The Dale Carnegie School of Poetry encapsulates what I dislike in poetry, or more generally, in people. The Dale Carnegie School of Public Speaking stated, say what you’ll say, say it and say you’ve said it. Presumably because repetition and simplicity equals comprehension.
The Dale Carnegie school of poetry is when a tone is set at the start of the poem, the poem expands or expounds on it and it ends with a one or two line reinforcement of the same as a moment of awww. It vexes me because it dawdles and goes no where unexpected. It bothers me because it is against my world view that life is complex and messy and of quick turnabouts. A poem if a model of the world is a revolution at the particle level. There’s a spin, a twist, an unexpected, perhaps even unaccounted for, trajectory. Not everything fits. It is not a linear narrative.
Perhaps this explains why I like haiku. It gets right down to the business of pivot and juxtaposing. It turns on itself. When I unconsciously get that one nostril curled up when I say the word narrative or lyric, I mean this sub-set of those where everything is boiled down to a sieved single flavour.
If the narrative goes along as lineated story-telling but then expands here and there to profound, it saves it in my mind. If what is added as a gesture comes justifiably from what was said before, and is not a tacked on obvious attempt to be profound, but a genuine-feeling eureka, and all that came before is changed in light of the new information, I can roll with that. There is revolution. The concrete become re-signified, this meets my criterion for satisfaction.
If the poet questions her or his own narrative, I can go with them, comfortable that they are sentient and critical-minded. If they dither on basking in their own emotional roller coaster, I want another ride. Emotional-junkie poetry that calls complaintsky indulgence, an expressive therapy is therapy that reinforces rather than transforms, then it just feels counterproductive to read or write. Something new must arise. It need not be salient or sense. It just can’t be the predictable. I’m overstocked in the predictable. I’m hard to impress for new. I frustrate myself with this.
When I first saw Niagara Falls, I was underwhelmed. When I saw mountains with my own eyes in person for the first time, I was disappointed. The same sort of thing happens with built-up award winning poetry. That’s it? I don’t get how others are so impressed. Are they being nice and encouraging or are genuinely blown away?
Am I too cynical? Expect too much? Am I being a brick-layer laying one dang brick after the last, or am I the bricklayer who has the vision to see that with hundreds of others over the decades, we are together making a great cultural treasure that will house people? One brick and one bricklayer is nothing but we are all part of something greater. Or am I just the person defacing the wall with a paint doodle?
If a whole collection seems spiffy, lines are enjambed freshly, words are considered, but beneath that, consuming more, there’s an underlying constancy I get uneasy. Is it just expounding in the same linear motion while dressed in dazzling ruffles, ribbons, grommets and colors array? I get the sensation of being shown the menu and the first is a pink aspic salmon. The next is a green aspic turtle. Then a series of tiny petit fours, except in aspic. And the picnic starts to get a bit grim.
Does a collection amount to a tone of self-pity, even if prettied up by arm’s length cynicism? Is all the humour dark as if there’s a dignity in never being truly sad nor lightly amused? All kinds of alarm bells go off in my head but I can’t hear them because I’m used to screening out the din of fire alarm tests.
But if I poem is an expression of a person, then a criticism of their expression is a criticism of the foundations of how they see the world, and not just a matter of the work? To remark on the point of view of the poem is to remark on the person. We must talk of the artistry and craft not the ideas. Not question where the wall was put, or that there be a need for a wall, just accept that a wall is a good thing and remark on how well the wall is doing.
Why must I always have revolution? Why do I find the dull so tiresome instead of finding comfort in the constructed stability? Why must I construct instability? Both are as riddled with false vision. If I mix it up and say something straight as an orator for copper-lobster mould sales, would I threaten myself so?
Do I think on some level that if I don’t make a miniature model of the world that somehow the world that it represents changes? Do I think that the world needs the prayers that imitate the shape I want the world to have in order to keep the shape it doesn’t have? What do I have vested in the idea that poems must be complex. Do I conflate that with intellectual rigour and a plain poem comes from a dumb mind? Was I called stupid that much of the time for the first 10 years that I will carry that fear of being taken for a fool as a resistance indefinitely? Or do I over-examine?

The new issue of 17 seconds an annual online journal of poetry and poetics, is now live with writing by Gregory Betts, Judith Copithorne, Amanda Earl, and Derek Beaulieu, and interviews of Stephanie Bolster and of myself.

How lovely to encounter poetry in transit. How sweet of them to be lacquered into a wall rather than a plastic sheet in a track that could just as easily swapped, and will be, for some ad for a charity or fast food.
I saw a poem by Wisława Szymborska, translated from Polish that I’d read in English not so long ago greeted the entrance to the train.
As I went along the wall, reading each, I gathered a retinue of people who stopped their brisk commuting walk. At one point 5 people stopped to read the poem I was reading. Heh, made you look. Somehow the gaze can rest longer and more safely on poetry than the other texts that insist with accompanying photoshop disasters in garish colors to buy a thing rather than buy into an idea.

A poem by Gaston Miron grabbed my funny bone and my truthy bone.

And then to see Nicole Brossard. Fancy meeting you here.
The familiar and the unfamiliar mixing like a crowd.
For more Le Printemps des Poètes and Écrits des Forges

A Monk’s Fine Robes: haiku sequence from Cambodia by Terry Ann Carter (leaf press, Canada, 2011)

hibiscus blossoms
girls paint their nails
for the tourists

There’s a compression and density, no filler line to be a vehicle for kigo. Each line works and expands to change the vantage point as you walk thru. Some of the poems in this collection have been in various magazines and anthologies and some won the Origami Crane contest.
grain, issue 38.4 (Summer, 2011, Canada), p. 21, Gary Barwin, 2 poems

All connections are pataphysical. All categories. Even the number two is one.

Something to stop in. We spend a good deal of time narrowing in on discerning this from that, categorizing even with a certain amount of conflating going against the current of seeing distinctions. Where to tether in relativism, in a quantum flux universe?
Killdeer by Phil Hall (BookThug, Canada, 2011), p. 39,

[…]a final symbolic knell in 1994 at the signing of the NAFTA agreement
Mulroney & Reagan singing together at the White House
(The windfall of Canadian literature in the ’60s & ’70s — was a crop from an already toppled tree)

The essays look back like memoirs in places but provide context for the broader than one person.
p. 27 but the one person is also broader than one.

I got a degree in writing –& I published a first book – way before writing became my compulsive practice.
Since then I have learned to always put the art before the course

lol, didn’t get that until I heard it aloud.
p. 28

[…] my snout also caught a glorious whiff of the death of my past
I thought I had killed off all that haunted me by writing well
I had written atrociously –& my doodling toward islands of repair – hadn’t even begun yet

How many times does that happen. Words as cement shoes and doff one hand with the other and walk away. And yet. The excellent achievement of words and it’s danderduff.
The Poetry of Men’s Lives: an International Anthology, edited by Fred Moramarco and Al Zolynas (University of Georgia Press, USA, 2004)
This is the second all-men’s anthology they have done. The editors in 1992 did an American only one called Men of Our Times. This men’s anthology has over 250 poets in translation from over 100 countries to tell the story of men, childhood, lives, loves, family, work, mentors and rivals and other categories, all arranged by region as well. Here an excerpt of p. 310 by Nobuo Ayukawa who emerged at Japan’s preeminent modernist writer following WWII, translated by Oketani Shogo and Leza Lowitz

[…] our discussion was limited
to our job histories and how many children we had.
Everyone had become his old age.
Someone took his medicine,
and night came so early […]
We had a nice conversation
and ate lunch cheerfully —
noon is a safe time.
On a day that smelled of rock and sky,
waves, sand,
and flowers
there was no place
to mourn.

p. 137 from Secret of Fire from Abdul Wahab al-Bayati starts off

On the last day
I kissed her hands,
Her eyes / her lips.
I said to her: you are now
Ripe like an apple
Half of you: a woman
The other half: impossible to describe.
The words
Escaped me
And I escaped them
Now I pray
Both of us collapsed.

Clear Light: haiku by Alan Spence (Canongate, Scotland, 2005)
p. 99

making tea
as if nothing
had happened

This Scottish poet has a clarity in the poems but there’s sediment rather than sentiment. They aren’t glossy simple poems. There are nods to what is excluded.
Some poets as they process experience into language put the experience thru the juice extractor, keep only nectar and throw away fibrous things. Some regulate experience and add filler to make it come to the level one wants. Some make miniature models keeping the original proportions and he seems to write more to that model.
p 113

after everything
the simple absolution
of the rain

The Literary Type interviews the editor of Arc, Katia Grubisic. Noteable quotables? “It kills me when would-be literature aficionados balk at buying books or mags—for likely less than the cost of the beer you’d drink at a launch.” “We are about to open our first fully electronic reading period on September 1, so what you see in the photo is the last “Still Life with Slush Pile.”