Lethe: a mock-metaphysics, Photographs by Karen Moe -2006
Reviews of Richardson, Thammavongsa, Kolos, Brandt and Fretwell -2004
The Wake(ning) -2003
Abject Oceans -2003
A derelict look -2002
POETRY MATTERS -2002
Everyday Epiphanies -2001
Review of Books by Gerald, Henderson and Moritz -2001
Christy Letter -2000
Motes on Poetry -1999
Deft Ignitions: Quotes 1999-2004
An Interview(?) with Catherine Owen -1995
All material copyright Catherine Owen 2003.
Webmaster: Chris Matzigkeit inhumanist@ziplip.com
Lethe: a mock-metaphysics, Photographs by Karen Moe
Commerce, both the trading of saleable merchandise and its
more sexualized cycle of exchange, holds sway in the psyche
as a violence committed upon the price-less foundations of
existence. In the 1957 movie, The Three Faces of Eve, commerce
within the self escalates as psychiatry uncovers a
clamorous trinity of inassimilable beings. Multiple personalities are
viewed as life without a brand, a marketplace run amok. But
must this be so? Vancouver photographer Karen Moe’s black and
white shots of her self’s traumatized and triumphing assemblages seem
not only to debunk the myth of the individualistic
consumer, but to imply that an unearthing of such
contesting fragments of the psyche is an essential, if
disruptive, or perhaps because disruptive, process.
Third wave feminism, with its reconciling of a critique of
the beauty culture’s abuses and power structures, and the
acknowledgment that such nastiness can also be compellingly naughty,
provides the theoretical tension in Moe’s Lethe: a
mock-metaphysics. The title is ironic, Janus-faced. The river of
oblivion (Lethe being the mythical watercourse of forgetfulness on
one’s way to Hades) after all, courses through our
capitalistic hell, its amnesiac waters making us more malleable
consumers. However, while these images engage with the repercussions
of a consumer-based relationship with one’s
identity, they enact in order to recall, to valorize formerly
un-witnessed history, both personal and cultural. Moe’s technique of
multiple exposure and negative layering, which emphasizes the
overt construction of her images, increases their strain
towards a brute “re-membering.” Further, her mock metaphysics, while
definitively deriding the triptych of Christian patriarchs
at the root of much gender (and ecological) trauma, is
not an imitation but a performativity, a “the[ory]atre.”
Take the god of this monstrous trinity, Constable-Hold-
the-Tits, the antithetical force in Moe’s metaphysics and yet the
ersatz progenitor. His garish mug leaking out of the shadows like a
Noh mask, the shell of his profession glued mawkishly on his
head, the Constable is snagged in a trap of his own making.
Patriarchy turns all men into parodic transsexuals. The
system of father-rule is one of mother-flesh appropriation.
Madre clamps onto Padre as in Freud’s return of
the repressed. Thus the tit in the light is gripped with an
agricultural ownership, its nipple milked awkwardly, grimly. Why do
we pity this figure? His abject conglomeration of body parts
points to the contradiction at the heart of the desire to
possess; what we claim we kill and, at the same time, it eludes us,
remains ineffable. Then there’s Poopsie, the Christ figure,
suffering under a crucifixion of commercial signifiers.
She’s the chick with the thigh-highs and pearls,
suitable accoutrements for Daddy’s little slut, hands caressing the
phallic-stub of a looking glass she wields as if making a serve in a sadistic
game of tennis. Yet the rakishly-tilted crown
on her mop is absurd, a six year old’s party tiara turned sordid, a
skeletal version of the Constable’s hat. Even sillier is her
moustache, gashed on with a felt. That she is supposed to be
posing as Lord Rochester, the 18th century bisexual libertine
suggests her awareness of the affinity between the
strategies of the hyper-fem and the courtly stud. A “performativity
of gender,” to use Judith Butler’s term, is at
work here, the end in service of sex and power, however
inscribed through a subjugated lens. While both the Constable and
Poopsie, at least in this portrait, are truly engaged in literal
“trans-actions” in which the final product is a mish-mash of
materialized Mommy-Daddy nightmares, the Holy Ghost, She-Doggy,
transcends this gender mess through her adoption of the faithful
inhumanism of the rebel pup.
Hair woofing up into shaggy ears, tits becoming a bitch’s
glands, She-Doggy pisses on the line where utopia becomes dystopia.
Is this a repellant habit she should have her
cartoon-huge snout rubbed in? Or is this lassoing loom of urine a
blast of refreshing shit-kicking, its acid an attempt to erode the
Constable and Poopsie’s stagnant androcentrism?
She-Doggy’s dervishing bladder puts the kibosh on any essentialist
reading of existence, pointing her piss at these
pastiches of rationality, a stink pie launched in a politician’s
deceptive maw. These three archetypes, taken together, manifest the
complexity of feminism, that it is composed not of a unity,
as the Christian trinity is constructed to be, but as
Alison Stone dubbed it, feminism is more akin to a “coalition” or a
“geneology.” Then things spin into the kinky. The ménage a
trois’s commence with Poopsie “palimp-incestuing” her flesh against
the Constable’s in a self-absorbed lap dance. She’s a
working girl for the patriarchy’s pimp, but she exudes the pseudo
potency of a Paris Hilton clone, gawping into her omnipresent lens
while the Constable stiffly pincers her/his doppelganger
breasts. But who’s that between her legs, her mutty face becoming a
muff of sorts, not
yipping this time, but innocent, secretive as a child beneath the
tablecloth who notices uncle fondling uncle and enacts a sabotage.
Guysering over both their bust-like mugs, She-Doggy’s
leakage spirals up in a tentacled spurt though the Constable feigns
aloofness while Poopsie brandishes her mirror as a shield
against such abject impositions.
However, as the following montage, Vanquished, appears to
drive home, the future is an Orwellian boot stomping forever, only
here not on the human face, but on She-Doggy’s tender
coccyx. A fascistic monster-a-phobe, his cunt mottled, tits wrung by
his own sweaty paw, the Constable crushes his Hitlerian nylons
into an innocent derriere to purge the ineradicable, his
violence an ache to regain what Kristeva calls “the self’s
clean and proper body.” Yet She-Doggy remains the artist.
Divested of mercantilist props (hat, pearls), she refuses
to copulate with the dollar but, instead, urinating her
agony onto the archetype and his signifiers, She-Doggy
exposes fissures in the supposedly tenable system. Floating beside
Vanquished’s cyclical Golgotha, a satanic physique grins
, thrusting out its tiny, commodified rump. Her days may be
numbered but this Daddy’s calendar girl shimmers like a
Beelzebub in spandex. Is she in cahoots with all this? As Genesis,
the last and initial image makes clear perhaps it is she
who is the Horned Almighty and not the Constable. Can we
blame her though or is she merely another concocted objectification
and is this beginning but an anti-uroboros is
pursuit of its own hot tail, not to emblematize unity but an
incestuous discord?
Moe, in Lethe: a mock metaphysics, revokes photographic and
metaphysical seamlessness, slapping her selves one on top of
the other in an orgiastic and traumatic card game. Her
“the[ory]atre” is both a Beckettian blasting of the impossibility of
justice in this sacrilege of a universe and the bravest of
admissions that, to heal from violation, one must expose the
irreconcilable in oneself, even to the point of respect.
TOP
An ABC of Belly Work by Peter Richardson
Peter Richardson’s second collection of poems rides a baggage-car
across the terrain of fatherhood, history, nature’s tenacity and even
the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Whether or not the subject
matter grips you, however, you’ll still, as with the poems of Ken
Babstock or Mark Cochrane, experience a re-invigoration of
language and its often-neglected music. The first half of the book
steers strongly through a disconnected farrago of twentieth century
landscapes. In the title poem, Richardson describes a scene at
Mirabel Airport in 1980 featuring the “German Sixth Army” who
“saw pianos burning in plazas/now watching an animated desert
bird/as hail raps our windowsills in June.” The incongruities
erupting from both temporal and seasonal shifts are finely and
disturbingly detailed. His most lucid pieces emerge from his
explorations of late-in-life fatherhood. In “Coracle” he unflinchingly
records the sight of his daughter’s placenta “roiling out in a
prolonged dollop…the veined nubbled pup tent,” while in “Packet”
his account of rocking his child to sleep resonates due to the
eloquent words Richardson has selected to convey an infant’s
ominous fragility – “I hold her there a while/cantilevered over the
parquetry/abeyant.” Only his tendency to stretch metaphors to the
absurd, as in his comparison, in the same poem, of his daughter to
a “drunk,” settling into the company of men “at long trestle tables/at
a snowy railhead whose hostelries/teem with pale camp courtesans”
weakens the initial gasp of the image.
The pieces that attend to the small, generally
unacknowledged damages to the natural world are also potent.
“Siberian Elms Below the Metropolitain Autoroute” awakens one to
urbanity’s effect on trees whose twigs are “shiny with busted
car-stereo tapes.” Another piece, “From the Suburban Book of
Sightings,” recounts the lengths a city dweller must go when “living
beside a highway” to witness that rare “red-crested
insectivore/whose body clambers sideways.” Richardson’s poems are
frequently limned with a subtle humour that proves effective in the
juxtaposition of his conversation about misrouted suitcases and the
exigencies of a vasectomy in “Standby,” but can fall off the conveyer
belt in such doggerel-style rhymes as when in “That Summer,” the
cushions that are “worse/for wear looked as though/an elephant
had sat there.” Often the poems, especially in the occasionally
abstract second half of the book with its historical scenarios and
de-contextualized lineages, felt as if they were on the verge of greater
revelation but shied away, their endings limping in the descriptive
instead of the epiphanic. Yet Richardson’s obvious ear for the
textures and timbres of language, whether in using daring Dennis
Lee- type words such as “kerflooeyed” or “lollygagging,” or in one of
the last pieces, “He Considers Protected Witnesses” which carves
clear, uncluttered imperatives: “I’ll take the steady twilight of Chez
Bebert…I’ll stick to my one-room sublet by a railyard,” makes “An
ABC of Belly Work” settle deep in the gut from its runway rich with sounds.
Small Arguments by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s first book is as beautifully crafted
as the
poems within. The cover features a sprinkling of insects, silver as
stars
against a woven gray sky and the contents page ray the titles at the
bottom
of the margin as if to keep them in close association with the
earth. Inside,
the poems move their spare inscriptions across pages
generous with an
allowance of breath, paying homage first to an array of
fruit, then weather,
and lastly, insects, with a smattering of others on
trees, seashells, salt.
Using a form often reminiscent of Phyllis Webb’s
“Naked Poems,”
Thammavongsa branches out where Lorna Crozier left
off in The Garden
Going On Without Us, albeit in a tone more sacred than
sexual. Her fruit,
rather than “fucking the earth” like Crozier’s carrots,
has gentle lessons to
teach on vulnerability and loss, the orange sharing
the “bitterness of skin
and seed,” the cocoanut the necessity of violence
to revelation. The only
strained piece in this section is the skeletal glosa,
“The Grape (a remix)”
which struggles to seamlessly interweave
A.F.Moritz’s lines with its own
perceptions of a shriveling fertility.
While the weather poems, and most notably the one on rain, serve
to
remind us of the simple entrances we fear, and therefore seek to avoid,
her
insect poems most potently explore this human tendency. “The
Worm” is
literally defaced by science and its misguided quest to discover
“how so
simple/a creature can manage/a world/in which we invent so
much,”
while “The Butterfly,” dying, throbs a pulse “beating against (our)
own,”
however reluctant we are to admit kinship. A sense of collective
guilt
pervades these pieces in a mild but persistent chiding to “hear these
small
questions” (“The Snail”) as the relentless eyes of insects watch us,
“the last
of its parts to go” (“The Dragonfly”). Rather than varying the
form,
Thammavongsa occasionally plays with the position of titles or
epigrams to
prevent visual monotony. Her diction sticks to Anglo-Saxon
essentials:
light, earth, bone, weight: in order to access the unadorned
core of the real.
Only a few times does it slip into the oversimplified,
leading to vagueness,
as when in “The Firefly,” darkness is “unable to
hold” in order to “put
down” the incandescent insect.
The opening poem of the collection, “Materials,” eloquently
describes the
impetus and consequences behind this young poet’s desire
to witness the
small. The newspapers she learns to read from are
released from their
utility, the reductive acts of drying and wrapping, and
enabled to enter the
poet’s mind, becoming a non-quotidian “way in” to
the imagination. Freed
from the need to dub everything functional, she is
then able to awaken to
the sacrality of the inhuman universe. Mourning
frogs in “pickle jars,”
Thammavongsa’s poems create alternate
containments for the natural
world and lucid arguments for the gifts one
can glean by simply paying
attention.
Slipped Out, a compilation of poems by Daniel Kolos, spanning
form a 1968 haiku to a 2003 meditation on war, is as diverse and exuberant as its author’s
passions. Akin to a heavier-handed Zagejewski or Kaplinski, Kolos’s forte is the
philosophical musing. In “Absurdities,” a narrative on the paradoxes that continuously
operate beneath the surface of our hypocritical society, Kolos is pointed and pithy. He
wonders why his neighbour’s wife will not break her vows though her husband has “three
more wives back home.” He questions why his doctor promotes Prozac instead of
St.John’s Wort, concluding that the doctor’s real profession is to attend to the “circulation
of money.” Politically speaking, Kolos’s sequence of pieces on farming, especially,
“Where is Nature,” remind us of the thin divide between the pristine and the constructed,
evolving a mythologically-engaged ecology.
His eclectic reading habits bubble up in poems on Lewis Lapham’s concept of the
Comfort Zone, Iona Culianu’s “Eros and Magic in the Renaissance,” and, most
successfully, in “Ode to Villon.” This piece burbles with Zorba the Greek joie de vivre as
it recounts an erotic quest for the delicacies of a “thick line of black hair…from edible
lips/all the way up to [the] navel.” In poems such as this and the bawdy doggerel, “Domestic Servitude,”
Kolos injects Canadian poetry with a lewd enthusiasm it often lacks.
Many pieces in this slim volume however, would benefit from a tighter form, a
looser rhythm and a more poetic approach to the music of language. In “Midsummer
Day’s Musings,” for example, what begins with focused lucidity descends into jangling
rhyme – “the pond is dry/the well is walled up/the children cry/the plumber’s called up,”
while “Toxic Shock” presents an overly sentimental response to 9-11 that shrinks from
the complexities of the crime. Slipped Out features a smattering of rural and paternal
pictures of the author and, most interestingly, a translation of Penn Kemp’s “Poem for
Peace in two Voices” into a colourful tablet of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Kolos
obviously adds an enriching sensibility to the Canadian poetry scene. Slipped Out only
needs to rein itself in a bit more, linguistically speaking, to be a potent offering of verse.
Bouquet for St. Mary’s by Di Brandt
Reviewing an occasional poem seems slightly impertinent, even irrelevant.
Yet Di Brandt’s Bouquet for St. Mary transcends its inaugural request, serving as an
evocative ten-part meditation on a microcosm of narrative, history and worship. Drawn
partly from parishioners’ accounts, a “witty history of the Church,” and the imagination,
Brandt fashions a trajectory of irreverently key moments in the story of one valued church.
Genesis is re-envisioned as beginning with the patriarch, Hiram, the proprietor of
Walkerville Distillery and St.Mary’s patron, who quoth, “Let there be fire…heck, Hiram
said, waving his arm…Let there be fire all over this country” (I). The Biblical and
colloquial merge in this rollicking tale of rat-advised rectors, childish séances and the
cycle of Christ’s season. Clichés that go hand in hand with commissioned oratory such as
“lavish attention,” are saved by the sound of lines like “a nickel a tipple” (II), and
depictions of pastors taking the sun as “deliciously pagan” (VII). Along with religious
panegyric (St. Mary’s as an “exquisite little jewel of a church”), Brandt manages to slip
in subtle eco-critiques of air pollution (VII), and a wonderful depiction of adolescent
disdainment as a girl’s “older friends with their secret breasts/ and newfound arrogance”
(IX) mock the lyrics of The Little Drummer Boy.
Like the “charming young Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue” (V), whose “ingenious
cross made of fishes” transforms “the somber sign of the Crucifixion/into delicate
symbols of Communion,” Bouquet for St. Mary is Brandt’s own water into wine.
Shaking Hands with the Night by Katerina Fretwell
Writing confessional poetry takes courage. Even in this age of bare-all shows, to
create art out of personal trauma requires an ability to excavate the strata of one’s life in a
way most of us shrink from. Katerina Fretwell’s Shaking Hands with the Night
acknowledges an intimate acquaintance with the scarring darkness of alcoholism and
madness. In the first two sections, Dark House and On Tap, Fretwell traverses the spiral
from inebriated parents to university alienation to the mirror image of herself, a drunken
mother and poet in a 70s “anti-psychotic haze” (Madness). The strongest pieces,
“Whiskey Breath” which glosses Yeats’ Second Coming and “The Sun also Rises,” a
fierce counter-cry to Hemingway’s escape into “absinthe” as the poet gazes “within/hard
and clear/savoring sobriety,” shape grief’s memories into tight forms and lucid rhythms.
Fretwell’s use of extended metaphor and alliteration as in lines from “Convivial
Oblivion” describing “heady days horrid/years that left my daughter un-mothered/me
devil-dueling, nearly dead,” limn the poems with rich texture, falling only occasionally
into euphony or excess.
The following sequences redeem such tendencies; “Quartzite Dialogues”’
modified haikus and ghazals and the “Brides Gate Meditations” seek place as a node of
healing. Here, Fretwell lifts self into locus, seeing in a Nova Scotian clearing her “old
road broken” (Clearing), in “granite blood-red lines/childhood’s rough residue” (Feldspar
Slashes). The Bridal Arch at the Inn then offers a space to reclaim the lost purity of
marital vows though the couple are long “beyond/fuss and gush, both/ex-drunks, well-
seasoned” (A Woman Stands). Recurrent images of clovers and poppies weave these
pieces into an antique trellis with perceptions reminiscent of Blake and Vaughan.
The final section presents a powerful array of stages in the long-term process of
reconciliation. “Finally the Funeral,” “Self Love,” “Reclamation” and the title poem each
end with the hope derived from the un-denied journey into the psyche, a “56 year search
for light” which becomes at last a “vow fulfilled, a votive candle.” The language is
consistently musical, the diction sashaying between medieval grace and archaism. “Self-
Shadowed,” which serves as a postscript, and is possibly the most solid piece in the book
for its clean lines and specificity of detail, seals the reader in a dream-world of renewal in
which the reward for “embracing [the] dark side” is a momentary but suffusing light.
Shaking Hands with the Night contains fifteen colour plates of Fretwell’s exquisite
renderings of nebula, fitting universalizations of the poems’ own entrances into forms of
chaos and order. A CD of Fretwell’s recitation of the book is also included. While the
sound quality is strong, the addition of musical interludes would have leant this
compilation a more intriguing texture, particularly as Fretwell has already collaborated
with Michael Horwood on setting “Quartzite Dialogues” to music. In both content and in
the multi-media presentation of this Pendas Productions book however, Fretwell has
painted an unyielding vision of the rigors and release attendant on the act of seeking in the
“petrified lava” (Aligning Soul & I) the star-burst of constellations, the glinting of sea-creatures.
TOP
There is a place after grief almost harder than grief itself.
After the disbelief that becomes language, the hurt that becomes
language, after even the tears that burn through a month of the
body dry into the lucid surety of language, comes the place of
no-language. This is where I find myself. In a tiny, vast desert
of my own making. For twelve years or more, through marriages,
children, degrees and other dislocations, words, their textures
and timbres, kept coursing. The world sprang with subjects. I was
relentlessly, restlessly engaged.
Yet a certain safety surrounded my manuscripts like yellowed cotton
batting; my Muses were all dead. Muse: a word calling faintly in thees
and thous of Parnassus and Graves's goddess. Inspiration is as lofty
as we get in this era of a thousand channels. But inspiration, as its
Latin root inspire suggests, concerns the act of breathing. The cat's
pink tongue in a haft of sun is inspiration. Muses converge around the
mind like crows over a rat's eye: they are feverish, they are rabid,
they oppress.
Even dead, Egon Schiele, Robinson Jeffers and the host of hauntings
that formed my sequence on extinct species consumed me for several
years apiece to the exclusion of other sources (Muses being notoriously
jealous…), turning single poems to entire funnels for the transcription
of imagined lives. Yet they did not disrupt, not entirely. They did not
establish situations of divided loyalty or demand sudden trips across
the country. The bodies they presented me were not newly broken inside
improbable coffins.
Muses are a romantic notion, of course. And there was nothing romantic
about my one, once-living Muse, I can assure you. His name was an
abbreviation of the shortest month of the year. He stuck needles in his
arm. On his bicep, the tattoo: NOTHING. He knew he was white trash, he
told me, when he saw a soft bouillon of margarine sliding down a pale
ruin of noodles. He played a harmonica in the halls of Montreal General
and took photos of the Mona Lisa propped against refuse. There was
absolutely no reason why I ruined so much of importance to pursue his
terrible eyes from Commercial Dr. to St. Catherine's. It is wholly
unfathomable how over fifty poems emerged from a man who spat in my face
the last time I saw him, nine months before he ended his life with a
flight onto the asphalt in the first flicker of March.
But the absence of language is the one unforgivable loss. Is it you
strange Muse or no one? Will I become unbearable as Yeats over Maud
Gonne, Van Gogh over the sun that navigated his mind to madness? Rilke
once wrote: Great works of art always spring from those who have faced
the danger, gone to the very end of an experience. Well, I'm here now,
I think, and amid the silence root only tiredness, and questions.
TOP
Frank Bonneville
Abject Oceans: The Piscatory Underground World of Joe Rosenblatt
The light is on in the aquarium, a blurred welt of red. Depths are being
sounded on the monitor - shadow shapes stumble about the chairs, some
seeking the naugahyde reef, some the paisley oasis. Sheldon & Travis,
two noble blowfish, nestle into the glass castle a giant has let pell-mell
to the gravelly bottom, one tapping his cane like a metronome on mushrooms,
the other adjusting his gold aviator glasses, both tippling back conches
of coppery fluid with somber ceremoniousness. Tracy, the geoduck, sips
daintily at her abalone wine, guarding her breathing hole with the stub-end
of a bicycle pump. Shark-fin pressed to the door, Jason awaits the arrival
of the Great Minnow, scheduled to descend, in his plastic bathysphere, at
8 pm. And the moon, ancient fish egg, swings above the illegal scene in
its hatchery of cloud.
Fishers, send us back to Mother water/ we're frightened children without fins.
Paradoxical request, but the Great Minnow revels in such contradictions. For him,
the rogue primate species are more akin to deviant amphibians, adorers and
despoilers of the watery womb, yet devoid of the necessary equipment.
Boats, life jackets, scuba gear, water wings and even those absurd
exploding bathing caps, bobbing upon the ocean's surface like
toxic foam, are but sad prostheses for our lack of gills. Steeped in
memories of uterine warmth, attached octopi to the omphalos, we plead,
though destined to be a meal, for the fisher's hand, hard as a father's,
to cast us forth into the churning brine. The poet dangling his rod,
mobile with its lines of thought and song, waiting for an infant nibble
at his line from the darkness of this vast, carnivorous cradle.
Through the aquarium's porthole, the poet is seen parking his bathysphere,
leashing it to the thermometer beside the copulating shades of eels.
KNOCK KNOCK - he clears his throat with the force of an underwater
earthquake, grayed locks streaming like shoals. Great M? Mr. Shark burbles
inquiry. Tis I, the poet's eyes announce with aqueous intention, falling
intensely upon the scene within where piranhas knock back pints and the Divine
Dogfish, Ms. K, reigns in all her inedible glory behind the makeshift bar
in one corner of her East Van abode.
Some in attendance bear signs of recent capture: hooks still in noses,
small puncture wounds on cheeks or hands. Ms. K herself is revered for
the strata of scar tissue on her hide from years of near escape. Worse,
she tosses out amid the froth of drinks, are the looks on the faces of
fishers - disgust! Hard at first, but now? I laugh at their haste to chuck
me back. Patriarchal dirt! I mock their salmon-lust. The G.M. burrows
into a barstool, shuffling his papers and books like tectonic plates - the
room teaming with expectant waves.
Gastric Love: A Dialogue on Pen & Ink
The Octopus:
I, famed cephalopod
Am not Ophelia, though doleful-
Eyed, tentacles outstretched
As if victim, suckers plumb as anvils.
Aswarm I seem with all the fish
Who use me as a bachelor pad,
Teeming over my protuberant head
In amorous pursuit. Yet patient
As an angler, solitaire in my rubbery
Flesh, I observe the frenzied forging
Of rumbling alliances, momentary
Satings before suddenly unleashing
My own onanistic ink, sending
The whole merry game into
A gourmand-burning Hades.
The Non-descript Water Nymph:
Attached by a whipped umbilicus
To my burnished fish, I am empress
Of such intestinal copulations.
Bobbing about on my mobile throne
I survey the swarms of eater and eaten,
Relishing the recidivism of the deep.
The vagrancy of minnows tailors
Them for these squads of peckish
Beasts, bound on turning them into gut.
Only the octopi rears aloof
From the ravenous masses
With his inky motility and I
Call to him as I pass -
Oh, loner, thou art loved!
A band is playing aft of the aquarium for openers - Herr Jiggy jigging for
applause with the silver lure of his sax, burbling with jazz, bopping his
baited head, bop-a-dee, bop-a-dee, foot taps on the glass. The tipsy gaggle
of guests hoots. The G.M. gives the scene a sodden look - seen it all before,
he grunts, all the lasciviousness of the shallows was mine once, but now I
pass it over for the deeps. Then a fan-tailed fish washes through the door, eagerly
bandying her membership card and one of the G.M.'s famed books. Sign please!
Indeed, indeed, my child, the G.M. plumps with sudden pride, patting his
knee, hover here a while, finned pretty, and I will inscribe all your heart's
desires in the ink of my escaping. On the half-shell stage, the band is
disembarking, and Piranhal Paul is rising behind the mike, bald pate flashing
like a siren's voice. But seriously, folks, halfway into his comedic routine,
the crowd straining to hear every biting word above the din of laws outside
this aqueous world, I only come here for the nibbles…
As if on cue, Ms. K passes out a platter of her finely cured caviar, which
the Great M declines, complaining of a tendency to gastric interruptus during
recitations. All my ogling life I've been intimate with fish, he quips,
leading Paul to insert his bababoom line - Yeah, and he doesn't even have any
piranheal diseases! The caught crowd groans and Paul is whisked by crooked
hook to the sidelines, smirking, as the poet stands, immensely auraed,
sonnets raying from each hand.
For the hermit crab begat the clam who begat the starfish who begat the
octopus who begat the eel who begat the rockfish who begat the squid who
begat the crab who begat minnows who begat the fish egged moon who begat the
grim nomad who begat the chameleon lover who begat the whisper who begat
the nude desire who begat the wooing who begat the armoured mouthing who
begat the pellucid who begat the jiving who begat the exploding bullets,
the delectable, the shining pilgrims who begat the glowing fish egged moon.
And so thought flourished in its teaming shoals, birthing illusion upon
illusion in the underwater of the poet's mind, until the aquarium perforce
burst under the pressure and the fishy generations were cast (alas!) from
their swimmy homeland into the brute terrarium of an anonymous city…
The G.M. does not stand before the finned throng long; due to a certain
reserve, the anchor of his dorsal hump, he chooses to recite from the perch
of a kitchen chair, speckled like the scales of a rainbow trout. ARGHHUM,
he intones, tossing his sea-horsed locks back so the candle light,
spitting on the table before him, skims the center of his face, striping
his features like the moon on a wave.
An ancient lover hugging a remembrance of sunnier flesh, his voice brays
out at the watery weave of the ceiling where no hand will descend from the
holy ether to sprinkle hosts of flaky fish food. Nay, this aquarium is wild;
no government sanctions its shenanigans; it thrives in its licentiousness
without licence. Pulsing above the flame, the G.M.'s thick reefs widen and
nostalgia swims out, doing the backstroke of course, incandescent memories
rolling off his barnacled tongue. BOM BOM BOM - one fin beats out the knell
of strophes, glancing off the great knee like the collision between a skiff
and a schooner.
The aquarium begins to leak. Salty drops the size of cigarette butts pelt
from fissures in the glass on passersby and those just emerging from
Continental Barbers after a hot shave. The G.M. persists, indifferent to the
thin shrieks rising from the street and the bubbles of consternation
percolating about him. Not to engorge, but to embrace the body of an
escaping cloud, he intones, as if uttering a dictum for the uneasy room. The
Divine Dogfish dashes up to the stage, jaw wide in a wired cackle, to tap
the G.M. on his shoulder, Ah, Minnow, dearest, looks like you'd better stop
reading awhile - give the old ecosystem time to settle, eh, what d'you
think G, another beer?
Much obliged, pet, he replies before launching into another line, Can I
deny that time does slip… EVACUATION PROCEDURE!! Ms. K is able to yodel - and
then it is too late - the glassed carapace splits sending the entire
illegal speakeasy and all its performative paraphernalia sloshing two
stories down onto the corner of Commercial and 1st. Suckerfish and flounder
bob amid squeegee boys; the fan-tailed fish squeals distraughtly as she
swirls in the eddy of cop cars, skateboarders and aging Elvis impersonators
clutching onto their walkers, Ohhh, Great M, now…now you'll never be able
to write your autobiography!
Nonsense, child, he boomingly replies, momentarily snagged on a punker's
nose ring, I'm nothing if not practical, eminently efficient, utterly
reliable…DO YOU THINK I WOULD ALLOW SUCH RENEGADES TO PERISH SO ABJECTLY?
With that, one fin beckoning, he made to summon the inebriated troops
down the storm sewer before a city crew arrived to suction away the whole
lot of gilled miscreants -
Oh, how each day brings more sediment into my life… he was heard to mutter
with resignation and then URKK, DLUP, he was through the rust-bound bars
and gone.
TOP
A derelict look: perros y leones de centro habana -
Karen Moe at the Havana Gallery
The gazes of these canine guides is what first struck me upon encountering
Karen Moe's perros y leones series. Bleeding Heart's doleful and capricious
stare beneath the matted romanticism of tubers; the hollow olived loll of
Slut's cracked prance; Besos's anarchic eye-rolling above a spatter of raw
graffiti. No coddled lap pups could look so desperately dignified. Even the
dogs sporting "owners" pitch a gaze at the viewer less tame, more akin to
the unquenchable wilderness of the bears and lions behind bars in the Havana Zoo.
But where are these inhuman relics of neo-imperialism taking us?
Into the alleyways, perhaps, the nearly-concealed lanes of confused
detritus that belie our superficially clear approach as turistas into
this land gripped by poverty & nostalgia. The photographer, after all,
is conflicted. Her lens is wearied by the common captures a visitor to
Cuba may contrive. Entraining the camera upon the invisibilized (street dogs),
the diminished (captive animals), and two participants in the colonizing
Gaze (polizia & turistas), perros y leones aims for an architectonic of the
unaestheticized.
Simultaneously lifting her subjects into the lavishing of her attentive
textures and highlighting the stigmata of their posturing beneath a system
destined to either eradicate or glorify them beyond their actual "worth,"
Moe unearths the duality churning beneath her desire to re-present.
Nowhere is this more potent than in the stark diptych - Egg and Bone. The
shards of a protest cast against prison walls felled beside the final image
of a dog bone lone on the cement floor of the lion's lair. It is here that
ends are recalled. What the turista evades, the artist's camera lingers over:
remnants of the imperialist experiment, depths, edges, shadows, impossible
stances and that wild, dark glance in a lost dog's eye.
TOP
There is a fear of poetry in our society, a fear that takes the form of
utter dismisssal; of the Globe & Mail mainly publishing doggerel on their
poetry page; of the reductive technologizing of the heading "How Poems Work"
in the National Post; of the predominance of spoken word slams, and of the
recoiling reaction, "I hate poetry," heard often from the mouths of reluctant
students. Teachers too have admitted to me that they tremble at the thought
of teaching the poetry segment as though it necessitated the painstaking
dissection of dead animals.
I suppose I was just fortunate. Poetry threaded through my childhood in songs
and anthologies, was found on the backs of waybills in my father's truck and
was acknowledged, despite its lack of financial remuneration, as a vocation
not entirely dishonourable.
Society, however, shelves poetry below basket weaving in its hierarchy of
necessities and the increasing dehumanization of the economy which leads,
invariably, to an Orwellian attrition of language, is contributing to poetry's
diminishing audience. Not to be entirely pessimistic, I also feel that as the
lack of what poetry provides becomes more chronic, a resurgence of the craft
and its re-integration into daily life is likely, even inevitable. I would
like to offer then, six characteristics, unique in their combination to
poetry,and suggest, through the reading of poems which echo these attributes,
that it is only poetry's absence from society that is to be feared.
#1 - Rhythm
WB Yeats spoke of the need for lyricism when he wrote that, "the purpose of
rhythm …is to prolong the moment of contemplation…which is the one moment of
creation." Amid the monotonous cacophony of everyday life which often
nullifies thought and dream, the musical form of the poem can chant us back
to the innocence of the infant state when sounds soothed us, or into the
lull of an aesthetic arrest, or what Sven Birkerts dubbed, "deep time," a
space where symbols have the chance to haunt us.
Whether contained in a traditional form or echoed erratically throughout a
contemporary piece, the particular rhythms of poetry emerge from an
unrepeatable breath and blood. My father used to "dance" poems with me
clinging to his back, the ebb and surge of the lines fusing with the
undulations of skin and muscle. The poem is not divisible from the human
who created it. Its rhythm pierces through the sounds of the assembly line
like a child's voice calling for her lost pet on a winter's night, trying
to moor it back to its name.
Roethke's "The Waking"
#2 - Diction
As our society moves further away from monotheism and monogamy, it curiously
moves closer to monoculture and monolinguism. Our favorite word is "nice";
our predominant "feeling" is "busy." We have lost the awe for language we
possessed collectively until at least the Elizabethan era, and with awe,
much of our desire for precision, specificity - a tonal and connotative
exactitude to the words we select in our speech or writing. Our political
leaders parrot mixed metaphors; advertisers parade cliches. Words dry up
like stones in a drought, all speaking a similar greyness.
Poetry is a "gaiety of language," according to Wallace Stevens, and poets
the revelers. I was so obsessed with words as a child that I read cereal
boxes when denied books at the table, masticating the flavours of the
General Mills lexicon with my Wheaties. Poets create of words little
unkillable pulses that throb with allusiveness and music. In the best poems,
the diction is so gingerly handled that replacement of one of the chosen
words, or even its translation, is rendered impossible. Poetry re-enters the
realm of language, de-familiarizing it with the tenuous fusion of a
childlike exuberance and a cautious, respectful tread.
Birney's "AngloSaxon Street"
#3 - Memory
We are a throwaway society. From styrofoam to stereos, we subconciously love
to indulge in the purgative cycle of consuming and casting away, even to the
point that we believe we are thereby fulfilling our role as citizens.
Unfortunately, this tendency to buy and abandon, along with the tampering of
language undertaken by the media, is beginning to affect our ability to
remember. Not unlike the scenarios in Orwell's 1984, deLillo's White Noise,
Zamyatin's We or Lowry's The Giver, memory is being distorted, presented in
sound bite format, relegated to a minor place in our lives, or even
eradicated.
Poets, however, are doomed to be elegiasts. In a world determined to
psychoanalyze the past into absence, poets insist on returning to the site
where it all began, re-opening the wound in their attempt to elaborate
origins, fix motivations, recall the dead. At times, I have felt like the
poet laureate of all funerals.
Poetry composes itself around memory like bark over a tree bole, bent on
including it as part of the whole, however intrusive or difficult to
articulate. Whether it be uttering the uncertainties of childhood, or the
insanities of war, poetry sings out of a desperate ache for remembering,
lest we forget and repeat.
Heaney - "Personal Helicon"
#4 - Imagination
Children have little difficulty performing marriage rites between salt &
pepper shakers or speaking to stone lions. Yet somewhere in the passage to
adulthood, we learn to devalue the leaping of the mind between strangenesses.
Poetry retains a posture of innocent acceptance towards the incongruous.
Metaphor and simile enact encounters between disparate entities with the
intensity of the irrational. A feather meets a boulder; lions lie down with
lambs; or from Kenneth Patchen, "lilies lock and sing in the bone." The
artificially constructed barriers and compartments we have erected around
things recede to be replaced with an acknowledgement of similarities.
Not homogeneity, but an allowance for a uniqueness that resides inside
convergence. If we can see "beauty in ruins" as Gerald Stern advised, by
using the imagination's sensory transport, then we have a means to transform
and enrich any circumstance with uncommon perceptions. It takes courage in
this specialist era, to be a roamer among the myriad shells & violins &
kites & syringes, ever open to the mysterious affinities between them.
EE Cummings - "somewhere I have never traveled"
#5 - Political Concerns
Poetry has always been a means to convey a subversiveness towards the state,
from Vergil's Eclogues, to Mandelshtam's mockery of Stalin, a poem which
cost him his life in 1930's Russia. In Canada today, one is likely to be
executed in quite a different fashion for fusing a passion for issues with
poetry. Just on the basis of the subject matter tackled, reviews are likely
to include words such as "didactic," "polemical," or worse, "preachy." More
than likely, indifference is the guillotine. Used to the circumlocutions and
clichees of our media, we are uncomfortable with an art which can tunnel
right to the core with unflinching imagery and memorable language.
Poetry, for this reason, is considered dangerous in other countries; it
crawls between enemy lines and lines of print, exposing the contradictions
on both sides, the consequences of a missing word. Poets are allies of the
marginalized, eager to question the exclusion of a particular group from
society, be it homeless or homosexual. Despite the cynicism of our times,
poets somehow still assert the power language possesses to arouse ire
against oppression. It is not the exclusive facts but the eternal patterns
that poetry seeks in the political, an awareness of the cyclical often
diminished in the turmoil of the moment. Therefore, as William Carlos
Williams once phrased it: "It's difficult to get the news from poetry, yet
men die everyday for the lack of what is found there."
Webb - "Prison Report"
#6 - Attention & Acknowledgement
Poetry is a waking pill for the senses. In a world that asks us only to
focus on economics, the poem turns our gaze to the frequently forgotten or
undermined aspects of existence. Merely being conscious of suppressed and
non-human life forms is an act of opposition. Lifting them to momentary
light in a poem serves as a paean to the insects, addicts or aged society
deliberately ignores. The poet, when attentive, can impart a vivaciousness
to our engagement with the universe. Lorna Crozier's evocation of the secret
lives of garden vegetables, Naomi Shihab Nye's reminder that the "button is
famous to the buttonhole," or Sharon Olds' comparison of the snail's
shrinking motion to a nascent sexual experience, allows us to transform our
numbed interactions to nubile ones.
It is subversive to acknowledge that which has no monetary value, no currency
within a system whose boot blindly crushes the beetle's carapace. If the
dominant powers operate from a willingness to destroy at whim, then poets
emerge from a desire to recuperate the ruins. Accepting the humanness that
remains in our ability to stare up at the sky and down into the gutter is
the most important role poetry can play in a time when often the endless
yellow lines on the road are the only imprint left on our eyes.
Avison - "A nameless one"
TOP
Everyday Epiphanies: Nature Awareness as Spiritual Practice
Although I was raised a Catholic, I believe it was my parents' expressions
of connection to the natural world that most enduringly influenced my own
sense of spirituality. My mother had a child-like love of flowers and rainbows,
while my father's intense relationship with nature's cycles displayed itself
on the hikes we took with him, his belief in the necessity of "weeds", and
his work in attempting to save a neighbourhood forest from fatal "development".
I was a child who rescued worms from the brink of dessication and
prayed to the god-tall cedar trees in our front yard to transform me
into a crow: oscine and sleek.
As an adult, I made a pact with myself to nurture this intimacy with
other species, other sentient forces, as much as possible, as a way
of honouring the earth and as a means of preparing for the creation
of my art and poetry. This means that I make time in my life to go on
retreats to islands where I can steep myself for days in non-human
rhythms, clear the sirens out of my ears and open them to a tender
attentiveness. Walk barefoot on the loam. Curve my body over
ocean-mouthed rocks. Follow deer tracks and the water path left
by sea lions heaving their mysteries upon the shoreline. How words
then come unbidden into the hollowed place that was my name.
Equally important however are the everyday entrances. I live in the
core of the city, surrounded by detritus and cacophony. Part of my
practice entails a morning walk, up three alleys, down three streets.
Before I start a writing session, whatever it may be I'm working on,
I want to have made myself vulnerable to epiphany. What kind of
epiphany? A leaf with red and gold ridges, the ghost-croak of a
raven in the pines, the sight of a squirrel pressing a nut between
roots with minute claws. One morning in particular remains lucent in
my mind. I was walking up a steep section of an alleyway as the sun
rose when I was brought to a halt by the sound of birds' feet
scrabbling on bark. I looked up and the tree before me was filled
with dozens of finches, some with chamois-coloured bellies, some with
dark plum markings, others with black and white swathes around their
beaks. They were feasting on the minuscule, aubergine-shaded berries
suspended in haloes from the end of each branch, straining their
small feathered bodies up to nip each tiny fruit and singing thin,
exquisite songs. I was arrested in a timeless state, feeling as if a
portal had been opened for me, not into another world, but into this one.
Such a moment in the city, the urban hubbub which has been the cause
of so many extinctions, is even more moving than in a rural area,
due to its rareness, the way it provides a startling juxtaposition
to all that remains counter to it.
"A little too abstract, a little too wise, it is time for us to kiss
the earth again" reminds the my favorite poet, Robinson Jeffers.
Awareness directed outwards, toward the non-human, shapes a space in
me through which rhythm, and light, silence, and darkness can flow.
From these everyday epiphanies an uncommon art grows with an intent,
regardless of subject matter, to express a spiritual attachment to
what is real, what endures.
Poetry and Spiritual Practice
TOP
As the epigraph from Dogen that prefaces Brian Henderson's book intimates,
the art of practice entails that one's "mind return and abide in things."
These three poets, all in mid life, exemplify with varying ability this
praxis, their poetry translating life's particulars into a cosmology of
philosophical and political motifs.
Poems from a River City, by John Bart Gerald, is a pocket-sized,
self-published book whose cover, with its wash of grays, is reminiscent
of Carl Sandburg's poem "Fog." Beautifully designed, apart from an
aggravating font, this book offers well-intentioned, if often naïve, forays
into personal memory and societal violence. Influenced by the form and
impetus behind the Black Mountain poets, these poems eschew punctuation
and metaphor while launching an opposition to such atrocities as the war
in Kosovo or east Timor. Their effectiveness resides in the resonance of
individual lines. A statement such as "[we are] consumed by what we carry"
or a question like "how can the land remain whole/when its people are
broken?" disturb long after the journalistic litany of events and the
didactic clutter of poems like "injustice" dissipate. Gerald's poetic and
political resonance is best expressed in his briefest lyrics, as in the
couplet "jump": "these fish bones make a pattern without flesh/a poem whose
writer was forced to silence." However, even in his shorter pieces, Gerald
is prone to abstract constructions such as "the meaning of eternity" and:
suffering survived through madness
at the pain of loss- our mirror, truth
shattered to shard sparked slivers.
Rather than labouring to elaborate convincing contexts for his polemics,
Gerald often relies on this abstract lexicon to convey the gravity of his
poems' content. Poems from a River City only truly shines in those instances
when Gerald addresses a poverty closer to home, as in "parent street" or
"to my father" with its poignant recognition that "death was the secret/he
tried to hide from me."
Brian Henderson's collection, Light in Dark Objects, suffers, conversely, from
this kind of attentiveness to the close at hand. In a poem entitled,
"Everything will Change," Henderson's line, "I know no way to separate/my
knowing from my doing," encapsulates his frequent difficulty in gaining the
necessary distance from his own domesticity and near obsessive motif-making
to expand his scope or refine his forms. Questions sing through these lyric
poems. In a piece, like many of Henderson's, reminiscent of Po-Chu I's
ironic and meditative tone, he asks:
How could I have done everything I have
and learned so little?
Did things not fall into me? Did the water wear only a skin of ice?"
Another poem, after a brief nod to society's ills, queries, "what can life be thinking?"
His sequence of pieces all entitled "Theory of…," "Three Twilights"
and the four untitled poems that close the first section offer some of
the strongest images in the book.
Here, Henderson's patience with the inhuman world, its minute gestures
of wind and shadow, raises his poetry to a musicality, part scientific,
part mystical, as in "Theory of Stone" where the human element subsides
in the face of:
the battered reservoirs of leaves
liquid hornblende or biotite,
and the meteorites of late moths
begin to pelt the little dazzle
of glass.
The consistent preoccupations of these pieces start to wear on the reader, however.
Perhaps if Henderson trusted his images to carry their weight and didn't
slip so often into excess or explanation, the book's thematic recurrences
would continue to intrigue. In "The Bond," for example, where Henderson
might have rested on the resonance of the line "someone has left a toy
boat/moored only by a thread," he adds the summative comment, "it reveals
a boundary/the elsewhere of a self." Throughout other pieces, rather than
working to crystallize one image, he presents the reader with too many
possibilities. A house is "like an island, a boat, a water lily," a pendulum
is "like a heart or a cry." Form-wise, the poems are frequently uncommitted
as well. Even when Henderson experiments, with anaphora, for instance, in
"Floating above the Sea," he fails to do so consistently, cutting off lines
without thought to meter, casting the technique aside in mid-poem, leaving
the reader with only a cluttered sensation. Light in Dark Objects is imbued
with an earthy intimacy, crucial in this age of screens. It only needs to
take greater risks with its imagery and form to emerge into luminosity.
Risk is something that A.F.Moritz, the most accomplished poet of these three,
readily takes. While lyricism is often lacking from Gerald's political
vision, and a political scope is rarely part of Henderson's poeticisms,
Moritz successfully fuses the two. A surreal tension informs his work.
Transcending limitations of the "I" through the imagination's all-encompassing
gaze, Moritz engages both eye and ear with his gothic rhythms and macabre
visions. In "Prehistory," mountains become "titanic carious ribs" lodged in
an apocalyptic landscape peopled by nostalgic androids, red lights:
guttering in an eye
under air the grey of frozen streams or electronic glass.
Other pieces feature a panoply of incongruous beasts: serpent-like animals,
whales with "elbowed/arms and fingered feet," piano-playing polyps. These
apparitions disrupt the potentially placid narratives of lives lived amid
a deceptive technological hum. Throughout Conflicting Desire, Moritz comments
on the void widening between humans and their tools, including language.
"Even the space between two footfalls or two syllables is endless/pilgrimage"
in an age of mediation, the gap yawning between signifier and signified until
"visible things too avoided their language."
The proliferation of mirrors and windows in poems such as "Hagiograph,"
"Animal Magnetism," and "Midnight Snack" intensify this sense of alienation.
Moritz's poems exist in an unheimlich space in which tenderness is often
anxious in the absence of familiar reflections. Only occasionally does
Moritz fall into heavy-handed wordiness or abstraction, as in the piece,
"The Task" which attempts to describe the progression of the spirit in
clichéd fashion as a "beautiful woman in a dream pursued." This
inattentiveness, however, is rare. Conflicting Desire, imbued with echoes
of Kafka, Wislawa Szymborska and D.H.Lawrence, is a haunting book. As in
lines from Moritz's exquisite poem "Dusk," reading this work it is as if a
"spear, part human/and heavy iron, part cold deep-ocean water" pierces one,
irrecoverably, "head to sex."
TOP
Dear Jim,
I can wholeheartedly agree with your diatribe against the proliferation of
creative writing degree graduands who seem to think that all there is to
spinning a story is a farrago of oddballs and a hodgepodge of trite pop
culture clichés, or that all there is to weaving a poem is a collocation of
"things I have seen" wrapped up in a tidy, tuneless form. I myself curse
Earle Birney for his efforts towards developing such coterie programs that
often only produce homogenized hacks bent on seeking the approval of the
grade or grant bestowing elite.
However, Mr. Christy, to suggest that no one writes "with passion" or imagination
anymore, and that this is due to the fact that all these writers "haven't
lived", is patently ludicrous. Overgeneralizations emerge either from
ignorance or a desire to shock an audience into response. I can only hope
that your whitewashing blather stems from the latter. Few writers who went
the MFA route that I am aware of did so at "18." Most had full lives
already as teachers, parents, travelers, lovers, seekers, and yes, even
truck drivers. Yet whether they are able to translate that experience into
good writing is another question. I'm sure there are as many heavy
equipment operator-poets who have failed at transmuting the substance of
their lives into a good poem as there are MFA grads who have not been able
to wrangle that summer tree-planting job into a worthwhile story.
As to the issue of publishers' unwillingness to accept writing with "risk," I'd say
that's an omnipresent plague in all areas of the arts in this "bottom line" age we
live in. However, literature must not be given "back" to any sector of society.
To thrive it must sprout fearlessly and willy-nilly from all kinds of minds and
hearts, even those of academics. Yes, even those whose experience lies in the
delirious alleys of lust, or the banal tenderness of diaper-changes, and not just
those pipe-puffing stevedores and loggers you so adore idolizing.
Rousedly,
Catherine
TOP
"Those who speak for the inhuman are an endangered species"
-Robinson Jeffers
Poems do not have to be peopled. Or people can reside in the margins of the
poem, ousted from their false position as centerpieces. Poems may displace
people, but not to render them refugees; to offer them, instead, a heightened
sense of recognition. As Oriental art features the human as a miniscule script
set against the immense epic of the mountains, so the poem too can restore
proportion. It's an endless struggle not to humanize everything - perhaps
it's impossible - apart from the brief glimpse a haiku presents. The poem can
offer another channel through which to "know" things, resistent as it is to
simple categorizations, rejecting understanding through the control and closure
of names (whether it be "wolf" or "canis lupis"). From the solitude of Walden
Pond, where he was trying to "be" with the essence of other species without
immediately reducing them to food, lucre, experiment, or, yes, even metaphor,
Thoreau wrote, "As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I
can at once forget its name". An awareness of life, and life in all its
imagined abundance and diversity, is a prerequisite for the writing of a poem.
The bottom line, in any meaning of the term, is anathema.
Simplicity, not the lowest common denominator approach of accessibility, is what
draws me to poetry. The opportunity to be uncluttered. Fiction is often awash
with pop-culture particulates "signifying nothing" beyond the trivial moment.
Many poems are too, unfortunately. This glut, so prevalent in other media,
has infected poetry to an overwhelming extent. Why? Part of the reason might
be a need to be prove topicality, relevance, while another might be the
mistaken assumption that the poem is merely a compost heap full of "stuff
I've seen". Look through any Canadian literary magazine and you'll smell the
stench of sameness. Narratives, anecdotal and colloquial, are easier to
peruse for the publisher after all, not to mention more accessible to the
dumbed-down public, and simpler to "teach" in creative writing departments,
than the rhythm and mystery-driven lyric. Perhaps when I speak of the
unpeopled poem, I am referring only to the lyric, a form which refocusses
the lens through which we look at life, a collaboration with the unknown in
the transcription of a moment of epiphany. Both the contained shape, and the
rhythmic intensity of a lyric enable an imagery of a different order than
can usually be found in any other genre. This order - whether you call it
the inhuman or the transcendental - is endangered in this homogeonous,
technical and cynical age.
"Poet and painter alike live and work in the midst of a generation that is
experiencing essential poverty in spite of fortune"
-Wallace Stevens.
The much-hyped resurgence of poetry among the masses is a myth. "Popular"
poetry is a contradiction in terms. Hordes of people didn't swarm into
Russian football stadiums to hear Yevtushenko's poetry; they came to hear
rants, chants and slogans in praise of their country. It's not poetry lovers
who fill spoken word venues; it's people seeking another brand of fast-paced,
sensationalistic, competition-driven entertainment. While there's nothing
wrong with that per se, it does not support a claim for poetry's renaissance.
Poetry is an intimate art form which tends to affect people in intricate and
secret, rather than common and blatant ways. The fierceness of a poem's
diction, the compactness of its content, and the imagination inherant in its
imagery, not to mention the likelihood that a poem will offer layers of
allusion or metaphor, combine to make it unlikely that the masses, especially
in any western society, will connect. Why is this so? I believe that it is
due to an illiteracy that goes far beyond the inability to decipher written
language. Many people who can read adequately enough to peruse newspapers,
and even novels, are incapable (to their own minds) of reading a poem.
Perhaps they have developed an aversion nourished by the school system and its
methods of "dissect and conquer", or they have closed themselves against the
emotion a poem may arouse, or they simply don't see the significance of this
ancient genre. Or perhaps they cannot read a poem because they have been so
bombarded with the blaring sound-bites of countless screens that they have a
societally-inflicted attention deficit disorder. The rhythmically-charged,
condensed language of a poem is sealed to them because it asks a stillness
and a listening that they are no longer able to provide. It may also ask for
the awakening of a child-like imagination, the possibility of which almost
everything in our culture conspires against. We can become "pre-mature" if
it means we'll spend our money on video games, but not if we intend to
invest in an innocent sense of reverence and wonder in a manner contrary to
economic mandates.
The strangest part about all this "illiteracy" is that even poets themselves
seem to be afflicted with it! I've encountered too many who claim that they
have difficulty concentrating on the reading of poetry, or who admit with a
misplaced pride, "I don't read poetry because I'm afraid it will influence me".
Who are one's teachers if not the books one reads? Just think of the possibilities
if even only all the so-called poets became literate and chose to purchase
even one meagre book a year! What a flourishing industry we'd have - and
there'd be far fewer poets who'd have to add an extra wing onto their houses
to hold their accumulating boxes of unsold books! However, a byproduct of a
gain in comfort often seems to be an unfortunate turning from what keeps us
truly alive - the arts. As we drown in a slough of materialism and haste, a
poverty of spirit and nation becomes entrenched until even the poets are no
longer immune.
"Familiarity is the long enactment of surrender to a place"
-Wendell Berry
This is a time in which a lack of commitment is mistaken for a surfeit of
freedom. Having lived in one neighbourhood since the age of two, I find the
idea of attachment to one place compelling. Sometimes, it's as if the
inhabitants of this locus are characters in my own private play. I accord
them names to describe their idiosyncracies or their physiognomies. Some
of them I've been meeting for over twenty years and have heard all about
their gall-bladder operations, their daughters in Denver and the rising
price of deli meat. They are an integral part of my daily walk about the
streets. No poems, however, have emerged from my encounters with them. They
are the life I leave just that, unsung. Conversely, it is the inhuman
aspect of this neighbourhood that has claimed me so irrevocably as its
denizen.
For the past two and a half years, I have written hundreds of poems about a
piece of land that is all but lost to memory. This ten acre forest at the
end of my street, once home to hawks, trilliums, and countless, unnamed
insects, once a haven for blackberries, salmonberries and fiddleheads, once
a niche for firepits and children's forts, but now metamorphosed into a
multimillion dollar factory for the virtual, has fed my poetry more
thoroughly than any other subject that has chosen me. Often a crisis
precipitates poems. In this case, the crisis of losing a place that
epitomized the real to me, has extended itself indefinitely. Through the
rhythm and form of poems, I have funnelled my grief and anger, in the end
hopefully producing elegies that others can enter, even without a personal
connection to the place. Everyone, after all, is intimate with some moment
of loss. The book that emerged is a tribute to this irrecoverable terrain
that I, and my neighbours, dubbed "Trillium Trails".
Surrendering to the presence of an absence, I have been able to travel
inward on the successive layers of memory, circling within on the spiralling
tracks of a stump. Sometimes I fear that in these days of "fast and fun",
my singular obsession appears monotonous. Then I think of Hesse's book on
all the facets of homesickness or of Wendell Berry's many sequences on the
takeover of his family farm by generations of carelessness, and I receive a
sense of reassurance. Books of poems affect me most deeply when they are
not about one-night stands with either a place or a person, but detail
instead a long struggle with surrender to a life force that is beyond a
writer's momentary choosing.
"Be it life or death, we crave only reality"
-Henry David Thoreau
Poetry, somehow, makes the real that much realler. Ever since I was a child,
I've had to write down my life to find it tangible, multi-faceted,
meaningful. Much of this life ends up in a journal (my purge-atory),
occasional letters, or lists. Some of it seeks form, a persistent rhythm
or a central image, and contorts into a poem. Lately, my life has tended
not to land directly in a poem, but has been transmuted through the life
of another, like the Viennese painter Egon Schiele, or has metamorphosed
into an extended preoccupation, like the plight of extinct species.
Particularly when dealing with incidents of loss or death, I never fully
feel their impact or heal from my grieving, until poems have emerged to put
erratic, chaotic life in its place. Not to fossilize it, seal it hermetically
against further exploration, although that can become a dangerous assumption,
but to memorialize, in the beauty of language, an irretrievable moment.
One's poetics are merely the meditations of a phase of growth. A searching
for sense, pattern, in what often emanates from a mystery. Contradictory?
Yes. But a necessary process of self-definition in these flimsy, fearful
times in which any attempt to side with one's beliefs of what is "right and
good", whether ethically or aesthetically, is met with resistence or
suppression. Serious poets are scoffed at. In fact, seriousness in any
pursuit, unless it be making money, playing sports, or keeping fit is
derided, trivialized. As poets, we are denigrated to reading at the "Fool's
Banquet" (whose logo is Bozo with a microphone), joining the Really Awful
Poets Society, contributing to the Journal of Contemporary Literary Stuff,
and participating in Slams or Magnetic Poetry Fests.
In this country, another kind of gag is used to silence our real poets.
Reduced to irrelevant jesters, bereft of critics to maintain our standards,
and lacking a considerable, considerate reading/listening public (due to
illiteracy, poor marketing and competition from screens), the poet who
wishes to keep a song going today must be brutally self-reliant.
The task is to be tough against indifference.
The task is to be tender towards an infinite number of life forms.
To be an embodiment of these two acts is the real poet's calling.
Are you up to it?
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Deft Ignitions: Quotes 1999-2004
A book of poems is the chronicle of a haunting
There's a sense of virtuosity without necessity in many modern poems
Experiment is from the surface; innovation from the depths
Poetry is not about making a living - it's about making a life
Poets: word-musicians
Poetry must make sensory what has become automatic anomie
Poetry is the rhythmical record of a race
It is the fear of the indifferent reader, the absent audience that makes
the poet despair or sink into solipsistic trivialities
Poetry is a wildness around the garden of prose
Poetry is irreducible to the bottom line
The primary known of poetry is the unknown
Poetry is an undeniable intimacy with language
Poetry has lost its secret toil, the sweat of strange silences
Poetry should be a waking pill for the spirit and for the senses
Lyrics: melody-embedders
It is the pace, the cadence, that counts in poetry
Poetry: words that chant afterwards in the blood
Poetry: coherence that transcends the age's chaos
Poet: a person who is led around the world by a rhythm
A poet is someone who refuses estrangement from the world
Poetry: the next best thing to silence
You cannot teach the writing of poetry, you can only teach a writing
of poetry which leads to cliquism, homogeneity, staleness and,
eventually, censorship.
The poet's three T's: texture (diction), tempo (rhythm) and intensity (form)
The poet thrives on an abundance of nothingness
The poet transfigures echoes
Poetry: moving brutality
Performance fires the hidden vein
A poet creates best in an environment of nostalgia and exile
The poet: unformed and continuously arriving
Art elaborates out of hauntings
Poets are scavengers of the imagination
Poetry: sex in the soul
Poetry: the ear’s vision
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