Another bit of the read this year pile, a stack of read I missed mentioning before:
- Nelson Ball‘s Three Letter Words (a reprint by Press-Press-Pull in 2014 of the 2006 book)
is a mouthercize where there are tables of lists of possible words, and English words mixed alphabetically so they start to merge.san sen sin son sun
sap sep sip sop sup
saq seq siq soq soq
sar ser sir sor sur
sat set sit sot sut
sav sev siv sov sovand so on thru the whole set of possibles.
It reminds me of teaching phonics to literacy students. “deal eel feel heel meal peal real seal steal” and there was a chorus echoed on each word until a total volume drop on the word seal. Some women blushed. No one would say what just happened there. In break time a Somali woman shyly told me that seal is the word for cunt. - Ker-bloom! 107, March-April 201Four from (artnoose, Pittsburgh PN) is a blog post meditation against the need to possess/hoard with a letterpress cover.
- Sandra Ridley’s The Counting House (BookThug, 2013)
is a bit hard to quote with columns of texts, left and right justified which seems to be about living within domestic violence of territoriality, keeping up appearances and the neurotic stasis of second guessing reactions of an unstable person; people in a matchbox game of playing petty roles against each other. p. 50 “Assume this is based on this. Fact perhaps. Truthfully even. A response to the unembellished. (Recent.) This is why. That is why. This is unlamentable.[…] Brocade her.”
p. 46A gentler lesson then. Deserved. Repeated as often as possible. Propose her more reasonable. Present her with a pleasant disposition. For most general acceptance.
A lasting positive impression.p. 48
Never call her by her name. Your Darling. Clandestine.
Such is not possible. Unless (of course). Such is possible.
Continue to writhe. For there has always been curiosity. Strict inquisitions.
You are insidious. Where have you been? With whom?
Your permitted versus that unbidden.
Unexplained.
As if the encounter took place without you. (Denial of the witness.)
The absolute privilege of unknowing. Impossible.
There is no identity of even you.
Accuser. - Steven Artelle’s Metropantheon (Signature Editions, 2014)
I must have raved about this. The poems are tight and creative. The language is unexpected. Familiar scenes go from flat to whap such as p. 51 “monkey bars” which could have come from something so simple as calling a kid a monkey, affectionately and then thinking around the child on the monkeybars. If more people used modifiers so aptly, the poetry world would be a more beautified place. The conjointing of word, kneeskin highsummer add to the rush of exhilerated joy to the scene.you were born with your soul in the branches
and a heart made of monkey bars
all up and down Cambridge Street
you sent kneeskin to the jubilant gods
swinging blisterpalm in the iron vines
anointed with chalk
or pennyspit breathless
blurred above the cement’s primary colours
whoever you become
clambering up through your heart’s scaffolding
I’ll encounter you with the same wonder
as the schoolyard’s wilderness of highsummer grass - Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers (Anansi, 2013)
It is a project book turning around the idea of plastics, the chemistry and repercussions of it, dire takes. All poetry comes in part thanks to the intellect but this also mixes in machined language. He gave an entertaining reading from it. As Jason Camlot put it for his own reading, a book has a lot of wallflowers that never get read at reading. The extrovert poems that can joke or entertain get airplay but what about the rest?
In Dickinson’s books, there’s a lot of poems about being in a tired slog such as in “Hydroelectric Wax Museum” where “The line-up is good/for us./It privatizes patience,/demarcates the vector/of progress[…]plastic blue rain slickers[…] Niagara Falls is/the molecular/concourse/of one lake changing/into another,/and one culture/eating another’s/failed burlesque” and with the Charles Bernstein epigraph, the poem becomes a concrete poem of the falls.
As you can see it is not just plastic but everything it touches, from rain slickers (and presumably everyone else calls up the microplastic beads from shampoo and hand lotions that also tumble from on elake to the next) to (p. 57) the indictment of the short-sighted consumer culture of “Hand Picked” where “I eat the tomato/and I have a debt/to the tomato//I eat the migrant/worker with neoprene/gloves”
He’s in interview with fellow Trillium nominee Souvankham Thammavongsa - DH Lawrence The Daughter-in-Law
A play set in a coal-mining town written in dialect which follows the node of the family of a mother and her two sons who remain at home as her help in old age, and the woman who would marry one of the sons. It is full of lively language. The characters seem real from the small-town boy who tries to accommodate and obey but breeds hopelessness in the act. The characters and view of them change and grow to a greater degree than most fiction seems to. It does a one-minute wrap up end that seems as if on deadline for commercial. I can’t offer a better ending myself but it seemed anti-climatic after so much good before it. - Louise Carson’s Mermaid Road (broken rules press, 2013)
A literary fable, novel mixed with poetry thread about a coming of age of the girl who was a mermaid born to humans.She secretly eats some smaller fish, sucks flesh from shells. She teaches herself to smash sea urchins or thorny egg-cases of rays between two rocks to get at the food inside.
Her mother knows or guesses this is happening. Her daughter usually skips lunch on the days they visit the sea, then has a huge appetite for supper.
When it’s time to go the mother calls, “Anne, Anne,” sometimes kneeling on a rock, lowering her lips to the water and shouting there. Once, Anne didn’t come and the mother had to sit and wait with a pounding heart, then called again, whereupon the girl reappeared, grinning.
“What would I tell your father if you disappeared, you little monkey?” The mother scolded. “He thinks we’re in the pool at home.”Once she entered the world on her own, she herself sometimes birthed humans who she left as foundlings, and sometimes birthed mermaids who as some frogs do, let them into the world to fend for themselves. A story in itself it also seems allegorical for all the parenting where the child of different personality and capability must make their own path, leave when she needs.
- Diane Tucker’s Bonsai Love (Habour Publishing, 2014)
at the National Post today.
The poems seek closure, emotional and grammatical. Each poem a story or analogy about resiliency, moving past all the nattering griefs. It reminds that every act and moment in life is potentially meditations. There’s a lot of star-watching, nature walks but also the occasional bus ride that travels a distance in the poem.
Why Don’t You Take the Bus? (p.32-33) moves from a retort of why busses are distasteful, crowded, etc. moving to how-to of how to be present, from the silence of being jostled by strangers, how to sit with the “heavy/ round side against your own./Don’t break gaze with the toddler” “It is a benefit and a blessing,/bearing with broken others, the weight and heft of every/other rider towards the sinking west” but then a turn
When you arrive home
I will gather your small bones
against me. I will shake you free
of every lurching hesitation,
free of every rush and rattle.
And in the cloud of having touched,
we will lie flat and motionless
against each other’s bodies,
hallowed and transported.
That sounds like a good exposure therapy and reward training. 🙂
And closer to the Mermaid’s tale,
p. 47 Beach Glass
All of us were born
many times from this surf
and sucked back in,
our green and lilac
white and ochre shine
being scoured away,
all our sharp edges
rubbed strokeably smooht.
We received the sun
gratefully now, no longer
bouncing it back at you.
We let it glaze our skin
softly, all of us etched
with a thousand tiny
light-collecting lines.
We’re kept our curves
though, each of us shaped
like a human hand open
and at rest; each of us
carrying a little pool of
brine, an icy mouthful,
a doll-sized up of what
the waves keep crying.
Soft poems of controlled reflection, p. 46 in Coming Down with Something “I ought to sleep, but cannot.//Do I speak things too intimate for you?/Are there lines I don’t know I’ve crossed?/It’s been years since I remembered my lines//Are the shaking and the headaches/just the virus pounding to get in, or,/are they echoes, damnable afterimages/of the thing I wish I’d never said,/words I knew too smooth/as soon as they took flight to you,/or too rough, too raw, too much/like bare hands?”