I cleaned off my desk. (Stacking on floor in categories counts as cleaning, right?) Only 39 books, not including chapbooks, including novels, non-fiction, travel as well as poetry. (Last clean up, it was 63 books.) The tricky bit with making a snapshot list of what I’m reading is getting lost in the next book I touch (again).
There’s also what I’m reading online of course, including the entertaining 12 or 20 with Marcus McCann. It’s funny how much variability is a standard set of questions. Some people shine and some are earnest or informative but perhaps flat. Elsewhere, American Lit Mag Reviews. Interesting idea. So is this “The reader is there, always. Even in the face of blank page.” as Christine Anne Stewart said in the Garneau Review. She also asked there, “what kind of violence do we bring to the matter by bringing it to definition.” Interesting things to consider.
I’ve been perusing, University of Pittsburgh which has 50% off their poetry titles for July. [via Poetry Hut] Thus I discovered Dorothy Barresi and Alicia Suskin Ostriker. Sample of Barresi’s absurdities at airport time, including “Are you wolf?/ Have you ever been a wolf?”
Sqeaking shoes
must be x-rayed
Because we are more and more ourselves
the longer we wait
in any line.
Capable of anything.
Love her sense of unusual, such as going to heaven to discover we become gods surrounded by every insect we every harmed.
I’m finally getting around to This poem excerpt is the very one from Evelyn Lau’s Treble that I picked out. A lot of poems build and the crescrendo, as in her opening poem, The Red Woman, has impact of that accumulation over 5 pages, so that when she read it at writer’s fest it was a bulleye; a number of people over the room were simultaneously solar plexus whomped. The ending was surprising and fitting. Standing alone, the ending still aches from all the tumult of desperate jealousy and a touch of her own self-recrimination,
But there was a trick to keeping you.
I learned it as the hopeful bride learns from Joy of Cooking.
The trick was to need you more
To fly so close to the ground it became
like crawling.
Any given poem is intense. En masse, well, just is a no go for long for me. Just makes wants me to respond with, Girl, get a grip of yourself. Why exacerbate and dwell. It’s not romantic. You’re just giving yourself ulcers by not letting go. Writing is a letting go and yet the amount of honing and honoring one emotion (and rage is often named explicitly) can’t be healthy. How can I enjoy words. It’s like industry farmed food… How can I ethical enjoy when the process was so injurious?
Yet among the I for an I narration, there are little gems of observation p. 33, “a man with mirrors instead of eyes”, and astute wording and line breaks, p. 45, “you laughed/ weakly as though we were having some other conversation/beneath the one we were having”.
She seems to write from an unhappy time where she works herself up, as confessional poets lauded for such seem to be rewarded for doing. A beautiful pain aesthetic but it’s like a bitter comedian that never gets to the real other than this obsessive construction of wrongs. Small doses are fine. I haven’t got far into it. Perhaps she shifts. She engages. It’s powerful writing but Mother Hen of Me worries.
But then I turn back to Concrete and Wild Carrot by Margaret Avison and Lau seems just a product of her youth. There’s a steadiness an subtly. My mind and spirit get fed something. For example, p. 29 Third Hand, First Hand
The whispers Thomas heard
walled him in with thought,
heart-sick, tormented, not
open to silly words.
Flesh to dead body. Then how
alive- and walking, here?
(he faced the brute facts more
than the ten others. He knew.)
Blind in his mirrory grief,
stony, he came to them. And
they heard “Stretch out your hand….”
Thomas abandoned proof.
They saw because they wanted to?
They all half-doubted when
he asked for fish and honeycomb,
took it, and ate it too.
It was the doctor later who
said it had been so.
The opening pair of lines nail me with the freshness. reconsider biblical reference, which is one of my interests. Line by phrase I could disassemble and there is more to see. where L4 breaks almost is an command to the reader for an indulgence. It speaks of the hesitation and fear and curiosity draw of Thomas who actually came to check out the story. L5 stand alone as if resistance of Thomas and shifts to incredulity into L6 emulating the very experience of shedding doubt.
She also has that marvelous tingle of a phrase “Blind in his mirrory grief” which is so accurate to the experience.
The whole poem feeds into my fetish for speculative pivoting of point of view, questioning the reliability of narrator. It is not something I thought to question. Who says Thomas doubted more than others? Who dubbed him that and why? What if sight was enough without touch? Is it so that the others glibly followed, only Thomas was thinking critically or was that story a construction of power, politics, a psychological comfort to the others to deny their own doubts, insisting only Thomas was weak?
The implication of Thomas not exceptionally doubting is to rejuggle weights. Had the hand in Christ’s side been fabricated, the role of doubt shifts towards the doctor. What do we know of him really? To take away the truth of Thomas being privileged in history, the only one with tactile proof, makes him more like us who never got the chance, and at the same time, less like us, since he was holy enough, faithful enough to defer the option of having his hand knowing bodily what he saw was not a delusion.
Other poems, such as Cycle of Community is like a painter’s study of light, examining the day through street sounds and how we block them out and attend. A hard one to excerpt as pings of phrase happen thru its length with her knack of line breaks to exact pauses in such interesting places.
I would add notes about others in my head, but for time, less extensively now….
An Oak Hunch by Phil Hall makes me a little dizzy. I can’t hop to and fro. Apparently I initially started to read it wrong. It’s more novel-like, a linked long poem. I’m having hopes for some sort of narrative arc. A collection that is a one-person anthology of best of unrelated poems doesn’t satisfy any more than one extended exploration of one theme and stylistic. Poetry shouldn’t have to be bound to narrative arc, plot twist, movement and resolution but it needn’t be bound to disconnected still lifes either. I like more stretch and that hangs together as some path of A to B. It’s got some lovely texture. For example in p. 17 Tipsy & in what
I now know to have have been shock – or do
I flatter myself with a modern
term – I hiked my long serge skirt in the
cutgrass and brambles beside that falls
— this will sounds so strange in today’s terms
(the subsequent unifications)
but honestly I couldn’t recall
which country we were in – we had sung
through at least two others since morning
L5 and L6 speak to that critical mind trying to reconcile disparate worlds of different countries of the past. Memory reconsolidation meets a recognition of the terraforming of changing world and mind over time.
Razovsky at Peace by Stuart Ross, but which ones, how to choose Ten Ways of Looking at Me but it’s effect is partly the sequence and blind turns of page to page, the contrasts. So many of his poems make me feel happy. Even the gory horror ones (like The Cow and The Dinner where the diner and the dined on are reversed) are not caught up with their own preciousness and langoring in poetly lyricism. If Lau seems to be punishing himself, these seem more like getting a perspective and giving perspective and not taking sadness at its word.
[My goodness the paper is heavy; the collection’s stiff. 3 books piled up on it to hold it open instead of just 1 to tackle Lau’s.] Ross’ Shiny Piney Cranberriesp. 52,
A round things they call
the sun, because it is
far away and so hot you
can’t touch it, glints off
a tiny patch
of crumpled-up
soft-drink can
nearly buried
by the fetid mulch
that covers
the forest floor. The
light bounces up and
catches a chipmunk
in the left eye.
Glory! The forest,
previously despondent
about politics and
a tricky relationship
quagmire, becomes suddenly
happy. The trees swoon.
A dragonfly tears loose
from a spiderweb. Oh,
unexpected fiesta! The pine cones,
normally intensely shy
and lacking in self-esteem,
ask the cranberries
for a dance. A ghost
drifting by, perhaps
lost, though you can
never tell with
ghosts, feeels immense
relief.
I like being surprised. Lines are diving boards that may go off in any direction. I like being held to the serif of a ride, not being able to scan ahead and have the exact same tone and content to the horizon of the page.
It opens crack by crack, line by phrase, as if eyes adjusting to the dark and catching item by item as I blink around. It’s like an antidote to all those tired poems of personified trees that simper about and weep with the sky for the callow little human. And we have nature without it being tidily expunged of garbage and have a chipmunk without it being some allegory for being a wise investor or common complaint about backyard feeders. It’s bigger and not making a stubbed toe majestic. It’s more emotionally complex.
t doesn’t parse down to a Coles notes of this is how I feel: peeved. Perhaps I sound cranky. I must have been reading too many boring poems lately. It’s nice to read a poem and not slog. Lines reward by rereading as well. The sounds play.
Loving without being Vulnrabul by Bill Bissett, p. 93 in victoria
citee council is
banning drumming
complaints have
bin reseevd that
drumming is 2
repetitiv dis
trakting
mor distrakting thn
th fish n watr
dying in th ocean
around vic wher
untreetid sewage
diskreetlee no
nois no fuss not
distrkting not
repetitiv each
shit is sew
yuneek goez
Lovely to see political environmental poems. Unfortunately that was written in 97 and the same nonsense of priorities is still going on East, West, North and South in Canada.
Mountain Tea by Peter Van Toorn, p 63 Icarus Like Crane,
with body-checks of damp subzero winds
and dry central heating. Everything
takes a beating, cracks, blisters, gumps up, goes raw
under its massive strokes of frost and thaw.
Windows and door wood pull with cold, fault
in their frames
What marvelous momentum and sounds and so very grateful that it’s still summer.
Time for time under some sun…