At this wonderful non-commercial poetry site called Ubu editions [pointed out by rob mclennan] there are pdfs of works that made ripples through poetry world, that are outstanding in their subset of modern styles that should be more widely read.
One of the links is to to The Relative Minor a book of 83 pages of poetry by Deanna Ferguson who is said to “manages the turn from the personal to the civic that is a hallmark of Kootenay School writing”.
I like that I have no idea what she’s talking about or what to do with it when I first see something. It gives me a headache and it prevents my scanning on from jist to jist.
I am forced to take my time in her use of word with ambiguous reading for meaning like tear in Cut Opinions
>cut opinions tear tasteful
>hungers huge ground swell
>partisan have-not thought
>green opinions hidden slide
>hub from sprung in
>weather yah
>bold erect tender
>perfect term transparent till
>I two minute topless formed
>A necessarily sorry sloppy strands
>hot opinions oh like an apple
>a lie, a liar kick back
>filial oh well hybrid opinions happen
>not stopped
I like her flit thru registers of talking about class thought which is relatively complex and then throw in “yah”. Folksy and formal against each other with non-standard grammar and “quiet-like” and (later) muskeg that aren’t usually permitted in poetry except to be placed in someone’s mouth as a quaint voice is brought to sit with hydrant or tyrant as equals in validity and same person.
>father was off, sent some notes though
>“go back and kill moose”
>he writ me, I didn’t writ him.
>snide hose slid under her seat quiet-like
>public made the ebb, and she rose, hydrant
>or tyrant Ascension.
It looks at history but not in archival language. The stories are historical but phrasing and laying on the page and parsing is all modern. She seems to swoon through her sounds
>chemistry pioneered the lured call
>of lavish not slavish
>smoothing out the appearance of lines from
>the moment optical diffuses
>focus features an invisible jewel, bringing to secret
>its remove from a cellophane-threaded stain
It builds a momentum but breaks itself deliberately with “wrong” parts of speech or unexpected turns of words.
>Skip Town
>function emulation does / as if a TV could grow / atop another, shearing / strain occurs body / subjected to shear stress /change of shape we /
yipped and whooped / for an alabaster rupture / at least to intervene / involuntarily I read / or sing along
I like also how the female isn’t exclusively present and isn’t invisible. There’s a politicalness without a preachiness. It gets an algabraic sort of net effect. a + b + c = 17. How did it get to 17? One has to go back and find out how she got that whole from those pieces.
>Only biography. Face as close (memory)
>An incident in the park called.
>Epoxy Police. Kid on the swing yells
>Ronnie scribbles, Ronnie enters a world
>embarrassed. The woman with glue left,
>indifferent to, and, doesn’t smoke, got away
>so to speak. Not a loose transcription but languaged
>events. The end pulled through and the distance
>allows telling. This not the business of telling
>but the ever expanding entering the world (middle).
Poetry response from this point to that:
funereal relief relives
kids pulls sticks from dad’s
jenga arguments just listen
both sturdy excuses said so
understanding fades in dye
sofa
no good not what they picked
dad by seat of pants,
discipline hope he hopes
lopes years as superman
can’t girl boy see he
ro
hard row to hoe
merrily verily say unto hymn
do church as I did
it is what I do
your age is stage not decade
steam palm drawn cotton
pickin minute mockery
marquetry of word
unmarked heard going faster
than light speed
in old rage they see father each

siren-wind catcalls
the building snowed in
pane rattles in frame
fire engine hooonnnnnnnnnnks
— bed that much warmer
Shelter, prompt of week 37
Link:
The spring issue is up of Modern English Tanka.
They are very different than traditional. A breath and a glance of becoming alert, senryu-like sometimes such as Linda Jeannette Ward’s tanka

I pull on a pair
of vintage kid gloves—
in a black fingertip
the prick
of somebody’s nail

Or from an earlier issue James Andrew Lockhart’s

listening—
bad news after bad news
on the radio . . .
Amazing Grace bleeds in
from another station

This form is headed in so many directions, from microfiction of Aurora Antonovic or Kozue Uzawa to meditation of Jean Leblanc, to fewer syllables than haiku in gardens of Engle, to modernist typset and turn of Larry Kimmel, to layered images of Fran Witham to comically anecdotal of M Kei and Jack Prewitt.

“Writing, then, becomes meditative in the sense that experiences are recalled, and then described, again, without inference or evaluation. Most of today’s haijin speak of a deep experience consisting of recall, reliving, composing, and revisiting and recomposing. ” — Ray Ramussen

Second time, the charm. I went on the waiting list on the library for Ken Babstock‘s Airstream Land Yacht once before and was away when it came it and they sent it back.

It’s worth the wait. I love the drifting at anchor through waves of registers and unexpected laps that somehow all work together. In a way it’s frenetic or calm, images cascading. I suppose it’s in how I take it, trying to watch each like my eyes following particular snow flakes or just marvel in the snowfall.

In a way it’s flowing and in a way detached and here and there, humorous, such as in So Hush a Mask of watching the images float thru one’s own brain while in the background there’s the guilty knowledge of struggle elsewhere.

placed the toe of one shoe
on the top of the other, which made me feel humble, a bit quaint,

as though I should be shelved next to pillows painted with ducks
and fisherwives smoking pipes
calved out of balsam. When another thought got ripe
I shooed it away before the smell hit.

It’s got a vividness to it. I wonder if each 14 or 15 line poem started out at as many pages and all the expected nodding bits were taken out.

I can’t yet work out my relationship to the words. Is it so well-wrought and so closed and tight that it is at Indy-500 speed and zinger polish? In a way I wonder if it’s mind candy, yet I enjoy it, such as the poem from the book The Nabokov-Wilson Letters

                 in the Kiwarthas, where we lit
Coleman camp stoves, stripped
                 in the river, and brought God near us.
The best lines of that stiff
                 correspondence we agreed
were Volodya’s.

I love the cheekiness of a person summoning God to come to a camping trip and sit as an equal around the campfire and the best speaker being not God the writer of Lolita. All the dissonance is amusing. All details are very specific to a time and place.

There’s the playfulness of images and contrasts. Language is concrete and simple but used to leverage enormous ideas and an ant colony of working details that amount to a call for action to wake up to political injustices.

There’s the sounds that more than entice. They are heady in Versification about immigrant labour and presumably middle class students trying a furrow, working hard although as outsiders, optional visitors to the vistas

…Watch what

the hands do: while sketched on the scrim
            between sleep and not, her thumb as infant
                        bats snurl into the pack that clings

                        to the flesh of her rising breast. Her eyelids
            want the field bisected, then want it magnified
or widened. We arrived one summer night

in the tobacco belt wearing bedrolls tied
            with twine, bailer twine, and slept
                        in an anachronistic ditch. Morning

                        shaved haze off the immigrant labour
            cattled on flatbeds that rumbled past
the quaintness of lettuce heads.

It feels wrong to nit because the way he says anything is spectacular. It’s a rush of a ride. But he isn’t going to change my mind on any issue or enlighten me but deepen directions I’m already going. Is that a useful message? Yes. To me? Hm.

I could learn a lot from mechanisms and structures but the assumptions of social conscience, of the tragedy of lower class and the blank apathy of the vast washed middle class…how will that sit with me long term.

In a way it is like someone’s about me profile saying
Hate : Hypocrites, smog, poverty and animal cruelty
Love : Music, peace, animals, ‘the good times’

Tell me you love smog and make me love it as well or spin music as a nefarious lucifer slight of hand and then I’m surprised. But with his surprising me line by line, why do I want more surprise? Which is more an answer to myself than to the work.

It’s a damned if you do or don’t sort of thing that I know I’m imposing onto the work. I have issues with overt agreement/alignment with my views and direct disgreement. One seems to have to be unrelated or obliquely different for me to be pleased which is an thing about me not about the work…Effect on what I take away from what his upshots are…If he talks about what I know and agree with, the consensus was reached before I arrived on scene and I don’t add anything, just get reinforced. Where my knowledge doesn’t overlap, I don’t know how to weight it. What fit there is between his and my sense of integrity… accuracy…. poetic licence… non-anal-impressionism? Because I know zilch about this person, (presumably because I’ve been living on the moon) I don’t know whether I can come away informed that “there’s a hotel in Oslo where Ibsen sat/for cognac/before yelling at the actors”, or was it somewhere else? Or was it that who reported that he was yelling was known for embellishing? Or it wasn’t Ibsen but that scanned well?

The answer to any of that is to read more of him. Which won’t be an onerous thing to do.

All you folks not living in Canada get a treat due to technology: the Max Middle Sound Project: now at YouTube, an exploration of sound and poetry, the first a throat drum reminiscent of monks, the second almost soundless and the third voices overlapping to choral, dissect oral and intersect words. What fun.