The American Embassy sponsored a lunchtime reading at the Ottawa Public Library this week. The Poet Laureate of Vermont Sydney Lea was one half of the duel of Dueling Poets with John B Lee, an event done in cooperation with the LCP.
I believe Lea’s pictured here reading from his 2nd to newest poetry collection, Young of the Year. (Wish I’d asked if he had copies for sale but maybe that was before the reading not after.) There were a few poems I’d like to hear again. I got too swept inside to even take notes. But then, there’s always ordering direct, or ordering a copy in.
One poem in particular in the collection talked about the hard luck back country folks who live in any country. “Garnet’s wrinkles would hold a week of rain, his knuckles, small white onions”.
In the Q&A after Lea said that he learned his love of language from the old folks of New Hampshire and Maine who predated electricity like Garnet. They may not have had high education but they loved language. He met someone in the way back of Eastern Townships of Quebec who had Robert Frost’s book memorized. It just goes to show that bright people live in any region. He contends that remarkable people are evenly distributed, regardless of background or context.
It’s a relief to hear someone else say that. I hear so much dismissal of non-poets as intellectual inferiors. This idea of finding common ground instead of finding a niche of poetic territory is refreshing. Lee pointed out that the crux of some poetry is as simple as trying to work out the question of how other people work; why does someone behave this way towards me when I want them to treat me this other way.
Perhaps that’s something of what I was aiming to get at in the second last post: This snobbery of standardization of written text can make people miss both messages and soul gems who aren’t going to have their language jump standard middle class upper class school hoops.
We lose when we look at a different game than is being played. Judge baseball by baseball, not by cricket playing baseball wrong. (Why am I on baseball? Think that’s the John Degan interview of David McGimpsey percolating in.)
New improvement in boiling down point: “People who miss the point in favour of pointing out an error of some kind. #lame” ~ Laurie Anne Fuhr
To write poetry is a kind of terraformation. It is making the world you want, perhaps cherry picking, perhaps persuading, perhaps finding people who are willing to hear what you are getting at and build it as well. When one applies a grid of evaluation as if poetry is an English exam, who wins? It’s not just a matter of closing against voices of dialects and regions and classes of English but also literacies and those with dyslexia. And there’s something to be proved in allusions to Great Works, but that’s the means to the end. If someone doesn’t play that game, they nor their game are any lesser.
In short, getting back to the event, the respect of Lee and Lea for the “common man” is a balm. They both used story that was plainly worded yet not flat. The images shined and the phrasings popped.
Lee said that what brought him to writing was a love of language and a love of the world. Noticeably absent in the poems were the withering contempt, cleverness and condemning judgement that marks some poetry, not all poetry and poetry of the “common man” can also be a bridge to that.
What good people these are were first impressions and take-aways.
Lea’s New and Selected came out in 1996 with poems from 1980-1992. His Six Sundays Toward a Seventh: Spiritual Poems came out a few months ago. His collection of critical essays, 100 Himalayas, comes out shortly. Vermonter Lea’s honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a Fulbright scholar in Budapest. He has taught at Dartmouth College, Wesleyan University, Vermont College, among others. He’s been in 40 anthologies, give or take.
In the discussion they talked about the U.S./Canada border. Why is it that we know more of America than they know of us in Canada? Lea pointed out that 90% of Canada lives within the band of miles next to the U.S. but those U.S. border states are less populated and probably half a percent of the U.S. population overall lives within miles of Canada. He himself lives within 60 miles of the border.
John B Lee has been translated to French, Spanish and Chinese. He opened with a poem 3-days old about that fellow who walked across Niagara Falls. He read from a few collections. Here he’s reading from a recent collection, Let us Be Silent, poems that came as a result of he and his wife travelling thru Israel. I am trying to pace myself but have to admit I inhaled the first 60 pages in one whiff.
The poems are of particular interest given that my poems of Israel I’ll read this Friday at SPAO along with Amanda Earl, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Christine McNair and rob mclennan.
He has a poem called Wishful in that collection about going to the Western Wall (p. 62-63)
the paltry sorrow of my palm
one lifeline’s dark caress
in this I feel the wish of souls
my hand upon
the fragile mortar
of such deep belief
I hear a language
that I cannot speak
John B. Lee is the Poet Laureate of ,a href=”http://www.norfolkcounty.ca/”>Norfolk County, a promising kind of gesture of good will to the arts. Lee characterized pop culture as “aggressively indifferent to poetry” but on this local level there’s support from the 60,000-80,000 people dispersed across that area of Southern Ontario.
Lee has lots of projects on the go including editing You Can Always Eat the Dogs, a commissioned book of hockey poems. He also edited a collection of poems War of 1812: poetry and prose: an unfinished war (Black Moss, 2011). (Who was it that called in 2010 the prediction that our government would promote raising the commemoration of that war?) In a poem in there he pondered the collective memory, “the amnesia of asphalt” and how the life, so visceral can disappear so completely. He follows one solider with a poem “If there’s nothing left of…” listing elements “…of the drunken joy / why then are we alive?”
Both poets are “realists” in terms of storytelling. How do they not tell stories out of school? Lee related the story of Alistair MacLeod who had a story where the dog never existed in real life. A reader said she felt cheated and misled. He asked does a person feel cheated when they find the apple in the art gallery tastes like paint? Lee added, you can dumb down to the facts and miss the truth.
So distinguishing features get changed. All of reality is a construct Lea reminded, out but that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as a lie.
Emotional truths and accuracy both rely on integrity and care. To relate facts is not the same as saying a truth. A free-for-all doesn’t prove there’s truth because it is said. Anyone can say anything, but it doesn’t make it well-considered.
These poems come from a longer considering, one of Lea’s for example, remembering one summer night and a road trip for love to Montreal in 1965. But even then “Magical thinking couldn’t buy you a beer” especially when confronted with someone who wanted a fight, who was “drunk enough to be rhino-sized and growing”.
Both poets seem more circumspect and compassion-driven than most. They don’t stay in the pleasant bland zone of no risk, or the accessible to all simple palette. One poem by Lea on a neighbour’s dog turns back on itself and reconsiders the mutt and the speaker reconsidering his own judgements and gun’s scattershot of salt at the dog. They don’t avoid humour but the poems have a depth as well.
I try not to expect too much going into a reading so as not to be disappointed. I had good reason to expect good things as I read a John B Lee book a couple years ago and was blown away and have reread it a few times. But seeing a poet in person can sometimes be, what shall we say, deflating? But not this time. Lea is someone I want to read more of as well.
Some reading you come away more glad you attended than you’d expected.
A podcast of the reading will be up within a couple weeks at the US Embassy site.
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