Wednesday, October 4, 2006, 7:00pm
Ottawa International Writers Festival
Library and Archives of Canada,
395 Wellington Street
Launch of 20005 winner, Melissa Upfold's chapbook, "Welcome to Beautiful San Ria"
Readings by honourable mentions and award recipient (to be announced at the reading)
Music by Andrea Simms-Karp of the Vanity Press
Free Admission
Contact Info: Amanda Earl
(613) 868-1364
editor@bywords.ca
www.bywords.ca
PO Box 937
Station B
Ottawa,On
K1P 5P9
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Retrospecticus for the Rest of Us
On the eve of my departure for Fredericton, NB., I'd like to express my thanks to those in the Ottawa literary circle who have welcomed and nurtured my creativity over the last few years.
I suppose it's a truism that the appraisals of any city's literary scene are as numerous as its literati, but if my experience is indicative, then Ottawa has boasting rights. I have found the scene vibrant and diverse, with nary a shortage of high-quality readings and other events. Perhaps more importantly, I've found a complete absence of snobbishness. The people are welcoming to newcomers like myself, which is the way it should be.
I'd like to say thank you to you everyone who has befriended and supported me, and especially to Seymour Mayne and rob mclennan, who have published, encouraged and given advice to me. If I have grown during my time in Ottawa, it is in no small measure due to the friendship and inspiration I received from these and other great writers, readers and publishers.
I suppose it's a truism that the appraisals of any city's literary scene are as numerous as its literati, but if my experience is indicative, then Ottawa has boasting rights. I have found the scene vibrant and diverse, with nary a shortage of high-quality readings and other events. Perhaps more importantly, I've found a complete absence of snobbishness. The people are welcoming to newcomers like myself, which is the way it should be.
I'd like to say thank you to you everyone who has befriended and supported me, and especially to Seymour Mayne and rob mclennan, who have published, encouraged and given advice to me. If I have grown during my time in Ottawa, it is in no small measure due to the friendship and inspiration I received from these and other great writers, readers and publishers.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
A special invitation to Poet's Hill
The Directors and Members of the Beechwood Cemetery Foundation and thePoet's Hill Committee are pleased to invite you to participate in the officialdedication of POET'S HILL on Wednesday, September 13, 2006, 5:00-7:00 p.m., at Beechwood Cemetery, 280 Beechwood Avenue. This free event will feature areading by the Parliamentary Poet Laureate, Pauline Michel. A reception will follow.
Beechwood is the resting place of many writers of national significance,including the poets Archibald Lampman and John Newlove. The dedication of Poet's Hill fulfills a vision first expressed by an Ottawa writer in 1896: "Itis about time that we in Canada should consider keeping alive the memories ofthe many men and women who, by their literary or other gifts, have added in somedegree to the development of our culture and intelligence. Should there not besome place in the Dominion--and what more fit place than Ottawa--where memorialsof them might be preserved?"
To confirm your attendance please call 613-741-9530. We look forward to seeing you at Poet's Hill.
Beechwood is the resting place of many writers of national significance,including the poets Archibald Lampman and John Newlove. The dedication of Poet's Hill fulfills a vision first expressed by an Ottawa writer in 1896: "Itis about time that we in Canada should consider keeping alive the memories ofthe many men and women who, by their literary or other gifts, have added in somedegree to the development of our culture and intelligence. Should there not besome place in the Dominion--and what more fit place than Ottawa--where memorialsof them might be preserved?"
To confirm your attendance please call 613-741-9530. We look forward to seeing you at Poet's Hill.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
a brief note on the poetry of Michael Dennis
If you can imagine, during the 1980s, poet Michael Dennis (who turns fifty years old in a couple of weeks) was easily the most published poet in Ottawa, with poems in over seven hundred magazines; the author of a whole slew of books and chapbooks over the years, including quarter on its edge (Fast Eddie Press, 1979), sometimes passion, sometimes pain (Ordinary Press, 1982), no saviour and no special grace (South Western Ontario Press, 1983), poems for jessica-flynn (Ottawa ON: Not One Cent of Subsidy Press, 1986), wayne gretzky in the house of the sleeping beauties (Toronto ON: Lowlife, 1987), fade to blue (Vancouver BC: Pulp Press, 1987), what we remember and what we forget (Hull QC: Bobo Press, 1993), missing the kisses of eloquence (Burnstown ON: General Store Publishing, 1994), the ongoing dilemma of small change (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1995) and what we pass over in silence (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1996), as well as the collection This Day Full of Promise: Poems Selected and New (Fredericton NB: cauldron books / Broken Jaw Press, 2001). As I wrote in the forward to the selected poems:
poem for Jessica-Flynn
the name Jessica-Flynn
came to me in a dream
it was to be the name
of our first born child
when I was living
with an actress of subtle
and magnificent beauty
when we finally broke up
it was not a question of love
our dreams no longer mattered
in the confusion and anger
that barely concealed our fear
the scariest part of the entire affair
was the knowing
that love hadn’t failed
that we still felt deeply and sincerely
about each other
but that it wasn’t enough
and that there was no way to share
what we had thought
would be an ideal life
there was no hope of ever having a child together
and with that loss no hope of ever having children
it would become a gamble too great to chance
a gamble I would never be brave enough to take
when we separated Jessica-Flynn died
as surely
as if she had been torn
from the womb (poems for jessica-flynn)
Recently, Dennis launched two collections with Toronto publisher LyricalMyrical (Dennis is their only non-Toronto author), a small publisher of poetry collections produced in part with covers from recycled hardcovers, the collection All Those Miles Yet To Go (2005), and Poems For Another Poetry Reading (2006). Both were launched during individual events at the video store / art gallery speace Invisible Cinema (appropriately enough, the location of Gallery 101 during the late 1980s and through the 1990s). Much less active in performing and publishing his work than he was twenty years ago, Dennis' poems are quieter than they used to be (as is Dennis, I'm sure), but still retain that ethereal quality of Southwestern Ontario folk he grew up in, working his roughneck past into his current and even future.
Short Order
the waitress's English
is much better
than my French
between the two of us
I get my deux oeufs
and over easy as well
it all comes
just
the way I want
of course
they have no
Coca-Cola, only Pepsi
during that part
of the conversation
the entire room
stops talking
and smoking
so as to better hear
what the crazy Englishman
might say next (Poems For Another Poetry Reading)
michael dennis' poems are rough & sexual & sometimes brutally sweet & honest, & have an integrity to them, much as he does. The line between dennis & his poetry is very thin, & follows the working class traditions of Charles Bukowski & Al Purdy, of hard living, & sometimes hard drinking. There are poems about Catherine the Great's sexual appetites, & about Fellini (that makes my skin crawl, still). There are poems about working, & hanging artwork, about Thor, god of fuck, & about michael being in love with his wife.Part of a group of Peterborough poets in the early 1980s with Dennis Tourbin, Riley Tench, Richard Harrison and Maggie Helwig (all but Harrison and Helwig eventually ended up in Ottawa), Dennis was a force during the years that he was reading and performing in Ottawa alongside Louis Cabri, Kate Van Dusen, Ronnie Brown, Deborah McMullen, George Young, Luba Szkambara, Paul Couillard, Louis Fagan, John Barton, Nadine McInnis, Susan McMaster, Colin Morton and plenty of others. As Maggie Helwig once wrote of Dennis' poetry in a review in Kingston's Quarry magazine (Volume 35, No. 4, fall 1986):
It was in michael dennis' poems that I first found reference to The Royal Oak Pub at Bank & MacLaren Streets, poems that mention drinking pints of toby. When I was twenty years old I took great comfort there, & did the same myself, making the bar my own, for years' worth of writing, knowing that a real writer whose work I admired had done it before me.
Consider "first you take her by the hand", from his third book, no saviour and no special grace. It is, basically, the story of a slightly bungled first kiss, which in the end is neither disastrous nor wonderful. The poem concludes:One of the frustrating aspects of Dennis' particular grouping of poets (he also spent time with a number of visual artists in and around Gallery 101, where Tourbin started hosting readings throughout his tenure in the 1980s) is that it somehow wasn’t strong enough or organized enough to publish it's own anthology of Ottawa poets, considering that Dennis wasn’t included in any of the collections at the time, including Colin Morton's Capital Poets (Ottawa ON: Oroborus, 1988), Heather Ferguson's Open Set: A TREE Anthology (Ottawa ON: Agawa Press, 1990), or Seymour Mayne's Six Ottawa Poets (ON: Mosaic, 1990), and far too roughneck to be part of Christopher Levenson's rather exclusive "Ottawa Poetry Group." Dennis' poetry is part of a plainer speech, almost part of an extended urban folk song, writing earthy and working class poems of going to work, being in love with his wife, and existing in the world on a day to day basis, and are important and even essential to hear read out loud by the author.
you still end up thinking
about how wonderful it should be
and how hard it might be
it is so strange how we long for the touch of skin
and how it frightens us
That is possibly banal. Or else it is quietly, profoundly telling us something about who we really are. After several readings, I think it is the latter. The curious phrase "how hard it might be" is easily misread; we are all expecting something like "how hard it is." That is not what the poem is talking about at all.
Dennis never explicitly speaks of the terrible human reflex that rejects the possibility of love, but it is one of the themes that runs through his work. The craving for love is present, the potential joy, as well as the tragedy of love's loss. These are familiar. But its not so common to write a poem entitled "it bothers me that skin can be so inviting," which calls our attention to the pain and even the anger we feel at "the invitations of skin." Perhaps only a strongly compassionate man can admit -- on behalf of us all -- how much he can wish to run away from love.
"There were never any books in the house when I was growing up," Dennis says. "Even if somebody somehow managed to bring a book in, it would disappear. It was like a black hole for print." The first books he read outside of school were novels by Harold Robbins. In eighth grade he went, for the first time, to a school that had a library. "It was like, where's all this stuff been? I was taking out four, five books a day." In twelfth grade, he heard a tape of Earle Birney reading "David." After that, he never wanted to do anything but be a poet.
It was about this time, too, that he met a teacher named Don Quarry. "When he found out I wanted to be a poet, every week he'd load me with these stacks of books -- Layton, Purdy, Atwood, Phyllis Webb, Margaret Avison; the basics, the core work -- and tell me to come back when I'd read them; and then we'd talk about them. I just wasn't aware that all this poetry was out there."
Poetry, then, is not something Dennis has ever been able to take for granted. There is an urgency in his attitude towards it that extends even to how a manuscript draft looks -- "Handwriting should be nice." In "how the poet thinks," from his fourth book, poems for jessica-flynn, he speaks of himself
hammering away
not making sense of the thing
but just pounding
to make sure i'm alive
poem for Jessica-Flynn
the name Jessica-Flynn
came to me in a dream
it was to be the name
of our first born child
when I was living
with an actress of subtle
and magnificent beauty
when we finally broke up
it was not a question of love
our dreams no longer mattered
in the confusion and anger
that barely concealed our fear
the scariest part of the entire affair
was the knowing
that love hadn’t failed
that we still felt deeply and sincerely
about each other
but that it wasn’t enough
and that there was no way to share
what we had thought
would be an ideal life
there was no hope of ever having a child together
and with that loss no hope of ever having children
it would become a gamble too great to chance
a gamble I would never be brave enough to take
when we separated Jessica-Flynn died
as surely
as if she had been torn
from the womb (poems for jessica-flynn)
Recently, Dennis launched two collections with Toronto publisher LyricalMyrical (Dennis is their only non-Toronto author), a small publisher of poetry collections produced in part with covers from recycled hardcovers, the collection All Those Miles Yet To Go (2005), and Poems For Another Poetry Reading (2006). Both were launched during individual events at the video store / art gallery speace Invisible Cinema (appropriately enough, the location of Gallery 101 during the late 1980s and through the 1990s). Much less active in performing and publishing his work than he was twenty years ago, Dennis' poems are quieter than they used to be (as is Dennis, I'm sure), but still retain that ethereal quality of Southwestern Ontario folk he grew up in, working his roughneck past into his current and even future.
Short Order
the waitress's English
is much better
than my French
between the two of us
I get my deux oeufs
and over easy as well
it all comes
just
the way I want
of course
they have no
Coca-Cola, only Pepsi
during that part
of the conversation
the entire room
stops talking
and smoking
so as to better hear
what the crazy Englishman
might say next (Poems For Another Poetry Reading)
Monday, August 07, 2006
“poem for a sad november” from aubade by rob mclennan: some notes
I should be offering a detailed look at the entire book, fresh off the presses by Broken Jaw Press, but I’ve chosen to dally with the long poem I find most striking, in a book of remarkable work. As a follower of mclennan’s poetry, I am noticing growth in his writing. He’s always experimented with form and language, and these poems are no exception, but I’m finding his newest work to be more lyrical, more personal than in the past. By publishing yearly, or in some cases even more often, he gives readers an opportunity rarely presented: to see the evolution of a writer’s work as it develops and as he is exposed to new influences on his writing. This year he already has another book out with British publisher Stride, called "name, an errant" plus the chapbook, Perth Flowers published by Nomados Press
mclennan excels in the long poem and the series. He’s often said that when he writes, he thinks in terms of longer poems rather than in terms of one moment, one poem.
There is something so intensely beautiful about this poem, that I keep coming back to it. Here are my thoughts on the poem, bearing in mind that all is up for grabs, that interpretation is subjective.
“poem for a sad november” is a love poem, a lament, which opens with a quote by American poet and blogger Ron Silliman: “The sky grows lighter before it starts to rain.” The quote informs the tone of the poem with tentative hope and the pessimism associated with the month of November and with a love unblossomed.
Kudos to Joe Blades of Broken Jaw Press for the design and layout of “aubade.” In the case of this particular poem, there is enough space for the spaces between, which is an important element of mclennan’s poetry. Any publisher who tries to crowd the words of this poet is doing the work a disservice.
The opening is two lines at the bottom of a page, with space between each line:
“the impedimentia of grey white on the street below
breath like ghosts, float white affront the mouth”
As always mclennan is a clever word player. Here he blends “impediment,” a hindrance or obstruction with “dementia,” deterioration of mental faculties.
The opening lines act as a preamble to the poem. Throughout the poem, the images of white, of breath, air and floating recur.
Each section is separated by asterices (aster ices), which, for me, given the white, evoke snowflakes. In a mclennan poem, every element, including the visual, is deliberate.
“how many winters will i sit thru
before the ease begins, hearts aplomb
& sacrifice of days thru heart / she speaks
/ she says & then she just wont say / says
i dont know / i dont know
abt this / she says / wont speak / & now
no messages in days / watch ice form
on the trees outside the window
each drop pools the alabaster window frame”
The question form in line one of this stanza evokes the lament. Think Scottish bagpipes, a dirge which starts slowly, has themes and variations and returns to the melody or refrain.
mclennan breaks apart the stanza at the beginning and at the end, interrupting November’s freezing rain with thoughts of “she.” The interruption is in the form of internal thought, a realistic rather than traditionally poetic representation, which is classic mclennan.
Once again we have the reference to the colour white: “alabaster,” a dense translucent, white gypsum or variety of hard calcite. He could have said “pooling in the frame,” which would have been more expected, but “pooling the frame” makes the reader question the image, and gives the idea of the drops of ice melting and pooling, as if softening the hard window frame.
Next stanza is one line separated by an asterix:
“new for me still then becomes”
This method of separating one line from other lines by isolating it into its own stanza, breaking phrases and reordering words is disorienting, a way of interrupting the flow, of forcing a careful read.
“the tempest
ask which ocean the wind shows / the storm
backs off to the sound of its name
west windows out into the point-of-yard / check
back only thru the eastern front door
/ where one is another / which way
pointed
nearly bought a snow shovel in calgary october
to put my lips out, mine out there
to hers in the warehouse mall
film & letter drop / break
& yellow circles navigate white spread”
More evocation of air and breath, this time a wind going from west to east. The very interesting notion of the storm backing off to the sound of its name makes one think of the power of naming things, naming love perhaps, a new love becomes a tempest. Here nature is interrupted by the description of a romantic tableau, but a twenty first century view of romanticism, a kiss in a warehouse mall.
Once more the image of white, this time broken by yellow circles, an image of light on the snow, echoing the opening quotation.
“so much of this the way of remembering
trickles and fragments / goes thru
aversion, in that / what had happened, or
plows push thru the street / melts
wet footprints clear the earth / visibly
streams of white pour over government smokestacks
/the bridge to hull / past bytown / by”
We’ve moved now back to Ottawa, with mentions of Hull and Bytown. Mclennan is an admirer of regional poetry, poetry of place and this is clear in his own work. He often makes mention of Ottawa, the city of his birth. If others are known for the prairie long poem, McLennan is becoming the Ottawa long poem specialist, or do we have to say the Central Canada long poem specialist?
This section is dreamlike, smoky, the image of white still prevalent. mclennan has included a lot of liquid imagery in this poem, and most particularly in this stanza, we have the trickle of memory, the melt of wet footprints. Once more there is a clearing, an attempt to plow away all this yearning. Mclennan is emotional without being sappy. He uses the force of language and imagery to convey emotion.
“make out where we beseech the world
& long for beautiful days
the treacheries of the day-to-day / & green earth
peat moss bog beneath the understep
& swallows, whole / sentimentality
& pale descriptions / airplanes
circle the earth like stars / satellite
& rocket fuel commence / small parcels
& arrive in even smaller positions
the one chair where my mother sits / & wont
be moved”
The mention here of “treacheries” in reference to the day-to-day is an effective juxtaposition. Day-to-day is usually just ordinary stuff, how can it betray, how it is unfaithful? The feel of green earth under one’s feet is a lie in November. The longing is here once more, for “beautiful days.” Yet descriptions are pale, sentimentality is swallowed whole. Still mclennan pens a lyric of hope where airplanes circle like stars.
This technique of going from the wide circle of an airplane’s swatch to the small movement of a mother in a chair who won’t be moved is brilliant. Somehow the non-movement of the mother seems harder to understand, harder to accept, given that airplanes can circle the earth like stars. The poem feels very personal and the reader develops an intimate sense of the narrator as the poem moves forward. This is something that is difficult to accomplish in a short poem.
“look at me now, o mother, what have
i become
if you dont have it, you dont
need it / requiem
for sour grapes / to justify
five spaces left”
Interesting mention of a requiem here, a mass for someone who has died, or a music composition for the deceased, a hymn. This works well with the whole idea of this poem as a lament. The use of the interjection “O” is very much part of a lament, but not something one typically finds in a mclennan poem. O can be an interjection and it can also appear as a zero in print.
“corona down the macrolevel of a
novel spent overwritten on the trees / crack
ice or air she culls it, glass en français,
glace / not wrong but one language overlay
the other
beautiful & binary, irregular and dangerous”
Binary is the idea of something consisting of two parts. There’s the mention of ice once more, and the connection between glass and ice. The poem is covered with a layer of glass. The structure of the poem is binary also, beneath the weather layer, is a personal layer where lost love and family are lamented, in a twenty first century version of the pathetic fallacy.
There’s some delicious sound play here: the repetition of hard c in corona, crack culls, a hardening of the layers, but also a fracture, a crack of ice and glass.
“this lyrical twoness—breaks apart
distinction of the heart & beauty myth,
binary / yang / ying that completes the
hidden circle / i miss you
like alberta moisture, dry snow
so wet & cold & damp
sung deep in the bones”
With an abstract start to this section through references once again to the binary and to the philosophical yin/yang, the sudden “I miss you” packs an emotional wallup, touches the reader, then it goes on with an unusual simile, a bit of dry wit “alberta moisture, dry snow” and then back to another emotional punch “so wet & cold & damp / sung deep in the bones.” This is another example of the ability of the writer to juxtapose nature with the personal, abstraction with emotion. This ability is what gives mclennan’s poems their memorability. You don’t forget lines like these and the emotions they conjure up.
“presents a reasoning for this cold november
more than seasonal heat & lack thereof
prevents a making of
stone cold soup / hydraulic sage
& microwave blaze / old
radiation-king / & roommate
argues with her boyfriend, screams
thru the wall a desire that has not been spent”
The precision of the details here, the attention to sound in the long a of sage and blaze, and the close observations of the narrator make this section very poignant. You know what he means when he talks about a woman who screams a desire not spent. The idea of the doubling is still here, perhaps the doubling of the narrator and the woman with unspent desire.
“characterizing all spring rhythm—beat march
rapids & tripping, almost
liquid food / falls the gait
of desperation breathing thru
quiet anxieties / of snow
& liquid turnd to ice/ persistent chill
& heartbeats collapsing from the wait
/ the disappearance marks itself
/from beneath itself / an imprint”
Just stop here and admire the lovely imagery: “quiet anxieties / of snow” and the double entendre: “heartbeats collapsing from the wait.” Once again the imagery of snow, air and breath, liquid and disappearance. The repetition of these images throughout the poem reinforces this poem as a lament, provides a structure for the poem. In the previous section, mclennan has linked the ongoing winter to the “I miss you,” so that now all he needs mention is the persistent chill and there’s a metonymic representation of absence through the reference to snow.
“the dissolute warmth the body recalls
from seasons past / grasping arms / long
fingers pull closer
defensive moves/ turns strength
against itself
an open letter purporting / to be”
Here we have the sensuousness of warmth after the cold lament of snow, but its much more abstract than the previous sections, almost blank in its starkness with references to the body, grasping arms and fingers that pull closer. There’s a kind of depersonalization of the memory here.
“dont make much out of a spiritual crisis
/it happens all the time, to enter
the mind of the speaker
amid speech / & warm
summer
that sort of piety / a theory
of absolutes doesnt wash
take out of the rain / dissolves”
There’s a feeling of washing clean in this section as if the narrator tries to talk himself out of the emotions through intellectualization. Rain washes everything away. There are occasional religious references in the poem. Here we have the notion of piety and absolutes.
“no one knows what other accumulations exist
lie beside the phone / pretending
to flip channels / space heat red
glow out into presumptiveness & pro
:creation myths and syllabus / to know
the name, look up the number / twelve
hours pass by fruitlessly / an orange”
This section has the feel of time stretched out waiting. Colours are no longer white but red and orange, but the heat isn’t real, it’s artificial. mclennan plays with words once more here, breaks up the word procreation, in order to have a doubling once more: procreation and creation myths, the sophistry of having to know a number to find a name. All these details add up to the absurdity of waiting for the cold November to pass, for the love to come to fruition.
“to act, air
of days pass
blood ghazals
& stealing breath”
This short section repeats the motif of air. Ghazals are created out of blood, out of stealing breath. What is created from raw emotion.
“the first poem to synchronize swim
lake winnipeg &
the ottawa river
what saint gregory
called angels, angles
in flesh”
Here is an example of mclennan’s playing with conventional concepts to turn them on their heads. Be wary of swimming too deeply in literal waters with a mclennan poem. Just enjoy this, think of the concept of doubling. There’s another doubling in this poem highlighted by the mention of Lake Winnipeg and the Ottawa River, and that’s the references to both the Prairies and to Ottawa.
Angels are a theme that runs throughout the poems of “aubade” starting from the front and back cover paintings to direct references in the poems. There’s also word play of angels with angles, the whole reference an allusion to the story of Pope Gregory.
“spills coffee across the sheets of this page
& eighty-eight keys, piano forte
a life lived solely for 80s new wave”
There’s such a surrealistic feel to this poem. It meanders. In this section, we see once again the self-referentiality of the speaker to the poem being written. Throughout the poem there are references to the process of writing poetry.
mclennan’s poems often contain references to pop culture, to the era he’s living in. In this case a reference to 80s new wave music is a common feature of a mclennan poem. While some think it’s not a good idea to include popular culture in a literary work, mclennan has never shied away from referencing it as a deliberate force that informs his writing.
“this innocent movement, what stylistic body incarnates
the dimension of the poem? the self-consciously
constructed on the heavenly number seven,
conventional ingredient of the perfect rhythm,
first syllabic, of the fact always in
the only significant pause. oh, there
little aesthetic shocks. gets between
the blanket & her warm thighs.”
More specific reference to poem process, to perfection. There’s a link between the rhythm of poetry and the eroticism of “her warm thighs.” This small tableau is highly sensual. Even the interruption and the punctuation reflect the sensuality of the moment.
“from these intrepid movements where we contradict
get ephemeral / say one thing & say another
/you dont say / rain washes frozen boots
awash in verbatim / phone rings
in triplicate: forms an office cubicle & es
cape / ism / fear
forms out of popsicle sticks / kids craft
from glue & hot summer mornings, long gone”
More word play here, more seemingly free associations. There’s a “we” here suddenly, a reiteration of the cold weather still in existence juxtaposed with thoughts of summer.
Quite a few of the sections have a specific structure with a single opening line, two stanzas and a final closing line. There are some lovely images here: frozen boots/awash in verbatim, fear forming out of popsicle sticks. The treacheries of the day-to-day once more evoked. Word play once more, taking a cliché phrase and playing with it: say one thing and say another. mclennan has fun in this poem, plays with language, with concepts and with images, leading to images that resonate beautifully. There’s a poetry to letting go.
“& second vision of a staid perplexity
hunkers in: waits for slow fattening & sleep
disappears from view, we disappear from those
/ there i go again
plant body firm into bedsheets & slow mercy
of eventual snowfall / where
the heat includes / wont leave
: goes back off like a threat
made up in a dust storm”
We’re back to the artificial heat again, not quite real yet. Dust storms, dust when the heater hasn’t been used in a long time. Heat where there hasn’t been any in a long time. He says so much. You know what he means when he refers to the “slow mercy of eventual snowfall.” November is an in-between month. The poem reflects this so well.
“interplay of movement, love
final decision, “suicide is a last resort”,
pathologists, etc / the funeral
on the day he would be twelve / news photos
of him in a cub scout uniform / promoting
strange brotherhood / or the eight-year old
who shoots a neighbour / birthing
a generation of potential killers
waits for me to turn my back before leaving”
More doubling here, talk of love interrupted by mention of the suicide of a child on the verge of adolescence, an eight-year old who murders. All of this heartbreaking stuff we hear on the news, read in the papers. Perhaps once again a part of the treacheries of the day-to-day.
“were it only so
its own positioning
or posit
of the end result
& seeks out valuables
not something that can be
turned off / or
decided against / my mother
puts the soup on / says
turn the radio off”
I like the juxtapostion here of on / off and soup on / radio off.
“sets out into division of labour
lovers lost, dont know where it
got away / puts up periscope / looks
for unknown shores but comes back short
/ i dont know when this all began
to wither”
The idea of the periscope is interesting here, of being below, in some kind of submerged space, finally looking out, but submerging once more. The writing of poems can be an attempt to emerge from a small space.
Wither is to dry up, to lose moisture. This evokes the earlier “i miss you / like alberta moisture” for me.
“into this shadow of doubt, where it
began
two pigeons feed on bank street / symphonies
stolen from under our noses / kate refuses
board games for cd-roms, doesnt know
a single game of cards / holed up
roses
despite everything i still mailed the package
/ those letters
television introduces divorce court: new season”
More mention of Ottawa locations, personal references and popular culture and the lament continues: “despite everything I still mailed the package / those letters.”
The idea of a couple is conveyed: not one or three pigeons feeding, but two, divorce court. Symphonies, something beautiful, is stolen.” Once more the idea of being holed up returns.
“when will love come home / or was
it ever”
Short section in form of question on love is reminiscent of the opening “how many winters will I sit thru / before the ease begins.”
“tongue licks lips to whistle”
Another short one line section, poignant in its simplicity and sound play.
“the days are supposed to get better, not worse
hold off any decisions until next week
someone is waiting patient for your call
possible words explode in the matter
the big bang had to release from something else
gateway is not a word i understand
not all in the universe divisible by tens”
Sad despair is the overriding tone of this long poem and it’s expressed with clarity and straight-forwardness here. At times mclennan is a master of ambiguity. Here there is no mistaking the words, no word play, just a straight statement of despair, making it all the more effective and emotional.
“love is no longer a plausible standard,
known quantity
_______________gets in the way of our selves”
A nifty way of including everything, the ___________. The unknown of love can also relate back to the big bang of the previous section, it has to come from somewhere.
“not so much artful as
inevitable. a sequence
of diminishing numbers. & days
the roof falls in on . dogs
bark at trees . squirrels
collide . stay away from
//// a burning building, love love
beams collapse and bury the basement”
The images go from every day nature to conflict to disaster. There’s a fatalism in these words. Love is inevitable, but the beams of the house collapse, and bury the basement, another reference to something below.
& day of the dark sun, arrived
just before rain & snow, a little bit
of light”
A reworking of the Silliman quote used at the beginning of the poem, the juxtaposition of light with darkness: the dark sun.
“as deliberate as greek or latin
melts, back with time, tho
never enough
what can be done with the line”
The whole poem deals in some way or another with the inevitability of time and mortality. We’re starting to see a return to mentions of melting and winter again, as the poem draws to a close.
“how many times
do i have to say
before you believe it
before it starts to matter
persephone assails the
welcome mat / & locks
the door to the cave / behind her”
Another reference to the underground, this one a mythological one, but a fresh look, a cave with a welcome mat and a door the seduced woman can lock to keep her lover in or out or to keep others out?
“love is a strange thing / it eats
away the mind /demented
cache of despondency & hurt
in a time of / take & wake”
This packs a powerful emotional punch, the sadness of love. “Take and wake” is a rather brilliant way of describing the casual affair.
“cold air breathing thru the house”
Final section of the poem, one line, back to the beginning, the cold air that never really goes away, the perpetual feeling of absence.
I like this poem. I like the reiteration of imagery and theme throughout, the jumble of every day influences, the raw emotion of it, the clever word play, the humour and occasional biting wit. It builds up in intensity, yet at the same time conjures up the feeling of being emprisoned by November, a sad month of in between.
It is my understanding that the launch for “aubade” will take place in October. The book is available through Broken Jaw Press and if you happen to see him, you might be able to acquire a copy through rob.
mclennan excels in the long poem and the series. He’s often said that when he writes, he thinks in terms of longer poems rather than in terms of one moment, one poem.
There is something so intensely beautiful about this poem, that I keep coming back to it. Here are my thoughts on the poem, bearing in mind that all is up for grabs, that interpretation is subjective.
“poem for a sad november” is a love poem, a lament, which opens with a quote by American poet and blogger Ron Silliman: “The sky grows lighter before it starts to rain.” The quote informs the tone of the poem with tentative hope and the pessimism associated with the month of November and with a love unblossomed.
Kudos to Joe Blades of Broken Jaw Press for the design and layout of “aubade.” In the case of this particular poem, there is enough space for the spaces between, which is an important element of mclennan’s poetry. Any publisher who tries to crowd the words of this poet is doing the work a disservice.
The opening is two lines at the bottom of a page, with space between each line:
“the impedimentia of grey white on the street below
breath like ghosts, float white affront the mouth”
As always mclennan is a clever word player. Here he blends “impediment,” a hindrance or obstruction with “dementia,” deterioration of mental faculties.
The opening lines act as a preamble to the poem. Throughout the poem, the images of white, of breath, air and floating recur.
Each section is separated by asterices (aster ices), which, for me, given the white, evoke snowflakes. In a mclennan poem, every element, including the visual, is deliberate.
“how many winters will i sit thru
before the ease begins, hearts aplomb
& sacrifice of days thru heart / she speaks
/ she says & then she just wont say / says
i dont know / i dont know
abt this / she says / wont speak / & now
no messages in days / watch ice form
on the trees outside the window
each drop pools the alabaster window frame”
The question form in line one of this stanza evokes the lament. Think Scottish bagpipes, a dirge which starts slowly, has themes and variations and returns to the melody or refrain.
mclennan breaks apart the stanza at the beginning and at the end, interrupting November’s freezing rain with thoughts of “she.” The interruption is in the form of internal thought, a realistic rather than traditionally poetic representation, which is classic mclennan.
Once again we have the reference to the colour white: “alabaster,” a dense translucent, white gypsum or variety of hard calcite. He could have said “pooling in the frame,” which would have been more expected, but “pooling the frame” makes the reader question the image, and gives the idea of the drops of ice melting and pooling, as if softening the hard window frame.
Next stanza is one line separated by an asterix:
“new for me still then becomes”
This method of separating one line from other lines by isolating it into its own stanza, breaking phrases and reordering words is disorienting, a way of interrupting the flow, of forcing a careful read.
“the tempest
ask which ocean the wind shows / the storm
backs off to the sound of its name
west windows out into the point-of-yard / check
back only thru the eastern front door
/ where one is another / which way
pointed
nearly bought a snow shovel in calgary october
to put my lips out, mine out there
to hers in the warehouse mall
film & letter drop / break
& yellow circles navigate white spread”
More evocation of air and breath, this time a wind going from west to east. The very interesting notion of the storm backing off to the sound of its name makes one think of the power of naming things, naming love perhaps, a new love becomes a tempest. Here nature is interrupted by the description of a romantic tableau, but a twenty first century view of romanticism, a kiss in a warehouse mall.
Once more the image of white, this time broken by yellow circles, an image of light on the snow, echoing the opening quotation.
“so much of this the way of remembering
trickles and fragments / goes thru
aversion, in that / what had happened, or
plows push thru the street / melts
wet footprints clear the earth / visibly
streams of white pour over government smokestacks
/the bridge to hull / past bytown / by”
We’ve moved now back to Ottawa, with mentions of Hull and Bytown. Mclennan is an admirer of regional poetry, poetry of place and this is clear in his own work. He often makes mention of Ottawa, the city of his birth. If others are known for the prairie long poem, McLennan is becoming the Ottawa long poem specialist, or do we have to say the Central Canada long poem specialist?
This section is dreamlike, smoky, the image of white still prevalent. mclennan has included a lot of liquid imagery in this poem, and most particularly in this stanza, we have the trickle of memory, the melt of wet footprints. Once more there is a clearing, an attempt to plow away all this yearning. Mclennan is emotional without being sappy. He uses the force of language and imagery to convey emotion.
“make out where we beseech the world
& long for beautiful days
the treacheries of the day-to-day / & green earth
peat moss bog beneath the understep
& swallows, whole / sentimentality
& pale descriptions / airplanes
circle the earth like stars / satellite
& rocket fuel commence / small parcels
& arrive in even smaller positions
the one chair where my mother sits / & wont
be moved”
The mention here of “treacheries” in reference to the day-to-day is an effective juxtaposition. Day-to-day is usually just ordinary stuff, how can it betray, how it is unfaithful? The feel of green earth under one’s feet is a lie in November. The longing is here once more, for “beautiful days.” Yet descriptions are pale, sentimentality is swallowed whole. Still mclennan pens a lyric of hope where airplanes circle like stars.
This technique of going from the wide circle of an airplane’s swatch to the small movement of a mother in a chair who won’t be moved is brilliant. Somehow the non-movement of the mother seems harder to understand, harder to accept, given that airplanes can circle the earth like stars. The poem feels very personal and the reader develops an intimate sense of the narrator as the poem moves forward. This is something that is difficult to accomplish in a short poem.
“look at me now, o mother, what have
i become
if you dont have it, you dont
need it / requiem
for sour grapes / to justify
five spaces left”
Interesting mention of a requiem here, a mass for someone who has died, or a music composition for the deceased, a hymn. This works well with the whole idea of this poem as a lament. The use of the interjection “O” is very much part of a lament, but not something one typically finds in a mclennan poem. O can be an interjection and it can also appear as a zero in print.
“corona down the macrolevel of a
novel spent overwritten on the trees / crack
ice or air she culls it, glass en français,
glace / not wrong but one language overlay
the other
beautiful & binary, irregular and dangerous”
Binary is the idea of something consisting of two parts. There’s the mention of ice once more, and the connection between glass and ice. The poem is covered with a layer of glass. The structure of the poem is binary also, beneath the weather layer, is a personal layer where lost love and family are lamented, in a twenty first century version of the pathetic fallacy.
There’s some delicious sound play here: the repetition of hard c in corona, crack culls, a hardening of the layers, but also a fracture, a crack of ice and glass.
“this lyrical twoness—breaks apart
distinction of the heart & beauty myth,
binary / yang / ying that completes the
hidden circle / i miss you
like alberta moisture, dry snow
so wet & cold & damp
sung deep in the bones”
With an abstract start to this section through references once again to the binary and to the philosophical yin/yang, the sudden “I miss you” packs an emotional wallup, touches the reader, then it goes on with an unusual simile, a bit of dry wit “alberta moisture, dry snow” and then back to another emotional punch “so wet & cold & damp / sung deep in the bones.” This is another example of the ability of the writer to juxtapose nature with the personal, abstraction with emotion. This ability is what gives mclennan’s poems their memorability. You don’t forget lines like these and the emotions they conjure up.
“presents a reasoning for this cold november
more than seasonal heat & lack thereof
prevents a making of
stone cold soup / hydraulic sage
& microwave blaze / old
radiation-king / & roommate
argues with her boyfriend, screams
thru the wall a desire that has not been spent”
The precision of the details here, the attention to sound in the long a of sage and blaze, and the close observations of the narrator make this section very poignant. You know what he means when he talks about a woman who screams a desire not spent. The idea of the doubling is still here, perhaps the doubling of the narrator and the woman with unspent desire.
“characterizing all spring rhythm—beat march
rapids & tripping, almost
liquid food / falls the gait
of desperation breathing thru
quiet anxieties / of snow
& liquid turnd to ice/ persistent chill
& heartbeats collapsing from the wait
/ the disappearance marks itself
/from beneath itself / an imprint”
Just stop here and admire the lovely imagery: “quiet anxieties / of snow” and the double entendre: “heartbeats collapsing from the wait.” Once again the imagery of snow, air and breath, liquid and disappearance. The repetition of these images throughout the poem reinforces this poem as a lament, provides a structure for the poem. In the previous section, mclennan has linked the ongoing winter to the “I miss you,” so that now all he needs mention is the persistent chill and there’s a metonymic representation of absence through the reference to snow.
“the dissolute warmth the body recalls
from seasons past / grasping arms / long
fingers pull closer
defensive moves/ turns strength
against itself
an open letter purporting / to be”
Here we have the sensuousness of warmth after the cold lament of snow, but its much more abstract than the previous sections, almost blank in its starkness with references to the body, grasping arms and fingers that pull closer. There’s a kind of depersonalization of the memory here.
“dont make much out of a spiritual crisis
/it happens all the time, to enter
the mind of the speaker
amid speech / & warm
summer
that sort of piety / a theory
of absolutes doesnt wash
take out of the rain / dissolves”
There’s a feeling of washing clean in this section as if the narrator tries to talk himself out of the emotions through intellectualization. Rain washes everything away. There are occasional religious references in the poem. Here we have the notion of piety and absolutes.
“no one knows what other accumulations exist
lie beside the phone / pretending
to flip channels / space heat red
glow out into presumptiveness & pro
:creation myths and syllabus / to know
the name, look up the number / twelve
hours pass by fruitlessly / an orange”
This section has the feel of time stretched out waiting. Colours are no longer white but red and orange, but the heat isn’t real, it’s artificial. mclennan plays with words once more here, breaks up the word procreation, in order to have a doubling once more: procreation and creation myths, the sophistry of having to know a number to find a name. All these details add up to the absurdity of waiting for the cold November to pass, for the love to come to fruition.
“to act, air
of days pass
blood ghazals
& stealing breath”
This short section repeats the motif of air. Ghazals are created out of blood, out of stealing breath. What is created from raw emotion.
“the first poem to synchronize swim
lake winnipeg &
the ottawa river
what saint gregory
called angels, angles
in flesh”
Here is an example of mclennan’s playing with conventional concepts to turn them on their heads. Be wary of swimming too deeply in literal waters with a mclennan poem. Just enjoy this, think of the concept of doubling. There’s another doubling in this poem highlighted by the mention of Lake Winnipeg and the Ottawa River, and that’s the references to both the Prairies and to Ottawa.
Angels are a theme that runs throughout the poems of “aubade” starting from the front and back cover paintings to direct references in the poems. There’s also word play of angels with angles, the whole reference an allusion to the story of Pope Gregory.
“spills coffee across the sheets of this page
& eighty-eight keys, piano forte
a life lived solely for 80s new wave”
There’s such a surrealistic feel to this poem. It meanders. In this section, we see once again the self-referentiality of the speaker to the poem being written. Throughout the poem there are references to the process of writing poetry.
mclennan’s poems often contain references to pop culture, to the era he’s living in. In this case a reference to 80s new wave music is a common feature of a mclennan poem. While some think it’s not a good idea to include popular culture in a literary work, mclennan has never shied away from referencing it as a deliberate force that informs his writing.
“this innocent movement, what stylistic body incarnates
the dimension of the poem? the self-consciously
constructed on the heavenly number seven,
conventional ingredient of the perfect rhythm,
first syllabic, of the fact always in
the only significant pause. oh, there
little aesthetic shocks. gets between
the blanket & her warm thighs.”
More specific reference to poem process, to perfection. There’s a link between the rhythm of poetry and the eroticism of “her warm thighs.” This small tableau is highly sensual. Even the interruption and the punctuation reflect the sensuality of the moment.
“from these intrepid movements where we contradict
get ephemeral / say one thing & say another
/you dont say / rain washes frozen boots
awash in verbatim / phone rings
in triplicate: forms an office cubicle & es
cape / ism / fear
forms out of popsicle sticks / kids craft
from glue & hot summer mornings, long gone”
More word play here, more seemingly free associations. There’s a “we” here suddenly, a reiteration of the cold weather still in existence juxtaposed with thoughts of summer.
Quite a few of the sections have a specific structure with a single opening line, two stanzas and a final closing line. There are some lovely images here: frozen boots/awash in verbatim, fear forming out of popsicle sticks. The treacheries of the day-to-day once more evoked. Word play once more, taking a cliché phrase and playing with it: say one thing and say another. mclennan has fun in this poem, plays with language, with concepts and with images, leading to images that resonate beautifully. There’s a poetry to letting go.
“& second vision of a staid perplexity
hunkers in: waits for slow fattening & sleep
disappears from view, we disappear from those
/ there i go again
plant body firm into bedsheets & slow mercy
of eventual snowfall / where
the heat includes / wont leave
: goes back off like a threat
made up in a dust storm”
We’re back to the artificial heat again, not quite real yet. Dust storms, dust when the heater hasn’t been used in a long time. Heat where there hasn’t been any in a long time. He says so much. You know what he means when he refers to the “slow mercy of eventual snowfall.” November is an in-between month. The poem reflects this so well.
“interplay of movement, love
final decision, “suicide is a last resort”,
pathologists, etc / the funeral
on the day he would be twelve / news photos
of him in a cub scout uniform / promoting
strange brotherhood / or the eight-year old
who shoots a neighbour / birthing
a generation of potential killers
waits for me to turn my back before leaving”
More doubling here, talk of love interrupted by mention of the suicide of a child on the verge of adolescence, an eight-year old who murders. All of this heartbreaking stuff we hear on the news, read in the papers. Perhaps once again a part of the treacheries of the day-to-day.
“were it only so
its own positioning
or posit
of the end result
& seeks out valuables
not something that can be
turned off / or
decided against / my mother
puts the soup on / says
turn the radio off”
I like the juxtapostion here of on / off and soup on / radio off.
“sets out into division of labour
lovers lost, dont know where it
got away / puts up periscope / looks
for unknown shores but comes back short
/ i dont know when this all began
to wither”
The idea of the periscope is interesting here, of being below, in some kind of submerged space, finally looking out, but submerging once more. The writing of poems can be an attempt to emerge from a small space.
Wither is to dry up, to lose moisture. This evokes the earlier “i miss you / like alberta moisture” for me.
“into this shadow of doubt, where it
began
two pigeons feed on bank street / symphonies
stolen from under our noses / kate refuses
board games for cd-roms, doesnt know
a single game of cards / holed up
roses
despite everything i still mailed the package
/ those letters
television introduces divorce court: new season”
More mention of Ottawa locations, personal references and popular culture and the lament continues: “despite everything I still mailed the package / those letters.”
The idea of a couple is conveyed: not one or three pigeons feeding, but two, divorce court. Symphonies, something beautiful, is stolen.” Once more the idea of being holed up returns.
“when will love come home / or was
it ever”
Short section in form of question on love is reminiscent of the opening “how many winters will I sit thru / before the ease begins.”
“tongue licks lips to whistle”
Another short one line section, poignant in its simplicity and sound play.
“the days are supposed to get better, not worse
hold off any decisions until next week
someone is waiting patient for your call
possible words explode in the matter
the big bang had to release from something else
gateway is not a word i understand
not all in the universe divisible by tens”
Sad despair is the overriding tone of this long poem and it’s expressed with clarity and straight-forwardness here. At times mclennan is a master of ambiguity. Here there is no mistaking the words, no word play, just a straight statement of despair, making it all the more effective and emotional.
“love is no longer a plausible standard,
known quantity
_______________gets in the way of our selves”
A nifty way of including everything, the ___________. The unknown of love can also relate back to the big bang of the previous section, it has to come from somewhere.
“not so much artful as
inevitable. a sequence
of diminishing numbers. & days
the roof falls in on . dogs
bark at trees . squirrels
collide . stay away from
//// a burning building, love love
beams collapse and bury the basement”
The images go from every day nature to conflict to disaster. There’s a fatalism in these words. Love is inevitable, but the beams of the house collapse, and bury the basement, another reference to something below.
& day of the dark sun, arrived
just before rain & snow, a little bit
of light”
A reworking of the Silliman quote used at the beginning of the poem, the juxtaposition of light with darkness: the dark sun.
“as deliberate as greek or latin
melts, back with time, tho
never enough
what can be done with the line”
The whole poem deals in some way or another with the inevitability of time and mortality. We’re starting to see a return to mentions of melting and winter again, as the poem draws to a close.
“how many times
do i have to say
before you believe it
before it starts to matter
persephone assails the
welcome mat / & locks
the door to the cave / behind her”
Another reference to the underground, this one a mythological one, but a fresh look, a cave with a welcome mat and a door the seduced woman can lock to keep her lover in or out or to keep others out?
“love is a strange thing / it eats
away the mind /demented
cache of despondency & hurt
in a time of / take & wake”
This packs a powerful emotional punch, the sadness of love. “Take and wake” is a rather brilliant way of describing the casual affair.
“cold air breathing thru the house”
Final section of the poem, one line, back to the beginning, the cold air that never really goes away, the perpetual feeling of absence.
I like this poem. I like the reiteration of imagery and theme throughout, the jumble of every day influences, the raw emotion of it, the clever word play, the humour and occasional biting wit. It builds up in intensity, yet at the same time conjures up the feeling of being emprisoned by November, a sad month of in between.
It is my understanding that the launch for “aubade” will take place in October. The book is available through Broken Jaw Press and if you happen to see him, you might be able to acquire a copy through rob.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
a brief note on Rhonda Douglas
Recently, Ottawa poet Rhonda Douglas won the 2006 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, sponsored by The Malahat Review and judged by George Bowering, for her poem "Non-Exclusive List." The contest celebrates the achievement of emerging writers who have yet to publish their poetry in book form, and her winning entry is now scheduled to appear in the fall 2006 issue, due out in late September.
Rhonda has been around for a few years, although most of the time she's kept her head down, quietly getting work done. In 2004/5, she was part of Seymour Mayne's creative writing (poetry) workshop at the University of Ottawa, along with Jesse Ferguson, Nicholas Lea and Wanda O'Connor, among others [see Amanda Earl's review of the resulting class chapbook here], as well as The Banff Centre Writing Studio in 2005. What's interesting to note is that she took the same workshop at the University of Ottawa years ago with Mark Frutkin (the year Mayne took sabbatical) in 1991/2, the same time I happened to be there (it feels like millions of years ago, now). What was she doing in the years between? Working, and raising her daughter, and honing her craft, it seems.
Her re-emergence on the Ottawa scene happened at the same time she also started more aggressively submitting works to magazines, and is part of a whole slew of poets around town that have become far more interesting over the past year or two, including Mike Blouin, Gwendolyn Guth, Amanda Earl, Una McDonnell, Ferguson, Lea and O'Connor, so expect to see her name here and there with increasing regularity in various Canadian journals over the next few years. It simply seems a matter of time. And too, with James Moran and Jennifer Mulligan stepping down from running The TREE Reading Series last fall, it was Douglas who stepped up to the plate to take over, on January first of this year. Now its official: we have to watch for her name now. We wait for great things to happen.
Here is a poem of hers that appeared in the second issue of ottawater:
Cassandra and the Fifth Grade Essay
Miss? I don’t understand why
I got an ‘F’. Didn’t I have all
the right grammar: past, present,
future?
You said write a page about your family
and all I said was:
This is me and my house, my mom
and my dad and my forty-nine brothers.
My dad carries the weight of authority
and the inability to say no to women:
this will be our downfall, all of us,
these things that run in the family.
Once upon a time there was a city
and the people were happy. Mostly happy,
only sometimes sad in daily ways,
small griefs given perspective.
In the city, a family; around the family, walls.
What happened next was like a fire
made by Boy Scouts who are still learning –
many sparks, at first no hope and then
one catches and we are all
ablaze, uncontained.
That is all past tense now.
Future tense; my favourite
and the one we all fear.
Flashes of something normal: it’s just your sister-in-law Helen
in a pretty dress, the gold on her neck like the warning rays
of the sun at noon in July – go inside, protect yourselves.
I tell this to my mother, she says “no, Cassandra,
today it’s raining”, takes me firmly to the roof
of our house, makes me hold my hand out
to feel the warm wetness slide
across the centre of my palm.
I know enough not to say
it feels like tears, the temperature of blood.
She holds my hand out in the rain
as if I’m blind but I can see
and this is the problem.
Is guilt easier to handle if you can’t see it coming?
Nothing you can do, Miss? Same grade?
By the way, Miss, did you know you will die alone?
Rhonda has been around for a few years, although most of the time she's kept her head down, quietly getting work done. In 2004/5, she was part of Seymour Mayne's creative writing (poetry) workshop at the University of Ottawa, along with Jesse Ferguson, Nicholas Lea and Wanda O'Connor, among others [see Amanda Earl's review of the resulting class chapbook here], as well as The Banff Centre Writing Studio in 2005. What's interesting to note is that she took the same workshop at the University of Ottawa years ago with Mark Frutkin (the year Mayne took sabbatical) in 1991/2, the same time I happened to be there (it feels like millions of years ago, now). What was she doing in the years between? Working, and raising her daughter, and honing her craft, it seems.
Her re-emergence on the Ottawa scene happened at the same time she also started more aggressively submitting works to magazines, and is part of a whole slew of poets around town that have become far more interesting over the past year or two, including Mike Blouin, Gwendolyn Guth, Amanda Earl, Una McDonnell, Ferguson, Lea and O'Connor, so expect to see her name here and there with increasing regularity in various Canadian journals over the next few years. It simply seems a matter of time. And too, with James Moran and Jennifer Mulligan stepping down from running The TREE Reading Series last fall, it was Douglas who stepped up to the plate to take over, on January first of this year. Now its official: we have to watch for her name now. We wait for great things to happen.
Here is a poem of hers that appeared in the second issue of ottawater:
Cassandra and the Fifth Grade Essay
Miss? I don’t understand why
I got an ‘F’. Didn’t I have all
the right grammar: past, present,
future?
You said write a page about your family
and all I said was:
This is me and my house, my mom
and my dad and my forty-nine brothers.
My dad carries the weight of authority
and the inability to say no to women:
this will be our downfall, all of us,
these things that run in the family.
Once upon a time there was a city
and the people were happy. Mostly happy,
only sometimes sad in daily ways,
small griefs given perspective.
In the city, a family; around the family, walls.
What happened next was like a fire
made by Boy Scouts who are still learning –
many sparks, at first no hope and then
one catches and we are all
ablaze, uncontained.
That is all past tense now.
Future tense; my favourite
and the one we all fear.
Flashes of something normal: it’s just your sister-in-law Helen
in a pretty dress, the gold on her neck like the warning rays
of the sun at noon in July – go inside, protect yourselves.
I tell this to my mother, she says “no, Cassandra,
today it’s raining”, takes me firmly to the roof
of our house, makes me hold my hand out
to feel the warm wetness slide
across the centre of my palm.
I know enough not to say
it feels like tears, the temperature of blood.
She holds my hand out in the rain
as if I’m blind but I can see
and this is the problem.
Is guilt easier to handle if you can’t see it coming?
Nothing you can do, Miss? Same grade?
By the way, Miss, did you know you will die alone?
Monday, June 19, 2006
John Newlove’s “Ottawa poems”
Whom the gods do not intend to destroyIt's been said that John Newlove's The Night the Dog Smiled (1986), is one of the best books of poetry, if not the best, in Canada during the 1980s. Our finest lyricist, he was long considered to have been the best poet in Canada from 1962 to 1972. From someone who published poetry collections in the late 1960s and early 1970s in relatively quick succession, he had been showing signs of slowing down for some time, with his previous book, The Green Plain, in 1981, and a selected poems, The Fat Man: Selected Poems 1962-1972, in 1977. Not that the previous came in quick succession, but quick enough, from Elephants, Mothers & Others (1963), to Moving in Alone (1965; 1977), Black Night Window (1968), The Cave (1970), and Lies (1972), which won the Governor Generals Award for Poetry that year.
they first make mad with poetry.
— Irving Layton, "Birthday Poem for John Newlove"
With his stroke but days after his sixty-third birthday, and heart attack in spring 2003, just months before his death on the morning of December 23rd, 2003, to the dismay of readers such as myself, The Night the Dog Smiled remained his last trade collection of new poems to appear. But still, there have been a scattering of other poems, including the nine new poems at the end of his selected, Apology for Absence, as well as the eleven poems from the chapbook THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems, and single above/ground press poem broadsheet, “THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN,” with the last twelve collected in the anthology Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003. All in all, it makes twenty-one poems in roughly fifteen years; almost the entirety of his Ottawa stay. There are some other poems and versions that have cropped up there and here as well, including some in issues of Quarry and The Malahat Review1 from the time of The Night the Dog Smiled and beyond, as well as a piece written as part of his stint as Petro-Canada Poet Laureate at a Peter Gzowski Invitational Golf Tournament for Literacy in 1994 (the poem "Playing the Game," collected in the anthology Gorillas on the Dance Floor and Other Poems from the First 100 PGIs, published by ABC Canada in 1997), but for the sake of this piece, I will focus more on the poems he allowed a further life in print.
Predominantly, the poems that followed The Night the Dog Smiled – published the same year John and his wife Susan moved from Nelson, B.C. to Ottawa, so he could start his job as an editor at Official Languages – had him taking out more words than he was putting in. Even before he arrived, there did seem to be a break between his earlier work and what he had done in this collection. Although he was a strict lyricist, the poems that followed Lies were sparse, spare, and far between, reading more as occasional poems (with the exception, perhaps, of The Green Plain, which was later included in The Night the Dog Smiled) than any with a unified whole.
The poem "Progress," for example, the failed long poem he so desperately tried to write, appeared in multiple versions in various publications, including The Macmillan Anthology, before ending up in Apology for Absence. Working his lyric lines and phrases so tight (unlike the break he usually made for longer pieces, in a series of numbered sections), it was as though he couldn't leave the openings required for what he was writing, reading more like notes and phrases towards the long poem he longed to write than the poem itself.
As well, the collection The Night the Dog Smiled gave the reader a sense of another shift going on in John’s writing, as Douglas Barbour (who, along with his John Newlove and His Works from ECW Press, did more writing on Newlove than anyone else) wrote in his review of the collection in Essays on Canadian Writing:
But there is more here, which other reviewers have already pointed to: withoutIn the same issue, Susan Glickman, in her “Driving Home with John Newlove,” writes of The Night the Dog Smiled seeking to:
any diminishment of his sharp and accurate perception of human cruelty, frailty,
hypocrisy, and suffering, Newlove offers us a more positive vision in these new
poems than he has ever managed to before. Oh the savage, sardonic ironies will
abound, and in one piece at least he has achieved an inner vision of controlled
madness terrifying in its cool and analytical precision, but never before have
Newlove’s texts so obviously spoken of, and even proffered, love and compassion.
A further dimension is expressed, then, yet with its expression there is no loss
or dissipation of the unsentimental and utterly precise rendering of the things
that are.
redress the one-sidedness of Newlove’s earlier vision of the world by revealing
the bruised idealist one had always suspected of lurking under the nihilist’s
spiny armour. That this is the poet’s first full-length publication since Lies
(1972) suggests how difficult it has been for him to reorient himself; but the
relentlessness of Lies makes it doubtful that he could have proceeded any
further with his excoriation of man’s weakness and venality. At that point, it
seemed Newlove saw his task as a poet to be the generation of proofs for the
axiom of his favorite philosopher, Heraclitus, that “Whatever we see when awake
is death; when asleep, dreams.” But in The Green Plain Newlove allowed, for the
first time, that much of what we see is beautiful and to be cherished, and that
it is the vulnerability of this beauty – its very transience because of the fact
of death – that makes us cherish it the more.
I think it was very much a reorientation; that he didn't want the attention, and perhaps pulled away from it, spending years trying to figure out what he was doing, and what he was doing it for.
John had always been a reader before anything else, picking lines out of history books and putting them into poems, but by that time, he spent his days doing more reading than writing. Whenever I would see him on the street, he would tell me some clever line he'd read in a history text, like that the British militia during the War of 1812 were there to “add colour to an otherwise ugly brawl,” or tell a story of when the police beat him up in Vancouver, and discovering years later that he had broken his collar-bone. Alternately, when I saw his wife Susan, the conversations were on the fire that had happened down the street, or of the new grocery store. A recent visit by her son Jeremy, and his family.
In an essay on Matt Cohen, Margaret Atwood wrote that his collection Columbus and the Fat Lady, published in 1972 by House of Anansi Press and made up of fifteen stories
seeded almost all of what Cohen was subsequently to write. It’s a sort of
sampler: here’s the range, here are the styles, here are the interests, here are
the prototypes: all arrived at through fabulation, through the “adventure,” the
“freedom and play,” of the short-story form, all popping out of the unconscious
unbidden.
I would say the poems in John Newlove’s chapbook, THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems, and subsequent broadside, “THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN,” were written entirely the opposite: as a summing up of his long career as a poet, boiling the range of his interests throughout his life of poetry down into a sonnet of twelve short poems. Whether this was deliberate or not, it was certainly the result.
For John Newlove, the brevity became him; his terseness punctuated only by his clarity. It's not even a pessimism, necessarily, but a matter-of-fact, and ever with his sense of humour, dry as Regina bone. With pieces such as “AN OLD MAN, WAITING” or “AN EXAMINATION,” writing about a medical examination (“Take these pills with every meal, / take these for pain as needed (I don't need / pain) and these before you sleep.”), you can see it, the notion of stark inevitability. The range of subjects in these short pieces is far-reaching, but nothing new or unusual from the Newlove lexicon, albiet shorter than what he was publishing, say, in the 1970s. In the poem “HOME TOWN” there seems to be a great deal of summing up, writing “This country is so old that no one can remember / its history.” from a man who wrote poems of the prairie histories of indians, Louis Riel and other prairie landscapes, well before anyone else.
As his stepson Jeremy would tell me, John lived in Ottawa for seventeen years; longer than he managed to live anywhere else. For whatever reason: the city he finally chose not to leave. Through all of this, still, he considered himself above all, a Saskatchewan poet. The biography included in the literacy anthology, Gorillas on the Dance Floor and Other Poems from the First 100 PGIs, gives a sense of what he might have thought of these disparate geographies, in his usual wry humour, writing "John Newlove was born and raised in Saskatchewan, but, for his sins, he now lives in Ottawa." Perhaps the least known of his works, here are the last twelve published poems by John Newlove, all of which were subsequently reprinted in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (2003). Here are some notes on a few of them:
LOVE AFFAIR
LOVE AFFAIRIt’s the dark humour that comes out the most, even ahead of the pessimism. What does a hopeless man who’s lost his hopelessness do but feel the loss? After judging a poetry contest in the 1980s, this is what Newlove submitted as his "Judge's Comments," writing:
I’m not in love with anyone, not even myself.
It’s hard, living without hopelessness.
1. Poetry is the shortest distance between two points; prose, the longest.
2. Any form that functions fits.
3. Form and content are body and soul, and inseparable. When the first fails the second becomes a wisp; when the second fails the first is a husk.
4. Nothing to tell, nothing to sell.
5. This is the impossible self-set task of trying to tell the truth, of trying to be honest. It does not seem impossible. Better, sometimes, to lie. By our lies shall they know us. And you? You, who I think of as the truth: are you lying to me too? Surely not. If you are, lie to me, tell me you're telling the truth.
LIKE AN EEL
LIKE AN EELProbably the one line in the last poems that made the most effect, “The past / is a foreign country,” and the quote that Barry McKinnon used to open his selected / collected poems, The Centre, Poems 1970-2000 (2004). As the narrator in the poem wonders how you can know yourself through old poems, he could easily have been John reading from his Apology for Absence at the Fire Station on Elgin Street, hosted by John Metcalf. What year was that? 1997? During his reading, he spoke out loud of boiling his life down into a few, scant lines, editing and selecting as he went, down until there was almost nothing left. A few scant lies, and searching for himself through them, with an obvious reference to his award-winning collection from nearly three decades earlier. Is an author ever to be known? Does an author ever really know himself through his poems, let alone a past self, known for his lies? As he told Jon Pearce in an interview published in the collection Twelve Voices: Interviews with Canadian Poets (1980):
Hunting after myself in slightly used poems
is a heartbreaking chore. The past
is a foreign country and the quarry
is sly and elusive, a liar twisting
and twisting about the words like an eel
on a spear, dying, never to be known.
To tell the truth, another reason for calling it Lies was to deny this crud
about being as a poet an honest human being, because no human being is any more
honest than another. But I mouse-trapped myself for calling it Lies – people
would come up and say, “Look how honest he is; he admits that he lies.”
Sometimes I think what happens is that the first serious critic who says
something about your stuff that sounds reasonable gets followed by everybody
else. I could sit, I think, and write cheerful, optimistic things for the rest
of my life, and the one gloomy thing that I wrote would be emphasized in all the
reviews. What can you do? You become yourself, and you can’t get away from it. I
thought by having a slightly ridiculous cover on the book Lies, too, that it
would help but it didn’t do any good. Suddenly the rather funny raven became a
malevolent bird.
It seems far less dark a take than the one Frank Davey took, in his collection From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature Since 1960 (1974):
By looking mercilessly within himself, Newlove has managed, through seven booksStephen Brockwell, in a review of The Night the Dog Smiled, argues for the pessimism of the language itself, as opposed specifically to the writing or the author, ending with:
of poetry, to discover most of the sicknesses and stupidities of his contemporary man. His work displays a self-loathing only slightly less strong than his loathing of the human race and its wretched and treacherous planet. Particularly does he detest the inability of man to recognize or admit the truth about himself and his world. Newlove's poetry has been a relentless quest for truth, attacking in poem after poem the deceits of our politicians, mythmakers, historians, and theologians. The title of his collection Lies (1972) insists that even his own searchings for truth become, because of man's innate incompetence, merely fumbling examples of the human capacity for self-deceit.
A major theme of this book seems to me to be that language has played a part in
the corruption of the world. Language is a powerful device. Of what might we not
be convinced by carefully chosen words?
IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWA
IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWAHis poem, “IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWA” appeared earlier as “LEONARD, IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWA” in a fetschcrift for Leonard Cohen edited by Ken Norris and Michael Fournier, published by The Muses’ Company, and was, admittedly, the main reason I spent my last seventeen or eighteen dollars on the collection, for that, and his poem “THE CAT.” It was mainly for the first. The second poem was good, but not nearly as good as the other. And I thought, the least poem of the later chapbook.
The streets are full of overweight corporals,
of sad grey computer captains, the impedimentia
of a capital city, struggling through the snow.
There is a cold gel on my
belly, an instrument
is stroking it incisively, the machine
in the half-lit room is scribbling my future.
It is not illegal to be unhappy.
A shadowy technician says alternately,
Breathe, and, You may stop now.
It is not illegal to be unhappy.
Again, Newlove acts as apologist for the pessimism that too many have seen in his work, to the exclusion of so much else, including the dry humour of “the machine / in the half-lit room is scribbling my future.”
HOME TOWN
HOME TOWNAs Susan Glickman called him, the “perennial hitch-hiker.” This poem could almost read as one of what John wrote, starting in the 1960s, as a hitchhiking poem, or one of his letter poems. He’s taken out the external references of “Dear Al:” or "Letter Two" or walking down the highway west out of Regina, but the feel of the poem is much the same; removing the external buildup to leave only the core.
This country is so old that no one can remember
its history. The sky blooms and the rocks flower.
Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, Prairie. The oceans
surround us, blue, grey, white, green, the land
goes on forever.
Canada is my home town. Trees fill the mind
and people look at me sideways and smile.
just a hurried note to try to reach you before you're off to cubaThe need for exploration, to understand his country. In the end, he understood it well enough that he no longer had to leave the house. The hitch-hiking poem without the hitch-hiker.
spreading semen & treason
& red red wine
all over latin Americas ("Dear Al:," Black Night Window)
On that black highway,
where are you going?--
it is in Alberta
among the trees
where the road sweeps
left and right
in great concrete arcs
at the famous resort ("The Hitchhiker," Black Night Window)
It's almost as though he's merged a number of the poems together from Black Night Window into a single piece, taking out all the extraneous; obviously Newlove had become far more optimistic in the years between the poems. Listen to what he has to say in the poem "Like a Canadian" from the same collection, or what he says at the end of the poem "Canada," writing:
CBC producers own creativity. AllAN INSCRIPTION TO RICHARD JEFFRIES
they don't know is what to do with it. Did
you expect a conclusion? Signed off. I quit
honesty in favour of another drink.
I would like to point out that you
are bored.
ON A SARSEN AT BARBURY
AN INSCRIPTION TO RICHARD JEFFRIESJohn Newlove had always written poems as shorthand, over the years more often cribbing from books he was reading (see the poem "Quotations" from Lies, riffing off borrowed lines, or the poem "Speech about a Blackfoot Woman / with Travois, Photo by R.H. Trueman // ca. 1890" from The Night the Dog Smiled); John, the sort of reader who finished a book a day. A few years before he died, he spent a whole summer reading nothing but Greek history, as he told me, simply to get an overall sense of it in his head. His collection The Green Plain was said to be his reaction to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. He had a collection of file cards he had written single lines on for years, taken from books to include later on in poems.
ON A SARSEN AT BARBURY
It is Eternity now.
I am in the midst of it.
It is about me
in the sunshine.
But what about this piece? Taking the poem as a direct transcript, outright theft, did he really see nothing new to add? Was it simply perfect the way it was? Why write in anything else, when in the end, he would have only been removing. It was something that Newlove had referenced earlier, he who kept found lines on organized stacks of blue file cards, for him to later include in his own poems, writing on the theft between stolen lines in the poem “White Philharmonic Novels” from his collection The Night the Dog Smiled:
Look, nobody gets wise writingIn an email after John died, Saskatoon poet and Thistledown Press publisher Glen Sorestad told the story of a poem of Newlove’s left after a visit John and Susan made to the Sorestad house that afterward, John had no recollection of, and had to be sent a copy. As he writes:
Now I must be making
pretty manners
at you
It’s necessary to realize that all these phrases
are stolen. The arrangement is all.
Once John and Susan stayed with us for a few days in Saskatoon. At that time
we had a turtle aquarium (small) in our main bathroom. Some time much later
Newlove sent me a poem about the turtles in Sorestad’s bathroom, a brief cryptic
poem that I duly filed away somewhere. Years later, I happen to mention this
poem to John and he looked quite puzzled, then asked me to send him a copy of it
because he obviously had sent me the only copy he had. The poem shortly
appeared, somewhat revised in The Night the Dog Smiled. So god only knows
how many similar, original Newlove poems are out there floating around to be
gathered up like fallen maple leaves. (email, dated December 28, 2003)
A later version then appeared as “Dried-Out Insects” in The Night the Dog Smiled:
The turtles in the Sorestad’s bathroom
have beautiful markings
but look vicious.
I sit here shitting
and they sit there sitting
and acting mean.
I’m just trying to be clean,
but afraid to move. Can turtles fly?
I know they can’t.
But they might try.
Meanwhile, like wives,
they waver in the water,
beautiful and vicious. (The Night the Dog Smiled)
Does this allow for the hope of other work, hidden among his files in the house he shared with Susan? So far, unfortunately, Susan says not. Still, the hopes are that another poem or two might pop up as a new larger selected poems is built by prairie filmmaker Robert McTavish, for publication through Ottawa's own Chaudiere Books in fall 2007. McTavish just sold his documentary on Newlove, ten years in the making, to Bravo / Book Television, to be aired this fall, with the world premiere of the documentary to happen in a couple of weeks at this years' Saskatchewan Festival of Words in Moose Jaw.
Works Cited:
Atwood, Margaret. “The Wrong Box: Matt Cohen, Fabulism, and Critical Taxonomy,” Moving Targets, Writing with Intent, 1982-2004. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004.
Barbour, Douglas. “Weather Report: ‘Stars, rain, forests,’” Essays on Canadian Writing 36. Toronto, spring 1988.
Brockwell, Stephen. Review of The Night the Dog Smiled, The Rideau Review 2. Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, June 1987.
Davey, Frank. "John Newlove," From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature Since 1960. Erin ON: Press Porcepic, 1974.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land.
Glickman, Susan. “Driving Home with John Newlove,” Essays on Canadian Writing 36. Toronto, spring 1988.
Layton, Irving. "Birthday Poem for John Newlove," The Third MacMillan Anthology. Eds. John Metcalf and Kent Thompson. Toronto ON: Macmillan of Canada, 1990.
McKinnon, Barry. The Centre, Poems 1970-2000. Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2004.
mclennan, rob. Ed., Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003. Fredericton: cauldron books / Broken Jaw Press, 2003.
Morton, Colin. Ed., Capital Poets: An Ottawa Anthology. Ottawa: Oroboros Press, 1990.
Newlove, John. Apology for Absence, Selected Poems 1962-1992. Erin, ON: The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc. 1993.
________. Black Night Window. Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1968.
________. Lies. Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1972.
1 The poem "Progress" that appeared, finally, in Apology for Absence appeared (the first half) as "Bugdancing (a work-in-progress)" in The Mahalat Review, Volume 77, December 1986, and (the second half) as "In Progress" in The Malahat Review, Volume 82, March 1988. The collected version appears as "In Progress" in Colin Morton, ed., Capital Poets: An Ottawa Anthology (Oroboros, 1989).
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Mathematics and Poetry: Poor Bedfellows?
In May 2006, I taught a mini-course on creative writing at the University of Ottawa and had the good fortune to have some distinguished local poets deliver brief readings and talks. After Stephen Brockwell finished his talk/reading, he and I entered upon discussion of the proper ends of mathematical (and to a lesser extent, scientific) enquiry and poetry. Our differing viewpoints may be useful as points of departure for more involved discussion of this interesting and long-standing debate.
Stephen, being deeply interested in mathematics, partly because of his career and partly because of his general passion for learning, argued (in these approximate terms) that the goals of mathematics and poetry are far closer than is often supposed. In fact, says he, they are often one and the same. He claims that the goal of the theoretical mathematician is to learn about the universe and numbers in such a way as to increase humanity’s sense of wonder at the complexity of creation. He cites the work of theorists on the concept of “fuzzy logic” as a good example of such awe-engendering enquiry. In fact, Stephen is toying with the idea of a monograph on this topic, and, if the result evidences the passion he exudes in conversation, it bodes well for the book.
I, however, took a different stance. Far from asserting that math/science should not have intercourse with poetics, I have been criticized myself for incorporating too much nerdy science into my poems. I believe that poetry should encompass all areas of human interest, should “include them like a pool / water and reflection.” The “however” of my position resides in how I view the nature of mathematical and scientific enquiry; I see it as a process of dispelling, rather than courting, wonder. When a mathematician or scientist sets out to “solve” or “tackle” a crux, he or she attempts to master that problem, to peer into the secrets of the universe and push the bounds of what we know, which is just another way of increasing the power of the knower over non-knowers and what is known. Don’t get me wrong; many scientist and mathematicians take a spiritual approach to their work (Stephen is a good example), but the thrust of science and math is ultimately to nail things down, rather than to embrace unknowableness the way poetry does. Perhaps there is more to be made of the distinction between pure and applied science? Any takers?
Stephen, being deeply interested in mathematics, partly because of his career and partly because of his general passion for learning, argued (in these approximate terms) that the goals of mathematics and poetry are far closer than is often supposed. In fact, says he, they are often one and the same. He claims that the goal of the theoretical mathematician is to learn about the universe and numbers in such a way as to increase humanity’s sense of wonder at the complexity of creation. He cites the work of theorists on the concept of “fuzzy logic” as a good example of such awe-engendering enquiry. In fact, Stephen is toying with the idea of a monograph on this topic, and, if the result evidences the passion he exudes in conversation, it bodes well for the book.
I, however, took a different stance. Far from asserting that math/science should not have intercourse with poetics, I have been criticized myself for incorporating too much nerdy science into my poems. I believe that poetry should encompass all areas of human interest, should “include them like a pool / water and reflection.” The “however” of my position resides in how I view the nature of mathematical and scientific enquiry; I see it as a process of dispelling, rather than courting, wonder. When a mathematician or scientist sets out to “solve” or “tackle” a crux, he or she attempts to master that problem, to peer into the secrets of the universe and push the bounds of what we know, which is just another way of increasing the power of the knower over non-knowers and what is known. Don’t get me wrong; many scientist and mathematicians take a spiritual approach to their work (Stephen is a good example), but the thrust of science and math is ultimately to nail things down, rather than to embrace unknowableness the way poetry does. Perhaps there is more to be made of the distinction between pure and applied science? Any takers?
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Re:Generations Ottawa Style
In Re:Generations: Canadian Women Poets in Conversation (Black Moss Press, 2005), Canadian female poets discuss how or whether they’ve been influenced by their poetic foremothers. Ottawa poet Susan McMaster is in the book and a few former or dead Ottawans are mentioned also.
Re:Generations will be launched on Sunday, June 11 at Mother Tongue Books at 3:00 pm. Readers will include Carolyn Zonailo, Betty Page, Sharon H. Nelson, Susan McMaster, Penn Kemp, Cornelia Hoogland, and Barbara Godard.
I thought it might be interesting to cover similar territory by interviewing other Ottawa poets. Initially I planned to focus exclusively on women; however, I hope to post a series of interviews with both male and female Ottawa poets, emerging and established. My questions will center primarily on the legacy of our poetic ancestors and their influence on Ottawa poets today.
When I read Re:Generations, I mused on the source(s) of poetic voice. How does one go about establishing one’s own voice? Re:Generations showed the influence of others quite specifically by allowing contemporaries to pay homage to their foremothers. It includes poems that directly reference or include the work of modernist women’s writing in the post modernist poets’ work.
In a series of interviews, I would like to explore how poets today have found or are attempting to find their voice, see how they’re influenced and by whom. I’m hoping this understanding of poetic lineage and influence will inspire and (re)generate poetry and poetic discussion.
Ronnie R. Brown has been a published poet in Ottawa for over twenty years. Her first book Re Creation (Balmuir Book Publishing) was published in 1987 and she has a book coming out this autumn called Night Echoes by Black Moss Press.
Her poems are small stories, vignettes, complete with character, setting, plot, dialogue, wry humour. When you melt down each of Ronnie’s poems, you get a central image and themes that thread consistently through the entire body of her work. From the onset of her poetic career, Brown has never been afraid to talk about issues such as miscarriage, desire and death.
Here’s an excerpt from PROLOGUE (Re Creation, Balmuir Book Publishing, 1987)
That first time
over
before we knew
that what we had tried
to start had,
indeed, begun, telling my husband,
me, it was all
done; we could go.
I stand
a thin trickle of blood moves
down my thigh, past
my knee, down
into my brand new pair of shoes.
“Are you sure?” my husband asks,
“Maybe she should
stay for a day
or two?”
A few weeks later,
the check-up—
my own doctor says
the whole thing should be seen
as a good sign. “Shows you’re both
fertile, shows things work
down there; you know,
kick the Coke machine just once
and the cans keep rolling out!”
Earl: The poems in your first two books were mostly written in the first person. In Re Creation, the first section is a series of poems based on pregnancy, miscarriage and the birth of a child. I found these poems very poignant, and one of the reasons for this is because the use of the first person helped me to identify with the speaker. Then in Photographic Evidence and States of Matter, the first person is used sparingly.
Do you have any comments about why you use the first person less now?
Brown: In Re Creation, my first book, I consciously chose the first person voice to "tell" the story. I perceived this series as one person's story, a story with which I hoped others would feel some resonance, but still, just focused on one person. At the time I felt it would be pretentious to try and be "every woman." Each woman's pregnancy is different, in fact, even the same woman may have a different experience during subsequent pregnancies. As I wrote these sections it seemed natural to use the "I" voice, particularly so, since this series was more autobiographical in nature than much of the work that has followed.
With other pieces, however, it often "feels" awkward when I use a first person narrator. For one thing, I like to intimate past and future in some pieces--this requires an omniscient narrator--and once you've begun using this kind of distanced, third-person voice it's hard to switch back into the first person. Some of my pieces begin, as drafts, in the first person, and some even see are published in a magazine that way but, when compiling a book (or book section), I find it confusing when the poet goes back and forth from first to third person narrators. As well, some poems have less of a connection to me, they are based more on fictions than facts, and so the use of "I" doesn't seem to be as good a fit (for me, anyway.)
As well, I usually call on friends/fellow writers to serve as my initial editors and they have, almost universally, advised against mixing voices in this way, so I often end up using all third person pieces. I love giving the reader hints at a past and future about which the subject of the poem is clueless--details that are known only to the creator (who, in the case of creative writing, is the writer--and, no, I don't have a "God thing," but I do like showing glimpses of a larger picture.) When you are "inside" the skin of a person/persona and speaking through them using a first person voice you can know only what they know and see only what they. To me this is limiting.
Earl: There's been much debate over the years about the use of "I" in poetry. It was labeled "confessional poetry" for the writers of the 60s, later writers decided to reclaim “I” and now there's a kind of a mish mosh opinion about using it/not using it.
What do you feel about the use of "I" in poetry? What does "I" represent in your own poetry when you use it?
Brown: I don't think that the use of "I" should have been/should be made political. "Confessional" poetry is not really "true confessions" now, is it? Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" wasn't really the brute she described (or so the biographers tell us); so regardless of how the poet prefers to present the piece it is still, to a greater or lesser degree, a creative piece. When I was first starting to write seriously (I began as a teenager, but didn't really pursue writing and publication till my mid- twenties), Seymour Mayne's mother-in-law, the poet Gertie Katz, who mentored me, advised me to focus on the poem and not "the truth." She used to question me about my need to include specific details in pieces "just because that's what really happened." To quote Gertie, "It's much more important to include details that matter to the poem than those that matter to you!" And, of course, she was right.
To get back to the first question (too late to say "and make a long story short!"), I use whatever voice feels comfortable in the context of the poem I'm writing at the time. In my new book, NIGHT ECHOES (Black Moss), which will be launched this fall, I open with a first person poem as a prologue, then move into the minds and lives of various people's dreams. The first poem offers the reason why I/we should look into the dreams of others, but to have even a few of these pieces in the first person would make for confusing reading since I have already identified that first person voice with one character. On the other hand, in the series I'm working on now, I'm considering having a number of poems using the first person voice of a girl at various stages of her life, starting at around 4, and have only these (semi-connected) poems spoken in the first person. The reason for this is, not only that these poems are more closely autobiographical than most of the others in the series, but the voice of a child is both a challenge to write and "speaks" more innocently and directly. Also, I want the reader to see all of these "I" poems as coming from one child/persona. At least that's what I'm thinking now, these pieces, also expose the "me" behind the "I" and if that becomes too uncomfortable they just might get shifted to third person! That said, I guess the short answer is that often ascribing the "I" to a poem makes me feel a little un- comfortable, and limited, so I back away.
Earl: Your books have come out in 1987, 1988, 2000 and 2005. Can you talk about the various poets you were reading at these times? Do you think these writers influenced your writing? Are there poets you've been reading throughout and have changes in their work affected your own?
Brown: Until about 1977 my writing was kind of a sporadic and haphazard thing. We moved to Canada in the late sixties and, at first, there was little time for anything but finding and keeping a job. I started writing again after starting to take night courses at Concordia University to finish a degree I'd started in the US. I was further encouraged (as well as surprised and shocked) when I submitted a sample of my work for the Board of Governors's Award at Con. U. and won! While I was slogging through the requirements for an Honours BA in English (and studying Robert Browning, etc.), I began to take advantage of the reading series Con. U had to offer (a real treat back then, since food and drink were always in abundance!) I was able to hear and meet poets like Irving Layton, bill bissett, as well as talking to faculty poet/profs., like Henry Beissel and Richard Sommer. Till then poets, were for me, usually dead and always distant. But among those I heard and read, I think the first poets who really impacted my own style were Layton (I loved his fearlessness) and Atwood (her clever turns of phrase and sarcasm really struck a chord with me!)
Still, until I enroled in the MA Programme in Creative Writing at Concordia, I was pretty much trying to do my own thing. In the required creative writing workshops and especially, by working one-on-one with Gary Geddes (my thesis advisor) and by hearing what other students at the time were doing (and my "peers" included Michael Harris, Steve Luxton, Laurence Hutchman, Jim Smith, Ross Leckie, and many others), I tried to find/refine the voice that was mine and mine alone. I see finding your voice by sampling how others write as sort of like taking a recipe for a really great chili, and then adding a little more of this and a little less of that and, finally, coming up with something that you think is better, and you know is yours alone. Of course, just as you cook to suit your own taste, the way a poet writes is the way they like poetry to be. Every poet hopes that other folks will like their way too; that maybe their recipe might even win a poetry "cook off" some day, but, even if it doesn't it's your recipe by then and once you find one you love, that's pretty much the way you keep on making your chili from then on.
Earl: I've noticed that most of your poems are written from a women's point of view. I was interested to read some of your poems on Latchkey.net where you were a featured poet. In one of the poems, "Riding" from the Little Red Riding Hood poems, you use the male point of view to talk about a man's confused sexual feelings about his daughter. The poem itself is a very effective piece and I think it is so because of this perspective. When you were drafting this poem, did you try to write it from a female point of view? Why did you decide to write from the male perspective? Is this something you would like to do more of?
Brown: As for assuming the male point of view (vs. always speaking from a female perspective), I'd like to use a male voice/persona more often but I have had it drilled into me so often that one should always "write what you know" that I often back down. In NIGHT ECHOES, there are a number of male personae. I even have a piece about a gay man. This is another place where using the third person omniscient comes in handy (or, if you prefer, puts me at ease), since, writing in the third person allows me to say what the man thinks, without having to totally assume his personality.
The poem you mention is from the series Free Associations on Fairy Tales, and it steps into the mind of a man who unconsciously dreams his adolescent, horse-back riding daughter as a sexual being (thus exposing his own inner thoughts/ fantasies) is one I was a bit leery of taking on. I was sure I would be ridden out of town (pun intended) over that one, but Sue McMaster, who is often the first person with whom I share my work and who also is both a rider and the mother of a girl who rode, gave me a green light on the piece. Like the poem I've done as part of the "dream" series using a gay man, this poem felt like risky territory. Would I like to do more of these? Well, yes, I do like the challenge, but I will only take it on if I have something I need to say which I feel can only be said by a male. That is, I don't want to explore the other gender just for the sake of doing it.
Earl: Your poems are very much mini stories with characters and dialogue. This isn't easy to pull off and you do it so well, which I admire. Have there been times when you've wanted to expand poems into something longer? Do you write fiction? How do you see fiction and poetry as different or the same?
Brown: For some reason most of the things I write start with a word or image. I just wrote a poem entitled "Lost," for example, after seeing a number of surveillance photos in the CITIZEN. But, until that image (or maybe I should call it an idea) fleshes out in my mind and becomes a story, well, it tends to stay unwritten. I think in stories, so making them the core of the poem is, for me, completely natural.
I have, indeed, written fiction (short stories) and would like to write more, but I find the necessity to pare down the story to a kind of micro-story more fun and challenging. Even the non-story poems I write come complete with an (unwritten) back story in my head. But sometimes the poems "just grow" (as did the title poem in RE CREATION) where the story, grew longer until it evolved into a long (story-like) narrative. That was also the case with the poem "DRIVING INSTINCTS" (in STATES OF MATTER, Black Moss, 2005), which originally grew into a long narrative and then, because of editorial demands (and Sue McMaster's genius), became smaller fragments again which woven into the second section with other poems coming between the elements of the narrative in the same way that other things interrupt us during even the most tense moments of our life.
Excerpt from Driving Instincts I: Opening Shots (STATES OF MATTER, Black Moss, 2005)
Her hands white-
knuckled on the steering wheel,
or perhaps her foot, sensible shoe
firm on the accelerator. If this
were a movie these would be
the opening shots. Following
the title, overlaid on a panoramic view,
cars speeding down a highway, zeroing
in to a compact,
grey paint even greyer
under layers
of dust and muck.
She imagines the camera moving
up her leg to focus
on her face. If she could just deliver
the feelings, convey the pain, if she
could only find the right expression,
the director might call it a take,
a wrap, send everyone home.
Eventually, I tell myself, I'd like to really go with a story and write a novel--don't know if that will happen, but I'd like to try. Nothing literary, mind you, I'd like to do something in the manner of Koontz or King--not for the cash (although that would be nice) but because I find reading horror fiction calming (honest). I like the way a good horror book makes even the most awful turn of (real) life events seem inconsequential and, if you get too freaked out, unlike life, you can always close the book--it's a great escape to read horror books. What I'd like to find out is what it's like to write something like that.
As for the differences between fiction and poetry, well poetry needs a tight turn of phrase, good images and a great deal of self control to keep things small so what's presented comes across as large. Fiction requires so much more detail--who's wearing what, eating what, sleeping with whom, etc.-- it's like the difference between painting a perfectly detailed miniature and a huge mural. You need talent and certain skills to do either one-but not everyone can be good at both. Some writers, like Margaret Atwood are, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see if I can pull it off.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
He only notices her
when, retracing his steps,
he retrieves his hastily flung coat
from the couch where she sleeps.
Wrapped in an old quilt
she looks about the size of his youngest son.
Gingerly he lifts the coat, jumps back
as her eyes snap open
like a kewpie doll's. For a moment
he thinks of going back, adding a twenty
to the cash placed on the woman's
nightstand but, in the end,
he leaves, tries to forget, tries
to focus on his wife and kids six cities
and fourteen sales stops away.
For the rest of his trip
he will work hard
at forgetting those eyes, but
for years to come, they
will appear to him in dreams
just as his startled stare
will etch its way
into the nightmares
she will have
for the rest of her life.
by Ronnie R. Brown
from NIGHT ECHOES (Black Moss, 2006)
Re:Generations will be launched on Sunday, June 11 at Mother Tongue Books at 3:00 pm. Readers will include Carolyn Zonailo, Betty Page, Sharon H. Nelson, Susan McMaster, Penn Kemp, Cornelia Hoogland, and Barbara Godard.
I thought it might be interesting to cover similar territory by interviewing other Ottawa poets. Initially I planned to focus exclusively on women; however, I hope to post a series of interviews with both male and female Ottawa poets, emerging and established. My questions will center primarily on the legacy of our poetic ancestors and their influence on Ottawa poets today.
When I read Re:Generations, I mused on the source(s) of poetic voice. How does one go about establishing one’s own voice? Re:Generations showed the influence of others quite specifically by allowing contemporaries to pay homage to their foremothers. It includes poems that directly reference or include the work of modernist women’s writing in the post modernist poets’ work.
In a series of interviews, I would like to explore how poets today have found or are attempting to find their voice, see how they’re influenced and by whom. I’m hoping this understanding of poetic lineage and influence will inspire and (re)generate poetry and poetic discussion.
Ronnie R. Brown has been a published poet in Ottawa for over twenty years. Her first book Re Creation (Balmuir Book Publishing) was published in 1987 and she has a book coming out this autumn called Night Echoes by Black Moss Press.
Her poems are small stories, vignettes, complete with character, setting, plot, dialogue, wry humour. When you melt down each of Ronnie’s poems, you get a central image and themes that thread consistently through the entire body of her work. From the onset of her poetic career, Brown has never been afraid to talk about issues such as miscarriage, desire and death.
Here’s an excerpt from PROLOGUE (Re Creation, Balmuir Book Publishing, 1987)
That first time
over
before we knew
that what we had tried
to start had,
indeed, begun, telling my husband,
me, it was all
done; we could go.
I stand
a thin trickle of blood moves
down my thigh, past
my knee, down
into my brand new pair of shoes.
“Are you sure?” my husband asks,
“Maybe she should
stay for a day
or two?”
A few weeks later,
the check-up—
my own doctor says
the whole thing should be seen
as a good sign. “Shows you’re both
fertile, shows things work
down there; you know,
kick the Coke machine just once
and the cans keep rolling out!”
Earl: The poems in your first two books were mostly written in the first person. In Re Creation, the first section is a series of poems based on pregnancy, miscarriage and the birth of a child. I found these poems very poignant, and one of the reasons for this is because the use of the first person helped me to identify with the speaker. Then in Photographic Evidence and States of Matter, the first person is used sparingly.
Do you have any comments about why you use the first person less now?
Brown: In Re Creation, my first book, I consciously chose the first person voice to "tell" the story. I perceived this series as one person's story, a story with which I hoped others would feel some resonance, but still, just focused on one person. At the time I felt it would be pretentious to try and be "every woman." Each woman's pregnancy is different, in fact, even the same woman may have a different experience during subsequent pregnancies. As I wrote these sections it seemed natural to use the "I" voice, particularly so, since this series was more autobiographical in nature than much of the work that has followed.
With other pieces, however, it often "feels" awkward when I use a first person narrator. For one thing, I like to intimate past and future in some pieces--this requires an omniscient narrator--and once you've begun using this kind of distanced, third-person voice it's hard to switch back into the first person. Some of my pieces begin, as drafts, in the first person, and some even see are published in a magazine that way but, when compiling a book (or book section), I find it confusing when the poet goes back and forth from first to third person narrators. As well, some poems have less of a connection to me, they are based more on fictions than facts, and so the use of "I" doesn't seem to be as good a fit (for me, anyway.)
As well, I usually call on friends/fellow writers to serve as my initial editors and they have, almost universally, advised against mixing voices in this way, so I often end up using all third person pieces. I love giving the reader hints at a past and future about which the subject of the poem is clueless--details that are known only to the creator (who, in the case of creative writing, is the writer--and, no, I don't have a "God thing," but I do like showing glimpses of a larger picture.) When you are "inside" the skin of a person/persona and speaking through them using a first person voice you can know only what they know and see only what they. To me this is limiting.
Earl: There's been much debate over the years about the use of "I" in poetry. It was labeled "confessional poetry" for the writers of the 60s, later writers decided to reclaim “I” and now there's a kind of a mish mosh opinion about using it/not using it.
What do you feel about the use of "I" in poetry? What does "I" represent in your own poetry when you use it?
Brown: I don't think that the use of "I" should have been/should be made political. "Confessional" poetry is not really "true confessions" now, is it? Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" wasn't really the brute she described (or so the biographers tell us); so regardless of how the poet prefers to present the piece it is still, to a greater or lesser degree, a creative piece. When I was first starting to write seriously (I began as a teenager, but didn't really pursue writing and publication till my mid- twenties), Seymour Mayne's mother-in-law, the poet Gertie Katz, who mentored me, advised me to focus on the poem and not "the truth." She used to question me about my need to include specific details in pieces "just because that's what really happened." To quote Gertie, "It's much more important to include details that matter to the poem than those that matter to you!" And, of course, she was right.
To get back to the first question (too late to say "and make a long story short!"), I use whatever voice feels comfortable in the context of the poem I'm writing at the time. In my new book, NIGHT ECHOES (Black Moss), which will be launched this fall, I open with a first person poem as a prologue, then move into the minds and lives of various people's dreams. The first poem offers the reason why I/we should look into the dreams of others, but to have even a few of these pieces in the first person would make for confusing reading since I have already identified that first person voice with one character. On the other hand, in the series I'm working on now, I'm considering having a number of poems using the first person voice of a girl at various stages of her life, starting at around 4, and have only these (semi-connected) poems spoken in the first person. The reason for this is, not only that these poems are more closely autobiographical than most of the others in the series, but the voice of a child is both a challenge to write and "speaks" more innocently and directly. Also, I want the reader to see all of these "I" poems as coming from one child/persona. At least that's what I'm thinking now, these pieces, also expose the "me" behind the "I" and if that becomes too uncomfortable they just might get shifted to third person! That said, I guess the short answer is that often ascribing the "I" to a poem makes me feel a little un- comfortable, and limited, so I back away.
Earl: Your books have come out in 1987, 1988, 2000 and 2005. Can you talk about the various poets you were reading at these times? Do you think these writers influenced your writing? Are there poets you've been reading throughout and have changes in their work affected your own?
Brown: Until about 1977 my writing was kind of a sporadic and haphazard thing. We moved to Canada in the late sixties and, at first, there was little time for anything but finding and keeping a job. I started writing again after starting to take night courses at Concordia University to finish a degree I'd started in the US. I was further encouraged (as well as surprised and shocked) when I submitted a sample of my work for the Board of Governors's Award at Con. U. and won! While I was slogging through the requirements for an Honours BA in English (and studying Robert Browning, etc.), I began to take advantage of the reading series Con. U had to offer (a real treat back then, since food and drink were always in abundance!) I was able to hear and meet poets like Irving Layton, bill bissett, as well as talking to faculty poet/profs., like Henry Beissel and Richard Sommer. Till then poets, were for me, usually dead and always distant. But among those I heard and read, I think the first poets who really impacted my own style were Layton (I loved his fearlessness) and Atwood (her clever turns of phrase and sarcasm really struck a chord with me!)
Still, until I enroled in the MA Programme in Creative Writing at Concordia, I was pretty much trying to do my own thing. In the required creative writing workshops and especially, by working one-on-one with Gary Geddes (my thesis advisor) and by hearing what other students at the time were doing (and my "peers" included Michael Harris, Steve Luxton, Laurence Hutchman, Jim Smith, Ross Leckie, and many others), I tried to find/refine the voice that was mine and mine alone. I see finding your voice by sampling how others write as sort of like taking a recipe for a really great chili, and then adding a little more of this and a little less of that and, finally, coming up with something that you think is better, and you know is yours alone. Of course, just as you cook to suit your own taste, the way a poet writes is the way they like poetry to be. Every poet hopes that other folks will like their way too; that maybe their recipe might even win a poetry "cook off" some day, but, even if it doesn't it's your recipe by then and once you find one you love, that's pretty much the way you keep on making your chili from then on.
Earl: I've noticed that most of your poems are written from a women's point of view. I was interested to read some of your poems on Latchkey.net where you were a featured poet. In one of the poems, "Riding" from the Little Red Riding Hood poems, you use the male point of view to talk about a man's confused sexual feelings about his daughter. The poem itself is a very effective piece and I think it is so because of this perspective. When you were drafting this poem, did you try to write it from a female point of view? Why did you decide to write from the male perspective? Is this something you would like to do more of?
Brown: As for assuming the male point of view (vs. always speaking from a female perspective), I'd like to use a male voice/persona more often but I have had it drilled into me so often that one should always "write what you know" that I often back down. In NIGHT ECHOES, there are a number of male personae. I even have a piece about a gay man. This is another place where using the third person omniscient comes in handy (or, if you prefer, puts me at ease), since, writing in the third person allows me to say what the man thinks, without having to totally assume his personality.
The poem you mention is from the series Free Associations on Fairy Tales, and it steps into the mind of a man who unconsciously dreams his adolescent, horse-back riding daughter as a sexual being (thus exposing his own inner thoughts/ fantasies) is one I was a bit leery of taking on. I was sure I would be ridden out of town (pun intended) over that one, but Sue McMaster, who is often the first person with whom I share my work and who also is both a rider and the mother of a girl who rode, gave me a green light on the piece. Like the poem I've done as part of the "dream" series using a gay man, this poem felt like risky territory. Would I like to do more of these? Well, yes, I do like the challenge, but I will only take it on if I have something I need to say which I feel can only be said by a male. That is, I don't want to explore the other gender just for the sake of doing it.
Earl: Your poems are very much mini stories with characters and dialogue. This isn't easy to pull off and you do it so well, which I admire. Have there been times when you've wanted to expand poems into something longer? Do you write fiction? How do you see fiction and poetry as different or the same?
Brown: For some reason most of the things I write start with a word or image. I just wrote a poem entitled "Lost," for example, after seeing a number of surveillance photos in the CITIZEN. But, until that image (or maybe I should call it an idea) fleshes out in my mind and becomes a story, well, it tends to stay unwritten. I think in stories, so making them the core of the poem is, for me, completely natural.
I have, indeed, written fiction (short stories) and would like to write more, but I find the necessity to pare down the story to a kind of micro-story more fun and challenging. Even the non-story poems I write come complete with an (unwritten) back story in my head. But sometimes the poems "just grow" (as did the title poem in RE CREATION) where the story, grew longer until it evolved into a long (story-like) narrative. That was also the case with the poem "DRIVING INSTINCTS" (in STATES OF MATTER, Black Moss, 2005), which originally grew into a long narrative and then, because of editorial demands (and Sue McMaster's genius), became smaller fragments again which woven into the second section with other poems coming between the elements of the narrative in the same way that other things interrupt us during even the most tense moments of our life.
Excerpt from Driving Instincts I: Opening Shots (STATES OF MATTER, Black Moss, 2005)
Her hands white-
knuckled on the steering wheel,
or perhaps her foot, sensible shoe
firm on the accelerator. If this
were a movie these would be
the opening shots. Following
the title, overlaid on a panoramic view,
cars speeding down a highway, zeroing
in to a compact,
grey paint even greyer
under layers
of dust and muck.
She imagines the camera moving
up her leg to focus
on her face. If she could just deliver
the feelings, convey the pain, if she
could only find the right expression,
the director might call it a take,
a wrap, send everyone home.
Eventually, I tell myself, I'd like to really go with a story and write a novel--don't know if that will happen, but I'd like to try. Nothing literary, mind you, I'd like to do something in the manner of Koontz or King--not for the cash (although that would be nice) but because I find reading horror fiction calming (honest). I like the way a good horror book makes even the most awful turn of (real) life events seem inconsequential and, if you get too freaked out, unlike life, you can always close the book--it's a great escape to read horror books. What I'd like to find out is what it's like to write something like that.
As for the differences between fiction and poetry, well poetry needs a tight turn of phrase, good images and a great deal of self control to keep things small so what's presented comes across as large. Fiction requires so much more detail--who's wearing what, eating what, sleeping with whom, etc.-- it's like the difference between painting a perfectly detailed miniature and a huge mural. You need talent and certain skills to do either one-but not everyone can be good at both. Some writers, like Margaret Atwood are, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see if I can pull it off.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
He only notices her
when, retracing his steps,
he retrieves his hastily flung coat
from the couch where she sleeps.
Wrapped in an old quilt
she looks about the size of his youngest son.
Gingerly he lifts the coat, jumps back
as her eyes snap open
like a kewpie doll's. For a moment
he thinks of going back, adding a twenty
to the cash placed on the woman's
nightstand but, in the end,
he leaves, tries to forget, tries
to focus on his wife and kids six cities
and fourteen sales stops away.
For the rest of his trip
he will work hard
at forgetting those eyes, but
for years to come, they
will appear to him in dreams
just as his startled stare
will etch its way
into the nightmares
she will have
for the rest of her life.
by Ronnie R. Brown
from NIGHT ECHOES (Black Moss, 2006)
Friday, May 26, 2006
Laura Farina wins the 2006 Archibald Lampman Award
Laura Farina wins the 2006 Archibald Lampman Award for her book This Woman Alphabetical, from Pedlar Press.
Named after the 19th-century Confederation poet, Archibald Lampman, the award recognizes an outstanding book of English-language poetry written by an author living in the National Capital Region. Often considered Canada's finest nineteenth century poet, Lampman worked for the Post Office in Ottawa until his death in 1899. His poetry is noted for its ability to immerse metaphysics in the details of nature, which he observed while hiking around what was then the wilderness capital of a new country.
There were eleven entrants to this year's competition:
Daniel Boland: Toward the Chrysalis (Stoneflower Press)
Ronnie R. Brown: States of Matter (Black Moss Press)
Tony Cosier: The Spirit Dances (Penumbra Press)
Laura Farina: This Woman Alphabetical (Pedlar Press)
William Hawkins: Dancing Alone (Broken Jaw)
Bing He: Alphabet Zen (TSAR)
Tom MacGregor: Directions to the Cottage (Wallbridge House)
Nadine McInnis: First Fire (BuschekBooks)
Seymour Mayne: September Rain (Mosaic Press)
E. Russell Smith: Spring Garland (BuschekBooks)
Andrew Steinmetz: Hurt Thyself (McGill Queens University Press)
Recently, entrants participated in a very special poetry reading at Beechwood Cemetery, the resting place of Lampman himself.
The judges in this year's competition were Sue Goyette of Halifax, Ken Howe of Toronto, and Sue Wheeler Lasqueti Island, BC. Honourable mentions go to Tony Cosier, for The Spirit Dances, from Penumbra Press; and to Andrew Steinmetz, for Hurt Thyself, from McGill-Queen's University Press. Thanks to all those who entered this year's Archibald Lampman competition. Special thanks also to this year's jury.
from ARC POETRY MAGAZINE
Named after the 19th-century Confederation poet, Archibald Lampman, the award recognizes an outstanding book of English-language poetry written by an author living in the National Capital Region. Often considered Canada's finest nineteenth century poet, Lampman worked for the Post Office in Ottawa until his death in 1899. His poetry is noted for its ability to immerse metaphysics in the details of nature, which he observed while hiking around what was then the wilderness capital of a new country.
There were eleven entrants to this year's competition:
Daniel Boland: Toward the Chrysalis (Stoneflower Press)
Ronnie R. Brown: States of Matter (Black Moss Press)
Tony Cosier: The Spirit Dances (Penumbra Press)
Laura Farina: This Woman Alphabetical (Pedlar Press)
William Hawkins: Dancing Alone (Broken Jaw)
Bing He: Alphabet Zen (TSAR)
Tom MacGregor: Directions to the Cottage (Wallbridge House)
Nadine McInnis: First Fire (BuschekBooks)
Seymour Mayne: September Rain (Mosaic Press)
E. Russell Smith: Spring Garland (BuschekBooks)
Andrew Steinmetz: Hurt Thyself (McGill Queens University Press)
Recently, entrants participated in a very special poetry reading at Beechwood Cemetery, the resting place of Lampman himself.
The judges in this year's competition were Sue Goyette of Halifax, Ken Howe of Toronto, and Sue Wheeler Lasqueti Island, BC. Honourable mentions go to Tony Cosier, for The Spirit Dances, from Penumbra Press; and to Andrew Steinmetz, for Hurt Thyself, from McGill-Queen's University Press. Thanks to all those who entered this year's Archibald Lampman competition. Special thanks also to this year's jury.
from ARC POETRY MAGAZINE
Monday, April 24, 2006
Writers Fest-Final Poetry Cabaret: Three Men Walk Into A Library
and blow the audience away. AJ Levin, George Elliot Clarke and Paul Muldoon, not to mention Stephen Brockwell, the host, had the audience in their spell.
Brockwell set the celebratory tone of the evening with his eloquent and enthusiastic introductions. One of the things I enjoy about the festival is that those who host are usually well-known local writers and we get the chance to see them in a role other than authors reading their own work.
AJ Levin was the first to read. The former Torontonian, now a Winnipegger, has just had his first book, Monk’s Fruit, published by Nightwood Editions. It was fortunate, and likely not accidental, that he came first. It wouldn’t be easy to follow the powerhouse of George Elliot Clarke or the charm of Paul Muldoon.
He began by reading some of his recent and unpublished poetry, explaining that after the book had been out for about twelve days, he was already sick of it. His poems were full of humour, something that seems to have been very common to the male poets reading at the festival this time around. In addition there were many classical allusions and unusual juxtapositions: in a poem called the World’s Largest Cabbage Patch Collection about bullies for example, he read of “fairy tale white snow” being packed down a child’s underpants.
Between poems, Levin shared small biographical notes, but didn’t go on too long in his introductions. If a poet’s intro to a poem takes longer than the poem itself to read, I’m bored. This happens more often than you would think. I enjoyed Levin’s humour, found his poetry to be very masculine in that there were lots of allusions to males and masculine imagery and past times throughout: Vikings, Shakespeare, Orwell, shrimp trawlers. There was very little mention of women in the poems he chose to read: one poem feminised a potato, another spoke humourously about female curlers.
Levin is obviously a very well-read poet and his work was strong, but somehow I didn’t feel involved in it. I haven’t read enough of it to know whether this would change. The danger of poetry readings is this temptation to evaluate based on encountering someone’s work only once, especially when faced with so much poetry at once, as one is at a writers’ festival as this one. The reviews of his work are excellent. Ken Babstock says that “Monk’s Fruit revels in language, syntax, and allusion."
Next on the stage was the man many people in the audience, including me, had been waiting for: George Elliot Clarke. People actually screamed when he came on stage. I think he is the closest thing to a Canadian poetry superstar we have. In the audience that night was his young daughter, Orillia, about whom he boasted had just been chosen to be the poet of her grade 2 class.
Clarke read bits from his play Quebecité about interracial couples, announcing that it will be produced for the Ottawa Fringe Festival by Jessica Ruano. Clarke’s reading including word play extraordinaire and rapid puns, delivered in an energetic manner that enlivened the normally quiet Ottawa poetry audience. A few years’ ago, Clarke came to the Tree Reading Series and did the same thing.
He also read from his latest poetry collection, “Black,” explaining that he loved this word because of its strength, referring tongue in cheek to “he had black designs,” and “black mail not black male.” One of the strengths of a Clarke performance is his sense of fun. You feel like an accomplice to his wit, and his playful criticism of politicians. You are on his side. That’s not an easy feat for a performer to achieve, but Clarke does so with ease and experience. It was a lesson for poets wishing to conquer a stage.
I loved his sound play: “slinked off whistling to drink drink drink” and the poignancy of his imagery: “snow cleansed everything but memory;” the muscular language “the surge of sun, lemony, cantankerous, warm.” It is always interesting to hear a poet read work about one’s own city. In his poems “La Vérité à Ottawa I and II,” he offers a portrait of our city. Clarke lived here for a number of years when he worked as an aid to an MP. Perhaps that’s why his political poems are so sharp and so strong. He read poems about former prime ministers Jean Chretien and Pierre Trudeau. I am hoping he writes one about Paul Martin some day, but what is there to say, really?
Next on stage was Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who did a reading on Beckett the day before and from what I understand, thrilled the audience. After the energetic Clarke, Muldoon’s pace took a bit of getting used to. His voice was soft and he had a bit of a lilt. When he read he turned to face different parts of the audience. It didn’t take long before we were all spellbound by his stories, his wit and his poetry, which was observational and full of insightful detail and pathos.
While he had prepared poems to read, he also took his cues from what the other two had read. For example, he chose to read a poem about turkey buzzards because Levin had a poem about the vulture and the dredyl. The poem was also about his sister who had died after the poem was written. Muldoon used a lot of near rhyme and internal rhyme in his work. Some poems were historical: he read one about the Ottawa tribe, for instance, while others were amusing—a poem disparaging the cheeps and bleeps of modern technology, which turned out to be a grasshopper. He read a strangely poignant poem about his dog, Angus, who bayed at the sound of a train, filled with mustard gas or Saran. He also referenced a lot of male heroes, including Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island, Diogenes and Blondin, a Niagara Falls daredevil. He read an amazing poem called The Loaf, which is published in Moy Sand and Gravel. The poem was full of detail and word play. He reminded me somewhat of Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage who came to the festival last year. He had a similar story telling style and, like Armitage, his poetry was more formal, more inclined to rhyme and traditional word play than contemporary North American poetry I’ve read.
The question and answer period that followed was one of the most animated and participatory Q&A sessions I’ve experienced at the festival. Brockwell began with questions from the audience. rob mclennan, finally getting a break from his host duties, opened the questions, remarking that Clarke was one of the few who writes overtly political poetry and asking him to comment. Clarke feels that everyone has the right and the responsibility to comment on political goings on. Brockwell asked the others how they worked politics into their poetry. Muldoon said that it is inevitable for anyone who is vertical and trying to make sense of their world to include politics. Some of his latest work while he’s been living in the States has been overtly political, which surprises him. He gave a delightful etymology of two words mentioned by Clarke: “Tory” which he said meant “highway man, robber and hunted person,” and “shenanigan” the Irish word for a cunning fox.
Levin approached the question differently, stating that language is politics, a system of code created to keep others out of the loop, quoting a linguist/philospher whose name I didn’t catch. Levin feels it is the job of the poet not to exclude people, but to include them in new ways.
An audience member asked the writers to discuss the notion that poetry was meant to be learned by heart and the lack of memorisation of poetry today. Muldoon said that one has to allow poetry to extend culturally. Many people have memorised lyrics, such as the songs of Leonard Cohen. Muldoon admitted to having a bad memory for even his own poems and hoped that this didn’t have anything to do with their quality. He continued more seriously that in the past poems were beaten in to students and that it would be better if poetry were more a part of our daily lives. When he expressed the idea that newspaper should contain a poem a day, the audience cheered. Muldoon made the exquisite point that poetry should be part of our ordinary existence, not some strange thing.
Clarke continued along the same vein, pointing out that people do memorise non traditional media such as hip hop lyrics, love poems and religious scripture. He said that in order to be a half decent wooer, you have to be able to lay down a love poem. He then recited the twenty-third psalm in demonstration.
Oni, the Haitian Sensation, changed the subject completely when she asked all three writers “if you were a fruit, what kind would you be, and describe the flavour.”
Levin referenced his book’s title, Monk’s Fruit, which has no flavour.
Clarke replied that this was obviously an erotic question and said watermelon.
Muldoon quoted a poem by Tony Harrison, “A Cumquat for Keats,” saying that his fruit would be bittersweet and have a different impact from one occasion to another.
Revisiting the earlier question about poetry and politics, syntactic memorability, and Carleton University’s Penn Writer in Residence, Amatoristero Ede commented that he felt contemporary poetry was close to the syntax of prose. His current editorial on Sentinel Poetry gives further details on his opinion as I can’t do it justice here.
Muldoon chose to address the memorability portion of the question, saying rhyming verse is easier to remember and advertisers have figured that out. Clarke spoke of the blessings of having many resources for poetry. As a teen, he carried a boom box and listened to the music of Springsteen, Dylan and Joni Mitchell, even admitting to being a victim of disco. All of these influenced his poetry, including the imagery of the blues, “I want to grind your coffee.” He argued that some poetry is closer to prose, discussing the Language Poets, Pound’s “The Cantos.” He recommended that nothing be dismissed as being useful for poetry.
Brockwell asked a question about how each poet wrote and what instrument they used. Muldoon uses a PC because he finds it hard to write with a pen and his handwriting is poor. He used a typewriter when he was a teen, has always been concerned with how a poem looks on a printed page. Levin uses a pen, sometimes a typewriter and rarely a computer, claiming to be a sporadic thinker and finding the pen handier for clusters of thought. He doesn’t like to have to turn something on and wait for it. Clarke brought out a small Chinese diary, which he is currently using for his latest work, an opera about Trudeau. He writes with a fountain pen, but eventually everything ends up on his computer, a Mac that breaks down a lot. (I hope he backs stuff up!)
Jesse Ferguson asked whether the notion that the readership for poetry was getting smaller was a myth. Muldoon quoted Byron who, after selling 500 copies of a book overnight, suddenly found himself famous one morning. Muldoon said that popularity isn’t always reflected in book sales. One sure way of making it popular, he said, would be to make it illegal.
Mark Robertson, aka Max Middle, asked about the relationship of the poem to its reading. Levin likened it to a play and said that with the exception of visual poems, a poem is not a poem until it is read aloud. Clarke agreed and added that interpretation changes the reading of a poem, which must work on the page and in the air/ear. Muldoon said that the poem itself should teach us how it wants to be read.
An audience member asked how the writers cultivated their subjects and their imagery. Levin said that the way he sees the world is like a disease. He’s been called a Cubist and cannot stop connecting unlike things. Clarke said that he has the habit of reading a lot and paying attention to what people say. He stays interested in the world and uses weird stories for inspiration, such as the guys who robbed a lingerie store using a meat clever. He feels the poet has to be more open to experience, is called to be more alive and more awake to life. Once again the audience cheered. I think we all wanted to yell out “amen” and “hallelujah.” Muldoon said that everyone has this habit, this disease, right from childhood, but we are often educated out of it. He said that poets have the habit in a much more devastating way.
Amatoristero Ede sparked discussion when he talked of entertainment as pandering to the petit bourgeoisie, to which Clarke replied the petit bourgeoisie don’t read poetry and insisted that it is dangerous to impose a political meaning on form, form is apolitical. The sheer fact of using rhyme does not make a poem without politics. Muldoon mused about the need for poetry to be solemn and wondered what was wrong with fun.
Oni asked about the writers’ opinions of spoken word. Muldoon was the only one to answer for some reason. He said that it was wonderful and admired the genuine wit of hip hop. This inspired a folklorist in the audience to speak of the popularity of poetry even in the eighteenth century when balladeers sold their poems to people on the streets. The audience member spoke of poems that are memorised: children’s rhymes and ribald limericks. Poetry is part of every day life. Clarke ended the evening with a reading of the 1925 poem by Evelyn Hamilton, The Disintegrating Husband:
I got married the other day, I
took my husband up to a high
cliff an let him look over an' he
almost fell. If it hadn't been for
me, I grabbed him by the coat an'
saved him. But I was sorry
afterwards, because when it
came time for us to retire he took
out his false teeth, an' put them
in a bureau drawer. Then he took
out a false eye an' put it in the
bureau drawer. Then he took off
a false arm an' put it in the
bureau drawer. He took off a
false wig an' put it in the bureau
drawer. Finally, he took off a
false leg an' put it in the bureau
drawer. When it came time for
me to git in bed, I didn't know
what to do. I didn't know if to git
in bed or in the bureau drawer.
After that, what more is there to say? We all disintegrated and went our separate ways. Once more the festival was inspiring, eclectic and thought provoking. The aftershock will continue with readings with lots of readings this week and beyond: Tree features poets Jan Conn & Diana Hartog, and an inaugural reading at the new location of Richard Fitzpatrick Books when the Bookthugs of Toronto come to visit. For more events, refer to the Bywords calendar (how’s that for a shameless plug?)
Brockwell set the celebratory tone of the evening with his eloquent and enthusiastic introductions. One of the things I enjoy about the festival is that those who host are usually well-known local writers and we get the chance to see them in a role other than authors reading their own work.
AJ Levin was the first to read. The former Torontonian, now a Winnipegger, has just had his first book, Monk’s Fruit, published by Nightwood Editions. It was fortunate, and likely not accidental, that he came first. It wouldn’t be easy to follow the powerhouse of George Elliot Clarke or the charm of Paul Muldoon.
He began by reading some of his recent and unpublished poetry, explaining that after the book had been out for about twelve days, he was already sick of it. His poems were full of humour, something that seems to have been very common to the male poets reading at the festival this time around. In addition there were many classical allusions and unusual juxtapositions: in a poem called the World’s Largest Cabbage Patch Collection about bullies for example, he read of “fairy tale white snow” being packed down a child’s underpants.
Between poems, Levin shared small biographical notes, but didn’t go on too long in his introductions. If a poet’s intro to a poem takes longer than the poem itself to read, I’m bored. This happens more often than you would think. I enjoyed Levin’s humour, found his poetry to be very masculine in that there were lots of allusions to males and masculine imagery and past times throughout: Vikings, Shakespeare, Orwell, shrimp trawlers. There was very little mention of women in the poems he chose to read: one poem feminised a potato, another spoke humourously about female curlers.
Levin is obviously a very well-read poet and his work was strong, but somehow I didn’t feel involved in it. I haven’t read enough of it to know whether this would change. The danger of poetry readings is this temptation to evaluate based on encountering someone’s work only once, especially when faced with so much poetry at once, as one is at a writers’ festival as this one. The reviews of his work are excellent. Ken Babstock says that “Monk’s Fruit revels in language, syntax, and allusion."
Next on the stage was the man many people in the audience, including me, had been waiting for: George Elliot Clarke. People actually screamed when he came on stage. I think he is the closest thing to a Canadian poetry superstar we have. In the audience that night was his young daughter, Orillia, about whom he boasted had just been chosen to be the poet of her grade 2 class.
Clarke read bits from his play Quebecité about interracial couples, announcing that it will be produced for the Ottawa Fringe Festival by Jessica Ruano. Clarke’s reading including word play extraordinaire and rapid puns, delivered in an energetic manner that enlivened the normally quiet Ottawa poetry audience. A few years’ ago, Clarke came to the Tree Reading Series and did the same thing.
He also read from his latest poetry collection, “Black,” explaining that he loved this word because of its strength, referring tongue in cheek to “he had black designs,” and “black mail not black male.” One of the strengths of a Clarke performance is his sense of fun. You feel like an accomplice to his wit, and his playful criticism of politicians. You are on his side. That’s not an easy feat for a performer to achieve, but Clarke does so with ease and experience. It was a lesson for poets wishing to conquer a stage.
I loved his sound play: “slinked off whistling to drink drink drink” and the poignancy of his imagery: “snow cleansed everything but memory;” the muscular language “the surge of sun, lemony, cantankerous, warm.” It is always interesting to hear a poet read work about one’s own city. In his poems “La Vérité à Ottawa I and II,” he offers a portrait of our city. Clarke lived here for a number of years when he worked as an aid to an MP. Perhaps that’s why his political poems are so sharp and so strong. He read poems about former prime ministers Jean Chretien and Pierre Trudeau. I am hoping he writes one about Paul Martin some day, but what is there to say, really?
Next on stage was Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who did a reading on Beckett the day before and from what I understand, thrilled the audience. After the energetic Clarke, Muldoon’s pace took a bit of getting used to. His voice was soft and he had a bit of a lilt. When he read he turned to face different parts of the audience. It didn’t take long before we were all spellbound by his stories, his wit and his poetry, which was observational and full of insightful detail and pathos.
While he had prepared poems to read, he also took his cues from what the other two had read. For example, he chose to read a poem about turkey buzzards because Levin had a poem about the vulture and the dredyl. The poem was also about his sister who had died after the poem was written. Muldoon used a lot of near rhyme and internal rhyme in his work. Some poems were historical: he read one about the Ottawa tribe, for instance, while others were amusing—a poem disparaging the cheeps and bleeps of modern technology, which turned out to be a grasshopper. He read a strangely poignant poem about his dog, Angus, who bayed at the sound of a train, filled with mustard gas or Saran. He also referenced a lot of male heroes, including Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island, Diogenes and Blondin, a Niagara Falls daredevil. He read an amazing poem called The Loaf, which is published in Moy Sand and Gravel. The poem was full of detail and word play. He reminded me somewhat of Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage who came to the festival last year. He had a similar story telling style and, like Armitage, his poetry was more formal, more inclined to rhyme and traditional word play than contemporary North American poetry I’ve read.
The question and answer period that followed was one of the most animated and participatory Q&A sessions I’ve experienced at the festival. Brockwell began with questions from the audience. rob mclennan, finally getting a break from his host duties, opened the questions, remarking that Clarke was one of the few who writes overtly political poetry and asking him to comment. Clarke feels that everyone has the right and the responsibility to comment on political goings on. Brockwell asked the others how they worked politics into their poetry. Muldoon said that it is inevitable for anyone who is vertical and trying to make sense of their world to include politics. Some of his latest work while he’s been living in the States has been overtly political, which surprises him. He gave a delightful etymology of two words mentioned by Clarke: “Tory” which he said meant “highway man, robber and hunted person,” and “shenanigan” the Irish word for a cunning fox.
Levin approached the question differently, stating that language is politics, a system of code created to keep others out of the loop, quoting a linguist/philospher whose name I didn’t catch. Levin feels it is the job of the poet not to exclude people, but to include them in new ways.
An audience member asked the writers to discuss the notion that poetry was meant to be learned by heart and the lack of memorisation of poetry today. Muldoon said that one has to allow poetry to extend culturally. Many people have memorised lyrics, such as the songs of Leonard Cohen. Muldoon admitted to having a bad memory for even his own poems and hoped that this didn’t have anything to do with their quality. He continued more seriously that in the past poems were beaten in to students and that it would be better if poetry were more a part of our daily lives. When he expressed the idea that newspaper should contain a poem a day, the audience cheered. Muldoon made the exquisite point that poetry should be part of our ordinary existence, not some strange thing.
Clarke continued along the same vein, pointing out that people do memorise non traditional media such as hip hop lyrics, love poems and religious scripture. He said that in order to be a half decent wooer, you have to be able to lay down a love poem. He then recited the twenty-third psalm in demonstration.
Oni, the Haitian Sensation, changed the subject completely when she asked all three writers “if you were a fruit, what kind would you be, and describe the flavour.”
Levin referenced his book’s title, Monk’s Fruit, which has no flavour.
Clarke replied that this was obviously an erotic question and said watermelon.
Muldoon quoted a poem by Tony Harrison, “A Cumquat for Keats,” saying that his fruit would be bittersweet and have a different impact from one occasion to another.
Revisiting the earlier question about poetry and politics, syntactic memorability, and Carleton University’s Penn Writer in Residence, Amatoristero Ede commented that he felt contemporary poetry was close to the syntax of prose. His current editorial on Sentinel Poetry gives further details on his opinion as I can’t do it justice here.
Muldoon chose to address the memorability portion of the question, saying rhyming verse is easier to remember and advertisers have figured that out. Clarke spoke of the blessings of having many resources for poetry. As a teen, he carried a boom box and listened to the music of Springsteen, Dylan and Joni Mitchell, even admitting to being a victim of disco. All of these influenced his poetry, including the imagery of the blues, “I want to grind your coffee.” He argued that some poetry is closer to prose, discussing the Language Poets, Pound’s “The Cantos.” He recommended that nothing be dismissed as being useful for poetry.
Brockwell asked a question about how each poet wrote and what instrument they used. Muldoon uses a PC because he finds it hard to write with a pen and his handwriting is poor. He used a typewriter when he was a teen, has always been concerned with how a poem looks on a printed page. Levin uses a pen, sometimes a typewriter and rarely a computer, claiming to be a sporadic thinker and finding the pen handier for clusters of thought. He doesn’t like to have to turn something on and wait for it. Clarke brought out a small Chinese diary, which he is currently using for his latest work, an opera about Trudeau. He writes with a fountain pen, but eventually everything ends up on his computer, a Mac that breaks down a lot. (I hope he backs stuff up!)
Jesse Ferguson asked whether the notion that the readership for poetry was getting smaller was a myth. Muldoon quoted Byron who, after selling 500 copies of a book overnight, suddenly found himself famous one morning. Muldoon said that popularity isn’t always reflected in book sales. One sure way of making it popular, he said, would be to make it illegal.
Mark Robertson, aka Max Middle, asked about the relationship of the poem to its reading. Levin likened it to a play and said that with the exception of visual poems, a poem is not a poem until it is read aloud. Clarke agreed and added that interpretation changes the reading of a poem, which must work on the page and in the air/ear. Muldoon said that the poem itself should teach us how it wants to be read.
An audience member asked how the writers cultivated their subjects and their imagery. Levin said that the way he sees the world is like a disease. He’s been called a Cubist and cannot stop connecting unlike things. Clarke said that he has the habit of reading a lot and paying attention to what people say. He stays interested in the world and uses weird stories for inspiration, such as the guys who robbed a lingerie store using a meat clever. He feels the poet has to be more open to experience, is called to be more alive and more awake to life. Once again the audience cheered. I think we all wanted to yell out “amen” and “hallelujah.” Muldoon said that everyone has this habit, this disease, right from childhood, but we are often educated out of it. He said that poets have the habit in a much more devastating way.
Amatoristero Ede sparked discussion when he talked of entertainment as pandering to the petit bourgeoisie, to which Clarke replied the petit bourgeoisie don’t read poetry and insisted that it is dangerous to impose a political meaning on form, form is apolitical. The sheer fact of using rhyme does not make a poem without politics. Muldoon mused about the need for poetry to be solemn and wondered what was wrong with fun.
Oni asked about the writers’ opinions of spoken word. Muldoon was the only one to answer for some reason. He said that it was wonderful and admired the genuine wit of hip hop. This inspired a folklorist in the audience to speak of the popularity of poetry even in the eighteenth century when balladeers sold their poems to people on the streets. The audience member spoke of poems that are memorised: children’s rhymes and ribald limericks. Poetry is part of every day life. Clarke ended the evening with a reading of the 1925 poem by Evelyn Hamilton, The Disintegrating Husband:
I got married the other day, I
took my husband up to a high
cliff an let him look over an' he
almost fell. If it hadn't been for
me, I grabbed him by the coat an'
saved him. But I was sorry
afterwards, because when it
came time for us to retire he took
out his false teeth, an' put them
in a bureau drawer. Then he took
out a false eye an' put it in the
bureau drawer. Then he took off
a false arm an' put it in the
bureau drawer. He took off a
false wig an' put it in the bureau
drawer. Finally, he took off a
false leg an' put it in the bureau
drawer. When it came time for
me to git in bed, I didn't know
what to do. I didn't know if to git
in bed or in the bureau drawer.
After that, what more is there to say? We all disintegrated and went our separate ways. Once more the festival was inspiring, eclectic and thought provoking. The aftershock will continue with readings with lots of readings this week and beyond: Tree features poets Jan Conn & Diana Hartog, and an inaugural reading at the new location of Richard Fitzpatrick Books when the Bookthugs of Toronto come to visit. For more events, refer to the Bywords calendar (how’s that for a shameless plug?)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)