeners are gods of war
however
continue
The rebellion is now a thing
of the past, it is now a page
When
a few generations shall come and
go
our sad story of the Frog Lake
Massacre
may be totally forgotten and
the
actors therein consigned to
oblivion,
but, these few papers, should
they
by any chance survive the hand of
time
will tell to the children of the
future
Canada what those of your day
experienced
and suffered and when
those
who are yet to be learn the extent
of
the troubles undergone and the
sacrifices
made by those of the present
to
set them examples worthy of
imitation
and models fit for their
practice
to build up for them a great
and
solid nation they may perhaps
reflect
with pride upon the history of
their
country its struggles dangers
tempests
and calms in those days I
trust
and pray that Canada may be the
realization
of that glowing picture of a
grand
nation drawn by a Canadian poet
Towards
the end of Calgary poet and small press publisher Paul Zits’ first trade poetry
collection, Massacre Street (Edmonton
AB: University of Alberta Press, 2013), he includes the poem “The rebellion is
now a thing / of the past, it is now a page,” centring the collection precisely
there, at the beginning. Zits composes his Massacre
Street to recreate “a poetic view of the Frog Lake Massacre of April 2,
1885,” structured from the influence of various perspectives on the Canadian
historical prairie poem. Zits is working very clearly in a tradition that
includes work by Robert Kroetsch, Monty Reid, Aritha Van Herk, Jon Paul
Fiorentino and Dennis Cooley, each of whom managed to reenergize both history
and the form of “documentary poetics.” An unfortunate result of “documentary
poetics,” in Canadian writing at least, is that too many poets have composed
poetry collections that merely replicate information on historical and/or
literary figures and/or events without adding much of anything, whether to the
documentary information or poetic structure. I won’t mention names or titles,
but the offenders are many. Zits, on the other hand, seemingly takes as his models
the poetics of both Kroetsch and Cooley, falling somewhere between the lyric
questioning, tall tales and the perpetual return to the beginning of Robert
Kroetsch, and the collage-quilt of storytelling of Dennis Cooley, most notably
in his own historical prairie poem, Bloody
Jack (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1984). The book is constantly moving,
searching, interrupting and questioning everything that is being presented,
resulting in an unsettled book on an unfinished question, and one that attempts
not to assign blame, but attempt to discover the correct questions.
without giving expression to sentiments of sorrow
I will strive
to push on
to the end of
my undertaking
without
tiring my readers
with vain
expressions
____
It
was in a circle
and
a space in the centre being kept for dancing
and
the rabbit in the pot boiling, it was all there, head, eyes, feet
and
everything together
and
Little Poplar was arrayed in some of Miss McLean’s ribbons, ties
and
shawls
and
another with my hat tumbling over the bank
and
another with Mrs.. Delaney’s
and
the squaws with our dresses
and
before the sun went down they wrapped blankets around her
as
if, coming down, she would eat the whole camp up
____
a
sea of green interspersed with beautiful flowers and plants
as
in the echo after every bomb, charm lying in its wake
it
glided along the large rivers and lakes and desired rest
carrying
white flags, fishing and waving white flags
or
perhaps the pages of a blood and thunder novel
I
breathed in the echo of every bomb, a prairie charm delusion
except
perhaps when viewed from the deck of a steamer
____
Massacre Street is a large,
complex and critical document on a messy and complicated period of Canadian
history, a history that, in many ways, Canada is still working to comprehend,
and come to terms with. The poems, too, are attempting to find out what
happened. Through the poems of Massacre
Street, Zits adds a polyphonic and critical gaze, refusing a single point
of view but exploring many, and can be read as a poetic sibling to Myrna
Kostash’s Frog Lake Reader (Edmonton
AB: NeWest Press, 2009), or cousin to Margaret Sweatman’s novel, When Alice Lay Down with Peter (Knopf,
2002). Through exhaustive research and a large curiosity, Zits manages to bring
the material a new kind of life. Had only history been written so well before.
I fear I should have lost my small army in this
very big Country
The
most applauded warrior wore
a
policeman’s old tunic
on
the back of which was chalked
a
representation of himself
firing
into a teepee of sleeping enemies
The
horses also were depicted
in
convenient proximity
for
removal after this
glorious
feat of arms
The
first principle of The Barricades Project, to which To the Barricades belongs, is taken from Robert Duncan: “We begin
to see that the intention of the boundless is manifest in the agony and
restoration of pages or boundaries or walls” (“The Delirium of Meaning”).
A
second principle can be found in Walter Benjamin: “This work has to develop to
the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is
intimately related to that of montage” (The
Arcades Project).
If
there is a third principle, it may be contained in the following passage from
Rancière:
Suitable
political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a
double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or
perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists
signification between opposites, between the readability of the message that
threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that
threatens to destroy all political meaning.
(The Politics of Aesthetics)
To
push through boundaries towards the boundless (which is tangled there) – to mix
appropriation of found material with lyric expression to the point that the one
becomes indistinguishable from the other – to practice a dialectic of
“readable” political signification and uncanny shock – these are the pathways
of this poetry. A lyric voice takes up procedures and citations because they
are the world in which it finds itself embodied, a co-embodiment of the address
“Dear Common” that someone calls out to anyone else there. “Lyric,” writes Thom
Donovan, “relates the body of the poet to a poetics of collective affects”
(“Lyric’s Potential,” Jacket2). So we try here, in a lyric space in which we
must continue building resistance.
This
volume is part of an ongoing long poem project that always seeks “plausible
deniability” that it is in fact a long poem project. Everything I write is thus
part of some inaccessible and inconceivable totality outside the work itself.
Part of its fight is thus with itself, and with “culture” as such. The
barricade made of language is both boundary and call for “beyondery” – an
outside still to be practiced. But there’s that other boundary looming
everywhere here too: how and when do we cross over from word to world, from
text to action? Does the poem barricade us from a world of “doing things,”
postponing action? Does it wall us up in the “merely cultural”? These poems,
increasingly, have been written between
actions in the streets. They hover there – a boundless boundary around the
bound. The gaps and spaces between poems and pages and books are inhabited by
“activism,” by a body amongst bodies in streets. Dear Common. Let’s speak our
way into action, into each other’s arms, into new shared futures, into new speeches
at new barricades thrown.
If
this is “documentary poetry” – and it is certainly as much researched as it is
lived – it is a documentary of social affects, past and present, of collective
expressions of desire, of hope, of outrage, of solidarity, of defiance, of the
endless call from the commons for “liberty or death.” It is a documentary of
the spirit of resistance and revolution. The address of the insurgent impulse,
to all potential insurgents, to all tomorrow’s insurgent parties. (Stephen Collis,
“Notes and Acknowledgements”)
It’s
difficult to begin to discuss Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis’ poetry
collection To the Barricades
(Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) without first quoting at length from his
“Notes and Acknowledgements,” placing this collection in a context larger than
itself. Collis is the author of a number of books, including two previous
poetry collections which form the first two sections to his ongoing “Barricades
Project” – Anarchive (Talonbooks,
2005) and The Commons (Talonbooks,
2008). Over the space of five trade poetry collections, Collis’ work explores a
series of short-phrased stretches of sentence-stanzas in an ongoing project
writing Vancouver specifically, Canada generally and social issues throughout. In his “12 or 20 questions” interview (posted
September 7, 2007), he talked about his work-in-progresss, “The Barricades
Project,” and the subsequent volume of such, to be titled “The Red Album,”
which appears to have since shifted into fiction, given that The Red Album is the title of his
forthcoming novel with BookThug. As he writes in the interview:
I always work
on books or series of books. The book is the main unit I think in terms of—my
unit of composition. At the same time I do write short, occasional lyrics, and
I publish a few of these in journals, but whenever I’ve tried to group them as
a possible book it’s been entirely unsatisfactory. I just don’t work that way.
I have to have the concept for the book to work towards, to think through.
Writing in general usually begins with the making of collages—word assemblages
that come out of the research I’m doing for the book in question. These often
don’t make it into the book, but at some point the playing around with my
research stops, and something else takes over, as I find my way into the
language I want to use—or be used by.
There
has long been a history of politically-engaged poetry out of Vancouver,
something that, in comparison, seems lacking in much of the rest of the
country, and something that has been given far less critical attention than it
deserves. What is it about Vancouver that makes so many of their writers,
especially language writers surrounding the past couple of decades of the
Kootenay School of Writing, so engaged? One can point to such socially and
politically-engaged poets such as Aaron Vidaver, Roger Farr, Maxine Gadd,
Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen, Marie Annharte Baker, Reg Johanson, Peter
Culley, Nancy Shaw and nikki reimer, among others. To the Barricades is a book that works to document protest and
other civil action, including the “Paris Commune” or “Fourth French
Revolution,” a working class revolution that ran from March to May, 1871. The
collection contains critical poems of self-protection, poems working to protect
human interest and interaction, constructed out of ready-made material, quotes
that speak of action, such as the Fredric Jameson quote that opens the poem
“RELUMINATIONS 1”: “Barricades involve a kind of bricolage, a provisional
cobbling together of whatever bits and pieces come usefully to hand … this may
also serve as a perceptive account of the poetic techniques of a Rimbaud,
indeed of the revolutionary avant-garde in general.” In the second part of the
poem “La Commune [1871],” he writes:
Revolution
is
the search for happiness
we
know history
repeats
itself
thanks
to
all the dead anarchists!
I
make you a chain of flowers
a
grave of roses
now
let’s not lack audacity
in
dealing with the banks
even
in a democracy
we
aren’t free to demonstrate freely
things
kept germinating
long
after the event
it’s
time we stop being
represented
and start being
the
commune echoes
we’re
still at the same point
how
time exposures expose the times
wind
come up in fall’s green foil to Save-On Meats
opaque
an hour ago lit now by sun rustle shadows one
leaf
ripped off blows across bus-lit Arbutus
floats by
three windows per day … under Second
Narrows Bridge (slack water) can move 25 to 30
tankers per month
Palace
Hotel’s lost light a strand of starling shadows
pawn
shop Honest Joe’s grey face gone
flat pigeon
shit
stains Cosmopolitan Inn’s smart pseudonym glow
red
daily weekly monthly beyond white walk man’s
rapid
beat
building bigger cruise ships
bigger and
biggest too
tall to go under the Lions Gate Bridge
dark
deepens Save-On pig’s high-flying smile and cash
bag
meats grow synthetic in their silver trays plucked backs
legs
/ 98 / 99 cent links pale under fluorescent innards paling
nuder
yet
There
aren’t that many writers who rework poems after they’ve been published in a
book, let alone revisit an entire poetry collection some four decades later, as
Vancouver writer Daphne Marlatt has in her Liquidities:
Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013). Liquidities revisits her poetry
collection Vancouver Poems (Toronto
ON: Coach House Press, 1972), rewriting a number of the poems in the original
collection, as well as adding a healthy amount of new pieces. Although it isn’t
unheard of for a writer to revisit certain poems while putting together a
selected, I honestly can’t think of another example of an entire collection
being updated and/or rewritten. Reissues have happened, certainly, from Gerry
Gilbert’s Moby Jane to Peter Van
Toorn’s Mountain Tea, but those were
rarities in themselves, without a single word altered. Does the poem require an
update, in keeping with the city’s evolution? Does inflation impact upon
writing? As Marlatt writes in her introduction to the collection, “Then and
Now”:
Vancouver Poems was a young
woman’s take on a young city as it surfaced to her gaze. Under this new title, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now,
the poems remain verbal snapshots, running associations that sound locales and
their passers-through within a shifting context of remembered history, terrain,
and sensory experience. Rereading the early poems with a current ear and eye of
course led me to re-vision them, in some cases substantially so, in others less
so. Picking up a pencil to alter some early orthographic habits like “&”
and “thru” let to line lengthening, which sometimes affected their visual and
verbal rhythm. Rereading the poems in 2012, I see I had already learned something
back then from West Coast aboriginal art—the way forms emerge out of and appear
within other forms. The syntax of these poems similarly forms and transforms,
merging images in an ongoing flow. This rereading also led to a few changes in
diction and, in some of those early poems, lengthier additions or deletions.
Not all of the poems from the original edition are included here, only those I
felt still had something to say about the city as it was when the 1960s were
becoming those heady days of the 1970s.
As
it was then: a town outgrowing its wooden houses, Edwardian temple banks and
fog, a muggy harbor of shipping, a young city penetrated by water and beginning
to register its multiracial, multicultural roots and branches, yet oblivious to
First Nations presence both before its own beginning and still active within
its boundaries. What might be the shape of such a city’s shite or inhabiting presence, its ghostly energy for
self-transformation? In the original Vancouver
Poems, I had deleted the Japanese noh theatre word shite (or sh’te, closer
to how it’s sounded) from the opening poem, but here the word is restored to
its active place. This is the underground import (in both senses), the
unconscious question that drives the whole series of poems, then and now.
Vancouver’s
incessant deconstruction and reconstruction, its quick transformations both in
(re)structured ground and in urban imagining, come further into play in the new
series of poems, Liquidities (from liquid assets, cash, and increasingly from
the incessant rain of global warming). The slower, more introspective rhythms
of the city poems some forty years ago speed up as wordplay, faster image
traffic, quicker jumps through milieux and temporal strata that intensify to
verbal collisions in the new poems. Forest terrain faintly recalled in
high-rise architecture. Wave trains of thought that oscillate between naming
and transition. On edge, littoral, surfacing through the litter it leaves, the
city’s genius loci wavers in and out
of focus through its tidal marks of corporate progress and enduring poverty.
Through refacing and defacing. Through the changing faces of a metropolis
driven by big name corporate backing, citizens shortchanged in the private rush
to make profit at the expense of a faceless public. Yet these poems hear the
quiet generosity of trees, the swirl of riptide rush, under all the changing ings and isms, some generative force like that which runs through words to
make connection continue.
For
a city constantly rebuilding, as Marlatt suggests, to revisit her original work
made the only sense. When Marlatt was composing the original incarnation of
this collection, it was not only part of a wave of small press in Canada, but a
wave of exploration of Vancouver through poetry, including Maxine Gadd’s late
1960s “The Hippies of Kitsilano” section of her 1977 selected poems, Lost Language (edited by Marlatt for
Coach House Press), and George Bowering’s George,
Vancouver (Kitchener
ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1970) and later Kerrisdale
Elegies (Toronto
ON: Coach House Press, 1986; Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008).
Before and since, Vancouver has been explored through poetry by dozens of
writers [see the piece I wrote on some of it here], including Meredith
Quartermain, Stephen Collis, George Stanley, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Michael
Turner, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Sachiko Murakami, Oana Avasilichioaei, Roy Kiyooka, Earle
Birney, Gerry Gilbert, John Newlove, nikki reimer and Shannon Stewart. What is
it about the city that inspires? And yet, Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems was one of the first poetry collections to write so
openly, lovingly, critically and unapologetically lyrical about the city, and I
would suspect very much influenced a great number of poets in the years that
followed, suddenly given permission to write about Vancouver.
Slimey,
mackerel sea-sky (eyes down). Limed
public library steps, the
gulls. Mean what they
cry. Time, time. How many
stoop to a dead fish?
How would you like a tail in
the eye, scales, a
little bit rheumy but
other/wise … Off the point
they go fishing. Under
latches of the bridge,
rusty, rattling their rods.
Tide. Swirls down
deep there. Noon reigns in
the street, a White Lunch.
Blue hubbard figures hump,
endless round. The Cup’s
too big to geet into. Would
it hold anything but rain?
Steams on a hot day, the park
lunches.
Hold my hand in this cracked
vinyl booth where
bread wilts. I love you but
don’t, fling your rain-
coat over my head. It smells,
wet. Hair hangs into
my cup. Love rains. You will
go far somewhere.
Where? matter inserts
relation.
Peels, heels, float like
hulls of hands under the
wharf. Rats dockside.
Carrying orchards up, and the
port, and the
starred-on-board lights.
Milk run Amalia ends up on
library steps, a cigarette,
some soup. A wet day steams
up the insides of
their eyes. I want to know
how gulls keep flying.
If Barry McKinnon’s poems are
described as a single sentence-thought that each rise to an apex and fall away,
Marlatt’s poems can be described as single self-contained sentence-breaths that
connect perfectly to any of her poems placed before or after; the pattern the
reader sees from such comes in part from how the pieces are arranged. There is
a restless quality to the poems here, one that make her study of Vancouver not
tied to a single temporal point, but a book that stretches across decades.
Certainly, Liquidities feels less a
straight update of an older work than an extension of the original project, and
the lines that open one of the early poems, “Lagoon,” could have been written
in either era, and anywhere in between: “down a cut on the city side,
apartments / stacked uphill, through shadow and hulls and ribs we walk. /
You’ve come home.” For a poet who has always explored the lyric heart, Liquidities reads as a writer’s ongoing
relationship to her city, composed as a critical love letter home.
the fur parachute
these
angles not drawn by da Vinci
closer
to May Wests than Ariel’s wispy forms
always
this craving for earth 1100 jumps deep
always
this war, tilting
anguish
laid flat against another edge
a
simple bone-bridge
a
wolf dreams of prickly wild wings
a
wing might be a tongue
is
an earth breached, planted moon
between
heels
swimming
outdoors of language
the
knot has slipped
plastic
is the very idea of its infinite dip
(“Canto Ex Silentio”)
Guelph,
Ontario poet Shannon Maguire’s first trade poetry collection, fur(l) parachute (Toronto ON: BookThug,
2013), expands out from the Old English poem “Wulf and Eadwacer,” as she writes
at the back of the collection:
Wulf and Eadwacer: The Old
English poem Wulf and Eadwacer which appears in the 10th century
Exeter MS between the elegies and the riddles. There is no consensus as to its
meaning, origin, or even to genre. Some see it as a riddle, others as an
example of woman’s lament, and yet others in the broader tradition of the
elegy. It is a formal oddity, being one of only two extant Anglo Saxon poems
having a refrain (the other poem is Deor), and being one of the few extant
Anglo Saxon poems to be written from the point of view of a woman.
The
second collection produced by BookThug (alongside Christine McNair’s spring
2012 collection Conflict) originally
on the shortlist of the 2011 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing,
Maguire’s fur(l) parachute is
structured as a single work composed in six sections, some of which fragment
into subsections, even as the poems themselves fractal, breaking down pieces
into phrases, words and singular letters. With words and lines crossed out,
individual letters floating across an open space of the watery white page, or
reduced to the syntax of a howl, her collection begins from the kernel of the
original Old English poem, while using the thousand year old piece as a
bouncing-off point, unafraid to explore and expand sound and stretched meaning,
inference and the shape of the page. The collection opens with a reworked
version of the original poem, “a transformation from Old English,” before the
poem extends, and continues into sections for each of the characters.
Fascinated with origin, the collection opens with what Erin Mouré called (for
her own Sheep’s Vigil) a transelation, reworking her own version of
“wulf & eadwacer” into something far greater.
To
my people (s)he is a sacrificial gift
They
wish to serve h(er) as food to their
god
if (s)he comes in a host
To
lead my poor wrenched cub to the tree, my people desire
Love is different with us!
Do you hear us in our song,
watchman?
We two that never united
That my people easily tear apart
We are different!
Wulf,
my Wulf!
Your expectations make me sick
Your
infrequent visits tell me that you mourn my heart
not
at all
Wulf, you are my far-wandering
hopes!
Now Wulf is on one island and I on
another.
Secure, enclosed, firm, fast fixed
is that island.
I am a fen surrounded by a
slaughter-cruel
troupe
that wishes
to serve h(er) up
if (s)he comes.
(“wulf & eadwacer”)
Writing
references that include “a wetlands Ophelia,” Shakespeare’s Ariel and Mae West,
Maguire’s fur(l) parachute is rife
with stories and myths, weaving in threads from other tales. Through these
references, she hammers the point of speaking, giving voice to those too often
muffled, or altogether voiceless. In fur(l)
parachute, Maguire transelates
Old English and Middle English into language poetry, composing a new kind of
becoming and emerging from the dark, deep woods. This is a book worth listening
to; a book with just as much bite as bark.
so
small so smooth her three sides were
so
round I judged her her gems
gay eyes
alas!
I lessened her left her everywhere
so
round I judged, so small, so smooth
alas!
I lost her there
progressed
to the ground away
from me she got
all
of her blood there sprang in space a
sprite in
the
ground a bloodied place
the
soil my body an
in-sewn berth
all
hollers and echoes and
echoes and chokes
dubbed
wren she wrest, progressed
to the ground
away
from me she got her blood
their sprig
so
small so smooth so round
(“pearl/buttons”)
Legend, 1942
saskatchewan in autumn
war & harvest
fields given over to
air basses
times like these
where you come from less important than
how strong your shoulders
& how willing
& your name
falling unnoticed in
the wake of the threshing crew
heritage here
in the hands
scythe in
churchyard grass the arc
of axe
& mattock
this land’s bones
too stubborn for words
Edmonton poet Jenna Butler’s third trade poetry
collection seldom seen road (Edmonton
AB: NeWest Press, 2013) is a book of disappearance, as she composes poems on
ghost towns, forgotten figures and those who have been otherwise lost. The
author of Aphelion (NeWest Press,
2010) and Wells (University of
Alberta Press, 2012) as well as nearly a dozen shorter collections [including
one with above/ground press, posted online as a free pdf], Butler’s short poems
read like pencil sketches, deceptively quick but skillfully formed poems that
present the essentials of what each poem requires. Her lines are quick, and
require space to stretch out, and know exactly how to make the best of subtle
motion. As Andy Weaver once paraphrased Eliot, these are poems that make
nothing happen.
Constructed in three sections – “Inbound,”
“Lepidopterists” and “The Home Place” – Butler explores less a sense of
geography but a sense of grounding against the feeling of being unmoored,
tracking and tracing lines that have long faded and been forgotten. It’s as
though she grounds herself specifically through these lost and fading
touchstones, returning to each of them a strength and purpose simply for
reaching out to them.
5.
because marriage is less
about rings than
spirals the
fretworked granary floor
when the cats have been in
moonhued garden snails
plucked & dropped into
saltwater
dim reprimand of
shells against the bucket’s tin
you take
home with you
when you go
(“Seven Ways of Leaving”)
In the second section, “Lepidopterists,” Butler
composes a poem or two each for various historical figures that have slipped
just outside of view, including Seamuel Hearne’s wife who starved to death,
Mary Norton (1708-1728), one of the “Famous Five,” Nellie McClung (1873-1951),
Margaret Fleming (1901-1999), Dr. Elizabeth Beckett Matheson (1866-1958) and
“The Wives of Crowfoot” (1830-1890), a group of “up to ten wives” of Crowfoot,
many of whom have been long forgotten. The poem “Arrowhead Blue” is for
“Manitupotis’ Women,” (1873), as Butler writes, “Cypress Hills / Southern
Alberta floundering under the whiskey trade / Several members of the band led by Manitupotis / (Little Soldier) and his band massacred by
American wolfers [.]”
Arrowhead Blue
(Boisduval, 1852)
the lupines’ bloom
stills at dusk
all day they
have thrust
silvery-purple against
the hills’ spine
their scent
tearing the air like clamour
angling her wings
she dips amongst
violent petals
patina the
depth
of a new
bruise
a perennial ache
The poems in this collection can be described as
both meticulously carved and quickly sketched, and the best pieces are the ones
that remain shorter, boiled down to their essence, from pieces such as
“Inbound” to the sequence “Seven Ways of Leaving.” As the press release tells
us, this is “a collection of sharply observed and understated poems about the
land and its people,” writing the landscape from not only the ground up but
from the perspective of those who have helped in the long-thankless task of
building up from what was once nothing. The poem “Alchemist” is written with
the sub-title “Writing-On-Stone
Provincial Park, 1999,” a site long explored by poets, including Andrew
Suknaski and Monty Reid. The piece holds up well against the comparison, and
holds within it the entire scope of the collection, writing out loss, absence
and discovery. The single-page poem opens with:
the irony is
I come into being when called
bucking
like Sisyphus this
unloved
summoning
your voice
the wind
polytonal over
one stone or another
This
spring, New York publisher New Directions has announced the return of a
“reincarnated version of the ‘Poet of the Month’ and ‘Poets of the Year’ series
James Laughlin published in the 1940s” through the return of a reincarnated
version of their “Poetry Pamphlets” series. The first four to appear are Susan
Howe, Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of
Looking at Marker, Lydia Davis / Eliot Weinberger, Two American Scenes, Bernadette Mayer, The Helens of Troy, NY, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan poet Sylvia
Legris’ Pneumatic Antiphonal (New
York NY: New Directions, 2013). Constructed as an accumulation of shorter
pieces, Pneumatic Antiphonal is a
poem that opens and builds, containing multitudes. There is a language in
Legris’ work rarely seen in Canadian contemporary poetry. With the glut of
poems referencing birds, Legris seems to be the only poet who includes such a
rich and detailed language of birdsong. The first poem in the collection reads:
Lore: 1 (premise)
The theory of
corpuscular flight is the cardinal premise of red birds carrying song-particles
carrying oxygen. Erythrocytic. Sticky. Five quarts of migration.
Through
her three previous trade collections of poetry—circuitry of veins (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1996), iridium seeds (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone
Press, 1998) and the Griffin Prize-winning Nerve
Squall (Coach House Books, 2005)—Legris’ writing has long explored a detail
of space and sound, and in this new collection, the two are incredibly densely
packed. Throughout the course of her writing to date, Legris has moved from
death, cancer and bulimia to birdsounds and Latin. Writing of Sylvia Legris
work in Open Letter (Eleventh Series,
Number 7, Spring 2003), Steven Ross Smith provides a lengthy (uncited) quote
from Legris:
Of her
book-length work, Sylvia Legris has written: [My] “poetry has gone through
several shifts: from expressing, in circuitry
of veins, profound disquiet in relation to disease and imminent death to,
in iridium seeds, articulating, by
increments, those places of relative quiet lodged within the language and
experience of grief. In contrast to circuitry of veins in which there is a
rather conspicuous tangibility of flesh and in which death has an immediate, unquestionably
harsh presence (corpse and all), the poetry of iridium seeds radiates from a
deeper place, of body, mind, and imagination; death here inhabits more ghostly
territory – glimpses of insight hovering on the periphery or poems that are now
more obviously meditative and musical in tone and pace. The poetry of “leaf
margin” [unpublished, but which led to dysrhythmic
sky], further removed as it is from the actual experience of death, from
the materiality of body, has as its starting point a place that is relatively
contemplative. The movement of this work is deliberate, fugue-like in its
considered repetition…” This is an accurate description, primarily from the
perspective of content -- although formal considerations are implied. It is in
the formal and material mode that Legris stands on new poetic ground.
According to Wikipedia, “pneumatic” refers to “the
study and application of pressurized gas to produce mechanical motion,” and
“antiphonal” refers to “any piece of music performed by two semi-independent
choirs in interaction, often singing alternate musical phrases,” suggesting
that her title refers to a sequence of propelled binaries. In Pneumatic Antiphonal, she composes a
series of odes that bounce between flight and injury, and between heady song
and the collapsed, failed or depleted lung, from “Flight Song of the Old
World…” (p 16) to “Almost Migration” (p 21). With each poem comes another opportunity for air, and the lack of it.
One of Canada’s most underrated and possibly underappreciated poets, Legris
writes the complex simplicity of birds, through individual poems between a
sequence of lores that run through the collection like a thread, or tether,
from the opening poem in the collection to the closing:
Lore: 14 (mirror
call)
Quick-striking bittern with
a bill like a clapper. Head-bobbing
rhythm-keeping Rock Dove.
Rapid-tapping sapsucker, red-
naped, nasal. Birds hitting
below the belfry and lungs
are two-octave carillons.
Fan-arteried. Campanulate. The left
pulmonary veins carry a
25-bronchi clarion from the left lung
back to the heart.
Ventricles in a mirror dance of call and call
and call and call…
