- During by Karen Houle (Gaspereau, 2008). I’ve been reading this for 3 months. With 2 tosses across the room in aggravation and subsequent rants, and a few decisions that I’ll never finish it. And yet something about the text made me continue. Some lines sing, and there’s a sense of something urgent and necessary being said, not just a poetic exercise. There’s a fury and elbowing forward towards breathing space to be not superior, just not stepped on. There’s a sense of insistence to get past the place where one endures without comment being dismissed to where one is resilient and self-reliance and taking a stance of equal.
The book is structured with chapters for During, Duration, Endure and Endurable. I read the first section, then re-read it before reading the second, and re-read sections of During and Duration before reading the second half in a day.
Poems that are more about resistance and insistence on resilience are easier to read perhaps. Perhaps I tuned my ear better to the rhythm and density as well.
The first section was the high emotion and hapless float in that way that annoys me. If a woman chooses to script herself as powerless, as drowned woman, as Little Red Riding Hood without inverting the narrative, that isn’t empowering because she’s doing it and changing the ending to be a survivor and showing it from the inside and making a quick fix end bow. It’s still romancing the victim role. Like Martha Stewart said, “It’s not about emotion. You can be passionate. That’s the only emotion I allow in business.”
Which isn’t to say the business of poetry-making and meaning-making should be heartless. Is the emotion reinforcing the narrative or calling it out and refusing it and modeling other models that are valid? The structure of the book is something of a coming to age, recognizing the system, being abraded by it, resisting it and standing firm and strong in it.
Part of what annoyed me initially was the context outside the text, other books and photos and stories treading the same ground. And in the same time frame — coincidentally 4 poems taking roadkill as subjects them moving on past them as objects of scenery — too much.
The poem in During, however, made the deer-car collision more emblematic of relationship crash up, communicative impasse, being blocked and not heard. Instead of situating it as language only, or narrative around emotional, she uses chunks of the world and pours everything in, the road, the eventual deer, conversation, and inflection. p. 37 in “duration”i.
My husband is driving.
South now. Sunday night due south.
Striped clouds tinkering with the sun beating a bored retreat.
I am watching for deer.
“What’s your theory about all the deer?” his wife asks.
“Tics.”
His completely uninflected one-word response.
He adds two bends to the syllable:
“Spruce bat tics.”Because it is framed as he and she, or as roles, the wife, the husband, it becomes wider than two people and becomes about gender power differential.
Part of what I like is that the tone shifts among poems within section and there is a progression across sections. For example, out of p. 79 in “duration”, in the poem “What becomes visible from the high level”,Garbage they dump
in the picturesque
then want their picture
taken in.
When you hit the ground hard you weren’t running
you were particle matterm atomized,
menacing vista of the undercarriage
of high
flung places.The sense of self as atomized coincides with the narrator in Richard Truhlar’s The Hollow and the shifting unity of self as indistinguishable from environment also plays through Louise Carson’s poem talked about later in this post.
The poems in During reference each other without repeating one another. She has a poem about a girl child finding beauty and freedom and no danger in taking the path home from school through the forest (where rape is inevitable because girls are constrained where they walk and to disobey is to invite violence) and getting “found” by a search party. It swings back through in “durable” in “written on again” p. 104Not obeying I have never obeyed will not
stick to the path for safety’s sake;
Who are we if not those
for the sake of safety?
My unsexed breasts barely zipped inside, they hurt
like a headache inside my chest, times two.
Leaking into my waistband, you cry out: I don’t
stand still. My strong way of walking prevents
freeze-up on the river,
swings the world around by the hoodstrings and pummels
the life from its marrowing menace.
I am not the wrong language I am not too young to know better
what they buried in the yard,
in their shovel-dith yes;
there is no obedience in me in this regard
I recognize you, uncataracted
parabola of recognition,
each cell
not quite mine,
not quite yours,
the streaming matter that gives, and the spaces inside us for that.There’s a fury through most of the poems, no break into humour. It is rather relentless. The language and leaps can be lateral. The word combinations are uncommonly interesting “marrowing menance” could have started as a typo from narrowing menace yet it is threat in the bones.
There’s something of relief to hear “unsexed breasts”. Sometimes they are just incidental shapes not a weapon of sexuality. It’s complex the idea of a unwelcome touch being damp leaking and the presumable assaulter protests and is unheeded. At the same time the narrator also is water, refers to self as frozen but moving. Is the same material as the assaulter and dismisses self as cold. By walking away one stays animate and stays liquid therefore the material to cause assault as well. - Gusts, Fall/Winter 2013 issue (Tanka Canada, 2013)
So much goodness in the form. You never know how a poem will turn. Hubby was reading some aloud and as he read the first line of Carol Purdlington’s he decided to act it outAlmost sunset
my cold arms wrap aroundand he cuddles up arms around and reads the next line,
a cold pumpkin
[?] oh no! wrong turn.
my fingers tap the notes
of a going away balladthat put a kibosh on the romance. in a way.
but then laughter is a kind of romance.
Many tanka, like long lyric poems, embrace melancholy. But even that can be done well. For example, mac adastra’s (p. 25)laid flat
a sorrow of stones floating
on sparse grass
our bones are ripples
on an ocean of dustIt entrusts the tanka to a moment centuries long. Physical space dissolves its hard boundaries in an interesting way that is about melding emotion and atomic and cosmos-scale. I can’t say I’ve read that poem before. It doesn’t need to be bigger nor smaller. Line breaks aren’t arbitrary. More classic tanka in syntax and being two thoughts/images within a moment is the one by Dimitar Anakiev,
Under the heavy sky
the two white butterflies
catch each other —
from the distance hot wind
brings the smell of burningIt has the elements of transient life, innocence and sex edged with death. The second part comes unexpected and counters but completes the picture so there isn’t a simple image.
I appreciate other ones that are less expected such as Alegria Imperials’s (p. 16)like layers
of sunlight among weeds
our words
thrive on silence….until gushing
we burst into flowersThere are ones that navigate humour in the framework of 5 lines, also using that expectation and pivot of taking one element from perception and pairing it well with another unconnected piece. Luce Pelletier does this (p. 16)
a robin hops
hops
I wonder
if something inappropriate
was said between usApart from the humour of it, it enacts with that word hop going forwards and to the side the act of a robin. The movement of bird and line point towards the mind’s sideways movement. There’s an aimless and yet intentioned. What is knowable. How natural to examine, whether a bird or reflecting on what happened there socially.
- 29 Words in Solitude by Louise Carson (Leaf Press, 2013)
A gorgeous little thing, as all Leaf Press productions are. It is scaled to the hand with a textured green paper with a die-cut cover.
Even though it is 5 pages it isn’t excerpt-able easily because the poem builds each image off the previous and pivots what it used to mean, or rather, expands. Sea is freedom but then at the next page, perhaps not freedom,I wear the woods
the way another
wears the sea.
I wrap myself
in forest.
I walk
in a forest of men.
Mysterious phalluses,
each has a girl within.
I am wood
in a sea of women,
drifting, the way
the sea wear me.I love how boundaries are called out as being simultaneously itself, its opposite and all the gradient in between. There is a musical cadence yet simply stated in a way that reminds me of Joseph Massey mixed with something, I hesitate to say mystic or cosmic but also social conscience of asking for the world we want where underlying commonality is recognized and permitted even in words.
- The Hollow and other Fictions by Richard Truhlar (Mercury, 2005)
Speaking of underlying commonality. This is structurally fascinating. It has a similar quality to 29 Words in Solitude in that words refrain in a watery way. There’s a lap of repetition, an immersion in language, but not for its own sake but with an eye to social change.
In this case the novel takes place 40 years in the future where palaeontologists go to stone and objects, flee their lives, their cities for the solitude in a zone that has been evacuated for environmental and personal reasons. The timeline is not made clear. It seems at present for a long time then unclear, wobbly in time. There’s an existential sort of questioning of what is real that is both language and substance.
On the opening page,I do no harm. I’m heavy, motionless, stubborn, yet polite…I suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sensing that I’ve been somehow parenthetically placed within myself. Yet I can sit and read for hours on end, which relieves me, absents me, carries me away to somewhere I can forget that perhaps I’m imagined.
p. 38
Everything begins with objects, the small toys: rattles, mobiles that graced your crib; and even alter at college, the immobile pieces of mica, quartz that you would gaze at under the microscope for hours. Everything began with objets, so that you came to believe that the density of things protected you, protected you from any immanence that would eliminate your gaze, eliminate the object, its weight, opacity, substance.
What those are we speculate in a later section when the (spoiler alert — that’s short notice isn’t it) character is comparable, sifting through objects to try to reconstruct the past to figure out what triggered the phage and the apocalyptic environmental disasters. Perhaps if every teen were to read it in high school, there’d be a fire lit under the importance of looking forward 7 generations from the implication of each element of our economic choices.
- One Man’s Trash: Stories by Ivan E Coyote (Arsenal, 2002)
Some things that are uncommon and striking about Ivan’s stories is the sense of humour and sense of reconciliation. There’s a well-being in the world, even faced with hard-nosed prejudiced. People aren’t crass idiots worth getting enraged about, so much as characters caught up in their own versions of the world. Even when someone breaks a leg while tobogganing, and ends up with lifetime leg problem and life drags people apart, there’s a glow of perspective of being richer for having known the person, looking for how they are strong and inspiring.
Yes, you get past the mechanic on the take, being cheated, and knowing it and knowing there’s nothing to do but pay, and you are brought by chance and story to the next person who regrets the encounter and shows humanity can also be kind. There’s an abiding love and resilience. For example, living in a bachelor flat Ivan gets a girlfriend staying the night, waking horrified that there is no make-up remover, facial cleanser, etc. Next scene: at the shopping mall,Her eyes grazed over my short hair and flat chest, but she never blinked. She passed no judgment upon me from thinking toner was only for photocopiers, and I loved her for it. her name was Madeleine, and she spent forty-five patient minutes with me. Every time she leaned over to touch my skin I couldn’t help but breathe deep in the smell of her. I had an almost unbearable urge to rest my head against her ample chest. I felt so grateful, I wanted to mow her lawn, or change her tires, or something.
- Reluctant Gravities by Rosmarie Waldrop (A New Directions Book, 1999)
It’s another book of dialogues like Mari-Lou Rowley’s. And another that begs us to question the reality of these things we call distinct and separate, life that feels infinite and ample also is finite. “The body cannot keep the voice. It spills. Foliage over the palisade.” (p. 4). It speaks to the identity as non-body and as unshakeable body. “My shadows locks my presence to the ground.” (p. 11) “I hid my bones under sentences expanding like the flesh in my years.” (p.10).
Like other books in this set the preoccupation isn’t fixed to a particular life or event or lifetime but what is is dissolve and to remain. “Even books spot with secret menstrual blood and propagate their species, My hand forms letter of unamibuous design. Or are you preparing me for new ways of behavior?” (p. 59) Ideas are lives. Words are terraforming in guiding action in physical world of jackhammers and architecture. Everything interconnects.
Like Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, the meditations that run together. In a way her prose poems move like a bastard ghazal, all non sequiturs and yet not. The package of ideas rotate around themes. They stay mid-ground, not entirely abstract nouns, and not entirely concrete. There is the specificness of (p. 63) “seven types of apples” but not the specifics to the degree of apples like Lobo, Cortland, Red Delicious. But apples here shift, (p. 85)Exquisitely specific antibodies sidetracked by desire. The light turns to matter, the metaphors grey. The body, jubilant to meet its double, bites into the apple.
While mediations on mortality is central to poem-making it piques, the phrasing, the sense of vitality that continues. There’s a ragged non-narrative, with anecdotes not sustained, not much ground to touch down on as ideas of existence roll through. But the ideas are not groundless. p 90
Cells rusts, he says, not hunger. It seems yesterday that, gasping with shock, I plunged into the January river for the unreachable that is promised —though only as long as we have history. Now the train’s speed is hostage to the next station, becalmed legs and thinning hair. Could it be that loss complete possession? becomes, like the “with” in “without,” a second acquisition, deeper, wholly internal, more intense for its pain?
Even as cells age, mutate, die, some constant hunger, life-wish persists, outnumbering the breaking and lost bits of self and the world. It’s a new thought to me, this flying that not only does one need good, bad and neutral and for good and bad to reverse to be complete, but the loss is part of the having. Not part of the cycle of life, having and losing but there are one thing in a sense. It’s a book worth a re-read to catch more on the next round.
Also on the go: Quote Poet Unquote by Dennis O’Driscoll, The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, Blindsight by Rosmarie Waldrop, Comfortable with Uncertainty by Pema Chodron, There is a Season by Patrick Lane, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History by Elizabeth Bachinsky, The Polymers by Adam Dickinson, The Raw Pearl by Pearl Bailey, Conservative Majority by Spencer Gordon, Parisian Novels by Richard Truhlar, Flatland by erek beaulieu, A Writer’s Life: The Margaret Laurence Lectures, edited by Writers’ Trust and The Prophet’s Camel Bell by Margaret Laurence.