As you probably know I tend to cycle among titles, thru a day reading a bit of this and that to keep the palate refreshed since any given book doesn’t vary much and falls to same-same pretty quickly. I can read 40 pages at a sitting of a greatly enjoyable or engaging book. Something internally consistent seems more like a sitcom; if I’ve read one poem, there’s no need to see the whole series.
Anthologies can aid, but the editor may show a heavy hand in some cases. This one doesn’t have that problem:
Women Romantic Poets: 1785-1932: An Anthology edited by Jennifer Breen (Everyman library, 1992). I don’t know why the 1700s appeal at they do to me. I say I was born in the late 1800s so perhaps its nostalgia. I’m reading some Keats and Coleridge so I’m glad to balance it off with what the female contingents were saying. I’m not familiar with even the names of people let alone their poems. Anna Seward’s “Sonnet: To the Poppy” was written in 1789 and strikes me as amazing that it can stand and be read still.
Poppy of the pathless field
Gaudy, yet wild and lone; no leaf to shield
Thy flaccid vest that, as the gale blows high,
Flaps, and alternate folds around they head[…]
Thou flimsy, showy, melancholy weed.”
What a dismissal. Flowers can’t be withered by poems luckily, but it was likely not just the garish plant. Association with the dead was in place since ancient times. The opium trade was brisk in those years. As much lively language aimed at accusing, ranting at who, addicts of the day who aren’t living to her model of proprietary of model paths of sobriety? It’s so harsh as to be comic. Poor ole poppy. I feel sorry for it and at the same time I’m glad in the that’s-funny-partly-because-I’m-grateful-it’s-not-me-being-slagged way.
Irving Layton, Selected Poems, edited by Wynne Francis, (M&S, 1969).
Speaking of something perhaps unintentionally comic. Oh, he does go on and every line a new metaphor family. The poems are dense in the good sense, piled heaping, complex in a way but armageddon high emotion neverending. A writer may be unlike his writing but his striking language is in a tasmanian devil with epilepsy sort of way. Can he have a conversation or only present caricature of energy? It’s hard not to pathologize someone who behaves differently with different values. He seems to take rebel as identity, like some poets who find a suitably conservative crowd where they can be the wild one by saying poop and getting gratifying blushes and titters.
One said his mission was to bring ugliness to poetry which I suppose was useful if people at the time primarily prized prettiness and god’s order but it being a different prevailing mood where disorderly spouting is the norm…? Or is it? We do have that de facto ideal for one subject at a lyrical good time. Nothing extraneous, a short story’s dictum that things be included because they reinforce, make coherence and propel forward motion, hook together in a false manufacturing of order. But that he made a cluttered rant does not make it any less of a false manufacturing. As he says in interview at TVO, he’s against dull complacency. In a poem “Prologue to the long pea-shooter”, p. 28
For now, no lampooners, themselves grown sick,
Prefer poets with a touch of colic
Who’ll speak in soft, deflated tones
That’ll menace no one’s sleep or bones.[…]
Assiduously learn the art to please
In the interview he seems as hair trigger as any family member. I think it’s the contempt/superiority factor, the belief that one sees true while others deserve ridicule, hallmarks of bullies. I’ve come to the same conclusion as he has in the TVO interview that if society is moving from less verbal and more visual, future poetry will be expression thru film not plain page of words. We have moviemaking literacy from a young age that is more sensory than words.
Seth Abramson points out that 70,000 currently active American poets don’t have one centre. (Add to that the mobile world of communication and reading those from Canada, around Europe, Australian and those who only share among friends not playing the publishing game and you have a good-sized nation of people.)
He points out that to communicate about poetry one needs to trust the speaker to weigh the words. A certain percentage of reviews you can skim off as irrelevant as they are “a product of their interest in light sadism rather any sincere interest in the dialogic[…]sanctioned “flaming” that animates certain individuals.” The blurb business can also be taken with the grain of salt that it is in order to move copies, advertising copy, rather than trustworthy. I suppose her poem isn’t exactly trustworthy as her bias is showing. At the same time, lack of covert is a blessing too.
Four Corners Looking for a Room, Glenn Kletke (privately published, 2002), The poems are economical with not an extraneous word and yet not pontificating on the course known from before the poems began. The order of reveals proceeds logically, each poem expanding, elaborating so the reader can infer rather than get the 2×4 treatment. It’s tricky to excerpt because the writing tends to tongue-in-groove. p. 25 you get a sense of its movement perhaps with p. 25, 7 couplets containing: “Fireworks for the first”,
fills the heavens with a blue speckled
perishing sphere. Ahhh we utter
the sound breaking suitably but almost
involuntarily from our lips. Other
sky flowers follow, so many that we
settle back and demand great upon
greater pyrotechnic petals to capture us.
Perishing spheres. What a wonderful way to describe it. How fabulous are those line and stanza breaks. It doesn’t become jarring but has a balance and slow proceeding, controlling speed. It has the spirit of the experience. I’m particularly admiring the poem about the hat in the costume department p 29, “Label”
a label on the inside rim.
His name, all that’s left of him.
What they called him on earth.
Printed neatly in eight dark letters.
He doesn’t push as far as the aww, ooh, papercut ending moments, which is further proof of grace.
One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing, by Diane Ackerman (Norton, 2011) is a autobiography or couple’s biography. I haven’t read any of her poetry but then she doesn’t drop her poetic grace to write prose. p. 222
Now our phone calls were short, less playful, less intimate and without that lifeline I sometimes felt strangely unreal when I was on the road, as if I were somehow disappearing. […] Touching voices by phone, we had always insinuated our arms down the lines or across the air-miles and held each other close. Without that ethereal embrace, home felt like a distant star.
Insinuated is a strange word choice. I wonder if it was a last minute’s editor’s change to have that negative connotation that doesn’t fit with all else she’s said.
It’s a fascinating look at how the couple lived and live, and how the brain when one part is broken still is functioning behind that bottleneck of language. As charming as their language play is in flashbacks and informative of being an active petitioner inside the medical system to get options for recovery, there’s only so much I want to live inside someone else’s stroke. Still, in hindsight I can see my dad’s first stroke occurred years earlier than I suspected.
The Back Forty: Farm Life in the Ottawa Valley by Steve Evans with H Sibbald (General Store Publishing, 1990). This is a book I’d wanted to get my own copy of for years. And all the Steve Evans books of portraits of local people and verbatim texts of their lives. Beautiful local history project. People chose their context, their kitchen or dining room, by their shed or antique, with grandchildren or dog. A lot of plaid and names my dad mentioned. Ray Campbell from Forester’s Falls said of what old timers passed along,
Times have changed a lot in some senses but in other ways it hasn’t changed.[…] One old remedy to get a mother to take her calf is to put baby powder on the calf and the cow can’t scent the calf and she’ll make up with the calf. I never knew that. We tried it this spring and it worked.”
Gould, in an interview with Rob Taylor said,
And yes, I refer to dead cows. If you have livestock, you have deadstock. That was a bad run, losing three cows, but it happens. We have years when we don’t have any cows die but that was a tough year.
I see my love more clearly from a distance by Nora Gould (Brick, 2012) has a lot of euthanizing animals, sometimes with a gun, and a lot of injury and grisly pain. p. 65 “He said sit here to feed the baby, in the blue chair, that’s what it’s made for”
Cousin Matt […] brought Irving’s ashes here
in this kitchen where he spooned them into the urn.
The ashes spilled everywhere, like Irving did,
more volume than you’d expect.
We breathed him in, laughed as we brushed him
onto paper, funneled him in,
quiet as the wax melted for the seal.
There’s death but there’s none of the abstracts that poets usually cover the ground with. A phrase like “quiet as wax” takes it beyond the everyday speech. p52 “Prairie’s had a two-inch rain” ends with,
[…]Some nights I have no arms. His weight
on my inner thigh turns my femur to a crow
bar, opens me – my latch unsought.
Cotter-pinned, my body stirs.
It feels like I’d be anti-climatic to add anything more to that. Fresh. Strong. Vivid. Concretely grounded. Tough-minded and yet not impervious to spots of beauty.
20th-Century Poetry & Poetics, 5th Edition, edited by Gary Geddes (Oxford, 2006) comes from wanting to get some systemic survey instead of the scattered picking up on writers, when they come thru town, or when a promotional splash is on, or after the hue and cry of how essential someone is who never gets mentioned or quoted yet is foundational. I tend to like that which is not the middle of the road anthologized bit of a writer. ee cummings and WCW I never suspected as having written things of interest based on the usually cited poems but full collections appealed. I like primary sources but somehow read about rather than read. p. 78 has H.D.’s “Garden”
O rose, cut in rock,
hard as the descent of hail[…]
If I could break you
I could break a tree,
If I could stir
I could break a tree –
I could break you.
It seems fierce and maudlin whimper of an ending or a threat from nearly a century ago. Rose being something of love or because the plant rather than the blossom, of the origins, the context of love? It’s a turnoff so it’s hard for me to want to reach the meaning. The poem doesn’t give me enough to go on. I don’t really know what’s going on. But the rhythm is striking.
Pecking away at the poems and bios. Getting up to speed, driving in reverse. I wish this would help orient me to current writers but most seem to plough ahead without so much influence from the past. So much lineated prose autobiographies out there.
So what *do* I want from a poem? Not to be lectured at. Not to be agreed with. (If we both agree, one of us is redundant; except if we never agree why would we bother with each other.) I want to learn something, to be taken elsewhere as an insider, passed notes on significances that I wouldn’t have suspected. To raise my awareness. Newness. Bad men are bad, fearful things are scary, calm sure is, doesn’t get me anywhere except in time. I glaze over at drama. I glaze over at pretties.
I like plain speech. I like clever and metaphor and music but those alone without insight are baubles. I don’t particularly like to be moved. I don’t want to be told a story; just format it as prose so I can skip it. Nothing pretending to be innovative by messing with sense and syntax as if revolution. Marije Langelaar is almost there. It sidesteps usual story pattern except essentially it becomes an expected story, romantic personifying, or adultifying of an infant who remembers the womb when seeing the sparkle of salt water. This ending disturbs me. It is magical thinking. Nonsense that is just obviously ridiculous is delightful, so long as the speaker knows what they say is tongue in cheek, grounded in proper history or science. Relate things that will allow culture to carry forward something of compassion, comprehension or let it not have sense of emotion required of it, just an intuitive scratching towards something.
What then do I want? A list with surprises in it?
Conduit, fall/spring 2012, vol 1, issue 1 / Yes, Number 20, a split magazine issue. The history of Yes magazine from 1957-1970 was a fascinating read. Clear, articulate and engaging.
Peter Gibbon at the launch.
Edited by Peter Gibbon it opens with a quote from Milton Acorn,
To avoid legal fiddle-faddle which I couldn’t afford, and especially to strke a blow at Yankee Imperialism I did with the poems what I eventually intend to do with all my poems – declare them in the Public Domain.
Rachel and Cameron at the in/words new magazine launch.
The issue was an enjoyable morning and due for some re-reads to an uncommon degree. In it is Cameron Anstee’s poem “Some of the Reconciled” which includes the lines
the difference of a well weighted knife
the length of needle that enters the body
that knocked the breath out of me during his reading.
Rachel Simpson’s poem “Wild, Domestic” has a careful controlled step as well that reveals bit by bit over its length and goes to a close in a way that leaves no room for the smallest nit. An, Ah, so that’s why people write poems.
