The Poet, Inturped: A Review of Peter Norman's Water Damage

Water Damage

Peter Norman

(Mansfield, 2013)

The last poem in Peter Norman’s debut collection At the Gates of the Theme Park (Mansfield, 2010), entitled “Judgment,” provides an apt entry point into the work of this remarkable poet. I quote the full poem:

I saw a girl begging for change.

I gave her change, for she was beautiful.

But nothing shifted: next day she was there

still beautiful and begging. And the eye

she cast was cold, its judgment terrible.

My boss returned the annual report.

I’d written it. He’d circled things in red

that needed fixing. So I fixed those things

and sent it back. He sent it back again.

A dozen circles blotted every word.

Three storks delivered babies to my door.

The babies made much noise and ate much food.

What can you do? What else would you have done?

I fed them food and bore the noise

and one by one they crawled to better homes. 

As throughout Norman’s work, the plainspokenness here conceals great linguistic and even (for lack of a better word) philosophical depth. Notice, for instance, how the first stanza collapses the two definitions of change—i.e., as money and as alteration—to reveal the disconnect between them: the speaker gives the girl small change when she seeks a more thoroughgoing one, and so he returns the next day to find “nothing shifted.” Motivated in his gift primarily by her beauty (“for she was beautiful”), he returns to find her gaze turned back on him and coldened, “its judgment terrible”—a reflection of his sense of culpability in paying for her as an aesthetic object rather than meaningfully engaging with her disenfranchised humanity. This speaks to one of the key elements of Norman’s worldview: his speakers never try to occupy a moral high ground, instead acknowledging themselves as creatures of folly, eternally culpable. In the often-hapless way they shunt from incident to incident, they can remind us of the Everyman of medieval morality plays, running his gauntlet of tribulations. But Norman never allows this sense of anonymity to lapse into a false universality; though “Judgment” alone may not convey this, taken as a whole his work makes clear that the sorts of quotidian worlds portrayed in this poem—as stanza by stanza it moves from the sphere of society to that of work to that of family—belong not to every man but to a specific kind of white middleish-class Western one. Indeed, Norman’s work derives great power from its continual acknowledgement that to occupy such a subject-position is in some sense to be always already guilty. This can be seen in the last lines of stanzas two and three above (“A dozen circles blotted every word” … “and one by one they crawled to better homes”), which achieve their surrealistic impact by amplifying this pervasive sense of guilt to almost terrifying degrees.

Technically speaking, there is much else to admire here. Notice, for instance, how the archaic twinges of “for she was beautiful” and “made much noise and ate much food” evoke a Biblical context of judgment. Or how frequently and subtly Norman falls into perfect iambs, using music to sell his difficult twists of logic. Or, more generally, how the plainness of diction and syntax work in tension with the surrealistic imagery to produce a tone poised ambiguously between humour and inner turmoil—a technique used to great effect in the best work of his editor, Stuart Ross, and indeed a central element in what has almost become Mansfield Press’s ‘house style’, though Norman imbues it with his own peculiar brand of mastery. I know it may seem odd to qualify “mastery” as “peculiar,” but this near-paradox captures the weird variousness of Norman’s work: he seems capable of writing anything he wants—ranging in his two collections from brilliant sonnets and rhymed quatrains to fragmentary free-verse narratives and prose poems—and yet every display of metrical virtuosity or musical uplift seems counterpointed by a moment of bizarre incompletion or even just silliness. Put simply, Norman is a master whose suspicion of mastery leads him to self-sabotage, and—and this is the kicker—rightly so, for in continually emphasizing our fallibility, the worldview embodied in his work depends for its persuasiveness on the poet’s showing himself to be fallible. Thus, in addition to exemplifying all the fine qualities I’ve named above, At the Gates of the Theme Park also presents itself as a catalogue of lapses, and it is all the better for it.

This is not to fully excuse Norman’s occasionally too-high tolerance for triviality and non sequitur: several of the least effective poems in At the Gates use asterisks to link their disparate sections rather than the figurative connections he proves so adept at building elsewhere, and several of the shortest pieces read like anecdotal sketches rather than fully drawn poems. But for the most part even the least substantial pieces contain some glimmer of off-kilter insight, and overall At the Gates of the Theme Park coheres because rather than in spite of its lightest moments, while still containing poems that, in their thoroughness of development, tantalize us with what a Peter Norman less consistently suspicious of his own mastery might achieve. Witness “Recursion”:

I fall awake alone. Outside,

nocturnal rain ascends.

Alarms rage, summoning a thief

who hurries to the store,

unpacks his duffel sack,

replaces items on the shelf.

Morning. The plane dispenses you.

We enfold each other,

celebrating your undeparture.    

Tears scroll up your cheeks,

nestle into ducts.

Last night we wake

sweat-soaked and sated,

breathe flame to candlewick

and fuse, hips coaxing sheets

to smoothness.

Years ago, our meeting is unmade.

My life hurries back into ignorance,

days spent unrolling snowballs,

being chased by the ice cream truck,

gathering bread spat by ducks

beside a cool lake.

We will never disentangle

at the baggage check.

You won’t be tugged from me

by announcements,

gates, corridors, customs.

I am three years old.

I urge spilled milk into a jug,

right it on the table.

My mother’s alarmed eyes

flash calm.

Outside, a robin

cocks her head,

feeds worms

to the hungry soil.

“Recursion” constitutes a feat of defamiliarization on par with Craig Raine’s classic “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” transcending what might be dismissed as its ‘gimmick’ through the way each verse paragraph serves both to advance (or, rather, claw back) the narrative while also functioning as a little imagistic prism through which our desire to turn back time is warped to reveal its laughable poignancy. Everything here is apt, as each few lines reveal a fresh figuration of the essential futility of the enterprise, until in the penultimate verse paragraph the poet even finds a way to reinvigorate the proverbial “spilled milk,” before ending on the startling image (a perfect example of what Jonathan Ball has referred to as Norman’s “soft surrealism”) of a robin feeding worms to the “hungry soil.” It’s a brilliant ending to a brilliant poem—you can see how adjectives fail me—as that closing image functions not just as a surrealist depiction of a carnivorous earth, but more generally as an evocation of the grave that will swallow us all, the universal refutation of the poem’s animating impulse. “Recursion” is one of those poems that makes me see the book around it in a more vivid light—a kind of beacon newly illumining the essential seriousness (not to be confused with solemnity) of Norman’s funny, smart, imaginative vision.

Norman’s recently released second collection, Water Damage, finds this vision both intact and expanded upon. Whereas the longest poem in At the Gates—the very fine “Sentences”—ran four narrow pages, Water Damage contains two much longer and bulkier poems, “Dr. F. Attends a Show” (in which the last word of each line mirrors the corresponding line in Margaret Atwood’s 1966 “Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein”) and “The Flood,” both of which find Norman deploying his talents for narrative emplotment on the one hand and surrealistic shifts on the other to poise the reader between vividness and incomprehension, suspending us in a kind of impressionistic supra-clarity. “The Flood,” in particular—as its speaker weaves together an account of his troubled marriage and his clerical duties, “sift[ing] through pages of reports / filed by those requiring recompense” after his town is struck by a catastrophic flood—reads like the bastard child of Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” and Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual,” achieving a tonal and metaphorical range new to Norman’s work and largely successful. Though consisting of varied, amorphous verse paragraphs—and so not thoroughly illustrative of the poet’s formal skill—it finds ways (as his poems often do) of justifying its form through its subject matter, as in the following verse paragraph from near the poem’s midpoint:

Those who came here afterward

to cash in on cheapened real estate

never really dug the flood's extent.
Wrecked lots were scoured flat,

subjected to construction. One by one

the porches filled with barbecues and bikes

and lawn chairs folded anytime it rained.

Newcomers found their powers ailing here.

A softness in their joints, a squashy sloth.

Emerging from a troubled sleep,

they’d sense that something fluid caked their eyes

and everything they saw looked somehow warped.

How could such a poem—which elsewhere describes how after the flood “the old stream flowed / as it always had, but / thicker, muddied, snarled with all our lives”—be written in anything other than its amorphous verse paragraphs, which warp and flow along with the convolutions of the speaker’s mind and the flood that occupies it, evoking the dual blank-verse traditions of epic and remembrance while also making space for a more postmodern sense of lineation reflective of the psyche’s inherent fragmentariness? Content-wise, this passage enacts many of Norman’s typical gestures: an alertness to socio-economic realities (“cheapened real estate”), a nod to the workaday world of the Western white middle-class male (“barbecues and bikes / and lawn chairs”), and then the distorting, abnormalizing, undermining gesture, thrusting the reader into contingency (“something fluid caked their eyes / and everything they saw looked somehow warped”). Indeed, perceptual confusion or uncertainty—not just visual, but across the senses—is one of Water Damage’s signal motifs, as even a brief list of titles can illustrate: “What I Meant,” “Dried My Eyes,” “Everything Arises from the Sound,” “Nothing Arises from the Sound,” “Sometimes Hypochondriacs Get Genuinely Ill,” “Sorry If You Feel I Misspoke,” “I Helped Them Draw Your Picture at the Station”…and so on. This motif is inaugurated in the collection’s opening poem, “Up Near Wawa,” the first verse paragraph of which reads:

Up near Wawa, where the 17

was lightning-lit and slicked

with flagellating rain and hit

repeatedly with hailstones;

up near Wawa, weary

of the pummelled 17, we saw a buck

self-mortify on an advancing rig.

I say self-mortify, which is to say

in fact it ran, confused or mad,

straight for the grille, the brights, but like

atoners and their sniping whips perhaps

it thought the sins of herbivores,

or just its own, or those of every deer,

might gather in its blood and dissipate,

run guttered on the gleaming grate,

spatter on the road and disappear.

Perhaps the most immediately forceful thing about this passage is its sonic heft. Many threads of alliteration, assonance, and consonance can be traced through it; for example, the thread of “lightning,” “lit,” “slicked,” “flagellating,” “hit,” “with,” “self-mortify,” “rig,” “grille,” “whips,” “sins,” “herbivores,” “dissipate,” “disappear,” which provides a sonic analogue to the patter of rain and frantic wipers, as well as the figurative whips of the “atoners.” This dense sonic patterning, combined with the predominantly four- and five-stress lines, evokes an Anglo-Saxon poetic context of exile, loss, and (returning to one of Norman’s signal themes) guilt. Beginning in a Purdyesque descriptive mode, with the speaker glorying in the tribulations of Northern Ontario car travel, the paragraph undergoes a shift around the word “self-mortify,” which leads the speaker down a trail of self-relflexive clarification, bizarrely personifying the deer and comparing it through simile to “atoners and their sniping whips,” leaving us to wonder what “sins” any deer might feel warranted suicide. None, of course: we already sense the speaker projecting some guilt of his own onto the deer. This act of projection is signalled formally, as what begins in sonically woven free verse resolves itself into a rhymed quatrain of iambic pentameter that serves as a kind of code, as if the poet is saying, “Here I am! See how I just alerted you to my artifice at the very moment that I spoke of the dissipation of sin? I’m trying to tell you that this is my sin, not the deer’s, and that absolution, like the coherence sought by poetic form, can only ever be snatched at and missed, can only ever gild failure.” The second and final verse paragraph reads:

But wait.

I got it wrong.

There never was a buck.

Or moose. No elk, no lowly mole.

The rain was real as hooves for sure and kept

the frantic wipers set on highest whine

and lightning really lit the way

with winking glimpses of the broken line.

Up near Wawa, yes, the 17,

and rigs for sure, their bright relentless chain,

and yes, there was this one oncoming truck

with high beams, nearly croaked us in the rain.

The rest, I guess, was wrong. There was no buck.  

Norman isn’t interested in self-disclosure, but in exploring language’s capacity to veil as much as reveal—in exploring the way that, in attempting to disclose ourselves through language, we often end up confronting our own opacity. This opacity is encapsulated in the last line’s “The rest, I guess, was wrong”—as though the speaker, in exerting his poetic faculties upon the incident, is by the end of the poem somewhat unsure whether he has in fact fully created this incident of self-mortification. And in a sense, I think, he hasn’t—I read this as partly a poem about being gripped by the fleeting compulsion to swerve one’s car into oncoming traffic, and then displacing that compulsion onto an invented deer—but in another sense—and again, as both verse paragraphs’ resolution into rhymed quatrains serves to highlight—the poem is pure artifice, a verbal event whose biographical roots are entirely beside the point. Neither of these angles in itself can do the poem justice, however: it’s important to the poem’s impact that Wawa is a place that many of Norman’s readers will be familiar with, but just as important that we accept as (fictional) fact that “There was no buck”—that it was invented purely as a poetic emblem. Seen in this dual light, “Up Near Wawa” is about the agony of artifice, the artistic impulse to experience one’s life as ‘material’, the delicious sin of supplanting life-and-death reality with made-up junk.

This act of supplanting is also often illuminating, however, as the artist’s outlandish fabulations serve to reveal hidden aspects of the quotidian. Take “Letter from a Creditor,” for instance, which uses its surrealism to dredge up the often-catastrophic undercurrents of our fears of financial precarity:

Dear Mr. Norman:

We have not received the payment due November 1st.

Within three days, reply to this notice

or your service will be cut off.

We strongly advise you to pay these funds

without delay. We’re loath

to terminate this service.

Please don’t make us do this.

We know there are circumstances.

We’re sure you’ve had a painful day

and something roams behind your brow,

a lost fly trapped by a pane.

We can surmise the state of your surroundings.

Yes, we figure we can see you now,

slouched and weeping in the tattered chair

marked with stains from when you lost control.

It’s clear you lost control.

Control took leave at a date unspecified

before November 1st. That much is plain;

the rest we’ve merely guessed.

Enclosed please find a sheaf of charts

delineating what you should have paid and when.

This info will not help you, but the sheets ensure

a fanning-out of papers at your feet

as you sob and let them drop.

We hear the termites moving in your walls

and sense their hunger hollowing the planks

beneath your seat. Please pay the fees

outstanding. Insect bellies fill

with floor. Your chair will plunge

straight down and ever down. How far you’ll fall,

we’re sad to say, is way past our surmise.

Again, and like most of Norman’s poems, this exudes linguistic skill: in the way it falls into subtly perfect iambs at just the right moments to offset its apparent plainspokenness, for example (“This info will not help you, but the sheets ensure / a fanning-out of papers at your feet”), or in its deft appropriation and creepy amplification of bureaucratic cadence (“We can surmise the state of your surroundings”). Like “Recursion” from the earlier collection, it is also a masterpiece of pacing; Norman doesn’t feel the need to load every line with metaphoric and sonic tension, instead allowing the first seven lines to flow straightforwardly, even blandly, until the sinister twist of line eight (“Please don’t make us do this”), and from then on gradually amping up the menace, stanza by stanza, building to the alarming shift to the immediate present in the climatic “Insect bellies fill / with floor.” Also like “Recursion,” “Letter from a Creditor” serves as a sort of anchor poem which holds in its orbit the lighter pieces that surround it. A superficially silly poem like “In Praise of the Top Three Cellphone Manufacturers, as Determined by Global Market Share in 2010”—which begins, “O Nokia. Noblest of providers, number one / by far in market share”—though in one sense trivial, is revealed by its proximity to poems such as “Letter to a Creditor” to comprise yet another aspect of the collection’s undercurrent of engagement with the colonization of our collective consciousness by power, whether corporate (as in “To Staples,” an apostrophe to the office supplies vendor), political (“On the Occasion of Her Majesty’s Passing My House in a Boat”), medical (“Dried My Eyes,” “In the Clinic,” “Dr. F. Attends a Show”), educational (“School Day”), or religious (“Tracts”). More generally, “Letter to a Creditor” also represents one of the most lucid instances of an apocalyptic current that runs through not just Water Damage but At the Gates of the Theme Park as well, identifiable at least two dozen poems, with Norman’s surrealism serving to illuminate—and, through its frequently quirky tone, conceal—a genuine horror at what we allow ourselves to mistake for normalcy.

I must be careful, however, not to misrepresent Norman’s work by shoehorning its more purely funny or whimsical elements into this serious framework. On the other hand, I must admit that once I latch on to his apocalyptic sensibility, it becomes difficult to not see almost every poem arising out of it. Take “The Turnips,” for example, perhaps the most overtly comedic performance in Water Damage:

The turnips ooze a juice just visible on his chin.

Etiquette-bereft, the cad inturps the conversation I was in.

In the urn’s pit, ash accumulates: mortality’s pith.

A tin spur goads moans from the lover I lie with.

Poking the proxy doll with a rustpin makes for anguish.

Don’t stunrip the ne’er-do-wells. Just let ‘em languish.

Pit urns fill with spit-out pits of fruit.

Baffling ritpuns offend the ruling brute.

Punstir the ticklish for a ribald effect.

A nut rips when the razor swipes. Your denim won’t protect.

On the suntrip, bronzed-up tourists tipple plonk.

Untrips are offered. The unship’s waiting at the dock.

Writhe and spin, rut and grunt among the scented sheets.

Runspit in thickets like a rabid boar in heat.

Pitnurs leave me stumped. From a small stump I orate.

Runt, sip that rancid wine. You’ll find it tastes of acetate.

Bail out the punt, sir, or the ferried souls will drown.

Your turn: sip the sugared venom, force it down.

The tip runs off on tipsy legs, leaving the servers broke.

Turps in turpish venues tell the filthiest of jokes.

            Spurtin’ depravity, he mounted the stump—and spoke—

It’s utterly typical of Norman’s brand of mastery—and of what I’ve said about his suspicion of such mastery—that he should reserve his most virtuosic technical performance for his most ostensibly ridiculous subject matter. Each line of “The Turnips” incorporates the anagram of the word “turnips” from the corresponding line of bpNichol’s “Historical Implications of Turnips” (“turnips are / inturps are / urnspit are…”) and the result strikes me as—I don’t use this word lightly—genius. Not just for the way it incorporates each anagram, whether semi-familiar compound (“The tip runs off on tipsy legs, leaving the servers broke”) or coinage (“Turps in turpish venues tell the filthiest of jokes”) into an utterly appropriate context. Nor for its formal virtuosity, with each rhymed couplet forming a ballad stanza (by each individual line following a four-stress/three-stress pattern) and thus lending the proceedings a folkish orality. But for the way these linguistic and formal felicities build the illusion of this being spoken from another dimension, somewhere both antediluvian and postapocalyptic at once, possessed of a language both primitive and futuristic, akin to the “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After” section of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. As I finish the poem, I imagine the depravity-spurtin’ figure mounting the stump to deliver a prophetic lament, ragin’ at the loss of an old world and drivin’ us towards the new. There is a sense in which “The Turnips” is one of the most serious poems I’ve read in months, if by “serious” we mean committed to language as both aesthetic and social material, traversing past communicative horizons to probe out new ones. This may sound far-fetched; but Norman’s work across both At the Gates of the Theme Park and Water Damage lends itself to far-fetchedness on the reader’s part: it is smart, funny, skillful, and various enough to tug our imaginations in all sorts of strange and contradictory directions. Read both books the way you’d listen to one of the great double albums—plugged in for the long haul, prepared to see any apparent inconsistencies as in the service of the whole—and let them subtly stunrip you.    

The Allusionist: Reviewing James Pollock

You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada
(The Porcupine’s Quill, 2012)

Sailing to Babylon
(Able Muse, 2012)

My apologies for the hiatus. Please know that it was unwillingly taken. With the spring releases starting to filter out, I’ll be back on a monthly schedule henceforth.

One of the unanticipatedly interesting things about running a blog has been the feature that allows me to see the google search terms that bring people to The Urge. While most of the unusual strings have been pursuant of urges of a decidedly stickier kind than I usually deal with here—this very day, for example, has shown me “pushing her pet snak up her poessie”—occasionally someone stumbles upon the site through a search both odd enough to take me aback and actually relevant to poetry. By far the most intriguing of such searches landed someone here in late November 2012: “neocon critics listastarnino james pollock.”

This rough-hewn gem is illustrative of a number of crucial facts about the Canadian poetry scene. First, it is divided—and if Twitter and other byways of internet detritus are any indication, the fundamental division is often seen to be not just aesthetic but political, not just a matter of ‘avant-garde’ or ‘innovative’ versus ‘traditional’ or ‘formalist’, but of radical versus conservative politics. This is adolescent nonsense, of course, since it too often rests on a dubiously strict analogy between poetic forms and social formations, as though the eschewal of the formal, prosodic, and rhetorical means that have served the bulk of the English-language poetic tradition for 500+ years automatically implies a subversion of the social order—as though ‘the Man’ himself speaks in rhymed iambic tetrameter. Which brings me to the second fact about our CanPo moment: its pervasive sense of division is largely fuelled by illiteracy. Not just political illiteracy—though the marshaling of the word “neocon” above is truly dumb, trivializing an insidious cocktail of corporatism, militarism, and a dash of religiosity by deploying it as soundbyte fodder in one’s petty sub-aesthetic skirmishes (to avoid any such future boneheadedness by getting clear on what “neoconservatism” actually is, I recommend David Harvey’s 2005 A Brief of History of Neoliberalism, pages 81-85, though the whole book provides an essential synopsis of our political era)—but poetic illiteracy as well, at the levels of both craft and reception. Because let’s face it, poets who ‘innovate’ away from the use of metre, rhyme, and the spectrum of rhetorical devices at least sometimes do so because they know they don’t have the chops, and so need to find less- (or even un-) populated avenues along which to busk their talents. In our time of relentless self-branding, in which even poets seem to have internalized the logic of a market that would clearly rather they were more useful, more profitable, more easily understood, and generally shallower, such a move to stake out one’s own superficially unique plot of literary turf both satisfies that market’s demand for novelty and helps further the myth of individualism upon which its continued dominance depends. To look at it from a readerly (or at least fellow-writerly) perspective, there’s no good reason to like, say, Lisa Robertson but not Eric Ormsby (or vice versa) unless you are: a) so invested down to your very identity in liking (or belonging to) one camp of writers that you won’t risk diluting your carefully cultivated personal brand by truly engaging with writers of another camp (in other words, you need to stay ‘on message’ or risk forfeiting your carefully burrowed-into literary wormhole); or b) so blindly committed to one narrow set of aesthetic strategies as being the ‘right’ one that you have fallen into artistic and readerly complacency (in other words, you’ve become so ensconced in certainty as to have forgotten that aesthetic experience often precisely entails uncertainty, the scrambling of one’s categories).

Paradoxically, then, those who mistake themselves for radicals often find themselves even more committed to the postmodern marketplace’s central ideals of individuality, novelty, and niche-seeking than those they dismiss as conservatives. As will be obvious from the moronic google search with which I began this review, these investees of innovation will be all too ready to clump James Pollock’s You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (Porcupine’s Quill, 2012) in with the conservative faction and, probably, ignore it. This will be their loss. For Pollock’s book—though it certainly espouses its aesthetic ideals with a firmness that will rankle with both those whose poetics stand at odds with them and, more moderately, those less willing to make hard-and-fast evaluative judgments—provides both a series of unusually nuanced and intelligent takes on individual poets and volumes and, taken as a whole, an erudite accounting of Canadian poetic identity in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. The book is divided into three sections. The first consists of six reviews—of Daryl Hine, Dennis Lee, Anne Carson, Jeffery Donaldson, Karen Solie, and Eric Ormsby—most of which address more than a single book by each poet, and all of which find Pollock striking a fine balance between evaluation and intense, excavatory engagement. The second section collects reviews of four anthologies (Carmine Starnino’s The New Canon, Sina Queyras’s Open Field, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, and Todd Swift and Evan Jones’s Modern Canadian Poets) and one critical survey (W.J. Keith’s two-volume Canadian Literature in English) which together serve to expand Pollock’s evaluative framework from the level of the single poet’s career to that of the modern Canadian canon and the criteria upon which its in- and exclusions should be made. And finally, the third section pairs off the more theoretical pieces “On Criticism: A Self-Interview” and “The Art of Poetry,” each of which deals with one side of Pollock’s investment in the craft (his first collection Sailing to Babylon was nominated for the 2012 Governor General’s Award). Over the course of the book, several distinct lines of argument emerge: 1) nationalist ideology has proven a negative influence on Canadian poetry, rendering us dully insensible to global poetic influence; 2) a lot of bad or mediocre work has been exalted in Canada either for reasons other than its literary merit or out of a mistaken sense of what literary merit entails; and 3) literary merit entails employing the formal and rhetorical resources of the poetic tradition with virtuosity and engaging thoroughly and meaningfully with the best poetry of the past, both in English and globally. Whether readers find themselves nodding or fuming at such a list, they will find much to engage with in Pollock’s meaty elaboration of these claims.

In his Preface, Pollock vividly recalls his mystification at the disjunction between reputation and quality in the 1980s Canadian literary culture of his university years, describing the two main strands of poetic fashion: “One was a rough, dull, plainspoken lyric poetry in casual free verse, either autobiographical or mythically didactic: Atwood, Al Purdy, George Bowering. The other was a loopy avant-garde composition whose main qualities were tedium and incoherence: Nichol, Fred Wah, Steve McCaffery.” Citing his realization that “these poets—not just Atwood and Nichol, but the names I stumbled across in anthologies and journals—were not very good,” Pollock casts his decision to move to the United States (where he completed his graduate work in creative writing at the University of Houston, and now teaches at Loras College in Iowa) as inevitable: “If I was ever going to be a writer, I felt, I would have to leave.” Pollock thus frames You Are Here as offering the perspective of the self-exile, assessing Canadian poetry from both within and without, with at once the fierce investment of a native and a cold alien gaze. The opening to his review of Modern Canadian Poets memorably captures this duality:

On the rare occasions when my American literary friends ask me, as an expatriate Canadian, to recommend some poets from my country, the first thing I do is steer them away from the anthologies. Let me make you a list, I say, and whip out my pen. If I see an old disused copy of The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English or 15 Canadian Poets X 3 on someone’s bookshelf, however, I know it’s already too late; that reader won’t be taking another stab at Canadian poetry until something drastic happens.

This passage embodies the characteristic tone of You Are Here—a tone that one might characterize as anywhere from congenial to smarmy, depending what one thinks of its revisionist impulse. I am steered toward the former, not just because I agree with most of Pollock’s guiding premises, but because of a quality this passage does not capture: his extraordinary rigour, the meticulousness with which, in his finest critical moments, he substantiates his strong claims with argumentation so textured and intelligent that one feels dared to disagree. In the book’s opening review, for instance—of Hine’s Recollected Poems: 1951-2004 (2007)—Pollock begins by carefully enumerating what he believes to be the five reasons for the poet’s undeserved neglect in Canada: 1) “our poetry’s puritanical devotion to sincerity and authenticity”; 2) “Hine practices a brand of classicism which, for all its mastery, could not be less fashionable”; 3) “his highbrow homosexuality”; 4) “his highly sophisticated prosodic imagination”; and 5) “the matter of Hine’s long-term residence in the United States during an era of fervent nationalist anti-Americanism in Canada.” Each of these points receives deft elaboration, and overall this structural framework serves to lend contextual stakes to the skillful close readings of Hine’s poetry that make up the bulk of the review.

Indeed, Pollock’s structural and close-reading prowess comprise his two chief critical strengths. In his review of Carson’s Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2006), for example, Pollock’s own structural premise—that “Carson has always been a writer in the tradition of the sublime, a tradition stretching back through modernism and Romanticism to Homer, Sappho and the Bible”—equips him with a theoretical concept (i.e., the sublime) both broad enough to do justice to the poet’s capacious erudition and specific enough to produce close readings that prove revelatory in their illumination of the deeper spiritual and aesthetic structure of Carson’s complex book, with its tricky interplay of subtitular genres. In this essay, Pollock shows himself to be precisely the sort of critic Carson needs more of: neither adulatory nor sneering, equally respectful of both her skill and her potential failings, and willing and able to meet and inhabit her eccentric intelligence rather than simply dismissing her as obscurantist. Pollock’s review of Jeffery Donaldson (an overdue assessment of a wonderful poet), entitled “The Magic of Jeffery Donaldson,” embodies a similarly felicitous combination of close readings performed within an insightful structural framework. Pollock broadly divides Donaldson’s poetic output into the “black magic” of his dramatic monologues—in the critic’s view too often infected with the “stylistic mannerisms” of Richard Howard and lacking in the tensile dramatic irony that animates Browning’s best work in the genre—and the “white magic” of his lyrics proper—three of which (“Above the River,” “Bearings,” and “Feddy Doe”) he singles out as among the best Canadian poems ever written. He then traces the evolution of the latter lyric strain in Donaldson from the confessional mode of Once Out of Nature (1991) and Waterglass (1999) to a more philosophical, meditative mode in Pallilalia (2008). It is a remarkable critical performance, both as a model of using sensitive close readings to advance a nuanced argument, but more crucially as an act of critical communion that blurs almost to effacement the line between evaluation and engagement. Pollock criticizes Donaldson mostly in terms of the poet’s own best aspects, serving both to convince readers of the poet’s essential stature and to illuminate for the poet himself tendencies in his work he may not have framed so consciously and, perhaps, to help shape future directions that work may take.

Those of Pollock’s reviews that lack such explicit structural frameworks are not drastically inferior; the close-reading prowess is still present (for evidence of which see his engagements with Solie’s “Thrasher” and “An Acolyte Reads The Cloud of Unknowing” and Ormsby’s “Skunk Cabbage”), but in simply moving through poets’ careers book by book without any firm conceptual arc, they do come precariously close to forwarding dubious narratives of progress and/or regression. Pollock tends to explain poetic evolution through the very Harold-Bloomian concepts of “allegiance” and “self-overcoming,” with the former referring to one’s shifting attachments to influences and the latter to one’s gradual detachment from one’s own worst (usually, in Pollock’s view, narcissistic) poetic tendencies. His recourse to these concepts produces some of his most oddly characteristic paragraphs, like this one from the Donaldson review on the last line of “Feddy Doe,” in which the speaker imagines his sleepy childhood self “lost in translation on the wooden stair”:

There is, by the way, even more to the phrase ‘lost in translation’ in the last line; it is also an allusion, which is another of this scholarly poet’s favourite spells. ‘Lost in Translation’ is the title of a much-anthologized poem by James Merrill, which is dedicated and addressed to none other than Richard Howard, who is, among other things, a celebrated translator from the French. Merrill’s poem is also about childhood, and involves marionettes, mysteries, a translation from French, and a woman saying good-night to a child in another language; indeed, ‘Feddy Doe’ as a whole strikes me as a brilliantly executed response to Merrill’s poem. The allusion in the final line reads, therefore, like a valediction to Richard Howard, and a transfer of poetic allegiance not only from dramatic monologue to lyric but specifically from Howard to Merrill.

So much here rings as typical of Pollock’s critical preoccupations, and how one responds to his “agonistic” (to use another Bloomian term that Pollock favours) conception of poetic influence—that is, how readily one swallows claims like that made above, that Donaldson’s self-overcoming required that he shift his allegiance from Howard to Merrill—will to some extent determine how warmly one receives Pollock’s criticism as a whole. Setting aside the awkward way in which the word “allegiance” conjures images of a defecting general committing his forces to one liege-lord over another, rather than a poet with a no-doubt wide range of influences whose sway over him may shift fairly unconsciously from poem to poem, there’s something undeniably smart and convincing about the way Pollock traces the allusive echoes from Donaldson to Merrill to Howard here. Problems arise with this conception of influence, however, when either a) the critic starts to identify allusions as intentional which are far more likely unconscious echoes (as Pollock does with Solie, in casting her “Medicine Hat One-Way” as a “revisionary response” to Hine’s “Plain Fare”); or, more detrimentally, b) the critic ignores or denigrates those poems in which he cannot find evidence of agonistic influence or a recognizable allusion a past work (as he also does with Solie, whose poems seem treated as “good” in proportion to how readily Pollock perceives allusive engagement in them).

To his credit—and this is one of You Are Here’s distinct strengths—Pollock takes pains to explicitly lay out his criteria of poetic excellence, as in the following passage from his closing essay on “The Art of Poetry.” After citing the “new aestheticism” of recent generations of poet-critics, Pollock opines:

I number myself among these new aesthetes; as a critic, I too stand for aesthetic pleasure, and like my fellow critics I focus on poetry as an art, particularly its rhetoric and prosody. I avidly search out poems that engage creatively with other poems, including the great poetry of the past. I believe in the primacy of art, which must remain at the heart of any good theory of poetry. I insist that, unless a poem succeeds as a work of art per se, it is not a successful poem, no matter how much I may sympathize with its other values.

The pluralist might demand: Whose rhetoric, prosody, or  allusion? But Pollock makes it clear that he means to exalt specifically manifestations of these elements that are aware of themselves as such, or at the very least arise from long training and wide reading—and fair enough, as throughout You Are Here he repeatedly alerts us to the pleasures of such crafted effects. (Indeed, Pollock’s deepest and most convincing close readings all root themselves in the teasing-out of allusion.) This strange notion of the “work of art per se,” however, raises some perhaps insurmountable problems. First, let me make my position on this clear: there is no “work of art per se,” in the sense that “per se” means in itself and so implies that a work of art that can in any way be isolated from the social conditions of its creation and/or reception. Such a notion—also embodied in Pollock’s conception of poetry as “an autonomous technology for producing aesthetic pleasure”—is a bourgeois chimera. Now, in order to clarify what I mean by this, let’s look at a passage from Keith’s Canadian Literature in English, which Pollock quotes approvingly in his otherwise skeptical review of that book:

The realm of literature needs to be won back from the sociological, the ideological, and the politically approved, and restored to the human spirit of delight, originality, imagination, and, above all, the love of what can be achieved through verbal sensitivity and dexterity. There is no inherent reason why Canadian writing, prose or verse, should not take a major part in this endeavor.

    

Ironically, Keith’s cry against ideology is precisely the commonest manifestation of ideology in our aesthetics-obsessed age: the kind that pretends that there exists a place beyond ideology, a haven of aesthetic pleasure free from the corrupting influences of politics and sociology. Keith (and by extension Pollock, if he swallows this nonsense) is like the teenager who retreats to the headphoned sanctum of his room to escape his fighting parents below, reveling in petulant autonomy while oblivious to the fact that his very idea of room-as-sanctum is conditioned by what he’s trying to escape. In other words, what qualifies for us as “delight, originality, and imagination,” or which aspects of “verbal sensitivity and dexterity” we are most attuned to as any given person in any given time is significantly shaped by the political, social, and otherwise material conditions that produce both us and the art we encounter. This is why the best argument in favour of formalist practice remains a social one: that such practice does justice to poetry’s social origins and orientation, linking us rhythmically and rhetorically to a shared past and giving shape to our aspirations for communal futures. This is also why the most compelling argument advanced by the ‘innovative’ school against such formalisms is also precisely social: that the old forms stand at odds with our modern social formations, that we must seek out new forms to reflect our societal disorientation. These two positions might best be thought of as the two ends of a continuum, somewhere along which—whether they know it or not—most poets today situate their practice.

That Pollock takes no account of how our criteria of value are socially conditioned is a serious critical flaw. That (in his essay on “The Art of Poetry”) he repeatedly labels himself an “aesthete” and exalts “aesthetic pleasure” without working to articulate what precisely such pleasure entails (Is it Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose”? Adorno’s “recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it”? One of myriad other conceptions? Something new?) or considering how “pleasure” is itself a socially conditioned phenomenon right down to the level of the individual—where Pollock might get “pleasure” from a paragraph of well-turned blank verse, an opposite-minded critic might derive an equivalent “pleasure” from what Pollock would see as disjointed prose poetry—exposes a blindness in his work. Something similar might be said of his conception of “verbal mastery”; while it’s clear what he thinks such mastery entails, it’s not at all clear that he knows that why he thinks as he does isn’t entirely up to him. I’m not espousing a relativistic position here; as I’ve said, I agree with many if not most of Pollock’s premises and assessments. What I don’t agree with, however, is the hollow theoretical foundation upon which his justification of such assessments ultimately rests, namely the chimeric notion of an autonomous aesthetic sphere (and by extension sphere of poetry). Such a notion is an ideological mystification that only serves to install our biases as facts and, while appearing to invest art with great seriousness by granting it its own sacrosanct sphere of contemplation, actually trivializes art by ensconcing it safely away from our material concerns.

While Pollock is certainly right, then, that ideology (particularly of the nationalist variety) has had a deleterious influence on Canadian poetry by causing bad or mediocre work to be exalted despite its technical incompetence, the solution is not to turn around and pretend that poetry and ideology ought to be kept apart (as Pollock implies repeatedly throughout You Are Here). The solution is rather to attune ourselves more thoroughly to our saturation in ideology, its inescapability, and the artistic opportunities our entrapment affords us. (In the mid-1930s—like ours, fiercely ideological times—Auden characterized the role of artist and scientist alike thusly: “To understand the mechanism of the trap.”) The best poets writing in English are doing this. Take Frederick Seidel, a poet who embodies all the prosodic and rhetorical mastery, all the thoroughness of engagement with past poetry that Pollock demands—and yet few poets writing are more thoroughly subversive of ideological mystification. Whether one believes that Seidel’s persona is a gleeful conscience-less member of the 1%, a vicious hedonist who has flipped the latch on the socioeconomic cage and loves to rub the rest of our noses in it as he flits about on demonic wings, or that he is in fact a satirist out to undermine oligarchy through the sheer pigshittedness of his glorying in it, the point is that his poetry’s brilliance largely derives from its immersion in and engagement with the slick recalcitrant materiality of our tastes and desires, both bodily and (and this really means the same thing) aesthetic.

Turning briefly to Pollock’s first collection Sailing to Babylon, then, we can see what kind of poetry results from his own combination of extraordinary critical acuity and thoroughgoing verbal mastery, tempered by a discomfiting ideological blindness (or perhaps more gently—for Sailing to Babylon really is an excellent book—unwillingness). I mostly agree with Michael Lista’s laudatory review in the National Post, particularly with his eloquent overarching claim that in Pollock’s work “we get a vision of an old world, freighted with history, and still able to astonish itself with the novelty of its recurrence.” Pollock’s poems embody precisely the virtues his criticism espouses: an agile command of prosody and rhetoric informed by a thorough foundation in past poetry and (above all) the skill and willingness to lend authority and texture through allusion. Take “The Poet at Seven,” for example—which I quote in its entirety:

If only he could watch his teacher read

and, gazing, could lean there at his desk

in the winter light of Hillcrest Public School

and listen as she speaks the strangest words—

with her vivid face, her braided hair

and dark eyes like a real and ordinary

siren’s—if only he could wait like that

forever while Miss Harmon reads The Odyssey

(his kind young teacher with the ringing voice

he loves so much he lets the story sing

into his heart), she would peal out for him,

swaying above him like a slender bell,

the breaking changes of a life to come.      

In a recent interview with Open Book, Pollock says of the post-release experience of Sailing for Babylon that “It’s been fun reading the critical reactions to the book so far, and seeing people catch the allusions”—he really is somewhat fixated on allusion—and goes on to mention this poem, saying that it was written with three particular poems in mind, one of which is Rimbaud’s “Poets at Seven Years.” Another is almost certainly Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” the speaker of which experiences a similar kind of revelatory opening to that envisioned at the ending of Pollock’s poem, with the key difference that while Keats’s speaker really does find an expanded universe within the pages of George Chapman’s translation of Homer (“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken”), the “breaking changes” of Pollock’s poem occur only in the hypothetical tense set out in the poem’s opening “If only”—a fact that lends the poem the poignancy of a revelation narrowly missed rather than one gloriously collided with. There is much to admire here: the sprezzatura with which Pollock conducts the blank-verse line, varying stresses and caesurae enough to keep monotony well at bay but not so much as to ever feel like he’s straining to meet the form; the subtle modulation of the sonic motif, from “strangest words” to “siren’s” to “sing” to “peal” to “slender bell” to “breaking changes”; and finally the way the third-person point of view (“he”) works with the hypothetical mood to lend the sense that this child exists as a version of the speaker never fully actualized, imprisoned in the thwarted potential of that “If only.” And yet—and yet. Despite the essential virtuosity at work here and throughout Sailing to Babylon, and despite my essential admiration for its achievement, I’m occasionally fraught with the nagging sense that not enough is at stake here aesthetically—by which I mean I don’t feel myself pushed upon, à la Adorno, say, by the pressure of the possible upon the actual or, to put it more colloquially, “The Poet at Seven” doesn’t impress upon me any new sense of poetry’s communicative possibilities because I feel like the essential elements of what and how it’s communicating have been closely combined too often before. A 13-line poem in blank verse about a child newly awakened to the life before him by a great book and a teacher for whom he feels a curious mixture of filial loyalty and nascent desire: this is a premise that should not work, and yet it does—or does it? This uncertainty points to the potential drawback of a poetics too steeped in allusion.

In closing, and to clarify, let me compare two passages from the clear highlight of Sailing to Babylon, the Dantean vision-quest “Quarry Park,” a 22-page account in masterful terza rima of the speaker and his son Felix traversing the rich natural-historical terrain of the titular public park in Madison, Wisconsin. Overall the poem is, frankly, a masterpiece; if I were compiling today an anthology of Canadian poetry from its beginnings, it would doubtless make the cut. For not only does it constitute a significant formal achievement, but it takes the prominent Canadian genre of ‘nature poem’ to new heights, meditating on aspects of flora, fauna, and landscape formation with a level of detail and engagement with both the scientific and folkloric aspects of natural history that can only be attained through years of intimate observation. As verse narrative, “Quarry Park” flows so beautifully as to make it difficult to quote from while doing justice to its subtle rhetoric, but my point here warrants trying. After describing in thrilling detail a war between ants and a ladybug over an aphid (a wonderful kind of Microcosmos in the verbal medium), Pollock’s speaker turns bluntly philosophical:

What a hell this garden is. I’m aware

even so that without killing there would be

no evolution, nothing human. Nature

makes beauty into death abundantly

and death into beauty; though if they’d never

started farming aphids on some tree

thirty million years ago, those clever

ants would still be a strange modest class

of tropical wingless wasps forever

scavenging or hunting prey en masse

in cloudy jungles—and not as pervasive

an ecological champion as grass.

Pollock begins this passage with a sly reference to the Dantean provenance of his poem (“What a hell this garden is”) then deploys terza rima’s capacity—shared with all forms demanding such virtuosity—to void commonplaces of banality, infusing truisms with profundity (“without killing there would be / no evolution, nothing human”). Next, he borrows one of the climactic claims of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” (“Death is the mother of beauty”) and forges out of it a deft cyclical antimetabole appropriate to his own poem’s nuanced sense of ecology (“Nature / makes beauty into death abundantly / and death into beauty”). Finally, he provides us with a mini-lesson in ant evolution, skillfully couched in an ‘if-then’ statement so as to temper its didacticism. Pollock’s willingness to double his adjectives (“strange modest class,” “tropical wingless wasps”) briefly lifts the passage into an exoticism appropriate to the “cloudy jungles” of “thirty million years ago” before the determinedly Latinate “ecological champion” sets us back down on the firm “grass” of today’s scientific perspective. On the whole, form and content work here in a complementarity akin to the symbiotic vision of ecology at the passage’s core—and crucially, its deep allusiveness never eclipses its singularity of vision, but instead the passage displays its contemporaneity precisely through the way it revisions its sources through a present-rooted ecological lens.

Most of “Quarry Park” embodies this level of careful virtuosity; but at the poem’s rhetorical climax, just before he and Felix are “cast out into sunshine in the street,” I am once again accosted by the same nagging misgivings that “The Poet at Seven” and others of the shorter lyrics in Sailing to Babylon incite—the sense of a poet leaning so heavily on inherited forms and modes of perception that he risks seeming like he’s trying to usurp poetic authority rather than legitimately winning it:

       

it all fills

me with such longing, for God knows how frail

our lives and their monuments are, and yet

how beautiful the ruins that prevail

even in the midst of death; how we forget,

and how our forgetting makes us homeless,

until we dig ourselves out of this debt

we owe the giant past for making us

ourselves.

Passages like this afflict me with critical questions. Shouldn’t I just accept this as both beautifully written and true, admire, and move on? But isn’t there a sense in which the three and two-thirds lines from “it all fills” to “death” consist entirely of cliché both verbal and emotional, ventriloquize far too many predecessors at once (many of them justly anonymous), and really arrive so worn with pseudo-insight that even masterfully composed terza rima can only lift them into the barest semblance of profundity? And really, couldn’t all this be said of the entire passage? But given that it ends on its own built-in defence against these accusations (“the giant past for making us / ourselves”), shouldn’t I—again—just give Pollock’s usual virtuosity the benefit of the doubt? But doesn’t the present make us ourselves too? Is this an example of the urge to timelessness trumping actual engagement? Of formal mastery becoming servitude to tradition? What about the inverse: rejection of tradition becoming slavery to fashion, which is really novelty, which is easy to mistake for innovation? Isn’t that what Pollock, in both his poetry and his criticism, ultimately strikes against, and isn’t that a much greater danger nowadays? Isn’t that much worse? Well, is it?