I’ve plummeted largely into poetry but am still clicking along on some non-fiction. In the next part of the reading of the year is largely contemporary, although among the 44 books left on my active reading stack, some are more from a century or so ago.
- Need Machine by Andrew Faulkner (Coach House, 2013).
I’m not the audience for it any more than I was for The Lease. A young man’s poetry, perhaps? I was waiting for the mandatory masturbation poem and thought it wouldn’t come but, p. 36, 37. Box cutters, being drunk, diary of sports metaphors, stories of planning revenge on ex, of stalking, of being drunk, hungover, more shots, more beer, a bullet, relating feeling bored, yawning. The language is crisp but I’m not interested in the message. Awkward. What’s “always present like a limp body/a the bottom of one of the meaner lakes”? A casual metaphor to describe a radio being always on as white noise (p. 35). There’s a constant tracking of baldly reporting violence, p. 34“He’s a slow waltz with a gorgeous someone across a floor or tacks.
Loves like a Brillo pad. Attentive as an open fridge[…]
He brought a present, and his intentions are as clear
as a sliver of glass in a chocolate cake.
This will only be hard on one of you. Guess who?”I’m not sure if it is presented to be accurate to the world, or to shock or to brag or to romanticize the hardness or oppose it. There’s the story of wasted youth anomie (p. 60, “like a minor sitcome character I appear at the edge/ of scenes.”) There’s a lack of introspection or speculation into human nature or motivation. Perhaps that means there’s room for the reader to do it. One is positioned as a gawker to the spectacle rather than one can can interfere or intervene or change course. The story seems to be of a society running larger and more powerful than the one narrating.
- Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry: Essays by Jane Hirshfield (HarperCollins, 1998)
It isn’t a foundational sort of book of essays by chance. Dense reading but worthwhile. p.111But if creative making lives in our every mental gesture, both verbal and non-verbal, then what is particular to the kinds of perception we call art? First art springs from a heightening, widening, and deepening of attention, and a craft-sense sufficiently developed to place this altered condition into the work.[…] Art’s seeming obliqueness and riddling meanderings are not arbitrary – the circuitousness of the artistic form is what appears once conventionalized habits of mind are stripped off, allowing the deeper grain to be revealed.
- The Alchemist by Paul Coelho (HarperCollins, 1992), was a book I enjoyed immensely, and quickly. It isn’t surprising that at that point it sold 27 million copies and has had his books translated into 56 languages. The story is plainly spoken, compassionate, but complex and unpredictable. At that link you can hear it read for 4 hours. A gratifying sort of train-ride/beach read, musing on cosmic within a frame of a hero’s journey. From p. 130
If what one finds is made of pure matter it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light like the explosion of a star, would would find nothing on your return.
- Nigh-No-Place by Jen Hadfield (Bloodaxe, 2008)
This was recommended to me as one I’d like the year it came out and it took me this long to read it. I remember reviews being harsh and pooh-poohing it as over-praised at the time. I delighted in the book. From Burra Grace to a poem of a hedgehog in hand, there’s a varied tilt to the poems. There’s a lushness of language, a love for the world “I go to the rock pool at the slack of tide[…]It has its ventricles, just like us – pumping brine, like a bull’s blood.” My favorite might be “My Lady of Isbister”.
Writing a melancholic or angry poem is easier than walking but a poem that manages to cherish and celebrate without being maudlin is a far harder art. And she does it with such wonderful sound and language and using the space on page and line breaks in a way that works the pacing.the wind driving spittlestrings
to skimpy shores of dark red stone,
same hot sweet slaw
of muck and shit and trampled straw;
the chimney bubbling transparent heat;
a whirlpool of Muscovy ducks;
paet-reek;
[…] O send e another last life like this[…]It is a relief to me in a world of first person singular, or thinly veiled 3rd person singular, to have a “we”. She has some other people on her verbal planet and some other species but human. The one poet against the world trope does wear.
- Lake Superior by Lorine Neidecker (Wave Books, 2013)
This is a mixed bag, some essays, or parts of, some correspondence with Cid Corman, a travel guide to the badger state that Neidecker wrote, a poem, some travel notes she wrote on a road trip in 1966, an excerpt of what Henry Rowe Schoolcraft write in 1832 that she had read. She travelled to Lake Superior with a sense of what happened in those places, geologically and from the 1600s to her present. Her travelogue reminded me rather of rob mclennan’s approach to the world; place as a researched literary overlay of what came before. She’s a copious researcher before she begins to distill anything. The essay by Douglas Crase looks at her precursor explorers of the land. On p. 46-47 he talks about what she grasped that her predecessors didn’t that earth is home, the material of earth is us. [Like Locard’s Principle (as Joe Schwarcz pointed out.)]this is home – iron in our blood, a transit of minerals ourselves[…] we die miserably each year every year for the lack of news we could find in poetry. And the news in American poetry has yet to reach to people who still, against all available evidence, regard humans, not rocks, as the heroes of this earth.
Funnily enough the rare word carnelian was in this text and one other. (Doshi? I can’t place my finger on it just now.)
- Wait by C.K. Williams (Bloodaxe, 2010)
This is a book I nearly bought at least 3 times but wondered would I really read it again? It seemed so plainspoken that it wouldn’t yield to reread. And I already have, once I bit. They seem casual but are controlled. At that first link for the book title you can hear him read his poem “Singing”.
There’s a distance of approach so that things after the dervish of day settles, he attends to what still matters. Another mark of the poems is how much they vary in form and content and tone. It’s not one of these books that seems a lineated spiral novel. It doesn’t feel straight-jacketed the way themed collections can.
While collections often close on a hopeful twist his last section is a Holocaust poem. Many of the poems within approach death and dance between that and hope so it doesn’t come out nowhere as a discordant note. A poem dedicated to the life of Robert Lax speculated into the character of the man unseen. The poems look into motivations, the underlying musculature of himself and others. For example in Lies, p. 81“there’s a stage of growing up
when children conclude that reality is a negotiable,
not absolute matter, that what is “true” is determined
not by the case, but but agreement between parties,
and therefore if one can state one’s own version of events
with suffient conviction (eyes sincerely widened,
mouth ajar with disbelief at someone else’s disbelief),
it will overwhelm the other’s less passionately desired
version of what’s happened or hasn’t.”He doesn’t populate his world only with people. A poem of a wasp banging against glass chimed against the similar subject of the book read in parallel of Tishani Doshi.
His one of cows struck me as being, sublimely surpassing the anecdote, which is also is, and illustrating how the mind fuses two disconnected associations, in this case, his emotional tumult over whether to interfere or comfort or inquire or ignore the crying girl, becoming spliced into the calves in the field, and into the future cows he sees. It is a poem that alone is worth the cover price. - Under a Northern Sky: Poetry and Paintings by Ian Scott Massie (Masham Gallery Press, 2009)Ian’s poems struck me as being present inside themselves. And language and a moment. There’s a immediacy and slow reveal in fitting cadence, such as in p.10, Rain
As I reach the remote bridge
Across the winter water
That erupts through razored rock
And rushes between the rotten hearted hills
The rain begins.
Fat drops splat and burst against the windscreen.
The temperature falls on
The ghost grey shrouded land
And I mutter a gut spittle curse.
An hour later,
Skin soaked and rain plastered,
I pull open the car door
And drop into the driving seat
Raw with elation.
Still tasting rain
And watching the windows crawl with steam
I swing the car through an arc
Of black shining road.The sound and cadence transmit the exhilaration of the direct experience of rain. The road becomes sensual and freeing as the afterwaves of rain are flowing not down the body but through it in that washing clean way a downpour has. The foul mood of “rotten hearted hills” that would make one erupt with a “gut spittle curse” has been completely displaced.
- The Right Chemistry: 108 Enlightening, Nutritious, Health-Conscious and Oaccasionally Bizarre Inquiries into the Science of Everyday Life by Joe Schwarcz (Doubleday Canada, 2012)
- The Burning Perch by Louis MacNeice (Faber and Faber, 1963) [that link has lineation all messed up but has the text at least]. In one poem on p. 39, he converses with Horace,
[…]It looks as if both of us
Met in the uniqueness of history a premise
That keeps us apart yet parallel.
The gap reducible only by language.
It is noisy today as it was when Brutus
Fell on his sword, yet through wars and rumours
Of wars I would pitch on the offchance
My voice to reach you.What hope! for language that is could be the only route to join with another. Non-verbal is potent but who was describing the anecdote of avoiding language by only carrying a rucksack of exemplars of things you would want to say by showing them to who you might meet? Jonathan Swift?
His poems are densely structured for sound and while perhaps overly formal, also cut loose in places with a nimbleness and humour. His her is often less of an internal voice and more of an oratory voice intended for rhetoric. That’s not to say he doesn’t play in musicality. And satire.This is the Life
Down the rock chute into the tombs of the kings they grope
these battling sandalled
Elderly ladies in slacks and a hurry, their red nails clutching
at hieroglyphics,
Down to the deep peace of the shelter, everything found,
cuisine and service,
All the small ochred menials and livestock discreetly in profile,
every convenience
Laid on free so that they may survive in the manner to which
they are accustomed,
Gracious in granite this is the life with their minds made up
for ever and the black
Sarcophagus made up ready for the night, they can hide their
heads under the graveclothes
And every day in the dark below the desert will be one of both
independence and thanksgiving
So they never need worry again as to what may fall out of the
sky
But whenever they want can have a Pharaoh’s portion of
turkey and pumpkin pie. - How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish (Harper Collins, 2005)The subordinating and additive styles of presenting information is fascinating. p. 31 is in the chapter about it’s not the content but the form that is generative.
In a “Had I” [starting] sentence, an action taken or not taken in the past will be related causally to an action you did or did not take at a later point or in the present. This very abstract account is an account of form; as a form it is empty, but precisely because it is empty – not hostage to any particular content – it seres as a mould into which innumerable contents can be poured. There is no limit to the forms you can practice in this way: “Even though,” “Were I to,” “Notwithstanding that,” “Depending on whether,” “In the event that” […]you know what kind of relationship between propositions will follow when the first two words of the sentence are “Even though”.
This is the precise sort of exploration we did in making the “If” chapbook. Once you have form, content comes. You don’t need to start with an experience or vocabulary or sound, but from the level of thought form and syntax.
- Everything Begins Elsewhere by Tishani Doshi (Bloodaxe 2012)
While this sample isn’t exactly typical, since poems more often reference Xuanzang, or Samsara practice, life in Madras or Wales, this poem was the one that sold me on the book, p. 26, “Lesson 3: Stillness”All morning I try to hold it
the desperation of a fly
beating against glass,
a dog’s distant bark,
the dull throb of a lorry
winding its way up the hills.
By afternoon I think I’ve mastered it.
Nothing the world offers me
can be as complete or as full as this.
When I step into the light,Although “Lines to a Lover from a Previous Century” I am glad to read and re-read. It’s an interesting vantage point to dialogue back when it is too late, but then, isn’t that most of dialogue. It is like falling in love with a film star from the silent movie era. The life seems so vivid and yet there’s that disjuncture in time. “Walking Around” (p. 59) starts with “It happens that I am tired of being a woman” and continues with a sharp-edged lushness. “I do not want to keep growing in this skin,/to swell to the size of a mausoleum./I do not want to be matriarch or mother. /Understand, I am only in love/with these undrunk breasts.”
- Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal by David Dowker and Christine Stewart (BookThug, 2013)
I was going to save this for later, and in a way, I am. The text moves rapidly, pulls ahead and I gobbled the first time. It is a kind of Deleuzean interlinked text where phrases here and there become titles elsewhere so it all flows kind of like a make your own mystery. Each has one or more. Many have footnotes that are more adjuncts to the poem that are poetic in themselves. Language is picked apart at the seams and the seems. There’s a playfulness and humour that most poetry lacks. The language feels good in the mouth. I immediately had to read some aloud. Like p. 49,a wavy maybe
Seen and unseen, an errant
strophe and catastrophe.
The eye is as apocalyptic as
reason (a hypnagogic plinth).26
Medusa whistles a medulla
obligata (cantata) – her
symptom’s a riotous wave
fluent in fixation wherefore
. . . sthenic then whence
sums come from, some
pressure on a nerve or
the ruins of this nevertheless
intermittent limit-field
in various similitudes
of swoon.
26 The day is lipid, your toque baroque.The language romps and ramps but doesn’t become entirely unhitched from sense. The eye and the mind are groggy basis with a tendency to be pessimistic and over-imaginative. “her symptom’s a riotous wave”, obsessed with its own sensing, to work itself up to a swoon. The mind knows its own habits, tendencies. It’s mind watching mind but not with apprehension, condemnation but in a way that fits the flitting of the mind. Like p. 31, “The habit of synaptics matters yet still one fumes and stares/ and wonders just what kind of trees are these.”
This contained a suprise. 6 pages on Bisphenol A (BPA) which
may be the most studied chemical ever, with over 4500 research papers devoted to it.[…] Fundamental repetitive work on Bisphenol A has sucked hundred of millions of dollars and it looks increasingly like an investment with nil return.”
Says Dr. Richard Sharp. Over 50 years and 3 nations and no results could replicate the apparently faulty study that found it mimicked estrogen and disrupted endocrines. It does not cause any effect for human development nor cancer. The press doesn’t pick up on this refrain of a story because fear-mongering and paranoia sells better than sense. It’s become an urban legend.
Nicely done, Pearl!