To read less, deeper, or more, broader? I like a wide scope. As a child I was bitten by the idea of Renaissance Man.
Much leads to more. You can get to anywhere from anywhere. Especially with dopamine misfire but real connection isn’t a sensation but careful insight.
You can have the whole world siphoned thru a moment if you analyze enough but is it not still sap turning amber, a skewed word that reflects self?
Even when you read, you read self. But you alter self by reading rather than elaborate what was already there. Samuel Butler said that as a boy he was sure Odyssey was written by a woman, and in his 60s had the articulacy to expound it. He didn’t change his view. His view was his own but did all his reading and study transform him? Confirmation bias is a tricky thing.
This Diversity training panel talks about how entrenched our experiences are. How thorough and unrelenting and omnidirectional. Fiction is said to experience another live directly vicariously, like a body-transplant. Does poetry do that connection as well?
Anyway, the looks back at books.
167. Haiku Canada Review (Vol 9, Oct 2015, Number 2)
Journals rarely get in the list because I usually only read the poems and reviews. With this one I read the articles, the essays, the various poems, even the French which I can pick away at slowly in the small chunks of poems.
Nick Avis’ 4 part life of Basho essay is pretty compelling. This issue contains part 3. His peak life work was said to be written on the road, comes across as real-time diary but was cooked up as desk poetry, reusing some of his favourite pieces from renga games. He was making his own selected of sorts.
There’s a review of a Bruce Ross, Kato Koko, Dietmar Tauchner and Patricia Prime endeavour that’s fantastical in logistics I’m sure. “A Vast Sky: An Anthology of Contemporary World Haiku” which presents 500 haiku from 55 countries.
168. Forecast: Selected Early Poems (1970-1990) by John Pass (Harbour Publishing, 2015)
Since I saw him in town for VERSeFest I’ve meant to look into his work more and here comes a selected. I liked the earliest of these earliest poems best. They have a comfort in being in the world which looks you in the eye without playing chicken nor with shame. Another case so soon of yes, this is why writing isn’t pointless as a reinforcement of George Bowerings reinvigorating talk at Writers Fest. Is there something in the water out west that makes people healthier? More temperate minded?
This book was invigorating. It says yes to life, not in some hazy glee but a steady return to this is valuable. People matter. He intercuts with nitty gritty. There can be tree watching but And Hold (p. 127) doesn’t start and end with “these fail where they appeared/strongest, their trunks’ sheared//white wood for a few days before the weather/works its grey in”. As much as I love the attention to detail and cadence, it gets to the details of school where the class asks “abortion. So where
does life begin? Birth, conceptions, a glance/on the street” and doesn’t rest at this with a pairing of external and human world but there’s an actor. Much of poetry seems disembodied and without context of concrete place but within the one poem “At break//I get out for some air, step in/to the stress of the emptiness of questions//near a few trees and cars closer/asleep on the gravel.”
The poem continues for 3 more pages and has a sense of being considered and allowing its own ideas to move in tailored but not binding garments of ideas.
The Proximity (for Pierre) I shared in Two Thing I’m Reading at Literary Landscape 2 weeks ago. There’s a sense of adamancy and intimacy, word play of “My small poems /open a moment/ close to me”. There’s a looking at being called out as “complacent” and underachieving. Instead of anger back, there’s a compassionate look. He protests too much. There’s a tenderness to him without caving to his point. Not conceding, proceeding. He “is mad for something” he sees and when he gets a few thoughts later, concludes “I am sane for something.” There’s a self-assured statement of pursuing what is the cause of curiosity. The poem is about respect, enacting peace not by chanting Hari Krishna and ignoring conflict and speaking one side and talking over the other side and omitting it. It
169. Emily Carr: rebel artist by Kate Braid (XYZ Publishing, 2000)
I saw this book when it came out and I’m slower on the draw than I knew. 15 years for me to get around to it. Yikes.
It fleshed out some details of her life with her sisters that I didn’t know about. Her connection with Lawren Harris if I knew about, I forgot. That she should be brought into the fold by Harris was touching.
This Sunday at Pressed Kate Braid, Peter Richardson and Rod Pederson read
170. West of Darkness, Emily Carr : A Self Portrait By John Barton (Porcepic Books, 1999)
Having come back across the one on Emily Carr, it seemed a good time to get around to this one.
I read the books in the wrong order.
Poetry takes a lot of space on a page so a book of 100-odd pages is apt to be 15 or 20 pages of prose words. It reads like a Cole’s notes of events recapped that I knew previously and from the previous book.
Because whatever you read sooner is more apt to seem true, Carr is a person of explosive anger, tendency to live alone, to reject church were dominant qualities and she waxes rhapsodic on church and forest.
In these poems she reflects, kindly and circumspect, on her childhood recounting things without much charge. It’s a stage removed. Rather than poems placed in the moment say of turning off the heat and water of tenants or hitting one over the head with a pot, she says, I was a lousy landlady and moving on. But then perhaps this decade or so didn’t register as real life and would have no weight to her.
I see a lot of anger in her brushwork not passionate happy energy. She loved the woods as home but the transport of painting somehow struck me as against my vision. Which isn’t to say he or I got it wrong.
There was a uniformity of tone to a tumultuous impulsive woman. Or has history read her so because history likes to read mental instability into the lives of woman who bucked rules in that era? Was her inner life calm as this when not acted on by outside force of fools and their rules that imposed on her?
171. Between Gods by Alison Pick (Doubleday, 2014)
This was a hero’s journey in a memoir with pieces fitting together. It felt effortless to read, utterly fluid. Narrative marquetry that doesn’t make the editor’s hand show. I can’t imagine how much work that must have taken to polish. We are slowly submerged into Judaism and her mental states as she fights depression and to keep eyes on horizon-line of humans that are good to her. What is it to belong?
The little ping of insight that people can be unreactive to something not because they don’t care but because they do. If you overuse an area of skin it becomes numb. Numb is not a lack of sensation but a reaction to too much sensation. If you shut off it may not be disconnect but being overloaded with sensation. Not something I’d considered.
Because I peck away at A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man slowly that seems to make it a point of reference. Both books pull in dialogues happening around them. She walks a school hall or in a streetscape and what registers fits the mood of the character, or sets it, or both.
172. Haiku Canada Review (Vol 8, Feb 2015, Number 1)
Almost finished it in spring except for the reviews. A re-peruse and to the end.
Each issue has an editor’s pick to be the poem on the back cover. This issue it was by Michele Root-Bernstein, a one-line poem form called monostitch which packs a lot of play and thought into it,
one season following another Mobius strip tease
A standout essay in this issue was by Christian Christian of Toronot who protests the use of the word haiku i Haiku Death Match for the rhyme slam ditties, comparing it to a minstrel show, cultural appropriation, colonization while gutting the intent of the original. The 10 page article is strongly worded. I don’t know of the writer. He also gives advice on how to do slam better. I wonder if the article landed anywhere with ripples. There was talk of changing the name of the death match earlier this year.
Ricepaper did a Haiku Death match a couple years ago but a haikuist won. Elsewhere the 17 syllable ditties got towards raunchy.
It seems the sense of haiku as syllabic verse can’t easily be shaken.
173. Humour Detection in Ulysses by Sebastian D.G. Knowles (Joyce Studies, 2004)
Sweet juniper. That’s nuts. He lists the 18 best jokes in the book. Humour is personal and I might have seen entirely other set but I see why maybe I never got far in Ulysses before. Obscure and odd and what mental break happened to that young religious man who wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
Usually when you explain a joke, you ruin it but here it was elucidated. It’s funny because structurally, it’s supposed to be funny but there is no punchline! Ha! It reminds me of my favourite joke as a gaffer passing around a blank piece of paper. What is this asks old person. It’s a cow eating grass? Where’s the grass? The cow ate it. Where’s the cow? There’s a snowstorm!
Except he does his with beastiality joke and Mary in stretched pun in French. My. In a way bad puns and sacriledge and religion should be right up my line but nope, seems not.
It makes a certain legibility by having read The Odyssey in parallel.
174. A Magpie Life: Growing a Writer by George Bowering (Key Porter, 2001)
This was a fascinating book. We read the whole thing aloud. What was early CanLit like? The people, the travel. What is Canada? His Canada includes natives. How odd. What other CanLit report did that?
Peppered with a swirl of essays taped together they cover baseball, life in the fruit belt, breaking an arm, chasing down history. Like so many books of essays it doesn’t assume you go from cover to cover and so repeats things. But a pretty enjoyable book.
175. The Odyssey by Homer, trans by Samuel Butler (1900)
The prose version of The Odyssey was an easier go than the previous time with rhymed English. This seemed modern although a century ago.
It answered why the dead may be burned. If not properly buried they’d be between heaven and hell. How curious that a ceremony in the kind-of purgatory you threaten the ghosts with a sword so only the ones you want to talk to can drink the blood they thirst for, enough to break the veil enough to recognize you and speak.
The frantic randomness of battle isn’t the main thing here. Curiously over the condensed version I read, the story kept going. That Penelope should wander into the battle scene, recognize him, hugs and curtains seemed strange. For some reason the condensed had Ulysses fighting 2 against all instead of 4. That he should go to his father makes more sense. That the other version should omit the peace treaty made by a goddess is strange. Having read the short, I can see Butler’s point of females being in prominent positions. The summary curbed them but this had women or goddesses at key junctures.
Reading this book fills in and complicates how Sir Phillip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella was tethered to it in structure, number of suitors being number of sonnets, and the hero being more analogous to the anti-hero moochers. That make the trajectory of Astrophel after the story a foul out and being killed by Stella’s husband.
In his other book, The Authoress of the Odyssey he has done a floor plan of the house, mapping all the actions. Because the text mentions no windows, he adds none.