I’d read and liked Concrete and Wild Carrot and a few reviews [won’t link to Globe & Mail since it loads pop over content ads] of Listening: last poems. I’d also heard a most emphatic panning of it that aroused my curiosity, as condemnations tend to bring moths. And then as a thank you for use of pictures of their authors, M&S sent me the book some months ago. Life seemed to conspire for me to read it. I read it once in summer in a park and picked it up again.
Margaret Avison, Listening: Last Poems, p. 8 from Answer for Children’s Questions
the “why, how, when” of it? To
know a
focus be-
speaking the
depthless, all-high au-
thority, there is a
quick reply: “Melchi-
zedek!*”
*Psalm 110:4 [The footnote is hers in the text.]
Avison does such interesting things with line breaks and breaking apart words that break apart sentences. To know a purpose, be. Speaking the depthless, high awe. But what’s a Melchi? Throughout the book she has some double-meaning word breaks and some that aren’t.
She likes to wobble on a syllable to give multiple readings, which I find fun. For example in Flaming?, p. 33
Reason’s first and
last resort, deliberate
reconsideration, is as an-
aesthetic under danger, even
transmittable, even to a few
withering generations
At the stat of that excerpt, I could fill in first and foremost as automatic, but she sets up and pivots.
The reconsideration line leaves a cliffhanger syllable to consider options, enacting the line.
A last resort is a deliberate thing which she highlights the aspect of by her setting it off from the grammar of the whole thought, so the meaning has line and weight on itself.
Then she splits the word unaesthetic so we see the aesthetic beauty bared inside the numb of anesthetic. I like the playfulness playing tag among the letters. I can see why she would have engaged bpNichol. (In The Alphabet Game‘s opening poem, not what the siren sang but what the frag ment is dedicated to her.)
She likes to crack open words, to highlight the pulse in im-/pulse in p. 17 Foretaste, Canadian. One piece is on etymology and twisting an ad lib in. p. 20
The misreading evokes a
thickening gentleman who
knew the tailor’s
larger waist was a good
fit, but hankered
to try a smaller…
He was
misreading “fit” because
he didn’t want to face its
meaning, yet.
I like the delicacy of thickening gentleman and the gentle grace of the scene, how universal it is that we come to understandings that we don’t like, in this twin mind of accepting and rejecting both. And yet it acts like a description of her play at pushing the words father than they will go, as making No- be stranded from -vember (p. 60). Vember loses meaning without the false etymology of the negative and yet, we know the gesture and can let it pass because the shape is still there. It replies to the line ahead of No and it anticipates play with a line that starts with yes! a few lines on. The poem’s parts seem to chat among themselves as the linear meaning continues on overtop.
I’m still lost on that “Answer for Children’s Questions”. By Talmud or Bible, that Melchizedek reference seems opaque; a never born, of low birth so not in geneology, yet allowed to be a priest anyway because of his virtues, or someone born with mystic stories, someone gadded about by angels, the Old Testament appearance of the Christ, or one who never was except as a figurative symbol of God.
What’s her intent? Hush child of the universe, just pray, or confound little kiddies with an answer that they could grow into, should they pursue religious history? Or, answer mysteries with mystery? Any seem possible. It is a good thing to my mind that the answer isn’t obvious.
Although her touch is light in some poems, some have dark religious fervor of end times. But that makes sense given that she was writing it as she knew she was dying. If there was a maker to be met, it wouldn’t be long. The book overall is a last will of lit. Avison testifies as duty to the Christianity she converted to 45 years before. Her most famous poem is also a making into modern phrasing of habit of Christian themes. The book was incomplete at the time of her death. It acts like one last stand up and testify to go on her Book of Life before she Arrives.
This isn’t to say that it struck me as being evangelical. It seems like her working her head in private meditations and ruminations and a few talks with You and He. Since religion and the religion of poetry are often seem to need a restraining order, like politics does from poetry in some minds, her exploration of religion and faith is a noticeable departure.
Her perceptions consistent with her life, filtered thru faith and struggle with faith. She was writing these at a time of life when one reconciles what one can and renounces what one must. The heat of hellfire is on. I this context, p. 64, safe but shaky she is dealing with the cosmic level baldly,
I know I’m safe, but scared
for fear my fingers slip
or shakiness and dread
might make me lose my grip.
I play the misanthrope
in my own pantomime,
All’s well, if I will cope
a minute at a time.
[…]
How do You guide us back?
In any case, we’re sure
You’ve yielded us the slack
till, jerked, we know You’re there.
She will do rhyme if it serves herself Some are of self-comfort in faith. It doesn’t feel righteous to me. Part of that interpretation comes from how it resonates from the years of my life feeling a dog for Christ being given a long leash and ascribing depressive bouts to divine punishment for some sin of omission or commission I’d have to figure out or just pray for intercession about while in the dark of what the yank was all about. So, been there. I don’t know if that would unpack the same way for others.
I like how the book doesn’t have a house style. Some might call all this uneven. The density varies and in no particular narrative arc way. It’s more of a scrapbook arrangement.
All poems are not Important Things or prayerful, not all toeing a line of rhymed, nor of having ragged line breaks ending on an article or preposition or mid-word. She will do poems about “out there”, or personal poems.
She’s not afraid to use humour, such as one comparing seniors to locusts. She point out that the former –as matter of accuracy in comparison — “tend not to swarm”. I respect her lack of confining her aesthetic and point of view. It includes a mixed-bag of shapes, and of subjects and tones — sexual allegory to pussy willows or sights around Christmas chatter or raccoons in the attic. One is addressed to her grandmother on how names constrain who you become. Another delves into her mind as a child doing willful wrong. These things you experience stay intact even at nearly 80 years later.
That said, it was the sensation of diminishing returns reading it, because I liked the poems in the first third and first half better than later poems. Still, having read all, it wasn’t like a movie where I wanted those hours of my life back. I can’t say I’m a wild fan but compared to most things I read, I’m satisfied and have more take away ideas of how ideas can be structured thru fracturing lines, yet letting them hold together at the same time. She manages a tricky balance.
Pearl,
I think Avison’s weakest in her bp Nichol (word-splitting) mode, writing that apes poststructuralist theory only (as seen in a line like
He was
misreading “fit†because
he didn’t want to face its
meaning, yet,
and strongest in her own (more intuitive) Talmudic & Christian musings, which are probably what she wants you to take from it. What’s wrong with “evangelical” poetry anyways?
Avison, like Page, is a poet we should be paying more attention to. For which, thanks.
>What’s wrong with “evangelical†poetry anyways?
rhetorically?
it can be guilty of lack of delicacy. Some evangelical bent poems seem intent to convince the writer of what they are unsure of, (doth protest…) whereas she writes from comfortable belief and doesn’t defend or contest these matters.
Avison balances emotion and intellect, form and conveying experience. in less experienced hands, if the purpose is overt conversion, it can be tiresomely earnest, direct speech to implore to change your ways (whether literally religious, or political, environmental). That’s positioning the writer up in the hierarchy of knowledge from the reader, as advisor, and the reader as “lost”, rather than an equal reader-writer relationship being in the circle sharing. Who wants to be told what to feel, think, do? An open palm of look, perhaps this, fits the dignity of a reader as being able to discern what may be rather than accept the predigested judgement of what is.
You could do a little derridean ‘close’ reading and take a citation from, say, Luther and lay it over a Cdn landscape poem, and though not exactly an “evangelical bent poem”, it’d still be a “landscape” poem though once removed.
And if you’re worried about “hierarchical discourse” the act of “covering over” would draw attention to itself, in a suspicious way: I mean we’re dealing with ‘grams’ of a master-text (whatever it may be) meant to show only the differences among a plethora of competing master discourses. Remember what Derrida did with van Gogh’s shoes? or Nietzsche’s umbrella?
I mean who would take religious poetry seriously anyways, except, of course, as this citational way of writing? I wish more people would write them: they’re actually quite fun to read.
I haven’t read Derrida nor Luther so first two paragraphs,… I have little common point of reference.
If a tangent off a landscape poem, is it still a landscape poem? If I write an ekphrastic on a painting is the poem a painting?
If I seed a poem with Derrida quotes, but don’t understand the essence, is it derridian, or only to people who bring more Derrida there than I did and who expect and imagine connections that I don’t know enough to place?
Other aspect,…
Who would take religious poetry seriously? As the post states, me, or rather a former self and everyone that person knew. And a good chunk of Canadian and American minds who presume God as clock maker if not micromanager.
If one is reading with an eye to mock, one is not hearing the poem and poet, only the perceptual lock of the reader. I hear myself enough of the time. When I read, whether I agree with the person or not, I want to hear what they are saying, not more of me. It’s an escape to another head and set of experiences.
As I said, or intended to convey, I appreciate Avison for bridging the literary and religious without caving in to the easy mainstream answer to the universe: to think one must be atheist and to believe in God, one must be a fool. She clearly thought and believed without there being a conflict.
To use the Bible citationally, as cultural reference, refiltering the stories, recycling the metaphors without believing, with reverence or irreverence is done of course. It can be good as fodder to play in or against – fine. To use religious language and its power to other applications is to toy with the oratorial effects.
To consider them, unserious, or trifles however is different.
At the same time, there’s a rubberneck shock at omg, this isn’t satire, this is meant straight-up. Overearnestness is auto-satirizing.
And mockery is coping response as well. One can only bear so much of any one same thing before it seems absurd. Not another tragedy, not another joy, not more humourlessness, not more anger. In excess it appears, is perceived, as its opposite.
What does one do but laugh or cry or mock or comfort. Is there any 5th option?
The power comes in part from the resonance of them meaning something. If the understanding is superficial, then the effect is as well.
To take an example, it would be like me attempting to talk that hip jive of them kiddies by culling a slang dictionary to talk about movie stars. It might give an amusing result but I don’t have the rich cultural connotations and wouldn’t know any the implications of what I said.
It would be sloppy misinformation to be people even less informed, and to people who know more, it would be negligibly more sensible than flarf.
It really isn’t necessary to have Derrida at all, only to appreciate the “law of participation without membership” (Derrida) that is the heart of reading (and writing) There does seem something “excessive” in writing with the aim of giving “an amusing result” but you can’t deny that it’s still a style of writing, at least quasi-intelligible though it might strike the kid-experts as “superficial” . But the adult imitating the adolescent might in time actually sound cool and “kitschy”.
We superimpose all the time: you just gave a marvelous example yourself of the “poem as a painting” Wonderfully citational, meaning you’ve imagined a case in which a language/art of landscape can work symbiotically with landscape itself. John Cage used “mushroom” a saprophyte as central metaphor for his own work in music/poetry by virtue of the way it both fed on decaying matter and yet gave life to surrounding forest growth. He tried to make music and words as “noise”, “interference” do the same thing. Because “mushroom” was the word that came next to “music” in the dictionary he made it a life-passion! I like that…casual and canonical quality in a writing/a life
Nobody who is serious reads to mock but thank god for the deconstructionist blurring (if not complete obliteration) of the lines between high/low culture, ‘good’ and ‘bad’writing/music/art that was the staple of ‘modernism’ When I went to university in 70s (McMaster in Hamilton) I was soundly thrashed (and made to feel stupid) for daring to question received (read ‘British’ academic) interpretations of everything, from Donne to Virgilian hexameter. How different the university syllabus (“discourse”) looks today! But I’ve never forgotten and I’ll never suffer modernist fools ever again.
“To use religious language and its power to other applications is to toy with the oratorial effects. ” I like that distinction between “play” and serious persuasive intentions with which language’s oftentimes invested (& when it matters the most) I’m sort of saying the same thing about the “transcendental properties” of blog (read advanced poststructuralist) writing, not meaning by that anything too mystico-philosophical but just acknowledging rather that oftentimes competing urge in us, in even our most irreverent moments, to say what really matters. As I think Avison is doing too in the passages you’ve given. I haven’t read a lot of Avison to say more than what you’ve intimated. And you’ve intimated much