On Writing #26 : Kevin Spenst

On Writing

Kevin Spenst

Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

    Wallace Stevens

     Paul Valery writes about the creation of a poem beginning with the gift of a first line - une ligne donnee given by god, nature or the particular placement of a baguette - a line through which you pull the rest of the poem. It's a beautiful notion but how do you get to that ligne donnee, and really, how do you pull the rabbit of a poem out of the slit of a single line?

   There are ten essential slight-of-hand tricks to writing poetry and nobody knows what they are.  If our goal is to write poems that really take people's heads off, then we need to dwell in the mysterious realms of religion, art, theater, Resident Evil 6 (or something equally intense to you.) No, but seriously. 

     Long after some spasmodic bursts of teen angst poetry, I found my way back into the realms of the literary sublime through the most circuitous of routes: acting lead to making my own short films which lead to scripting plot ideas which lead to becoming serious about fiction which lead to an MFA where I focused on poetry. My head is still spinning.

     For me, writing starts with poetic attention that exists in an open alertness to the world. On my bike ride home from work the other day, I tried to look at the entire road in front of me - from the ongoing rush of the asphalt beneath my front tire to the slow movement of the coming distance. There was no stuttering middle ground dragging my gaze down and then up, but it was all one gestalt. It felt different for a couple seconds. Who doesn't want to live with the possibilities of the mundane being filled with the new? I love poetry for its potential to open up spaces in my day-to-day life. (For the record, I don’t pay poetic attention to anything while drinking and operating heavy machinery.)

      In October of 2003 I started writing a story everyday. I’d been living amidst a growing heap of half-fished journals and motivational writing quotes, but none of my resolutions to take writing seriously solidified into a consistent practice. A friend, the supremely talented Paul Pratte, offered to help me design a website. The crux of the site was to be a short-short story everyday. Making a promise with a mostly imaginary online audience was what got me into the practice of writing.

    Poetry itself feels like the apex of potential. Poetry is game for invading any other discourse. Poetry raps: gratitude is the only attitude. Poetry plunders in wonder. Poetry is high-tech primitivism. Poetry runs the gamut of great ideals and taboo filth straight into the ground beneath our feet and plants something hybrid. Poetry is confessional and denialistic. (de-nihilistic?)As far as my poetics are concerned, poetry is language at play with the core plasticity of the self.

     When I read fiction or poetry, I don’t tend to see anything the first time through. I have to put effort into witnessing a scene unfold. It makes sense that I fell in love with poetry. The French Symbolists wrote with musicality in mind and there’s a mellifluous strain that runs through a lot of poetries. Certainly, we all have varying degrees of sensitivity towards language. Nabokov saw words accompanied by colours and presumably there are other synaesthetes who experience words with other sensory qualities. “’The Sublime smells like an aardvark to me,” someone might have once said.

     We speak from a place of flesh and blood and our “voice” is physically determined, but our culture and personality shape how we use it. A man growing up with four brothers who’s significantly shorter than the rest might compensate by speaking in the deep voice of a six-foot powerhouse. When I edit my poems, I listen for the quirks of a voice that may be hiding something. I let the poem keep its secrets as long as it’s willing to share something of greater interest.

     Language is at home in our mouths and the page is a strange fiction we all agree to take for fact.

     Poetry is an ideal, a place where the senses and abstractions are united. Nowhere is this interplay of modalities more dynamic than the work of Ken Babstock. Amanda Earl does a meticulous job of scratching at the paint and colours present in his first two books in “A Catalogue of Colour, Texture & Shiny Things in Ken Babstock's Poetry-Part One.” She explores the tone created through colour choices, drawing our attention to brush-stroked lines:

this year's open mouth looks like a red room of your own

heart; tin icebox; bloody plush at his chest (Waiting on a Transplant)

     What does this year, this month, this week, this day, this hour, this second look like to you?

     Last piece of advice: set up win-win situations for yourself. Write for yourself and for others. Think about your ideal writing circumstances. Imagine your dream audience. Think about how you want to feel when you write. Your warm coffee, the morning sun singling out the tip of your nose. What might seem drudgery can take on the quiet beauty of meditation. Through your editing and rewrites, listen carefully to determine what you’ve written for yourself and what might be of interest to others. Practice so that you can get to the place where you are simultaneously writing for yourself and others. Even if your poem doesn’t win the $50, 000 Montreal poetry prize, you’ll have grown from that time on your own.

    To sum things up in the BASIC programming language.

10 PRINT “Live”;

20 PRINT “Read everything from chapbooks to Chaucer”;

30 PRINT “Write”;

40 PRINT “Laugh at your mistakes”;

50 GOTO 10 

In addition to the UK, the United States, Austria and India, Kevin Spenst’s poetry has appeared in over a dozen Canadian literary publications such as Freefall, Prairie Fire, CV2, Dandelion, filling Station, qwerty, and Poetry is Dead. His work has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and his manuscript Ignite has come in as a finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. In 2011, he won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry. In 2014 he is going to do a 100-venue reading tour across Canada with his chapbooks Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press, 2013), Retractable (the serif of nottingham, 2013), Happy Hollow and the Surrey Suite (self-published, 2012), What the Frag Meant (100 tetes press, 2014) and Surrey Sonnets (JackPine press, 2014). Follow the chapbook tour at kevinspenst.com

EARL & STEADMAN - A B Series Celebrates National Poetry Month!

A B Series Celebrates National Poetry Month!

Readings by AMANDA EARL & DEAN STEADMAN!

With a performance of Après Satie: Four Two and Four Hands by Dean Steadman, Lesley Strutt, Frances Boyle and Alastair Larwill. Après Satie: Four Two and Four Hands is a work by Dean Steadman for multiple voices inspired by Erik Satie's piano composition.

7pm

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Auditorium

Main Branch

Ottawa Public Library

120 Metcalfe Street

Ottawa, Ont.

Free

A hat will be passed.

More info abseries.org

AMANDA EARL is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the publisher of AngelHousePress, including its transgressive prose imprint, DevilHouse. She is the author of several chapbooks. Her first poetry book will be published by Chaudiere Books in the fall of 2014. Her poems have also appeared in literary journals both on line and in print in Australia, Canada, England, France, Ireland and the USA. Amanda has received funding from the City of Ottawa and the Ontario Arts Council.

DEAN STEADMAN’s work has been published in Canadian journals and e-zines, as well as in the anthology Pith and Wry: Canadian Poetry (Scrivener Press, 2010). His poem, ‘Crime Passionnel’ (Descant 144, Spring 2009), was selected by Lorna Crozier as one of the top 100 poems in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2010 (Tightrope Books). He was a finalist in the 2011 Ottawa Book Awards for his poetry collection their blue drowning (Frog Hollow Press, 2010). His chapbook, Portrait w/tulips, was published by Leaf Editions in 2013.

On Writing #25 : Kate Cayley

An Effort of Attention
Kate Cayley

My greatest fear in writing poetry is that it will stop.

My other fear is that I have no idea what “it” is.

As soon as I began to be serious about writing poetry, meaning that it was more than a flurry of narcissistic excitement, writing it became tentative, apologetic. Who isn’t a little apologetic about writing poetry, really? It’s such an odd thing to do—a process of elimination. It’s not a story, or a song, or an essay, or a reflection, or a memoir, or a piece of reportage, but it contains elements of all those things—what remains behind when the trappings are removed.

It is a compression of thought and music into a very small, very modest space. So small, it’s always on the verge of disappearing. What are you even in pursuit of? A recognizable “I”? But the “I” of the poet is a fiction—a voice that is too precise, too conscious of itself, to be anything other than a heartfelt construction. I am not interested in I, not for writing purposes. It doesn’t feel tangible. It’s as elusive as the world, or more so.

As a poet, I need a subject—a large one, a far-removed one—art forgery, photography, Emily Dickinson, the history of flight. But I wonder if this is a form of obfuscation, of avoidance. Here is my subject. See how interesting it is. It neatly sidesteps the bigger question of what it is. There’s so much colour. You won’t notice the scaffolding sags, the foundation is leaking.

Auden, who I read a lot, said repeatedly (he was a crank, like me) to different people that, if there was any point at all in teaching poetry, which there wasn’t, he would teach only technical mastery. And I agree, except I can’t, because the technique of poetry has never yielded much to me, unless those rules move in my blood without my knowing it, as instinctive rhythm, but that is a tall order, very unlikely as well as romantic/Romantic. I think we live in a period of dissolution, of scattering, so it must be inhabited, as a poet. There isn’t really a choice. Just try to inhabit it as unaffectedly as possible. Which is tricky.

Poetry is borrowed time. Bartered awkwardly or gracefully from other work, children, partners, failures of noticing, failures of discipline, failure. Maybe that’s what it is? An awareness of the way time is borrowed—all of it? Maybe. Maybe if I got nearer to knowing what poetry is, I could stop being afraid that it would stop. Because writing it seems so lucky, so fortuitous, surely that can’t continue? I know I’ve been lucky, I’ve gotten a lot of undeserved blessings in my life thus far—but that lucky?

Or maybe if I figured out what it is, it would stop: it’s the tension of the unexplainable.

Simone Weil wrote “no true effort of attention is ever wasted.” I like this very much—that attention is an effort, a striving, and also that it carries something, holds something essential, even when that thing is not obvious and may never be obvious. That it, and we, are not wasted. Maybe poetry is evidence of the effort of attention that is not wasted. That’s probably enough.

Kate Cayley is a poet, playwright and fiction writer. Her first collection of poetry, When This World Comes to an End, published in 2013 by Brick Books, was named one of the season’s best collections by The Globe and Mail. She is a playwright in residence at Tarragon Theatre, and her play, After Akhmatova, was produced there in 2011. She is the artistic director of Stranger Theatre, and has co-created,directed and written eight plays with the company. She has also written a young adult novel, The Hangman in the Mirror (Annick Press), which won the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. Her poems and short stories have appeared in literary magazines across the country, and her first collection of short fiction, How You Were Born, will be published in September. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their two children.

On Writing #24 : Gregory Betts

On Writing

Gregory Betts

I like the messy body; not interested in only clean; the illusion of perfection. Mistakes embody the process of bodies. We slop, we spill, we tumble – and through an arduous process, we enable small moments of grace. The kind of poetry that I’m interested in – avant/conceptual/experimental/&etc art and poetry – is filled with attempts to highlight the importance of process – by which is often meant an acceptance of the mistake.

Kenny Goldsmith, who runs Ubu.com, in his book Soliloquy includes in the transcript a conversation where he reveals that he really doesn’t understand who Pere Ubu is or what he’s about. What astonishing generosity, honesty to include such a moment without editing it out. Ubu was a shithead, a guy lost in his own illusions. Was Goldsmith enacting Ubu by including his mistake, becoming late 20^th century’s ubu roi, or offering a wink to the observant? It’s that kind of elegance that I’m interested in with mistakes – where you reveal inverted, potential truths through errors, something perhaps inadvertently beautiful; discovering new terrain through mistakes.

Found poetry, appropriative writing, plunderverse, &etc, is laden with the rare mixture of innocent text with insight. Such unintentional poetry is, in fact, essential to teaching and to learning, but making mistakes is only a preliminary step in the process. There’s a reason the army of teachers out there spend so much time carefully correcting the mistakes in every essay, even when they know that many of the students will never even glance at those comments. We do it because error is at the heart of our enterprise, the moment’s chance to change the course of things to come: the inverted potential of the real lives of our students. But we should not be afraid of or disgusted by those errors – we have to attend to them, think about them more productively, exhaustively. Personally, I harvest them, revel in their spectacular vistas.

In This is Importance, I wanted to highlight the importance of the error –– not only because they are hilarious, but because they offer a glimpse into the process of teaching and learning, alongside rare glimpses of inadvertent beauty in student writing. In my classroom, in my poetry, I focus on the mistakes because I cherish the painful process of learning. My favourite mistakes are the ones that strive towards something lofty and often clichéd only to inadvertently arrive at a much more convincing insight. I don’t mean the ones where the language has no clue what it is revealing, and sit empty vestibules of incoherent letters. Those aren’t particularly interesting to me. I mean, the ones where the particular wording creates another possible truth that resonates. From that book: “Poetic form is how you tell a poem from nothing”.

A poetry from such mistakes is, to misparaphrase Robert Duncan, like a drug-addled addict suddenly happy and grandiose with a gladness to private meaningless pleasures, to profundities because they were depths, to ecstasies because they were heights—mere dimensions. A poet on writing.

Gregory Betts lives in St. Catharines, Ontario. His most recent books include This is Importance (Wolsak & Wynn 2013), a book of student errors on Canadian literature, and Avant Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (UTP 2013). His next book is Boycott, forthcoming from Make Now Press.

Recent Reads: Hugh Thomas and N.W. Lea

Albanian Suite by Hugh Thomas

Present! by N.W. Lea

Published by above/ground press, 2014.

Translators typically have an agenda when they choose their work. Whether the translation aims to remedy an incomplete version or present literature to a new population, the perceived gesture often determines the public’s approach. But Hugh Thomas’ treatment of poems by Visar Zhiti and a few others not only operates without that explicit gesture, it confesses to not knowing Albanian! Exploring the grey area of translation, Albanian Suite is as much a study in intuition as it is a doorway to improvisation.

Thomas’ key to informal translation involves responding to words as they appear on the page. (My efforts to do the same, focusing on poems Zhiti has had reproduced online, were unproductive.)  However the means of his methodology, it’s clear that Thomas’ poetic guide was at least accompanied by an experienced, geographical one. Signposts of a summer’s escape in Europe colour the culture-rich but cash-poor “Music I heard with you” and the title suite. But broadly speaking, Albanian Suite exists in an overcrowded nexus between languages – so again, Europe – and finds a couple decoding their way through the Mediterranean.

“Metropolitan

The two sicknesses frequent in this epoch are heat and isolation.

There are boxes of hotels. We are a collection.

Closet doors, gelatine reductions. Reapparition and sale of automobiles.

Miracles are also part of the equipment.

Painting, recovering, becoming impermeable.

The water is in your family.

Him vs. it: although they dream equally, they do not speak the same

language.

To become free as a fish, enter the universal museum.

Dolphin madrigal, closed water. The subway is culture.

Eat your ticket. Your future is our compromise.

Language is a door. At the door we watch you turning out the lights.”

Thomas’ lines are direct and unaccommodating, as if under foreign constraints, yet the linguistics at play resound beyond a surface level of political boundaries. The musicality of the “dolphin madrigal”, like the tokens and tradition that exude a hectic wedding day rhythm in “Epithalamion”, flex the non-verbal ways we navigate space (or lack thereof). Thomas offsets the narrowing effects of language’s deductions as an explorer in “The Strange Mine of Pork Poetry”:

“I don’t worry about the garden path, which is different for every letter,

because every letter carries a different experience to the poem. The poem

turns somersaults along the path despite the tower of texts piled atop one

another to deter diversions.”

This excerpt, the third of five prose-poem stanzas, also sheds light on Thomas’ attitude toward loose translations, waking up dormant avenues inside each letter. Although unable to find an online bio that lists the languages the author is fluent in, I reckon Thomas does know some Italian (which, as part of my in-house research, has been suggested as a useful tool for cracking Albanian) and perhaps some Swedish. These skills would explain the relative spaciousness of “Clear” (from Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti) and “Stars” (by Finnish poet Edith Sodergran), one-off translations that glimmer on the outskirts of Thomas’ jam-packed verse. It’s unclear whether Thomas took more or less creative license with these poems but, alongside one of his loose translations, the morning song “Early”, they’re the poems I find most liberating.

There’s a good deal of improvisation throughout Albanian Suite, as Zhiti’s influence maneuvers traditional stanzas, free verse, a ten-part sequential and a mock review, among others. The latter, entitled “Review”, reads like cut-up words of a poetry review reassembled in scattered order. It may very well be that simple, another angle of translation that excites with the glimpse of something new. From my experience, the degree to which these poems leave their mark is also varied, which is to say the impact of Thomas’ intuition will largely depend on the dexterity of the reader’s. Confusion is a latent component to excitement and certainly part of this translator’s curious agenda.

N.W. Lea’s new chapbook Present! forgoes the responsive processes that layer Albanian Suite, instead centering on small admissions of awareness. Assembled as twenty individually numbered trinkets, these new poems rouse us awake in the midst of minutia: a plain observation, the unspoken portion of a conversation, some inexplicable act or faraway memory. The who, where and why’s couldn’t make it. In fact, those omissions form the connective tissue for each tangent – omissions that put the onus on Lea’s delicate craftsmanship.

Several of these offerings expire within ten words, so it’s telling that Present! digs so much aplomb out of its sparseness. Take the otherwise untitled “9.”:

“the doughy flute music

the classical hand

the budding edifices

the braggart”

This bite-sized portrayal helps to populate Present!’s rather domesticated neighbourhood but also shows Lea’s mastery of honing in on the small scale. 

“5.

this forest is reckless

with odour

I am on the inside

of an outrageous calm

tiny respite

from the terror

of the temporary”

At once skeletal and fully formed, “5.” is an opportunity to revel in ambiguity. The forest, odour, calm and terror each have their proximity to “an outrageous calm” but even that imagery remains elusive. Lea’s disciplined sieve permits only mood and tone to have a fixed presence and it lingers like the afterglow of a good Haiku.

Present! collects unassuming but cleverly managed observations refined over time and, as such, rewards a casual read. Digested over a longer period, however, these poems and their gaps, like communal patches of lawn between houses that neither neighbour can fully enjoy, hang together like a tapestry, all the more memorable for the ways it feels unfinished.