Below…Jason Heroux, Margaret Kell Virany, George Bowering, Marilyn Dumont, rob mclennan, Nathalie Stephens, Clark Coolidge and William Wordsworth.
Emergency Hallelujah (Mansfield Press, 2008) by Jason Heroux strikes me oddly. I either like it a lot or not overall. In parts I like it a lot. For example, p. 29,
“down an empty street
with Stop signs in full bloom”
The idea matches experience and yet is animating the inert but without being precious. That pops out a line envy.
He thinks in unexpected lack of logic that is comic. For example, wouldn’t it be just like us overprotective humans to use this means to save themselves? p. 37
“He sleeps chained
to a street light
so that no one
steals him in the night”
Absurd and yet fitting. Poems have a concrete urban, recognizable sort of settings. He has some whimsy that’s very appealing such as p. 19
“and rain puddles
glisten
in the grass
like expired mirrors
slowly lowered down
into little graves”
His stanza break to set up the image before it’s turned around is effective. That mirrors can expire is a quirky concept. It suggests that it isn’t that a mirror gives an accurate reflection that the mind doesn’t recognize. it’s the fault of the mirror for rendering an image that’s off. That turn on puddles being like mirrors is fresh. The idea of the reflection being cranked away into the dirt is fun. Mortality not just being of a person but reflections of a person being interred as well. It unpacks as though it were made with an eye that it would be unpacked. No implication was missed.
It’s remarkably even with each poem having a consistent feel. It’s surreal and yet no sharp darkness nor laugh out loud. Each phrase surprises but the rate of upends of expected are so frequent that the teeter totter goes too fast for me to read the whole thing without a bit of vertigo.
It’s gentle in its way, yet witty. The darker themes get offset by the offbeat takes. Humor can be to mock, deflect, reflect or modulate intensity so more can be taken in. It’s part of good communication, allowing your audience time to breathe, relate on how all is best taken with a grain of salt. The balance is to taste.
A Magpie Life: Growing A Writer by George Bowering (Key Porter, 2001) is an autobiography of tidbits remembered such as how he was named what he was since the doctors didn’t think he’d live so his mom Pearl and his dad thought they’d better save the good chosen name for the next kid.
He spoke of early in life with his wife; “Angela Bowering had a short fuse, and I did not play with matches around her.”
I’ve barely started it yet it’s a quick readable read of all kinds of facets of tidbits as autobiographies can be when they’re good.
I’m also reading the family biography A Book of Kells – misleadingly titled, with possible confusion with The Book of Kells added to by using the Kells font for the title.
Religion is central to the book, only because it is mostly set in the life in Hudson Bay in the 1920s with a minister and his family on a native reserve. The details are rich thanks in part to the mother in the family keeping a detailed diary and copious stack of letters. It’s the story of a romance by correspondance and the times in early Canada. There are stories of relationships, dramas, events and personalities but there are also all sort of tidbits of life that can be pulled out…
- there were so few radio stations then that sitting up on Hudson’s Bay, having travelled for 10 days bushwacking from the nearest outpost, one could still settle in with the radio and hear opera night broadcast from New York or Los Angeles. (p. 64)
- A radio cost $105 (p. 57) and a used car or sea passage $200
- At that time, the 1920s, there were already 6th generation contacts with Europeans (p.81) and were on the tourist route and making sourvenirs (p. 106).
- The HBC had invited circuit preachers and there was a tradition of charismatic native preachers in the area in the 1800s. (p. 107)
- In the 1920s, the Cree had no word at the time for horse, and dubbed them, mistatim, big dog. (p. 45)
- In 1928, the minister (who also served as social worker, sometimes school teacher, and doctor) got $1343 salary while the Natives were given $5 per person per year as support. (p. 109-110)
- When Margaret’s mom was 4 years old (1904) she started school where she was taught to read, write, sew and knit (p. 7)
- The Cree were settled with sustainable trapping and fishing but the Europeans were nomadic, hunting out an area completely and moving on (p. 94)
- The CBC National News was named after the train The National which had radio on it so one could sit in comfort in the 1920s and receive radio and cabled messages to stay abreast of the news more than people on the ground. (p. 57)
- Mail could reach you anywhere, even if passed from person to person travelling by dogsled in the right general direction when you were in a camp off grid, or at a port when you were at sea. [which page eludes]
- The times were so helpless. To travel home took a week by open carriage bushwacking, sleeping in the open in -30 which now takes 9 hours by car. (p. 91). People died young and at such a rate. Cod liver oil prescribed for TB just to give something. (p. 80)
- How easily and randomly and unexpectedly divergences in understanding happen such as a placard on their home’s wall “Christ first; others next; Self Last”. Kids presumed it a message from parents but it was just there when they moved in. One child connected herself a firstborn as having a birthright validated as a connection to Christ. Another child interpreted it as a mandate to be never putting herself forwards being last born. (p. 28)
- How one brother went overseas to get a bride but finding chemistry but her being ill decided she wouldn’t fare well in the new world and didn’t propose as he intended, then ended up a bachelor all his life. Sometimes you don’t know when that’s your chance.
- Margaret’s sister playing hockey with Tim Horton, his birth name not being Miles but he insisted he be called Tim. (p. 139)
That Tongued Belonging (Kegedonce Press, 2007) by Marilyn Dumont has a mix of poems. I’m not sure why the book is double spaced and title in a handwriting font. I keep telling myself I’m not going to be bothered by this. Hers are life journalling sort of poems, such as the list poem on p. 14, She carries the Pope in her pocket
he doesn’t take up much room
between the pages
of a dog-eared prayer book
Her purse also serves
as a portable shrine to Ste.Anne
a collection of Pilgrimage medals
blessed, strung on safety pins
[…]
her purse smells of Jergens, Juicy fruit and second-hand stores
The Jergens smell is particularly vivid for me since my high school was beside the smelly lotion plant, tongues coated with those cheap perfumes when the wind shifted the wrong way.
The level of specificness is nice and close almost suggesting how religion is the safe comfort of the poor. Religion is material, tactile and at hand, as much a part of identity as identity cards. There’s a compassion in the very attentiveness, reminding of godlike care to the number of feathers on the sparrow. The person is known intimately through the purse and the items.
Another poem I like is p. 34 Inventory which, like many in this 3rd collection have the density and reveals of oral story.
the language that filled her was tasteless
slack in the middle of her breakfast
leaving her words
all bone and sinew
a few dry consonants
and a whole lot of bland vowels
and without fresh vowels
she was afraid to choke on her consonants
suffocate on her humming
yet, she was hungry
and she found a solution that inspired her and fired her to do more and dream more before the poem closes.
She writes at a rate on the edge of almost slower than I can think whereas What’s Left (Talonbooks, 2004) by rob mclennan takes leap after leaf of sightline and page.
Unlike Heroux the junctures aren’t to the point of lively surreal juxtapositions, and unlike Dumont the poems make lists but not necessarily of physically nearbys and in the opposite direction. Dumont seems to write to contain a bit of the world and mclennan to unpack a collection of the world, avoid clicking the poem open and shut for the passive vessel of the reader. Instead against this trend mclennan says, “the painterly sounding lines celebrates/ a radical, wearing a safety net” p. 114.
In Paisley for nathalie stephens the connection is a pivot to the next in a slideshow of the universe. p. 117
1.
go big or go. a machine-shop of users. brings
the car around. takes four days
to do anything. whether this is unreal, the taste
& the texture. four headboards appear.
a metaphysical ruse. the twelve parts
of her. misnumbered. a torn
progressive edge. this is a matter
of schoolchildren. open your eyes.
whoever said, that the mouth
has no memory. we forget
in stage
It wouldn’t have the same tension or meanings pulled across two subjects, two lines, two stanzas, or if clustered differently. Let’s see.
go big or go.
a machine-shop of users. brings the car around.
takes four days to do anything.
whether this is unreal, the taste & the texture.
four headboards appear. a metaphysical ruse.
the twelve parts of her. misnumbered.
a torn progressive edge.
this is a matter of schoolchildren. open your eyes.
whoever said, that the mouth has no memory. we forget in stages.
Does it fall apart into constituent materials? It doesn’t become linear or give itself up into regular syntax as with poems that just rearrange line breaks to give an extra oomph of double entendre. It is more oblique.
Is there meaning as well as play? All the way or quit. But all takes longer than one wants. Question perception yet perceptions answer with themselves asserting they exist. The workaday humdrum people in life continue? Perhaps. The four days to do anything shifts from frustration of stalled to begin to know someone in bed takes minimum four days.
Progress isn’t linear. Still there are disjunctures, fracturings yet all is simple and yet we forget what we say, forget everything. And by line break, the joke, who said we forget, I forget. And the poem plunges back into itself and sensory and memory overload of things to capture.
The rapidness of turns and the concreteness of details is nice, with the petals of humor thrown thru to keep a knit tension.
Touch to Affliction (Coach House, 2006) by Nathalie Stephens is intensely compressed singing. Relentless if singing can be called that. (Why have I not been reading her work before? I got a copy at at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library.)
My attention didn’t lapse in any phrase and read it cover to cover, most of it aloud. Take p. 34 for small sample,
“A city’s worth is a consequence of its bookshops and
architecture. And its capacity to withstand suffering.
Our cities are well worn and there is beauty showing
through. Their languages are sooty and they are delirious
with crumbling.
On the name of each city is a layer of dust. Underneath the
dust is nothing much.
Is the dust what we came for?”
Ok, so it’s sentences. I’m on rebound from “troubled language” and grateful for syntax so I’m not contending with that slowdown. At the same time, repeated times, on its turns I respond more viscerally. Goosebumps and the necessity for my tongue to get in on it and not just leave all the pleasure to the eyes and brain.
There’s meat under the bones of the poem. It’s not so far as didactic, nor with volume so spiked as to be raw. It’s highly processed yet one foot on figurative and one one literal.
Embedded is her essential question of do we love the actual, tangible or are we in love with our idea of the idea? Is there a meta with its own life force, almost a will of its own, this language, this nation, this collectivity of people with a general massed movement that creates feedback cycles that informs itself and creates itself?
I’m always drawn to people who inquire more than to people who have decided How it Is. Even if her questions are leading, that her work is exploring and emoting, rather than summarizing conclusions is more persuasive. I want to be part of the process of a writer learning the world not the officer to whom the final report is given. She is in the process of sorting.
It’s hard to pull out a stand alone section because it builds on itself. p. 42 “This two fingers sewn together tearing.” is a fantastic sort of sound bite but comes with greater weight as the cap to the 4 pages.
In a way the meaning doesn’t matter intially because the press of momentum of sound and pivots in subjects so that there isn’t the sense of a song being with too many runs thru a bridge or refrain.
I get more the sense in first reads that she intends to communicate cooperatively. There’s more of an emotional content, without adjectivaling even if sooty has connotations and suffering has a strong lean and is an abstraction. The mapping of the concept-level of generic city to the tethered language and concrete descriptors grounds it.
The refrain of city coming out of one’s thigh is a coy sort of phrase, like the bumblebee that stung me above the knee being reference to sexuality and the fertility of imagination.
That which we birth are constructions. What we take in in one form is birthed in larger, more complex forms and takes on behaviors that seem autonomous, past our ability to control, these stereotypes of nation and identity.
She asks people to think critically of their own perceptions and of politics and what informs what. p. 58-59
“Let me explain.
I am ignorant of my enemies and my face has many origins.
What part of you is city?”
As we travel ideas and places and people, we change and are changed. “Geography is conversion. A measure for what is lost.” (p. 51.)
It is good to see people who apply poetry to cognition and pratical life and poltics instead of only “emotional truth”.
We are carried by our choices and carried by forces. We each are a city making cities, renovating infrastructures of thought. There is much to contend with. p. 59
“We are prohibition. Our skin strips. Our bloodless. And we
are aghast at what we keep. What citystruck we keep. The
wrought-iron bridges. The candied animals. The drone.”
Yet her poems are grief-scored with anguish and betrayal, in so many words, heavy in being preoccupied with loss and call for change. She steps beyond the particularly Canadian female tradition mandates of romanticism of pain.
It has notes of moaning the blues (which has a place) and doing it in a compelling way. Her intellect is also engaged. She brings beauty to the message. Even if she didn’t, when people have enough cadence and phrase choice and thought behind words, I will listen to any message.
I finally got Own Face by Clark Coolidge a couple years after recommended to me. [Also picked up at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library] It’s a different sort of trip than I expected. I expected economy of word, condensed grace in compression, careful steps of phrase. I didn’t expect it to be so modern, especially given that it was written in ’78. It is so torqued in syntax seems machine generated. p. 8
Without the Agate
Such that the sky is striped it can’t
happen to us this way, in idles the wind sparks.
A type turned to, pads of finger, nailing
along in fleet sense (bebop).
The congestion any standing tube is, of
peeling passage. Put it down to glance,
right off reports. The tree stood it
said those poking at nothing to speak of.
Hard as candy turns on the spit.
Me and the poem seem more confrontational than cooperative. Is Coolidge attempting to communicate anything, even subconsciously? Is this just more meaning avoidance, interacting with language instead of people? I can’t catch his tone. Does he mean the formal diction “such that the sky” as a wry joke? Deadpan or taking himself somberly? He seems sad in withdrawn somehow and not willing to engage and yet writing. I’m getting mixed signals here. Maybe the poem’s just not for me.
I’ve not got enough hooks to latch onto anything much there but I’m closer to “getting” that poem than many in the collection. “nailing/along in fleet sense” doesn’t convey semantics to me but its soundiness is nice.
Discouragement reminds me how Jim Larwill said that poetry is for when you can’t effectively communicate otherwise. If we could communicate well, we wouldn’t need to bother with poetry. He was partly tongue in cheek but still it seems explanatory.
Is he playing with rhythm and sound but avoiding device? Line breaks seems more arbitrary than using enjambment. There’s not a lot of repetition or echo of consonants or vowels. There’s no persuasive lead of oratory. There’s a meter that may be more an artifact of English than deliberate “turned to, pads of finger, nailing/ along in fleet sense (bebop).”
I don’t get it. It could be anywhere anytime which is like the universal mystic. Is there any prevailing mood of poet or poem? Any general thrust? What is it that wind can’t do? Spark. Ok, let’s go with that. Loose word association, fingers and nails, so we pivot there. It’s all been terribly stern feeling so let’s throw in a whimsy sound and different register and content with bebop.
Coolidge played jazz so set up and shift of rate makes sense to how he’d think. Something comic in human as being a standing tube, reduced to that organism that food chutes thru. A pun of write-off as dismiss as useless versus make correction to the report in a thin-slice glance. Is the standing tube a person or a tree? What’s peeling? Who’s poking? And the last line deliberate nonsense or a metaphor for something useless of roasting candy or double play or turn on the spit, meaning fire and turn on the tongue in spittle.
Upshot point that while nature, sky and tree is busy being, existing, humans speak of prattled nothings? I don’t feel confident that I’m not going out on a limb to say that any meaning I see I’m not 80% imposing.
Another by him has more entry points, p. 70
Thronging Sunk
We make movements, then we make
a concerto of tea. As the trees
do all lie. We speak
and as we stop we forget
even to be alone is to repeat.
(A silence’s potential is to be infinitely printable.)
The whole fossil is a face
the music is to dissolve.
It’s a prettier set of lines and ideas. What does he expect of the trees? There’s a sense of hopeless jaded shrug at mortality to it. It seems to boil down to a variation of the poem: here I am a poet sitting alone in a room contemplating how I am alone apart from significance, bummer, ooh tea. Flip on the stereo and forget it all.
Perhaps that’s harsh. He challenges and therefore is more interesting than any high volume, moist puppy dog nose poems that give all there is to give in first glance thru. And yet if I get it more than I think I do, I’m sure I’m not in the mood or place to appreciate it.
There is a time and place to be aware of being completely in the moments. Every minutiae is worth a word or few. Poetry doesn’t have to be only rehashing historical figures, making grand gestures, being calls to actions, recording for posterity. I’m still in the thrash: Why is he choosing to share this?
All things pass away. Guess I am waiting for the and where he weighs in on whether this matters or doesn’t to him.
Considering for longer, I guess in this case it’s not the poem I don’t like. He says it nicely enough in sound. I like his imagery. His line breaks don’t grate.
Would I defend to my death his right to say it? Let’s say it’s not the top of my protect list. Just want to tell him get off his duff and shift his grump into useful action.
As Wordsworth said
The Tables Turned
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect.
Enough of science and of art;
Come up these barren leaves:
Come forth and bring you a heart
That watches and receives.
In a funny way, I think that’s part of what Coolidge is saying as well. All this thinking and feeling stuff is superfluous indulgence. What is real is material. Trees. Tea. Repeated patterns. As architect Dan Hangane put it an essential change happens but its the same essential. Significance is paradoxically insignificant. It isn’t nihilism precisely. Depressive perhaps. Pragmatic and deflated and realistic perhaps.
I’m also reading The Poetical works of William Wordsworth (undated publication, Thomas Yardley, London) is coming from another time and place in every sense.
p. 161-167, The Thorn where an engaged woman has premarital sex, is jilted by the man who marries someone else and she mourns the stillborn or infanticide child graveside as as a madwoman for 22 years.
“And some had sworn on oath that she
Should be to public justice brought
And for the little infant’s bones
With spades they would have sought.
But then the beauteous hill of moss
Before their eyes began to stir!
And for full fifty yards around,
The grass, – it shook upon the ground!”
And there were dissuaded. Unfortunately since 1770 we have lost only some prejudice and would count as superstitious and insignificant if the ground itself protested against injustice. At least in some places and in some families now Martha Ray would get her life back or support, likely.
Any conclusion to this lot all tumbling simultaneously in the head is anyone’s guess.