I haven’t updated the list in a while so I’m a month or two behind my own curve. I think I’ll post in segments rather than a mega-post. Throwing a curve in my curve is realizing I forgot from my summer list a book. The numbering may not match my list from twitter anymore. Ah well.
- Marshall Hryciuk’s In Search of Tatiana (LyricalMetrical Books, 2014)
He’s all over the place and having a grand time doing it like Food for Verse,
Here’s another piece from a long poem Deseronto:
Ideas jostle among themselves in a joyful sport and spurt.
Peculiar, there’s also all caps in poems and it doesn’t bother me here. There’s a lot of texture. Poems in columns, poems as conversation anecdotes, ones that break down into sound and concrete poetry, false etymologies and sonic cousins across languages. It doesn’t have confines. It’s kind of madcap like You Can’t Do That on Television, like “Essai un Rimbaud” where sounds bounce unpredictably,Mounds of fleece
and a circumference of félicitations
escape the valise of my fleeing.
Fleeced enough? Obscene enough?
Sit down. Shut up.
You’ll do.A fun zip to read that doesn’t take itself so very seriously. It is a poetry that’s here to inflict its group social conscience borrowed pain. Story-schmory. There is story, here and there. It breaks against itself which amuses me. It doesn’t become tedious chase to nail a point. What all can language do?
- Desperately Seeking Susans: An Anthology of Poetry edited by Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang (Oolichan, 2012)
Susan Holbrook and Sue Goyette pieces were worth the price of admission. (And if you borrow it from the library does that mean it’s like getting free cash?)
Good to see another by Susan Holbrook. I enjoy her way of moving through ideas. She plays with other ways of splitting the world into binary sets of mutual exclusive knowledge but there are so many rings in these venn diagrams
It somehow keeps hooking forward, mixing humour and pathos, recognition and who, what? of being in neither binary. Interesting head hop. It was originally published as a Nomados stand-alone chapbook.
Sue Goyette’s Alone moves and connects unexpected things as well. Things that happen in the night all wash together from the “Ryan’s glow-in-the-dark stars/ on the closet door” to alone “the ceiling is its own universe, a blank expanse/of sleeplessness” to the catIt’s not that I forget
the cat outside. She just wants to stay out
all night. And it’s her cry,
plaintive and despairing: forgotten, forgotten
each morning that wakes me.
And each morning, I open the door
to her joy at finally being remembered.and then somehow by the end the plastic stars, astronomical stars, cat and forgotten all lightly tie together in the gentle universe.
. - Milton Acorn’s I Shout Love, edited by James Deahl (Aya Press, 1987) A pretty hard slog for the first round. Better the second. There’s a lot of adjectives, with the ratio of more direct telling, less implying. The best of it to my filter is when I see is something like “Pit Accident” where he reports understated, the external for people reading/hearing to decide on what the internal or implication for action should be.
“I liked him,” said the small man
with coal seaming his hard little hands,
“because he never stood in your light.”
“It must’ve been a bad twinge,
in the bone, not the muscle,
that made him shift and lift his head,
riding down to work, and
that beam came too quick to blink at.”
“He never stood in your light, poor guy.”
He was pale, tough as a root at bedrock,
but tears squeezed out his ridged face
and even the rain tasted of coaldust.How elegant and understated for a maudlin grief. Only at the end can you see the narrator is also a miner perhaps, but a witness tasting his own tears.
There’s often a lot of all caps, exclamation marks and florid bias in the outward looking poems that leave it to the reader to feel what’s inward. Still, I feel like I’m reading the wrong side of history with wildly caricatured knocks on black people and women who are mentioned when swooning at his poetry or sitting on his lap. Not that that would be different among some contemporaries in a man’s bell jar world.
In ‘Belle” the woman even when she gives commands is silenced to offscreen and her reference is a joke more about the henpecked,Edwin with his glasses, is pipe
and freckled, spare-tipped fingers
she married at twenty-nine, had to,
(everyone had to, but she
claims that weakness like a certificate)
hums to himself, makes
the best cider in the settlement, hangs
doors that open to one hooked finger,
says four words in a day
and two of them are “No Ma’am!”But he’s varied, or as some say, uneven. The preface says, “the most complex and varied body of work to be produced by a Canadian author in this century”. Seems hyperbolic. Of course these are his early poems of the 50s for the most part, sketches of what was to come more than full finesse. Maybe it is more intended as a counterpoint to later works in other books.
I’m more than 30 years late for the debate but the thing with paper-text is that it is archival and can wait.
Yeah, can’t say I always appreciate what Acorn is fuming about. He has a desire to make change but points to problems and leaves solutions to others.
We’re on the same side in some things, but not in the same side of the side. I can see he’s anti-war such as “The Dead” “Must young men’s lives, our country’s richest store, /be stubble for a parliamentary plow?” The shoulder-chip of anti-government generally is there throughout. The artifice of the common man as having a plain and honourable distinctive muted inner life that is real is a hard bias to swallow. He’d be doing slam if practicing today with his justice stance.
The first and last version of I Shout Love are included which show a transition. I’ve heard people recite parts of the later version so it appeals so some. It’s got a Walt Whitman, make self, make nation sort of soapbox ego roll going. “La marche à l’amour” by Miron is much more triumphant, moving and riveting. Compare the two, both of the same era talking nationalism with an allusion to romantic love: Acorn’s:
From Acorn’s I Shout Love - Gaston Miron’s Ember and Earth (Selected Poems), translated by D.G. Jones and Marc Plourde (Guernica Editions, 1984)
From Miron’s long poem, “La marche à l’amour”
I read goodly portions of this book aloud in “want to hear a poem” sharing because of the power and beauty of the dense phrase. There’s a sensuality and momentum that isn’t linear. There’s a more direct vulnerability. The poems are public but a more inward-looking at the same time. For example, “A Glass of Water, or the Unbearable”the thirst buds in my pores
are not for the glass of water I drink
but for something beyond water
something we think about as the hours tumble past
like a man who’s been had through and through
all day the whole blesséd dayHe goes on to say “I’ve always had the lump of fire in stomach/and I say no down to the balls of my two feet”. Perhaps it is a little smooth yet there’s something like a steel guitar heart race sort of effect.
Concrete, palpable and encountering new. More a sense of willingness to transform. A desire to be changed. - Portal Stones by Frances Boyle (Tree Press, 2014)
Lovely to finally get a collection of poems from Boyle. At this point it is holding us over until her first trade collection from Buschek Books this November, to be launched at the pre-small press fair reading November 7th. It’s been a marvel seeing her poems develop over the last several years from internal shy vague poems to crisp tight, more sure and musical and wilder. Here’s a sample from Exhortation, p27A blackbird calls, piercing bright. Another
replies like recollection. The current
exhorts their song, urging you along, calling
forth in you wings or gills to carry on.There’s human nature and outdoors nature that are the canvas for many that are about expansion, opening. It’s a wonderful balm when many poems are clever and jaded. Consider this last stanza of Quest, p. 19, that gave my scalp tingles:
Unfolding the story like a map, you trace the roles:
victim, hero, dupe. Disbelieve them, if you can, but try not to become
wary of coincidence, connection. Seek out and find the route to where
X marks the spot, where the green fuses you lit in your
youth finally ignite the furious light of fireworks
zipping through you, ripping through you, harmless in the end.Chameleon (p.9) I would have to quote in whole since it is how it all moves and comes together. Come to think of it many poems are less excerptible, more the path the individual phrase. The unit is the sweep in a way similar to the way David McGimpsey’s poems act.
- Sandra Alland’s Naturally Speaking (Espresso, 2012)
The poems come from a method of playing with the constraints of the software that transcribes from spoken speech. It comes pre-loaded with a commercial-minded default of vocabulary. She fed in her own thoughts, translations of Nicannor Parra and sound. We only see what comes out, not what was fed in. What came out included from ii/, which fittingly enough, I hold open to the page to transcribe with the weight of more chapbooks and because that wasn’t heavy enough, my wallet.To the reader
eBay us, so is that okay?
No way through need.
Be a really dollar,
one dollar me.and from poem vi/
But it’s not as they seem. They came back at me with an Audi Bentley. Signal surely? Us the meaty and doubled. Let them in, and their will.
About a gay: that she penned it at the expected; that the meeting in the Apple meant I was a bit single.It lets the fractures in grammar stand as if fitting with the fractures in sense that a commerce-mind does to living sense.
- Rob Winger‘s Old Hat (Nightwood, 2014)
It’s good when a collection comes together. I enjoy his readings, their cadences and turns, and looked forward to having a transcript of ones I’d heard.
His spin on the pristine nature poems and his relating class is perhaps Milton Acorn updated for our era.
He allows seriousness and comedy, both satire and less pointed. There’s an intellect engaged but with a sharp mind for how human nature works, including the effect of listening to the spiel by a contractor and only recognizing the grammatical slots but pretending you followed all that. The accumulation to preposterous is what he does well
“Another lake poem” sits on the line between questioning and authority as authority erodes. What do we think we know. A literature of nature poems and yet can we tell our burr from our butt? Half way thru the winking elegy to the great outdoors it is more like an Irish wake than an English one,Canoes rust under beech trees.
At least I think they’re beech trees.
They’re near the beach.His poem spoofing prefacing patter to poems in a reading is a must read. Likewise re/covering Champlain Trail should make it to his collected whenever that happens. Here’s a bit of that poem,
one-dimensional wildlife bursting into our special conditions
of postmodernity: bearclaw cherry tree, beaver dam,
sugarbush woodpeckers, golden hawks gloating
in the turgid updraft, and our plucking of the first
red trilliums from the syrupy undergrowth
with a triumphant squeeze of pliers;
the apex, where we edit out a flawless man-made
bench, cut a tattered copy of The Idiot:
diction dimmed, pages drenched, spine reeking fungus;It’s at the interview link here. It’s in my favourite chapter, re/set.