tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9563090612700420732024-02-07T08:57:56.569-05:00The UrgeReviewing New Canadian PoetryStewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-86243516144806207622013-12-19T09:38:00.001-05:002014-03-14T08:17:27.942-04:00Meta- Meta-: On Guri on Guriel<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">I think Jason Guriel’s <a href="http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=8633" target="_blank">review of Alice Oswald’s <i>Memorial</i></a> is mostly very good, and this is why. First, he gives those of us who haven’t read the book a good sense of its structure. He describes, for example, how the seven pages of columnar names that begin the book “accrete to form a kind of concrete poem and war memorial” (which actually serves as both description and deft critical interpretation), and goes on to detail how “following the opening roll call, <i>Memorial</i> alternates between what Oswald calls ‘short biographies of soldiers’, which tend to be violent, and Homer’s nature similes, which the translator tends to repeat” (which again nicely combines description and analysis). Crucially, he quotes examples of both the biographies and the similes, thus allowing readers to directly sample Oswald’s work. Second, he explains the revisionist impulse behind <i>Memorial</i>, acknowledging that “while Homer's poem dwells on the parrying of patriarchs – heroes packing spears – Oswald's zeroes in on many of the wasted lives: the grunts on the receiving end of the spears; the small print on the slab in the park.” Is his reference to our contemporary understanding of <i>The Iliad</i> as being about “a scapegoat and her oppressive patriarchy” a “snide” one, as Helen Guri suggests in her compelling essay <a href="http://cwila.com/wordpress/processing-negatives-a-big-picture-of-poetry-reviewing/" target="_blank">“Processing Negatives: A Big Picture of Poetry Reviewing”</a>? Perhaps, but it may also be just a sly nod from someone who holds a PhD in English towards a postmodern theoretical climate with which he no doubt has considerable familiarity (and a climate with which Oswald herself seems to be engaging). Finally – and not without telling his readers that “You should certainly give <i>Memorial</i> a chance” and citing examples of some of its “memorable formulations” – Guriel gives us a thorough sense of what he sees as the book’s shortcomings, beginning with a subtle jab at its ready consumability: “you can read it in an hour” and it might even convince a “young ward” ignorant of poetry to temporarily leave aside his <i>World of Warcraft</i> and <i>Game of Thrones</i>. In other words, Guriel implies, this revisionist exercise is also conveniently crafted, in its brevity and extreme violence, to appeal to short attention spans. He communicates his other problems with the book with similar economy: “the aura contrived by unused space”; the effect of “willed breathlessness” produced as Oswald “proceeds to drop commas, run sentences together, go for the gross-out”; and the way “the run-ons and lack of punctuation” seem like “the sort of easy, go-to solutions a poet will grab for when she's after some violent spontaneity” – all substantial analytical gestures to the book’s formal properties that both further our sense of what the book is like and communicate the critic’s opinion on it. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">I’ve provided this selective recapitulation of Guriel’s review in order to highlight how much critical substance in the form of description, analysis, and yes, evaluation (and I certainly haven’t covered it all) is contained within its 1200 words. This is very difficult to achieve, as anyone who has attempted it well knows. While Guriel does often choose to communicate his insights sardonically or even sarcastically in a way that no doubt chafes at some readers (and has chafed at me on occasion, especially when I didn’t agree with him), one would be hard pressed to find many reviews that combine description, analysis, and insight with such economy as this one does. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">I’ve written the above because although I can agree with much of what Guri says in her essay before her analysis of Guriel’s review, I find the analysis itself almost violently distorting in a way that leaves me wary. I don’t want to get into rebutting Guri’s feminist reading point-by-point, but I’ll take for example Guriel’s reference to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memorial</i> as “Anne Carson-lite,” which Guri uses to spin off into an ingenious but problematic meditation on the cultural politics of female body mass. Guriel follows his characterization with half a paragraph on “how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memorial</i> <span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">updates the classical world with but a touch of the weirdness that is often attributed to the not-very-weird poetry of Carson.” Is his reminder here of his well documented disdain for Carson’s poetry a bit gratuitous? Perhaps – but by offering examples of Oswald’s seeming borrowings from Carson’s aesthetic universe, he makes sure that I as a reader am left knowing exactly what he means by “Carson-lite”: anachronistic references to “parachutes,” “god’s headlights,” “astronauts,” Hector’s motorbike left running, etc., all doubtless tinkle little bells for anyone who has read Carson, and so with the marketing word “lite,” Guriel is suggesting that in our post-Carson-enshadowed poetic landscape, Oswald’s use of these anachronisms smacks of influence verging on imitation (and perhaps for market-driven as much as aesthetic reasons). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Overall, the crux of Guri’s criticisms of Guriel can be found in her claim that his review embodies a “seeming lack of interest in presenting the poet as a coherent actor with credible motivations.” Here Guri strikes me as just wrong, as (and this is what I’ve tried to show above) Guriel’s criticisms of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memorial</i> are quite firmly rooted in his distaste for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">choices</i> Oswald has made in constructing it. Tellingly, Guri’s meta-review declines to tackle this passage of Guriel’s, which quite explicitly casts Oswald as “a coherent actor”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large; mso-fareast-language: JA;">The problem is not just that Hector was a convertible man; it's that there's something predictable, even calculated, about Oswald's choices. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Of course</i> the book is subtitled “An Excavation of the Iliad”; archaeology would be the appropriate metaphor for a post-Foucauldian project that seeks to recover a subjugated narrative – that “bright unbearable reality.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Of course</i> Oswald describes her “approach to translation” as “fairly irreverent” and that she's “aiming for translucence rather than translation”; what translator today is declaring her goal a stuffy, cautious fidelity? We're supposed to be irreverent now, aren't we? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large; mso-fareast-language: JA;">This is sarcastic, yes, but it also demonstrates a sophisticated theoretical understanding of what Guriel sees as Oswald’s motives (i.e., her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reasons as a conscious actor</i>) for constructing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memorial </i>the way she did. What seems to bother Guri (despite her protestations to the contrary) is that Guriel expresses disdain for these motives – that he finds them clichéd – but rather than simply admitting this, and constructing a counter-argument in praise of a book she admires, she instead undertakes the (rather easier) task of deconstructing the rhetorical situation of Guriel’s review, citing the details that fit her ideologically motivated argument and distorting or discarding those that don’t. That actual writers have characterized Guri’s essay as a “close reading” boggles my mind, and leaves me frankly reluctant to write further criticism myself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large; mso-fareast-language: JA;">As a fellow critic I find Guri’s penultimate paragraph especially troubling: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">Memorial</span></i><span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"> and reviews of it are involved in a dance I’ll call Getting Past the Gate (allusion to Troy only partly intended). The presence of even the shortest clip of music from this dance, the sound of even a few of its steps, should signal to a reviewer, especially a white male one, to tread carefully, acknowledge aesthetic affiliations and biases, substantiate criticisms concretely and without whimsical or sarcastic flourishes (though at other times such flourishes can be nice), spell out, not imply, any perceived lack of worth, and err on the side of caution when using language that has sexual or racial implications.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large; mso-fareast-language: JA;">This paragraph could only have been written by someone who doesn’t write very many reviews, so eager does it seem to further circumscribe an already delicate, difficult, unlucrative, and mostly thankless occupation. First, let’s acknowledge that if there is a “Gate,” Oswald is much more firmly embowered beyond it than Guriel is – which is why Guri’s implication that Guriel ought to have better contextualized <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memorial </i>within Oswald’s career strikes me as absurd. Most readers of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">PN Review </i>will know full well who Alice Oswald is, and if they don’t, that’s not Guriel’s problem. One could readily argue that his choice to focus strictly on the book in question (i.e., rather than wasting a couple hundred words paying homage to Oswald’s eminence) is a gesture of respect, not dismissal. Second, I don’t understand how Guriel’s aesthetic affiliations and biases aren’t perfectly obvious to anyone who reads his review (at least as those affiliations and biases relate to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memorial</i>), as they will be in any review of substance. To demand that they be more explicitly articulated seems like blind dogmatism. Third (and as I’ve pointed out at some length above), his criticisms are more concretely substantiated than in the vast majority of similar-length reviews. Fourth, no whimsy or sarcasm? Perhaps we should set up a Panel of – oh, I don’t know, let’s call them “censors” – to whom will be entrusted the task of ensuring that all such “flourishes” remain firmly on the side of “nice.” And finally, regarding “language that has sexual and racial implications,” Guri has not shown convincingly that the implications she highlights in Guriel’s review are anything more than emanations of her own ingenuity.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#1" name="top1">[1]</a> Those who want to bask in those emanations will presumably continue to do so, meanwhile ignoring and/or misrepresenting (as Guri does) the considerable descriptive and analytical work performed by reviews like Guriel’s. This is not to deny that the literary world in Canada and everywhere is fundamentally patriarchal (as our societies are) and that this fact should be railed against. I think it’s entirely probable that Guriel derives his pose of authority (and I mine in writing this) from a sense of white male privilege to which we are so firmly acculturated as to be almost oblivious. But I do not think it at all helpful to misrepresent his or anyone’s critical efforts so (and yes I do stand behind this) violently. Most basically, I would rather have seen the poet-critic Helen Guri use her evident talents to actually review one of the “too-large proportion” of books she loves that “don’t get their due in the public sphere.” But again, this comes from me thinking that the biggest problem in Canadian poetry culture is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lack</i> of discourse – especially lack of discourse on more than a handful of books per season – not the tenor of it. On the other hand, I’m utterly glad that Guri wrote what she did; as much I’ve found to disagree with in it, there’s no denying that it set me thinking (and writing!) unlike anything I’ve encountered in recent months. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large; mso-fareast-language: JA;">There will no doubt be those who choose to interpret this as ‘closing ranks’ – as another white male rising up indignantly to guard the entryway to the ‘boys club’ of the critical ‘brotherhood’. Many of those people will do this no matter what I say, but I’ll take a stab at pre-exonerating myself anyway. I’ve never met Jason Guriel; we’ve exchanged two brief cordial emails in the past, and that is the extent of our acquaintance. We are not friends. By contrast, I do know Helen Guri personally; I admire her work and like her as a person. I’d say we’re at least friendly acquaintances, and I have no desire to wound or alienate her. Nor is this an attempt to silence or intimidate her (on the contrary, I’d love to read more reviews from her). Put simply, this isn’t personal. And yet in writing that last sentence, it occurs to me that part of what disturbs Guri about Guriel’s review is the note of the personal – or at least the paternal – that creeps in, for example, in a male reviewer’s smug characterization of a female poet’s “willed breathlessness” – which conjures a whole misogynist tradition of men dismissing women’s concerns as ‘hysterical’. I see this, and I can see how Guriel should have “tread” more “carefully” here. Amid her hyperbole in evoking Fabio, Guri makes a good point, and this causes me to interrogate my own work. Could the sexualized language I deployed in <a href="http://theurgepoetry.blogspot.com/2012/10/hot-button-review-of-nyla-matuks.html" target="_blank">my review of Nyla Matuk’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sumptuary Laws</i></a>, for example (including the potential innuendo of my title, “Hot Button”), be construed as an enactment of gendered oppression? I used such language very consciously in response to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sumptuary Laws</i>’s strange air of luxuriance – a compelling facet of a book I greatly admire – but is it possible that in doing so I could have made Matuk her<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">self</i> (i.e., rather than her book) feel sexualized or objectified? I certainly hope not: but the fact that I’m asking myself such questions points to an important success of Guri’s essay.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large; mso-fareast-language: JA;">And yet as a critic I feel it my responsibility to maintain a primary fidelity to the text – a fidelity from which Guri’s essay too often strays. Of course, perhaps the major insight of the theoretical revolution in literary analysis is the inseparability of text from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">con</i>text (whether social, racial, sexual, or whatever), and this forms a part of my fidelity. Guriel’s and Guri’s critical texts both distort, but at different degrees of magnitude. One might mount a valid argument against Guriel’s sarcastic tone, characterizing it along with a few of his word choices as reflective of a certain white male privilege (but in doing so one would best acknowledge that he employs a similar tone in discussing male poets as well – <a href="http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=8228" target="_blank">a review of Seamus Heaney</a> jumps to mind). One might.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#2" name="top2">[2]</a> But Guri hasn’t done this successfully because her essay relies too heavily on evasions, omissions, and ingenuity over honest analysis. If Guriel’s review is like a warped mirror held up to Oswald’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memorial</i>, Guri’s critique of Guriel is like a magnifying glass so riddled with cracks that it can hardly be seen through, yet retains its power to incinerate. It is context from which the ‘text’ has gone too much missing, leaving mostly ‘con’.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#3" name="top3">[3]</a><br />
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-Stewart Cole<br />
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<a href="" name="1"><b>[1] </b></a>Notches (for arrows) and spears appear everywhere in The Iliad, for example, and so Guriel’s recourse to such imagery is more illustrative of the rigour of his engagement with Oswald’s project than of a pervasive phallogocentrism – though of course the works of Homer do stand rather like a huge oppressive dong at the centre of Western literary culture. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top1"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
<a href="" name="2"><b>[2] </b></a>Though one would be hard-pressed to show that his sex or gender identity played a greater role in determining his pose of critical empowerment than, say, his social class or ethnic identity (neither of which, incidentally, I know anything about). <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top2"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
<a href="" name="3"><b>[3] </b></a>On a lighter note, I couldn’t help wishing while writing this piece that my last name was Gu, so that I could title it “Gu on Guri on Guriel.” Then if someone wrote a response to me, they’d have to have no name at all – a reflection perhaps of the many online Anonymouses who creep in from the margins to offer their faceless insights amid such debates. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top3"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
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Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-34076409049117568452013-09-29T21:44:00.000-04:002014-03-14T08:17:54.233-04:00[Snip]1:A Review of Mary Dalton's Hooking<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Hooking</span></i></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Mary Dalton</span></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">(Signal Editions, 2013)</span></b><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Reviewed by Patrick Warner</span><br />
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</i></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Dalton Interview</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#2" name="top2"><sup>2</sup></a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">[snip] "The cento, according to the <i>Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics</i>, is a poetic creation made of passages taken from some major poet of the past, such as Homer or Virgil, and woven together as a form of tribute. In the 4th century A.D., Ausonius, himself a maker of centos, laid out some rules. He stated that the passages could be from the same poet or many. Among poets whose works have been paid tribute to through centos are: Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Goethe. In recent centuries there have been humorous centos. R. S. Gwynn wrote a rather lugubrious one about his own aging, entitled “Approaching a Significant Birthday, He Peruses The Norton Anthology of Poetry.” Online, I discovered something called CentoBingo and some rather underwhelming constructions called “Cento Mash-Ups.” I found out that the Empress Eudocia, the wife of Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II and an influential Christian in the 5th century A.D., had constructed a 2500-line cento out of Homeric passages in order to tell Biblical stories. The cento began to have a whiff of the circus about it for me. [snip]</span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">In making these collages, then, I felt connected to the activity my mother and aunts had engaged in in their childhood and young womanhood, when goods and money were scarce and chilly floors needed warm mats. But there were, of course, other motives, other satisfactions. It seemed to me that the cento, as I came to know the form, was one way to respond to what often appeared to be drearily earnest and misguided pronouncements about appropriation and originality. There, says the cento, what do you think of me? There is not a single original line in me, yet can you deny that I am something new? [snip]</span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">I think of the lines I’ve excised from poems as material, as strips of words. Each line, the hooking of these words into this particular sequence on a line, is the creation of its individual author; the sum of the lines in each cento, the way in which these syntactical fragments have been hooked together, is my creation. These pieces are at once mine and not mine." [snip]</span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>Minims</b><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#3" name="top3"><sup>3</sup></a></span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">What was it again?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Death by avalanche, birth by failed conception?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">See-saws. There have been a few of them.</span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Irksome and moody, the early traffic whizzes by.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">And you’re face to face with history,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">the draining board, its dull mineral shine.</span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The pitched grey, gull-swept sea,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">the badly behaved crowd—</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">each blade, for once, truly metallic.</span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Nothing that doesn’t have to moves.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The weatherman tells me that the winter comes on</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">because it wants to. Never that. Because it must.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Against each wall, a lame hope waiting,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">without the certificate,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">and doubly bold.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Carey Review</i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#4" name="top4"><sup>4</sup></a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">[snip] “Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton makes radical use of an age-old form in <i>Hooking</i> [snip]. The cento is a kind of patchwork poem made up of lines from other poets; it’s meant to pay tribute to the source material, and was popular in Ancient Greece. Dalton imposes an added condition on herself: each cento’s line has the same position in the original poems, so “Gauze,” for instance, is composed of the fourth line from work by writers as varied as Sylvia Plath and Leonard Cohen. (All the sources are listed in a section at the back of the book).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Dalton’s stitch work is very fine: it makes for some strange juxtapositions, but they are often as evocative as they are enigmatic. In effect, the collection as a whole is a celebration of creation, and subtly links writing to other products of human making, such as cloth, braids, lace, filaments and thread, all of which are mentioned in the poems. At their best, the strung-together lines and phrases have a new, arresting beauty.[snip]”</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><i>Jason Guriel on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry</i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#5" name="top5"><sup>5</sup></a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">[snip] “Language poetry, which took shape in the 1970s, is poetry that calls attention to itself as language. In fact, it’s sometimes spelled “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry,” an act of masochism before the era of copying and pasting. Still, if you had to type them out, the equal signs, like speed bumps, would have slowed you down and maybe even gotten you thinking about the materiality of words, letters. Note that those equal signs aren’t plus signs: Language poets aim to thwart our yen for language to add up to some larger point, to provide closure, takeaway. (These dubious satisfactions, they point out, can already be had in the offerings of what Charles Bernstein calls “Official Verse Culture.”) [snip] And the fragments are intended to be “nonabsorbable”—Bernstein’s coinage for disruptive writing that “prevents an initial / ‘illusionistic’ reading.” [snip] Language poets also lineate their fragments. [snip] Who is the speaker? What point is he or she trying to make?[snip]</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">But what’s so bad about kicking back with a poem that conjures the illusion of a speaker serving up a clear message in a linear way? (What’s so bad about a good read?) And why do these curious folk, the Language poets, want to take the reader by the lapels and jostle her so? I have a hunch the French are to blame. In 1968, Roland Barthes declared the author dead. I think he got the Language poets to thinking. Like those characters on <i>The Twilight Zone</i> who emerge from a coma only to find themselves in a comatose world (a suburb, say), the Language poets seem to believe they are awake to the fact that the rest of the populace is asleep. They want the reader to wake up already and see that words aren’t windows to the author’s soul. Poems are socially constructed. They are the expressions of a society, its ideologies. You don’t curl up with Robert Lowell; you curl up with humanism.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Maybe by writing in a fragmentary way, then, Language poets are trying to break the illusion that poems are people talking. They are trying to land one on the chin of humanism and, while they’re at it, the kisser of capitalism. After all, if the reader can’t figure out what the author is saying, then she can’t affirm the author’s existence as an individual property owner (the property being the poem’s meaning). Once roused, the reader can take back the language from the clutches of the patriarchy or Corporate America or what have you. [snip] Instead of feeling like a frustrated consumer, the reader can endeavor to make her own meaning out of the fragments. In fact, she can explain to her sleepier peers why Language poems need to be so fragmentary; she can become a graduate student.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Surely, though, there are readers who share the Language poets’ philosophical assumptions but don’t want to read writing shot through with disruptions. And surely there are those who aren’t much startled by the disruptions, having encountered them before. They might not be able to distinguish a Language poem from, say, the automatic writing of the Surrealists. But they know a poem that jerks a thumb at itself when they see one. [snip]</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Here are some more questions. How does a Language poet know when her poem is finished, or at least ready for the typesetter? (It strikes me that a non-linear and non-representational poetry of fragments that resist closure could go on forever.) Does a Language poem end where it does because its author got winded and, well, a poem has to end somewhere? What does her revision process look like? [snip] Why couldn’t the lines be shuffled into a different order and still enable the reader to come up with the same point about the wobbliness of words? And if the lines can be shuffled into a different order, why should the reader read the poems at all?” [snip]</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>Minims (shuffle)</b><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#6" name="top6"><sup>6</sup></a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The pitched grey, gull-swept sea,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">the draining board, its dull mineral shine.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The weatherman tells me that the winter comes on.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Death by avalanche, birth by failed conception,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">because it wants to. Never that. Because it must.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Against each wall, a lame hope waiting.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Nothing that doesn’t have to moves</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">without the certificate.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">See-saws. There have been a few of them.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Irksome and moody, the early traffic whizzes by.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">And doubly bold</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">the badly behaved crowd—</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">each blade, for once, truly metallic.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">And you’re face to face with history.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">What was it again?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><i>Carmine Starnino: Steampunk Zone</i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#7" name="top7"><sup>7</sup></a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">“In our mashup-mad era, we yearn for unpigeonholeability. We don’t want to be different. We want to be weird. We want to be total category-killers. As a result, it’s hard to find a poet – free-versifier and formalist alike – who doesn’t believe at heart that he or she is far too heterodox to be trapped in existing definitions of traditional and experimental. Contemporary poetry now comprises a vast invented form: the godknowswhat.[snip] As a result, more is going on in Canadian poetry than ever before – more sonnets, sestinas, flarf cycles, centos, erasure poems, plunderverse, uncreative writing, concrete.[snip] But, just as often, Canadian poets don’t play the odds as much as stack the deck. As more of them keep one eye on the lyric tradition and one eye on whatever comes next, they increasingly try to force a breakthrough by splitting the difference. The result can be too perfect, as if it were the winner of a contest to compose the ideal hybrid poem. [snip] Indeed, the dominance of the steampunk aesthetic, the easy availability of its procedures, has led to a growing uncertainty about how to discuss such linguistic lab work, or even whether anything meaningful can be said at all. The entrepreneurial spree of poets patenting new forms, and the feeling of optimism and copiousness that accompanies it, overwhelms taste. When every poet happens to be writing exactly the kind of poem he or she set out to write, and every poem embodies exactly its theoretical intent, it becomes harder to say which poems are good, and why; how one kind of recombining and estranging differs from another; what books are truly counter, original, spare, strange. [snip]</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">There’s a lovely image in William Gibson’s novel <i>Count Zero </i>(1986) of a sentient computer deep in an abandoned space station, creating beautiful Cornell boxes out of junk. The boxes make it into the hands of admiring art dealers on Earth who are unaware of their provenance. In the same way, Canadian poets generate, as if on automatic, wonderful contrivances from disparate materials. These are poets who care about their poetry and work hard at it. Like watchmakers, they build machines out of the minutest parts; unlike watches, these machines are full of beguiling generosity for errant incidents. But too often we are faced with an artificial intelligence, simulated for believability, not an actual style. Style is what happens when originality becomes indistinguishable from the poem itself. It’s a way of mingling the unfamiliar ‘new’ and the still-compelling ‘old’ so that we can no longer separate them. Style is therefore the result of a voice so grounded in its subject, the effect is not a self-regarding newness but a newness absorbed into the poem, a newness riening into something effortlessly manifold and available. Such poems may not be the sort fusionists like, but they are the sort real poets write.”</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"></span> <br />
<hr width="80%" />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
<a href="" name="1"><b>1 </b></a>[Snip] refers to the cut-up method Dalton employed to make the poems in <i>Hooking</i>. In the context of this review, [snip] indicates where lines have been excised from the texts used to make the review.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top1"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
<br />
<a href="" name="2"><b>2 </b></a>“Like the Star-Nosed Mole: John Barton in Conversation with Mary Dalton on Her Cento Variations:” <i>The Fiddlehead/Malahat Review</i>. Sunday, October 21, 2012. (online)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top2"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
<br />
<a href="" name="3"><b>3 "</b></a>Minims," p.26 (Hooking)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top3"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
<br />
<a href="" name="4"><b>4 </b></a>Carey, Barbara. “Poetry Book Reviews.” <i>Toronto Star</i> August 2, 2013. (online)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top4"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
<br />
<a href="" name="5"><b>5 </b></a>Guriel, Jason. “Words Fail Him: The Poetry of Charles Bernstein.” <i>Parnassus: Poetry in Review</i>. Accessed on September 2013. (online)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top5"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
<br />
<a href="" name="6"><b>6 </b></a>Minims (shuffle) is the author’s attempt to answer Guriel’s question “Why couldn’t the lines be shuffled into a different order and still enable the reader to come up with the same point about the wobbliness of words?” It’s the author’s opinion that the shuffled version of the poem is no better or worse than Dalton’s original. The author applied the same test to Ted Hughes’ "The Jaguar." See "The Jaguar (shuffle)" below, followed by the original.<br />
<br />
The Jaguar (shuffle)<br />
<br />
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun,<br />
lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil<br />
is a fossil. The eye satisfied to be blind in fire.<br />
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut<br />
<br />
as a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged.<br />
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion<br />
like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.<br />
Cage after cage seems empty, or<br />
<br />
stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.<br />
It might be painted on a nursery wall.<br />
But who runs like the rest past these arrives<br />
on a short fierce fuse—not in boredom—<br />
<br />
at a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized.<br />
Over the cage floor the horizons come.<br />
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.<br />
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes<br />
<br />
more than to the visionary his cell.<br />
His stride is wildernesses of freedom.<br />
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—<br />
he spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him. <br />
<br />
<br />
The Jaguar<br />
<br />
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.<br />
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut<br />
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.<br />
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion<br />
<br />
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil<br />
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or<br />
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.<br />
It might be painted on a nursery wall.<br />
<br />
But who runs like the rest past these arrives<br />
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,<br />
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged<br />
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes<br />
<br />
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—<br />
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,<br />
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—<br />
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him<br />
<br />
More than to the visionary his cell:<br />
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:<br />
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.<br />
Over the cage floor the horizons come.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top6"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
<br />
<a href="" name="7"><b>7 </b></a>Starnino, Carmine. “Steampunk Zone.” Lemon Hound, Apr 17, 2013(online)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top7"><sup>↩</sup></a><br />
</span> Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-3872195113729786302013-06-21T10:10:00.000-04:002013-06-21T10:33:27.788-04:00What They're Saying about the Poets: Donato Mancini's You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>You Must Work Harder To Write Poetry of Excellence</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>Donato Mancini </b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>(BookThug, 2012)</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Reviewed by Darren Bifford</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> title of Donato Mancini’s <i>You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence</i> is an ironic misnomer, as Mancini’s concern is less with poetry than it is with the state of poetry reviewing in this country. Poetry reviews in Canada, according to Mancini, have especially lacked in their treatment of postmodern poetry. The guilty parties are identified early on as “conservative critics” shackled by an ideologically crippled critical paradigm. With their dimmed and inflexible vision, these critics see merely what they want to see in all that they might profitably see, if only they worked harder. And it is not merely poetics which are at stake, but also politics. Mancini agrees with what seems to be a truism among some postmodern writers, and assumes that a poet’s (or critic’s) commitment to literary tradition and so-called traditional forms entails that he or she is also, even if tacitly, sympathetic to conservative and generally right-wing political agendas, while postmodern commitments, whatever they are, are allied with leftist ones. Carmine Starnino is thus declared an “arch-conservative” (though it’s unclear whether that title denotes solely an interest in formal elements of English prosody or an interest in lower taxation, or both), and George Woodcock’s “nostalgic reviewing […] writes its way willy-nilly into neo-conservative values, however “liberal” or “left” or even anarchist its departure points.” The dominant Canadian poetry review, then, tells us more about its author’s various poetic and political assumptions than it does about the poems it criticizes. These assumptions turn out to be embedded in a series of tropes—the common reader, accessibility, craft, tradition, meaning, the human heart—which lurk like a sickly mold beneath the surface of our typical reviews. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The stakes are high. Mancini suggests that there is a kind of war-of-poetry going on, with “innovative” or “progressive” Canadian poetry generally on the defensive.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#1" name="top1"> [1] </a></span></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Mancini asks us to
consider, for instance, David Solway’s ruminations about the reading habits of
his neighbor. Solway writes that he’s unable to “frankly conceive of any
intelligent middlebrow reader spending an evening with Anne Carson or Jorie
Graham in a way that my neighbor, a retired engineer, reads Houseman and Hardy
and listens to recordings of Dylan Thomas”. No doubt the truth of David
Solway’s thought experiment will be obvious to people who generally resemble persons
named David Solway; and it is, Mancini rightly notes, an irritatingly dumb
generalization. (For instance, my own neighbor, an unemployed alcoholic, spends
his evenings reading Jack Gilbert.) But how about Mancini’s response? “The poets [Solway] rejects are US
and Canadian women. The model poets are white, gentile, UK men: A.E. Housman,
who writes eroticized war propaganda; Thomas Hardy, who writes misogynist
social criticism; and Dylan Thomas, the hard drinking, womanizing,
troublemaking, bad boy romantic”. I’ll grant Mancini his suspicion of the
gender and cultural disparity but his reductive dismissal of Housman and Hardy
and Thomas is just as weirdly righteous as Solway’s.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The most useful and entertaining parts of Mancini’s book—and, as it happens, the most problematic—consist in critical analyses of those above mentioned tropes, which are often clustered together throughout the course of a single review. Since Mancini’s book is about the rhetoric of dominant Canadian poetry reviewers, it’s really important that the examples he offers of those dominant reviews are both sufficient in sample size and typical. If not, then Mancini’s argument loses a great deal of force, and what he attacks merely a series of straw-men (and women). So what then to make of Mancini’s method? He begins by citing a more or less brief example of a what he offers up as a typical poetry review that errs in exactly the way he proposes it to err. For instance, Solway’s retired engineer neighbor, busy reading his Hardy, is evidence on Mancini’s analysis of that Common Reader who often emerges in poetry reviews. This is the reader for and to whom the reviewer often speaks, either to recommend a book of poetry or to warn against its consumption. The reviewer, in this capacity, assumes him or herself a member of “the common sense police” who defend not poets and critics but “also their readers who are members of that hard to please but demanding clique: the general reading public. Voracious but impatient, the general reader reads to understand and to be pleased.” The assumption of this trope thereby tacitly allows the reviewer to reject poetry that doesn’t fit into his preconceived mould. The reviewer’s “discourse,” says Mancini, “[is thus a] sign of [his or her] difficulty lining up the dominant ideolect [i.e., the way a class of critics usually talk] with the aesthetic imperatives governing the actual book under review.”</span></span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Mancini’s survey of the ambivalent reception of his own poetry book, Ligatures, is characteristic of his method. The reviewer writes that it is his “pleasure to report that Mancini mostly […] com[es] off usually like a bright Martian inquiring into this thing humans call language, and only occasionally like a grouchy Marxist who has read 20,000 books and got tenure the year Foucault died.” Randall Jarrell this is not; but no matter. With citations from the questionable review now on his operating table, Mancini attempts to show that this review is not in fact revelatory of any feature of his book but again only of its reviewer’s dominant ideolect, which in this case relies on the trope of accessibility. Whether Mancini’s final analysis is convincing is another matter. Mancini sees in his reviewer assumptions that “Erudition is ‘degenerate;’ subhuman […] Because very little in my book signifies either writerly toil or Accessibility, to protect Ligatures from hostile criticism Neff turns me into phantasmic Human shield for myself […] The Common Reader is advised against braving this book.” Indeed, says Mancini, the reviewer has in fact turned his book into “a rarified piece of work, a cunning and esoteric thing, built for connoisseurs,” with the implication that those “who could like my book” are in some way “arch-perverts.”(To be fair I should say it takes a reference to Zizek to get him to that unusual final statement.)</span></span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Mancini applies the same method to reveal (or not) other tropes. In almost all cases he seems to equivocate his discovery and analysis of the aesthetic values embedded in a reviewer’s tropes with their refutation. On the one hand, it’s worth asking, as Mancini does, what exactly a reviewer might unwillingly imply by the following sorts of assertions, (all made by different reviewers about different poetry books): it is a “bland book [that] isn’t meant to make you feel or know anything”; she is “a better and more human poet now’”; “Failing to appreciate the subtle depth and force of blert may require you to consult your mouth or heart for a pulse or feeling.” It’s easy for me to sympathize with the very general claim that one of the ways poetry reviews must work harder is to avoid the lazy kinds of hypostatization that Mancini discusses. The common reader is indeed no reader at all, and Mancini is probably right to say that such invocations often function as empty receptacles for the reviewer’s own ideological predilections. He is probably right to say that the specter of accessibility or humanity or craft or tradition can simply be a way for the reviewer to reify his or her ideas about what poetry is—and isn’t. Thus what I think most useful about Mancini’s argument, i.e., that it makes a case for the necessity of more imaginative critical practices in order to negotiate the very broad range of poetries that have developed in this country over the last sixty or so years. If that’s the case, the terms by which those postmodern poems are to be engaged by critics and reviewers ought not be identical to the way we might, for example, engage a book of sonnets. Likewise an appreciation, say, of Arnold Schoenberg would be obviously impossible if I believed that music must be tonally conceived; any atonal work would be, by definition, not music. (And I would be, almost by definition, a cultural boor). </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I am, however, suspicious of Mancini’s method in its specifics. What he gives us are psychoanalytic-like redescriptions of the surface features of what is claimed to be a typical review. Yet the same problem holds for this procedure as holds for psychoanalysis in general: it offers an interpretation the strength of which is almost entirely conditioned by its acceptance as strong by the patient. If I fail to see the implication, for example, of an arch-pervert hidden in the unconscious of the connoisseur, then Mancini is simply left with repeating his interpretation. Or it’s as if Mancini offers us a series of jokes. Whether they succeed as jokes depends entirely on whether they make us laugh. If one does not, there’s little use saying it again. Moreover, I wonder whether some of these tropes are not far more useful than Mancini believes. Take the tropes of craft and tradition, both of which Mancini goes to lengths to dismiss. I agree that when taken as static fetish-like ideals, they may be less illuminating than otherwise. But when I praise a collection for its author’s attention and attainment of a high level of craft and of interestingly engaging with the English literary tradition, it seems possible—indeed, good critics show that it is possible—that I’ve used those tropes to point to actual features of the work of art as such. Of course these are not neutral categories; but it takes more than pointing out that fact to give us grounds for rejecting them. Furthermore, it seems to me that root metaphors—like craft and tradition—can be invoked to deal with a range of poetries. Again, no good critic would limit his or her discussion to the terms these tropes set beforehand; and he or she may wish to reject them for some artworks. Mancini will take issue with the very idea of “a work of art,” and claim to the contrary that these tropes are “inadequate to all poetry of any type.” To praise or simply engage a poem at the level of craft is then a kind of bad faith. Here, I feel, our disagreement runs far deeper than reasons comprehend. </span></span><br />
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</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What is a review for? What does a critic do? What a critic does not do, on Mancini’s view, is offer normative assessments. Those reviews which do so are characterized as “mercantile,” and are reduced to capitalistic tokens. Shane Neilson, for instance, is dismissed for evaluating poetry according to a normative checklist—intelligibility, meaning, emotional expressiveness—and rejecting poems which fail those criteria. I doubt Neilson would agree with this charge; nonetheless it is, on Mancini’s analysis, what he’s really doing. (Again the influence of psychoanalytic interpretation). Neilson, says Mancini, is representative of the critic-as-angry customer who merely wishes to return a product that he is unhappy with. Instead, Mancini endorses Frank Davey’s prescription that “textual criticism [be] informed by transnational creative and critical influences, one that attempts to meet language at its material bases, and to meet poetry at the site of composition […] What Davey envisions are poetics, rather than mercantile review criticism of imperative value judgment.” I won’t pretend to understand all the terms Mancini invokes. I’m not sure, for example, what is meant by the material bases of language, nor whether by transnational creative and critical influences Mancini means simply non-national. In any case, Mancini contrasts Neilson’s assessment of Kiyooka’s work—e.g., “it is difficult to pick just one offence against style and taste; Surrender is a repeat offender […] Indeed, confusion is a constitutive experience when reading through the whole book”—with Al Purdy’s reading of one of Kiyooka’s earlier books. Purdy describes Kiyooka’s poems as “creat[ing] an energy vortex in which all things turn inward and circle to an end inside the poem without question. The poem answers any implicit questions in process of asking.” The worth of Purdy’s description will naturally depend on our own acquaintance with the poetry in question, and I’ll assume here that Purdy’s statement is at least apt, if not illuminating. Mancini praises the review in the following terms: “without academic training in cultural theory, Purdy is perfectly able to read the effects of the form of Kiyooka’s poetry” in terms contiguous to those which the poetry itself asserts. He is “not fixated on poetry’s meaning […] representation or message.” I’m not sure if this example is sufficient to show the sort of textual criticism Mancini finally advocates. I take it, however, that Purdy’s critical attention is nonetheless lauded because he extends beyond his own poetics and inhabits Kiyooka’s work—albeit without, as Mancini notes, knowledge of critical theory. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It’s possible to disagree with Neilson’s rhetoric. And it seems equally possible, though a distinct activity, to disagree with Neilson’s opinion of Kiyooka’s poetry. It’s not obvious to me, however, why judgment and assessment of any kind is either precluded or opposed to the sort of hermeneutics Mancini calls for. It’s thus easy, again, to distrust the strong dichotomy Mancini asserts. In art, as in life, we do well to encounter strangeness with curiosity and an open mind. Even that supposedly conservative critic, T.S. Eliot, disparages the “dogmatic critic, who lays down a rule, who affirms a value.” Such a critic, Eliot continues, “has left his labour incomplete […] but in matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgments of worse or better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the correct judgment for himself.” Critics and reviewers are just those partial and fallible readers who publically articulate their responses to texts as best as they can. A good critic’s evaluations are always tentative; he or she knows very well the risk of attempting to judge a work of art. He or she will acknowledge that evaluation is never neutral and no perspective is from nowhere. Good critics, in other words, wear their aesthetic biases on their sleeves and, like Nietzsche remarked, match the courage of their convictions with the courage to challenge those convictions. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I’ll end with the acknowledgement that there’s much more in Mancini’s book that I would have liked to discuss: his ideas about aesthetic conscience take up a good portion of the work, and will be of interest to those interested in the link between moral psychology and aesthetics. Also, I’d have questioned more explicitly Mancini’s use of critical theory and the jargon which comes with it. This is a book wherein you’ll encounter, for an extreme example, statements like this: “[t]he poet activates polysemy on the formal level of parataxis, and activates it contextually with indexical signs.” I’ve provided no context for this quote but, truth be told, there isn’t much context to add. Mancini offers this remark almost out of nowhere as a clarification and extension of the sort of criticism he believes adequate to distinctively post-modern texts. Elsewhere, citing an example Stanley Fish’s use of Derridian theory to deconstruct a Dirty Harry film, Mancini seems to seriously ask: “If Derrida’s ideas are good enough to write about the films of Clint Eastwood, why not about contemporary Canadian poetry?.” This is an odd rhetorical question. I don’t believe any serious critic, by which I mean a person with a broad and generous cultural sensitivity, will say that Derrida’s or Hegel’s or Marx’s or Foucault’s or whoever’s ideas aren’t “good enough.” The question, I assume, is whether those ideas are useful and illuminating when applied to contemporary Canadian poetry. And the answer is probably, yes, in some cases. In this connection, and at a more basic level, I believe it worth defending yet another trope Mancini dismisses: that of the non- (or anti-) academic critic: the strong distinction between those in the university and those not beholden to the university. Mancini’s text proves to be an unusual attempt to extend the concerns and categories of the former to the critical practices of the latter. That by itself makes this book an interesting read, especially and even if chiefly to those of us who have suffered both within and without the academy. Nonetheless, the expectation, often encountered in the 1990s in literature departments and ubiquitous in Mancini’s book, that a front line of progressive politics is practiced in the seminar room seems to me extremely dubious. Without reifying aesthetics and politics into separate spheres, we still do a disservice to both by collapsing one into the other. So too I wonder whether the influence of critical theory, with its roots in Hegel, Derrida, Lacan and co., is not merely a more recent example of Plato’s desire for the philosophers to tell the poets what they’re really doing. And, as in Plato, those who agree with Socrates nod their assent while the poets (and, probably the critics), then as now, imperfectly carry on.</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073" name="1"><b>[1]</b></a> I suspect this combative rhetoric here, and in the literature at large, is largely nonsense. The only audible conflict is between those who feel it necessary to shout about their aesthetic preferences. I take it as obvious that it’s far more common than not for a single poet to be interested in many kinds of different poetry, even if he or she writes more or less formally (or more or less postmodernly). I know Carmine Starnino (again) and Christian Bök don’t much like each other’s work and once had a cage match but, really, shame on them both for agreeing to take part in such staged idiocy.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073#top1"> ↩ </a></span><br />
Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-69220749812994917082013-05-02T15:34:00.000-04:002014-03-14T08:16:56.666-04:00The Poet, Inturped: A Review of Peter Norman's Water Damage<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>Water Damage</i></b></span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Peter Norman</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>(Mansfield, 2013)</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The last poem in Peter Norman’s debut collection <i>At the Gates of the Theme Park </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(Mansfield, 2010), entitled “Judgment,” provides an apt entry point into the work of this remarkable poet. I quote the full poem:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I saw a girl begging for change.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I gave her change, for she was beautiful.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">But nothing shifted: next day she was there</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">still beautiful and begging. And the eye</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">she cast was cold, its judgment terrible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">My boss returned the annual report.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I’d written it. He’d circled things in red</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">that needed fixing. So I fixed those things</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">and sent it back. He sent it back again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A dozen circles blotted every word.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Three storks delivered babies to my door.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The babies made much noise and ate much food.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">What can you do? What else would you have done? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I fed them food and bore the noise</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">and one by one they crawled to better homes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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—<i>rightly so</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, 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, </span><i>At the Gates of the Theme Park</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> also presents itself as a catalogue of lapses, and it is all the better for it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is not to fully excuse Norman’s occasionally too-high tolerance for triviality and <i>non sequitur</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: several of the least effective poems in </span><i>At the Gates</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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 </span><i>At the Gates of the Theme Park </i><span style="font-style: normal;">coheres </span><i>because</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> rather than </span><i>in spite of</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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”:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I fall awake alone. Outside,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">nocturnal rain ascends.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Alarms rage, summoning a thief</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">who hurries to the store,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">unpacks his duffel sack,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">replaces items on the shelf.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Morning. The plane dispenses you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">We enfold each other,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">celebrating your undeparture. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Tears scroll up your cheeks,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">nestle into ducts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Last night we wake</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">sweat-soaked and sated,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">breathe flame to candlewick</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">and fuse, hips coaxing sheets</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">to smoothness.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Years ago, our meeting is unmade.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">My life hurries back into ignorance,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">days spent unrolling snowballs,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">being chased by the ice cream truck,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">gathering bread spat by ducks</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">beside a cool lake.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">We will never disentangle</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">at the baggage check.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">You won’t be tugged from me</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">by announcements,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">gates, corridors, customs.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I am three years old.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I urge spilled milk into a jug,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">right it on the table.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">My mother’s alarmed eyes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">flash calm.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Outside, a robin</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">cocks her head,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">feeds worms</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">to the hungry soil.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Recursion” constitutes a feat of defamiliarization on par with Craig Raine’s classic “<a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-martian-sends-a-postcard-home/" target="_blank">A Martian Sends a Postcard Home</a>,” 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 <a href="http://www.jonathanball.com/?p=876" target="_blank">Jonathan Ball has referred</a> 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. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Norman’s recently released second collection, <i>Water Damage</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, finds this vision both intact and expanded upon. Whereas the longest poem in </span><i>At the Gates</i><span style="font-style: normal;">—the very fine “Sentences”—ran four narrow pages, </span><i>Water Damage</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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:</span></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Those who came here afterward</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">to cash in on cheapened real estate</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">never really dug the flood's extent.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Wrecked lots were scoured flat, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">subjected to construction. One by one</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">the porches filled with barbecues and bikes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">and lawn chairs folded anytime it rained.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Newcomers found their powers ailing here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A softness in their joints, a squashy sloth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Emerging from a troubled sleep,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">they’d sense that something fluid caked their eyes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">and everything they saw looked somehow warped.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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 <i>Water Damage</i><span style="font-style: normal;">’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:</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Up near Wawa, where the 17</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">was lightning-lit and slicked</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">with flagellating rain and hit</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">repeatedly with hailstones;</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">up near Wawa, weary</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">of the pummelled 17, we saw a buck</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">self-mortify on an advancing rig.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I say self-mortify, which is to say</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">in fact it ran, confused or mad,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">straight for the grille, the brights, but like</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">atoners and their sniping whips perhaps</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">it thought the sins of herbivores,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">or just its own, or those of every deer,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">might gather in its blood and dissipate,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">run guttered on the gleaming grate,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">spatter on the road and disappear. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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 “lightn<i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ng,” “l</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">t,” “sl</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">cked,” “flagellat</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ng,” “h</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">t,” “w</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">th,” “self-mort</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">fy,” “r</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">g,” “gr</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">lle,” “wh</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ps,” “s</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ns,” “herb</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">vores,” “d</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ssipate,” “d</span><i>i</i><span style="font-style: normal;">sappear,” 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 </span><i>my</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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:</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But wait.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I got it wrong.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">There never was a buck.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Or moose. No elk, no lowly mole.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The rain was real as hooves for sure and kept</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">the frantic wipers set on highest whine</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">and lightning really lit the way</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">with winking glimpses of the broken line.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Up near Wawa, yes, the 17,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">and rigs for sure, their bright relentless chain,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">and yes, there was this one oncoming truck</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">with high beams, nearly croaked us in the rain.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The rest, I guess, was wrong. There was no buck. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Dear Mr. Norman:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">We have not received the payment due November 1st.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Within three days, reply to this notice</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">or your service will be cut off.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">We strongly advise you to pay these funds</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">without delay. We’re loath</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">to terminate this service.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Please don’t make us do this.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">We know there are circumstances.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">We’re sure you’ve had a painful day</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">and something roams behind your brow,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">a lost fly trapped by a pane.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">We can surmise the state of your surroundings.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Yes, we figure we can see you now,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">slouched and weeping in the tattered chair</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">marked with stains from when you lost control.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">It’s clear you lost control.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Control took leave at a date unspecified</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">before November 1st. That much is plain;</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">the rest we’ve merely guessed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Enclosed please find a sheaf of charts</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">delineating what you should have paid and when.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">This info will not help you, but the sheets ensure</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">a fanning-out of papers at your feet</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">as you sob and let them drop.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">We hear the termites moving in your walls</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">and sense their hunger hollowing the planks</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">beneath your seat. Please pay the fees</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-left: 1in;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">outstanding. Insect bellies fill</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">with floor. Your chair will plunge</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">straight down and ever down. How far you’ll fall,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">we’re sad to say, is way past our surmise.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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 <i>Water Damage</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> but </span><i>At the Gates of the Theme Park </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as well, identifiable at least two dozen poems, with Norman’s surrealism serving to illuminate—and, through its frequently quirky tone, </span><i>conceal</i><span style="font-style: normal;">—a genuine horror at what we allow ourselves to mistake for normalcy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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 <i>Water Damage</i><span style="font-style: normal;">:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The turnips ooze a juice just visible on his chin.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Etiquette-bereft, the cad inturps the conversation I was in.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the urn’s pit, ash accumulates: mortality’s pith.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A tin spur goads moans from the lover I lie with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Poking the proxy doll with a rustpin makes for anguish.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Don’t stunrip the ne’er-do-wells. Just let ‘em languish.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Pit urns fill with spit-out pits of fruit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Baffling ritpuns offend the ruling brute.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Punstir the ticklish for a ribald effect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A nut rips when the razor swipes. Your denim won’t protect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">On the suntrip, bronzed-up tourists tipple plonk.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Untrips are offered. The unship’s waiting at the dock.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Writhe and spin, rut and grunt among the scented sheets.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Runspit in thickets like a rabid boar in heat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Pitnurs leave me stumped. From a small stump I orate.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Runt, sip that rancid wine. You’ll find it tastes of acetate.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Bail out the punt, sir, or the ferried souls will drown.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Your turn: sip the sugared venom, force it down.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The tip runs off on tipsy legs, leaving the servers broke.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Turps in turpish venues tell the filthiest of jokes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> Spurtin’ depravity, he mounted the stump—and spoke—</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">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 “<a href="http://bpnichol.ca/media/audio/bpnichol_historical_implications_turnips" target="_blank">Historical Implications of Turnips</a>” (“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 <i>Cloud Atlas</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. 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 </span><i>At the Gates of the Theme Park </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><i>Water Damage</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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. </span></span></div>
Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-20168409935823733632013-04-02T10:57:00.001-04:002014-03-14T08:18:17.808-04:00The Allusionist: Reviewing James Pollock<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNefxQ5qrdnXUe8Ivd8bKIwhJ_ELtPTUGsdMsvJrAO75ueC79IS5XDtu7moHhQDMsN2OdyLDC9dX8U0NEfLeinGRCUp7X-q58sG10COku7uuazr17j7i2v1fRRtAS4V5pNE-9K0utF78c/s1600/youarehere2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNefxQ5qrdnXUe8Ivd8bKIwhJ_ELtPTUGsdMsvJrAO75ueC79IS5XDtu7moHhQDMsN2OdyLDC9dX8U0NEfLeinGRCUp7X-q58sG10COku7uuazr17j7i2v1fRRtAS4V5pNE-9K0utF78c/s200/youarehere2.jpg" height="200" width="133" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; clear: left; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b><i>You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada</i></b></span><br />
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</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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.</span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheUmLWuJ9NWr2MlnTH2BD8VHQNZ6_YzxLqr4WfrSWviwIPm7MvNQJCaWPyaecftzwdWQXY3xWDE4zT_73B91IeFP3YwgZdCj_2YrDVhwDP_iU9R4aFlJHHpOjJMa_AgCT32HVKJM429dY/s1600/sailingtobabylon2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheUmLWuJ9NWr2MlnTH2BD8VHQNZ6_YzxLqr4WfrSWviwIPm7MvNQJCaWPyaecftzwdWQXY3xWDE4zT_73B91IeFP3YwgZdCj_2YrDVhwDP_iU9R4aFlJHHpOjJMa_AgCT32HVKJM429dY/s200/sailingtobabylon2.jpg" height="200" width="131" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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 </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Urge</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">. 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.”</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Brief of History of Neoliberalism</i>, 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">un</i>certainty, the scrambling of one’s categories). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada</i> (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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Canon</i>, Sina Queyras’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Open Field</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008</i>, and Todd Swift and Evan Jones’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modern Canadian Poets</i>) and one critical survey (W.J. Keith’s two-volume <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Canadian Literature in English</i>) 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sailing to Babylon</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You Are Here</i> 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modern Canadian Poets </i>memorably captures this duality:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">15 Canadian Poets X 3</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">This passage embodies the characteristic tone of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You Are Here</i>—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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Recollected Poems: 1951-2004 </i>(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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Indeed, Pollock’s structural and close-reading prowess comprise his two chief critical strengths. In his review of Carson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera</i> (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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Once Out of Nature </i>(1991) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Waterglass</i> (1999) to a more philosophical, meditative mode in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pallilalia</i> (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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Cloud of Unknowing</i>” 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”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">To his credit—and this is one of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You Are Here</i>’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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">The pluralist might demand: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Whose</i> rhetoric, prosody, or<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You Are Here</i> 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in itself</i> 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Canadian Literature in English</i>, which Pollock quotes approvingly in his otherwise skeptical review of that book:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You Are Here</i>). 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Turning briefly to Pollock’s first collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sailing to Babylon</i>, 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sailing to Babylon</i> really is an excellent book—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unwillingness</i>). I mostly agree with Michael Lista’s laudatory review in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">National Post</i>, 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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">If only he could watch his teacher read<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">and, gazing, could lean there at his desk<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">in the winter light of Hillcrest Public School<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">and listen as she speaks the strangest words—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">with her vivid face, her braided hair<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">and dark eyes like a real and ordinary <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">siren’s—if only he could wait like that<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">forever while Miss Harmon reads <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">(his kind young teacher with the ringing voice<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">he loves so much he lets the story sing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">into his heart), she would peal out for him,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">swaying above him like a slender bell,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">the breaking changes of a life to come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">In a recent interview with Open Book, Pollock says of the post-release experience of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sailing for Babylon </i>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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really does</i> 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sprezzatura</i> 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sailing to Babylon</i>, and despite my essential admiration for its achievement, I’m occasionally fraught with the nagging sense that not enough is at stake here <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aesthetically</i>—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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">In closing, and to clarify, let me compare two passages from the clear highlight of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sailing to Babylon</i>, the Dantean vision-quest “Quarry Park,”<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Microcosmos</i> in the verbal medium), Pollock’s speaker turns bluntly philosophical:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">What a hell this garden is. I’m aware<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">no evolution, nothing human. Nature<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">makes beauty into death abundantly<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">and death into beauty; though if they’d never<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">thirty million years ago, those clever<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">ants would still be a strange modest class<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">of tropical wingless wasps forever<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">scavenging or hunting prey en masse<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">in cloudy jungles—and not as pervasive <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">an ecological champion as grass.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sailing to Babylon </i>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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">it all fills<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">me with such longing, for God knows how frail<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">our lives and their monuments are, and yet<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">how beautiful the ruins that prevail<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">even in the midst of death; how we forget,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">and how our forgetting makes us homeless,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">until we dig ourselves out of this debt<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">we owe the giant past for making us<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">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?</span></div>
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Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-70232493223465491882012-12-26T10:07:00.001-05:002014-03-14T08:18:41.955-04:00Safe at Home: A Review of Julie Bruck's Monkey Ranch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b><i>Monkey Ranch</i></b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b>Julie Bruck</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b> (Brick, 2012)</b></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">The sort-of title poem of Montreal native Julie Bruck’s first collection <i>The Woman Downstairs</i> (Brick, 1993)—entitled “The Woman Downstairs Used To Be Beautiful”—embodies many of the traits that still distinguish her work almost twenty years later. Its first two-thirds read:</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">This summer she’s grown huge, a ham with legs,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">she lumbers below, watering her garden with a hose.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">From my balcony, the evening light seems kind</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">to the extra flesh, soft</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">on her print shift, the scarf that holds back</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">her dark hair, and for once I want to believe</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">she’s not unhappy, not stuffing her face</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">to fill in the distance between her</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">and the unusually thin husband who travels, not hiding</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">in the body of the proverbial fat woman,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">passed in the street without notice.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Instead, she wants to be of consequence,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">clearly visible to her small son stationed</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">on their balcony, that he never lose sight of such a broad floral back,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">think she might leave him, vanish in the leaves below.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">As throughout her work, Bruck’s speaker here positions herself as a keen observer of the lives going on around her, a tendency that led an early review of the collection in the Dutch academic journal <i>English Studies</i>—would we ever be reviewed there now?—to smartly surmise that the poet herself must be “an inveterate people-watcher and eavesdropper.” The frequent observational vantage of Bruck’s poems helps shape their characteristic tone: empathetic yet distanced, too attuned to her subjects’ humanity to fully objectify them and yet rarely allowing this attunement to quaver her verbal precision—at least until the emotional lift that usually comes at the ending (more on which to follow). Indeed, the sort of unadorned precision we see above has become the hallmark of Bruck’s style; “stationed” is the least common word in the passage (and it skillfully conveys both the son’s watchfulness and his slight unwillingness to stay on the balcony where he’s been placed). This straightforwardness of diction, combined with a relatively slight reliance on figurative language and a commitment to free verse over set forms, means that her work often reads like lineated well-written prose. Granted, the persistent caesurae dividing the above lines serve to somewhat rhythmically embody the before-and-after of the woman’s appearance, but overall (and like much of Bruck’s work) the poem swerves clear of the pejorative <i>prosaic</i> largely by striking a tone that readers will recognize (it hopes) as poetic. This comes particularly clear in the poem’s final third:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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But the wail that comes from him’s a thin, unwavering cry,<o:p></o:p></div>
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as if he never comes up for air, this wordless child’s siren<o:p></o:p></div>
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of <i>come back, not enough, too far</i>, that has brought me<o:p></o:p></div>
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and, gradually, other neighbours onto our balconies<o:p></o:p></div>
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to look first on a small boy, who, thirty years from now<o:p></o:p></div>
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will turn his life over, say: <i>there was always <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>too much of her, she swallowed me up</i>—and then down<o:p></o:p></div>
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on a fat woman, breathlessly bending. <i><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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This ending finds the speaker proffering an interesting psychological suggestion: that as he grows older, the son will come to resent the dependence he once had on his mother, to blame her for his future failures of independence. The woman’s growing fatness thus serves to figure this parental “<i>swallow[ing]</i>” of the dependent child, just as her lost beauty comes to figure the transfiguration of that dependence from an innocent, natural state to a smothering one. As in much of her subsequent work, Bruck here proves herself an acute, subtle chronicler of the strength and strains of parent-child bonds. But alas, there are problems here: going back through the poem, one can’t help but be struck not only by the patness of the few metaphors (“ham with legs,” “child’s siren”) but by how its entire edifice rests upon a foundation of cliché. In her classic manual <i>A Poet’s Guide to Poetry</i>, Mary Kinzie warns us against mistakenly regarding cliché as a strictly verbal phenomenon, highlighting the perhaps greater danger of “clichés of feeling” (or what I like to call <i>emotional clichés</i>)—and these are largely what “The Woman Downstairs Used to Be Beautiful” offers us. Beginning with the title, with its stock evocation of the loss of beauty as a standard source of disappointment for ageing women, the poem moves through a series of tried pseudo-insights: the fat woman is probably “stuffing her face / to fill in the distance between her / and [her] unusually thin husband,” but perhaps she’s not, perhaps she’s gorging herself because “she wants to be of consequence,” wants not to be “passed in the street without notice”—at least this is what, in the “kind[ness]” of the “evening light,” the compassionate speaker would like to believe. For all her observancy and compassion, though, it isn’t until two-thirds of the way through the poem, when she allows for the stranger possibility that the woman may simply want to remain “clearly visible to her small son,” that the speaker imbues her subject with anything more than a caricatured fat-person psychology. This is too often the case in <i>The Woman Downstairs</i>: despite their verbal precision and even lucidity in observing the quotidian, too many of the poems take emotional shortcuts, mistaking well-phrased banalities for insight. This title poem actually stands as one of the better-realized pieces in the collection (I first encountered it in Carmine Starnino’s anthology <i>The New Canon</i>) and is indicative of the book’s central strengths and shortcomings. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Bruck’s second collection <i>The End of Travel </i>(Brick, 1999) is a stronger book: while still in free verse, the poems overall are formally tighter, less given to swell prosily toward the right margin, and they employ figurative devices both more often and more effectively. So while the now San Francisco-based Bruck’s characteristic distanced-yet-empathetic tone remains firmly in place, and while her range of subject matter remains fairly circumscribed—parents and children, fraught love and friendship, and the ever-presence of mortality, all rendered from a perspective that feels distinctly autobiographical—<i>The End of Travel </i>nonetheless conveys artistic growth. Collection opener “Sex Next Door” (also anthologized in <i>The New Canon</i>) finds Bruck at her concise best:<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s rare, slow as a creaking of oars,<o:p></o:p></div>
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and she is so frail and short of breath<o:p></o:p></div>
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on the street, the stairs – tiny, Lilliputian,<o:p></o:p></div>
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one wonders how they do it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So, wakened by the shiftings of their bed nudging<o:p></o:p></div>
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our shared wall as a boat rubs its pilings,<o:p></o:p></div>
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I want it to continue, before her awful<o:p></o:p></div>
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hollow coughing fit begins. And when<o:p></o:p></div>
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they have to stop (always), until it passes, let<o:p></o:p></div>
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us praise that resumed rhythm, no more than a twitch,<o:p></o:p></div>
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really, of our common floorboards. And how <o:p></o:p></div>
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he’s waited for her before pushing off<o:p></o:p></div>
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in their rusted vessel, bailing when they have to,<o:p></o:p></div>
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but moving out anyway, across the black water. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This free sonnet does everything right: from the first line’s deft simile, which sets out the poem’s central conceit of the neighbours’ sex as a kind of rickety Lethean ferrying; to the conceit’s further development in “as a boat rubs its pilings” and “pushing off / in their rusted vessel”; to the way the verse’s modulations evoke the rhythmic lapping of waves against hull; and at last to the ending, which eschews sentimental lift in favour of dark ambiguity. As one of Bruck’s many ‘neighbour-poems’, this one succeeds unusually in balancing the speaker’s arm’s-length sympathy for the woman (“she is so frail and short of breath / on the street”) with her odd and even potentially transgressive position as listener-voyeur (“I want it to continue”). At her best, Bruck holds a place as one of contemporary Canadian poetry’s most determinedly (and successfully) <i>social</i> poets, a writer over whose imagination the transfixion of people-watching—and of piecing together other people’s lives from snippets of anonymously observed detail—exerts a vital and productive hold. Still too often in <i>The End of Travel</i>, though, her poems lapse from sharpness into sentimentality; much more common than unqualified successes like “Sex Next Door” are middling pieces like “Greene Ave.”:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Montreal’s blazing in tufts<o:p></o:p></div>
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of acid green and crabapple pink.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Clouds mass at dusk behind<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mount Royal like additional summits,<o:p></o:p></div>
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as my father noted yesterday<o:p></o:p></div>
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from his favourite chair, pleased <o:p></o:p></div>
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as he should be with the rented view.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Framed by my office window,<o:p></o:p></div>
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two elderly women in pink suits<o:p></o:p></div>
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with matching handbags and shoes,<o:p></o:p></div>
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twin iced confections, swirl<o:p></o:p></div>
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across the parking lot to lunch.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It rains, the sun comes out;<o:p></o:p></div>
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a young girl in white begins<o:p></o:p></div>
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her slow, meditative dance<o:p></o:p></div>
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around each parked car.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The pastel ladies reappear, fold<o:p></o:p></div>
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their legs into the Seville.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Alone in their vacant space,<o:p></o:p></div>
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the girl in white spins and spins.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A man pees behind a parking meter,<o:p></o:p></div>
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hails a cab with his free hand.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The cab pulls over, the cab<o:p></o:p></div>
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will wait, and that ring is my rented phone.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Anything to be that girl, turning.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ah yes, and who doesn’t long for the careless freedom of a young girl? This poem begins well, with the vivid, sonically dense metaphor of Montreal “blazing in tufts / of acid green and crabapple pink” and the simile comparing clouds over Mount Royal to “additional summits.” With the entrance of the speaker’s father, however, the language flattens out; the last three lines of the first stanza do nothing except communicate information in a utilitarian manner. This touches on a frequent shortcoming of Bruck’s work: she often seems more interested in chronicling her life than in making art, and so substantial swathes of many of her poems consist of autobiographical detail transcribed with seemingly little attention to sonic or figurative concerns. Often—as in the descriptions of the elderly woman, the young girl, and the peeing man that take up the middle of the poem above—this commitment to transcription succeeds in lending us the impression of a observant, intelligent, verbally meticulous speaker, persuasive in her determination to chronicle the urban lives she observes. But description—even when enlivened by deft metaphors like the one that transforms the elderly ladies into “twin iced confections”—can only take us so far. When it comes time to transfigure this described material into insight, to take the rhetorical risks that lift the best poetry above skillful notation, Bruck too often falls flat: “Anything to be that girl, turning.” Whether out of a too-firm commitment to autobiographical verisimilitude—i.e., to sincerity over artifice—or a too-high tolerance for sentimentality, she too often defaults to the most obvious (and most obviously <i>poetic</i>) emotional responses to the situations she depicts.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This fundamental shortcoming still haunts <i>Monkey Ranch</i> (winner of the 2012 Governor General’s Award for poetry), but as with the interval between her first two collections, the twelve years between <i>The End of Travel </i>and this one have clearly seen Bruck further hone her craft. Her subject matter, too, has expanded; though still concerned primarily with family—and especially, here, her own close family, with husband, growing child, and ageing parents—and secondarily with the urban backdrop to this family drama, she has infused much of her material with a marked political concern. This is evidenced in the very title of the collection’s opening poem, “This Morning, After an Execution at San Quentin.” The poem reads in full:<o:p></o:p></div>
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My husband said he felt human again<o:p></o:p></div>
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after days of stomach flu, made himself French toast,<o:p></o:p></div>
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then lay down again to be sure.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I took our daughter to the zoo,<o:p></o:p></div>
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where she stood on small flowered legs, transfixed by the drone<o:p></o:p></div>
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of the howler monkey,<o:p></o:p></div>
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a sound more retch than howl.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Singing monkey</i>, my girl says.<o:p></o:p></div>
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She is well-rested. We all are. As we slept, cold spring air arrived,<o:p></o:p></div>
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blown from the Bay where San Quentin<o:p></o:p></div>
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casts its sharp light.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Tonight, my girl will tell her father<o:p></o:p></div>
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(a man restored, even grateful, for a day or so) about what she<o:p></o:p></div>
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saw in the raised cage.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Monkey singing</i>, she will tell him,<o:p></o:p></div>
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and later, tell every corner of her cool dark room,<o:p></o:p></div>
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until the crib springs ease because she’s run out of joy,<o:p></o:p></div>
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and fallen asleep on her knees.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is a wonderful poem, illustrative of Bruck’s greatest strengths—an eye for telling detail, verbal precision, and a kind of luminous regard—and yet figuratively and formally richer than the majority of her work. Note, for instance, how the first line—“My husband said he felt human again”—subtly casts a contingency over the man’s humanity, thus resonating with the title’s evocation of capital punishment, an institution that many argue dehumanizes us all. As it proceeds, the poem nuances this motif of dehumanization through the contrast between the “small flowered legs” of the daughter and “the drone / of the howler monkey, / a sound more retch than howl,” juxtaposing the girl’s cultivated yet almost angelic innocence against the basic guttural cries of our primate brethren. (At the same time, the monkey’s “retch[ing]” connotes disgust, perhaps reflecting the speaker’s stance on the titular execution.) The child’s innocence is further emphasized by her characterization of what she sees in the “raised cage” as “<i>Monkey singing</i>,” which works to convey her obliviousness to the injustices of captivity and killing that frame her zoo visit. Though he lacks the excuse of childhood, her father, too, takes his freedom for granted, remaining “restored, even grateful” only “for a day or so” after his illness. The closing tableau of the child, in a crib-cage of her own, having “fallen asleep on her knees” in a posture of inadvertent prayer, swerves clear of sentimentality through its utter figurative aptness—the way it draws together in a single image the poem’s motifs of animality, captivity, and ultimately, hope. “This Morning” succeeds as both a domestic poem and a political one because its two scales of concern are so deftly interwoven: while referencing execution only in the title, it manages to embody, through symbolically resonant imagery, both a stance against the death penalty and a sense of civic culpability in regards to it. That it stands as one of a handful of Bruck’s best poems is all the more remarkable because—though as I’ve said it does embody many of her typical strengths—it is also notably anomalous amid her body of work, both for its figurative rigour and (especially) formally. It is the only poem across her three collections that isn’t fully left-justified on the page, and is all the better for it: its weaving indent and alternating line lengths mitigate against the potential prosyness of the verse, setting out a rhythmic and visual analogue of a mind grappling with the moral complexities of the situation the poem sets out. (Ken Babstock has mastered this technique of using indentation and varying line lengths to create complex rhythmic and epistemic effects.) Based on the evidence of this excellent poem, Bruck would be well served taking more formal risks of this sort.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A more cynical and perhaps churlish response to a poem like “This Morning, After an Execution” would be to charge it with simply using political context as backdrop to lend undue weight to what is ultimately a quotidian domestic scenario—with deploying the fact of capital punishment to cast a eulogistic glow over the homey safety of the family circle. Though I don’t agree with this assessment in terms of that particular poem, a similar objection does trouble me at various other points throughout <i>Monkey Ranch</i>. Take “Election Night with Dog,” for example:<o:p></o:p></div>
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It bites, still pees in the house,<o:p></o:p></div>
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barks at every change, pulls<o:p></o:p></div>
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against the leash as if it just located<o:p></o:p></div>
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someone unsniffed since high school.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But when the young senator from Illinois<o:p></o:p></div>
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was declared President-elect, our child<o:p></o:p></div>
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watched, cross-legged on hardwood, weeping<o:p></o:p></div>
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for joy, the scruffy new dog in her lap.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It smells very bad when wet.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As she listened, it licked and licked<o:p></o:p></div>
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her streaked face, while she ran<o:p></o:p></div>
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both hands rhythmically down its spine,<o:p></o:p></div>
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head to tail, head to tail, and<o:p></o:p></div>
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then, for a second, I saw<o:p></o:p></div>
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the aisles of a cracked sidewalk<o:p></o:p></div>
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down which these two can travel:<o:p></o:p></div>
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A girl of strong feeling, and her<o:p></o:p></div>
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crazy dog, on a long, loose leash.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If this were only a bad poem, I could ignore it. If it were simply a slice of domestic life in flat, uncompelling language, sentimental and virtually void of resonance metaphorical or otherwise, then I could readily pass it over. Unfortunately, though, it is a bad poem not just verbally, but ideologically—a poem that tries to lift itself out of banality by deploying Obama’s election in the hope that the significance of that historic event might help to sanctify its artistic inadequacies. In other words, it’s a poem that brazenly (and one might even say cynically) attempts to transcend its status as a domestic vignette by partaking of the cachet of the ‘political’ realm. This wouldn’t be such a problem if it were as well-realized figuratively as “This Morning, After an Execution”; but here the attempt in the last two stanzas to lift the poem into metaphorical resonance—Is the “cracked sidewalk” symbolic of a divided America? What, politically, might the “girl of strong feeling” and the “crazy dog” represent?—fails utterly, and Bruck falls back (as she often does in her earlier work) to substituting a poetic <i>tone</i> for the rigours of actual poetry. As it is, then, the poem’s political pretensions amount to little more than a paean to the parents’ enlightened liberalism—even their young child weeps at Obama’s victory—while any reference to contentious subjects such as race, inequality, or the future of America’s wars (i.e., the central issues around which the hope in Obama constellated) is resolutely avoided. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is my issue with much of the “political” content of <i>Monkey Ranch</i>: it is riskless. It dips its toe in the political ocean just enough to say it has swum there—and glean the congratulations even such meagre toe-dipping commands in our alarmingly apolitical poetic culture—but without any chance of having to battle the tides. In poems like “Election Night with Dog,” “The Help” (a nod to domestic servants), “Goodwill” (a sketch of a low-wage Goodwill employee), and even “Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad” (a journalistic account of an distraught Iraqi father’s search for his son’s body in post-bomb wreckage), any explicit political position is carefully and safely avoided. Those inclined to disagree with me will say, “So what? Art isn’t politics. Bruck should be applauded for engaging without soapboxing. As a literary critic, you have no right to criticize her politics or lack thereof,” <i>et cetera</i>. To which I reply: one can’t have it both ways. A book cannot be simultaneously congratulated for its politics—George Murray’s <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/monkey-ranch-by-julie-bruck/article4178763/" target="_blank"><i>Globe and Mail</i> review</a> lauds how easily it moves into “deeply political” terrain—and yet immune to an examination of what precisely those politics entail. Snuggled in CanPo’s comfortable confines, we too often fail to acknowledge that our option to remain aesthetically “apolitical” is itself enabled by the political imperatives our governments and economic systems impose on those elsewhere, whether within our borders or abroad. Bruck’s work—while not entirely blind to this—often seems to want to gain the prestige of being “political” while never embodying any point of view that might arouse controversy, to quail at the death penalty or sympathize with the lot of servants or grieve at civilian deaths in Iraq or weep at Obama’s election, all while carefully avoiding even the slightest reference to the contentious issues that orbit these events. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The word that keeps occurring to me is <i>bourgeois</i>: not in the colloquial sense of middle-class—though <i>Monkey Ranch</i>, which besides many tributes to affluent nuclear family life, also contains poems on subjects like horseracing and closing up the summer family cottage, and so clearly embodies a specific class position—but bourgeois in the more nuanced sense sanctioned by Marxist theorists since Marx himself, designating the ideology of the “independent citizen” whose troubles and (especially) successes may be safely insulated from those on whose exploitation they depend. The bourgeois, in other words, is one who denies the reality that her or his material existence is utterly interdependent, who persists in the illusion that true material independence is even possible. This illusion inflects many of the poems in <i>Monkey Ranch</i>—“Gold Coin,” for example, the first stanza of which reads:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Two weeks past Chinese New Year, red<o:p></o:p></div>
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paper children and dragons still drape<o:p></o:p></div>
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the copy shops and nail parlors.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I wheel the baby through the street’s bright offer.<o:p></o:p></div>
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She hoots and points her articulate,<o:p></o:p></div>
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fat finger: comic books, pantyhose,<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Beard trim $4.50,</i> and the Chinese name<o:p></o:p></div>
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for a certain kind of orange, <i>Gum Chin Chang</i>,<o:p></o:p></div>
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posted above the fruit like a musical score.<o:p></o:p></div>
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From the title on down, San Francisco’s Chinatown is cast in purely economic and aesthetic terms, as the shops and their colourful contents amount to little more than sensory delectation for speaker and baby. Though “the copy shops and nail parlors” hint that this isn’t a particularly wealthy neighbourhood, this registers with the speaker only in how “the street’s bright offer”—note how the metaphor transforms the street itself into something to be consumed—peddles inexpensive wares: “comic books, pantyhose, / <i>Beard trim $4.50</i>.” In the final stanza-ending flourish, the Chinese language itself becomes an aesthetic object, “posted above the fruit like a musical score.” Through its first half, “Gold Coin” is notably well-articulated—its imagery is vivid, and that closing simile is apt—but it is also a exemplary ideological artifact. Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the poetry of the capitalist status quo, where when undertaking the task of writing a poem about North America’s oldest Chinatown, the poet studiously avoids any reference to the messy facts of history—e.g., that the area was settled by immigrants recruited as cheap labour in the development of the western frontier—or any exploration of cultural particularity, instead choosing to remain on the safe and level ground of consumerism, where foreign cultures reach us mainly through the weird things they sell and their general redolence of the exotic. The poem finishes: <o:p></o:p></div>
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What gives this day such perfect pitch,<o:p></o:p></div>
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a held note against the usual desolations?<o:p></o:p></div>
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The baby laughs—there’s a white moon up there—<o:p></o:p></div>
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as we rattle west with the hand-me-down stroller.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A new girl in town and her mother (new<o:p></o:p></div>
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too on this particular morning), we’re rinsed<o:p></o:p></div>
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with sunlight and wind off the Bay, glossy<o:p></o:p></div>
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as the scarlet envelopes you can buy here<o:p></o:p></div>
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by the pound and stuff with money,<o:p></o:p></div>
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meaning luck.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Of course, the poem isn’t <i>about</i> San Francisco’s Chinatown at all, but about the speaker’s beautiful day spent with her child. But to answer this stanza’s opening question: what <i>does</i> “give this day such perfect pitch”? Isn’t it at least partly (as the first stanza suggests) the sense of freedom and aesthetic satisfaction one feels, as a relatively affluent white person, strolling along soaking in the consumerist exoticism of Chinatown? And isn’t there a hint of defensiveness at this privileged class position in the speaker’s insistence that it’s not just a stroller she pushes, but a “<i>hand-me-down</i> stroller”? I’m not implying that poems set in such ethnic enclaves ought to take full (or even any) account of the historical and economic realities that mediate one’s relation to the place, but I can’t help but think that if Bruck had been willing to engage with her setting on anything other than an aesthetic or consumerist level, she might have found something more interesting to say than lines five-to-seven’s sentimental glorying in the “rins[ing]” power of “the sunlight and wind off the Bay.” Beyond the reference to the Chinese practice of giving money in red envelopes at special occasions like the New Year, I still can’t decide whether to read the final lines’ evocation of “the envelopes you can buy here / by the pound and stuff with money, / meaning luck” as the speaker’s tacit acknowlegement of her privilege—i.e., I have money therefore I am lucky—or evidence of her bourgeois obliviousness—i.e., having money is just a matter of luck. I think probably both.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’ve taken the deliberate rhetorical risk of engaging politically with <i>Monkey Ranch</i>—a move that I know will alienate and possibly even anger some readers—for several reasons. First (and as I’ve said), the book proclaims itself from its opening poem as politically engaged, and although that one poem succeeds, the overall terms of the book’s engagement trouble me. Second, I want this review to embody a sense of risk that Bruck’s work rarely does—not just politically, but rhetorically and even formally. I’ve repeatedly praised Bruck’s verbal precision, the descriptive vividness of her style at its best. The flipside of this, however, is that her work rarely startles with a sudden odd conceptual shift, or thrills the ear with chiming sonic patterning. When thinking of traditions or poets to which I might ally Bruck’s work (besides the lineated near-prose that characterized much of the dominant mode of Canadian poetry from the 1960s to at least the 1990s), I settle on Elizabeth Bishop, who serves as the subject of a poem in both <i>The End of Travel</i> and <i>Monkey Ranch</i>. Indeed, Bruck’s prosy free verse stands above so much similar work because of her Bishopesque powers of observation and phrasal care. On the other hand, however, Bruck is like Bishop purged of not just her formal virtuosity—Bishop excelled at even the most difficult fixed forms, while Bruck doesn’t attempt them—but her eccentricity: nothing in Bruck’s body of work is as unabashedly strange as “The Man-Moth,” for instance, nor does she favour the sort of daring rhetorical leaps that lift “The Fish,” for example, into its “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” moment of transcendence. Instead, whether formally, rhetorically, emotionally, or politically, Bruck’s work tends toward the safe route, rarely off-putting readers with any outlandishness, but lacking the sense of hazard that marks the artform at its best. To use a sports analogy: Bruck’s poetry often reads like it’s playing not to lose.<o:p></o:p></div>
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For this reason, the oddest poems in <i>Monkey Ranch</i> resonate as some of the best: whether the formal anomaly of “This Morning, After an Execution”; or the surrealism of the title poem, which opens, “Our monkeys were striped / green and yellow, except / for the red and white ones”; or the short, concise highlight “Scientists Say” (<i>After Neruda</i>):<o:p></o:p></div>
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Deep in the seabed,<o:p></o:p></div>
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when the Twin Towers fell,<o:p></o:p></div>
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two enormous tremors<o:p></o:p></div>
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rocked the eels<o:p></o:p></div>
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of Jamaica Bay, Queens.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A small disturbance<o:p></o:p></div>
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under the great water,<o:p></o:p></div>
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quickly settled. Now<o:p></o:p></div>
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they lie like circles<o:p></o:p></div>
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of the earth again,<o:p></o:p></div>
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mating and devouring,<o:p></o:p></div>
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dressed in ritual mud.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In a book that returns and returns to the family sphere through a first-person lens, the third-person detachment here is refreshing. The decision to trace the effects of 9/11 to “Deep in the seabed” allows Bruck to find a dark metaphor in the disturbed “eels / of Jamaica Bay, Queens” (a locale domestic and yet deceptively exotic sounding, helping make the poem both global and local, specific and mythic at once). That the eels—long a symbol of a kind of destructive phallic desire (as in <span class="st">Shôhei Imamura’s film <i>The Eel</i>)—lie now “like circles” hints at the historical inevitability of humanity’s destructiveness (as embodied, for instance, in the symbol of the ourobouros, the snake eating its own tail), an idea that resonates through the last two lines, which further point to the almost religious obsessiveness with which we sully ourselves by destroying each other. Though I still can’t help but think that such a poem would benefit from some sort of metrical patterning—which would only serve to strengthen the circularity and inexorability at its thematic core—this poem does succeed, largely through the skill with which it transfigures the central image of the “rocked” eels. Another element of its success, though, inheres in its point of view: while many of the other politically inflected poems in <i>Monkey Ranch</i> end up serving as little more than tepid advertisements for the speaker’s compassion, the shift into a mythic register here virtually absents the speaker, foregrounding the imagery and thus voiding the question of political stance. (*) This isn’t to say that many of the collection’s first-person pieces aren’t strong—poems like “Why I Don’t Pick Up the Phone,” “Snapshot at Uxmal, 1972,” “Love to, But,” “The Trick,” “Missing Jerry Tang,” and “How to Be Alone" are all skillful social/familial meditations in what has become Bruck’s signature style—but however accomplished, their consistent plumbing of similar thematic and formal territory leaves one cherishing any opportunity to dwell, even if only for a few poems, beyond the collection’s well-appointed comfort zone. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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(*) Bruck’s work <a href="http://speakingofpoems.blogspot.ca/2008_10_01_archive.html" target="_blank">has been</a> <a href="http://arcpoetry.ca/2009/06/22/david-kosub-on-julie-bruckssex-next-door/" target="_blank">repeatedly</a> <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/Susan+Schwartz+Julie+Bruck+watchful+caring+heart/7609616/story.html" target="_blank">lauded</a> for its “compassion.” In a better world, congratulating someone for being compassionate would be as ridiculous as congratulating them for being bipedal—so essential would compassion seem to any meaningful conception of humanity.</div>
<!--EndFragment--></span>Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-57785817680028355632012-11-21T10:10:00.000-05:002014-03-14T08:19:19.872-04:00Qu'est-ce que c'est?: A Review of Jonathan Ball's The Politics of Knives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b><i>The Politics of Knives</i></b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b>Jonathan Ball</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b> (Coach House, 2012)</b><br />
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In an April 2011<a href="http://kevinspenst.com/?p=490" target="_blank"> interview</a>, blogger Kevin Spenst asked Jonathan Ball, <b>“</b><b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Do you have any pet peeves when it comes to editing your own work or someone else’s?” Here, in full, is Ball’s reply:</span></b></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">I’m sick of all these boring, bland emotions that everyone thinks are precious and worth writing about just because they have them currently or had them once. And thus perceive as universally interesting throughout epochal time. Always the same emotions, communicated the same ways. If you put an original spin on it, find a prettier way to say it, it’s still a cliché. My joke is that as a straight, white male, aged 18-35, I feel my emotions are adequately represented in the culture. I edit to strip out emotion. If any emotions remain, they are then connoted or otherwise fundamentally tied to the language and tone and therefore necessary, or result from collusion between language and reader, and my ugly face is out of the picture.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">There are reasonable concerns lurking behind this posturing—a disdain for sentimentality, a suspicion that the inner life of his demographic is overrepresented in the culture at large, a thirst to overcome egotism as a prime motive for artistic creation—but Ball deliberately swerves clear of any sober reckoning with such issues, with his contradictory claim (for example) that “original” ways of expressing emotions are “still a cliché,” or his even more bizarre assertion that his “ugly face” is somehow “out of the picture” once he has edited “to strip out emotion.” This last point embodies two key delusions, particularly common among the self-identified “avant-garde” but indulged in frequently enough across the poetic spectrum. First, there’s the implicit assumption here that emotions as expressed in poetry bear any intrinsic relation to the author, rather than being just another set of variously charged elements in one’s periodic lexicon. Granted, much bad art suffers from over-earnestness (though arguably under-earnestness is just as problematic nowadays), but rather than mandate what amounts to verbal lobotomy by excising emotions from poetry, the ambitious artist might instead take up the challenge of re-kineticizing words like “love” or “sadness” or even “soul,” whether (depending on one’s poetics) as talismanic verbal meaning-units or as sentiments essential to any nuanced account of human experience. No matter how one thinks of poetry—I often prefer to think of my own lyric work as conducting ‘experiments in sincerity’, with all the potential for performative <i>in</i><span style="font-style: normal;">sincerity such a designation implies—it seems dogmatic, smug, and lacking in historical awareness to dismiss wholesale one of poetry’s chief wellsprings since antiquity.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Which brings me to the second delusion embodied in Ball’s desire “to strip out emotion”: the idea—speaking of clichés—that by disdaining feeling, one is somehow excising one’s subjective ego from the text. This delusion often manifests in ire-venting towards the so-called “lyric I,” as though the first-person singular pronoun inherently bore a hint of the megalomaniacal fervour at the root of all our civilization’s greatest injustices—as if the personal really were, in a dully literal sense, the political. This can produce (at one extreme) the robotic inexpressivity of the so-called avant-garde at its worst and (at the other) the irritating habit of many lyric poets to repetitively substitute “you” for “I” in conveying what is quite clearly autobiographical material, in a ham-handed stab at dramatic distance. Over longer stretches, the absence of the first-person pronoun and/or its emotional freight is often so marked and so obviously deliberate that the reader is never <i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> fully alert to the presence of the author, whose shadow over the text grows darker the more grimly determined s/he remains to excise that pesky selfhood from it. This is certainly true of Ball’s three books, each of which finds the author, in his resolute avoidance of “emotions,” looming over the text like a superego, absent in words beyond a few requisite postmodern gestures of authorial self-reflexivity, and yet ever present in concept, puppeteering us through meticulous edifices built to alternately challenge, amaze, disturb, and harangue—but never quite (to take recourse to one of Sir Philip Sidney’s two key objectives for poetry in his 1575 </span><i>Defence of Poesie</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) to delight us. Put simply, if Ball’s “ugly face is out of the picture” throughout most of his three books, that’s only because his unignorable presence as authorial impresario serves as a frame nearly as eye-catching as the picture within it. But now this review gets complicated. Taken as a universal proscription, Ball’s excising of emotions is condescending nonsense. As a personal credo, however, it has helped him produce one of the most singular bodies of work among younger Canadian poets—texts alternately infatuating and infuriating, but always infused with an arch theatricality, a smart awareness that art’s ability to exhilarate depends as much on artifice as any genuine feeling. </span></span></div>
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Ball’s first book, <i>Ex Machina </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(Book Thug, 2009), succeeds to a remarkable extent in embodying the absurd but germane premise, described by the poet himself in a 2011 interview with </span><i>CV2</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, “that we are the reproductive organs of poems … and that poetry might thus be considered a parasitic type (domain? kingdom? class?) of organism.” </span><i>Ex Machina</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> achieves this success by multiple means: the precise, often fragmentary sentences, delivered with disconcerting objectivity, that have become a hallmark of Ball’s evolving style; a narrow set of motifs—mechanistic imagery, undercurrents of violence and disease, thwarted readerly desire—relentlessly revisited; and above all the book’s form, 65 numbered sections each occupying a single page, each line within them footnoted with a number urging readers to another section, pulling us into short stark loops that tug at our curiosities by evoking the form of Choose Your Own Adventure novels, then inevitably short-circuiting—presumably to confront us with and frustrate our philistinic voracity for resolution. For example, opening the book at random to section [52] and reading the first line, I encounter:</span></div>
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The poem is written.<sup>[51]</sup></div>
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I then move to section [51], as directed, and read not the first but the second line:</div>
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It is the root, the cause of authors.<sup>[57]</sup></div>
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Turning to section [57], my eye is caught by a longish paragraph that serves as its fifth unit:</div>
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Those who internalize the poem, during the course of their processing. Who are sick with desire, symptomatic, unable to continue their normal functions, who must be isolated from their previous social contacts, who excrete new poems, seed new books: whose <i>reading</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> mutates into a more virulent form, </span><i>writing</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.<sup>[02]</sup></span></div>
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Section [02], second line:</div>
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The book that you write, to discover.<sup>[52]</sup></div>
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…which takes me back to the section that began this loop, to restart, renavigate, read straight through, or stop reading as I desire. This isn’t usually a profound or portentous enough exercise to sustain the book’s vaguely hectoring tone, but given over to for an hour or so at a time, <i>Ex Machina</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> can indeed begin to give visceral substance to its theoretical preoccupations: as we succumb to its viral creep, even the poststructural truism that subjectivity is constituted in language begins to take on an actuality, a now-ness, as we almost feel ourselves reading, writing, and being read-slash-written at once. Slight as <i>Ex Machina</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is, then—there ultimately aren’t many words here, and they’re all cogs in the same single-engined machine—it’s both fun to read and occasionally immersive, neither of which should be sold short. The book also provides us brief but memorable glimpses of Ball’s fecund imagination—on evidence above, for instance, in the grotesque metaphor of writing as a virulent mutation of reading—a fecundity displayed at much greater scope in his widely acclaimed second book </span><i>Clockfire</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (Coach House, 2010). </span></span></div>
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It isn’t difficult to see why <i>Clockfire </i><span style="font-style: normal;">has been praised alike by critics as divergent in their tastes as Sina Queyras and Carmine Starnino, for the book embodies a rare combination of accessibility, experimental cred, and linguistic craft. Structured as a series of theatrical scenarios, ideas for impossible-to-perform plays arranged alphabetically by title, </span><i>Clockfire </i><span style="font-style: normal;">reimagines the theatre not as a venue of cathartic spectacle but, very often, as a kind of sadistic holding tank in which the audience finds itself at the mercy of the cast and director’s dark transfigurative impulses. “Any Animal” is typical in this regard:</span></div>
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Prior to performance, audience members collect, with the program, a slip of paper and a pen. The paper bears the age-old question: ‘If you could be any animal you wanted, what would it be?’</div>
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The audience write down their names and choices. The ushers gather their responses and relay these to the actors in the green room.</div>
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The actors take the stage, which is adorned with the most advanced medical equipment available. Then the actors (in reality, a team of surgeons at the top of their respective fields) begin the laborious process of transforming the members of the audience into their animals of choice.</div>
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All props are sterilized, and patients are allowed to recuperate in nearby facilities. As there can be no predicting the choices the audience will make, a wide range of specialists stand by. Should any protest and wish to leave, ushers remind them that the world has changed. That the performance has already begun.</div>
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This is fantastic writing on every level, from the carefully weighted sentences to the macabre imaginative conception. Granted, it doesn’t demand close reading the way most good poetry does—indeed its status <i>as </i><span style="font-style: normal;">poetry might readily be questioned—but there remains much in this piece to notice and admire: its verbal economy (embodied in Ball’s rhythmically felicitous choice to begin “Prior to performance” rather than “Prior to </span><i>the </i><span style="font-style: normal;">performance”), the way a string of declarative sentences (“The papers bear…,” “The audience write…,” “The ushers gather…,” “The actors take…,” “Then the actors begin…,” “All props are…”) leads us with almost cruel equanimity through the gruesome twist, then the closing shift to ominous fragment, and of course how all these elements conspire in the service of the sort of thrillingly gross idea that a true genre writer might splurge a whole story on, but which Ball efficiently dispenses with in several crisp paragraphs. “Any Animal” stands as a clear highlight within </span><i>Clockfire</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, but is by no means anomalous. In general, the longer pieces like it tend to resonate most forcefully, while the shortest often seem underdeveloped or even phoned-in. The worst of these, “Something Comes Out,” reads in its entirety: “The audience enters the theatre, and something happens inside. Something happens to them. And something else comes out.” On the one hand this can be read as a clever meta-commentary on the book’s relentless project of theatre-as-infliction—most of the audiences in </span><i>Clockfire</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> are imagined as having unwittingly bought into some grotesque Faustian gambit—but on the other hand, in taking up (like all of </span><i>Clockfire</i><span style="font-style: normal;">’s 98 scenarios) a page to itself, a piece like “Something Comes Out” is insubstantial enough to make one at least wonder whether that particular swathe of tree might not have been saved. Far more typical, however, are successes like “Any Animal,” and for the most part </span><i>Clockfire</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> resounds as a marvel of relentless imaginative energy and eerie verbal precision, a book that bears comparisons to Borges’s unclassifiable compendia </span><i>A Universal History of Infamy</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and </span><i>The Book of Imaginary Beings</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span></div>
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<i>The Politics of Knives </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is another matter. Unlike </span><i>Ex Machina</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> or </span><i>Clockfire</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the book is not a closed system; that is, it does not refract a single conceit through a series of verbal prisms, each producing new colorations of it. Rather, it pursues a series of conceits, embodied in nine sequences loosely united by motifs of violence—whether concrete (the sequence “Psycho” meditates on and within Hitchcock’s murder film), more purely textual (the title sequence consists of redacted paragraphs, their black bars like slash marks across the page), or suppressed and simmering (violence is often less a presence in the book than a feeling, a grammatical-imagistic residue). Its lack of intense focus as compared to Ball’s previous work partly explains the diffuse impression the book leaves, but there’s also a verbal blurriness that often goes beyond elusiveness to become, if not quite impenetrable, then at least frustratingly hermetic. This comes across in the book’s opening piece, the first of three “Manifestoes” that make up the sequence “The Process Proposed”:</span></div>
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<b>First Manifesto</b></div>
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When she spoke, she did not speak</div>
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but with exhalation of wires.</div>
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Twelve awaited another.</div>
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When the process proposed.</div>
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Left her nothing but</div>
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time-limited amounts. </div>
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So iron sought skin.</div>
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And she said, ‘I shall leak</div>
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oil and wars for oil.’</div>
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Then a no-place gathering.</div>
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‘If I must be a muse,’ she said,</div>
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‘then I will be terror.’ And came.</div>
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Even with the word “muse” in the penultimate line, I have no idea how I would read this if the book’s Acknowledgments didn’t inform me that it “was written as a perversion of the traditional invocation of the muse.” Even this insight, while it does open certain aspects of the poem—the way the first line’s contradiction cleverly lampoons the idea of inspiration as evanescent muse-speech, the way “Twelve” likely refers to the Muses awaiting their newest sister (though this is still puzzling, because mythic tradition holds eight or nine Muses—the twelve Olympians perhaps?), and the way “the process proposed” hints at both the standard avant-garde exaltation of process over product and the union of poet and muse as a kind of marriage—the piece as a whole still rings flat. The “exhalation of wires” is an interesting image, and the references to “oil” and “terror” lend the poem a politicized edge (this is a 21<sup>st</sup>-century technomuse, raring to shock and awe), but I’m left with the nagging feeling—confirmed by the other two pieces in the sequence, which closely echo the first in form and content—that this would all be more persuasive if it were more concertedly versified rather than being simply a more fragmentary version of Ball’s usual prose style chopped into lines and stanzas. Now I’m not suggesting that the professed experimentalist ought to have turned formalist here, but some fuller deployment of the sonic resources of the language—perhaps just assonance and a hint of stress-pattern or metre—would likely have helped lift the intriguing fragmentariness of this piece into something truly seductive.</div>
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As it stands, too many pieces in <i>The Politics of Knives</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> never rise above “intriguing”—and for myriad different reasons. “Wolves,” the book’s other foray into verse, embodies almost the opposite problem to “The Process Proposed,” with its tense sonic patterning and prayerlike cadences failing to mask the fact that content-wise, it registers as little more than an incoherent torrent of doom-laden Big Bad Wolfisms, often verging on cliché. Two other sequences, “In Vitro City” and the closing “That Most Terrible of Dogs,” lean far too heavily on repetitious anaphora as an organizing principle. The latter contains much compelling writing—“Waiting for my luck to bygone. Waiting, glorious in insomnia. Waiting for the anniversary of the fetus overcome. Waiting for a series of vicious courtships. Waiting, boastful and rectal, quoting panhandlers…,” and I could go on—but over the course of four-plus pages of every sentence beginning with “Waiting,” one starts to feel interred in sameness, no matter the vitality of what comes after. As for the former, all but one of its nine short sections—each given its own page of course, as Ball once again makes liberal of use portentous whitespace, this time to dubious effect—begins with the phrase “in vitro city,” and many proceed from there to build momentum through further anaphora or, as here in the fourth section, epistrophe:</span></div>
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in vitro city, protesters are not welcome. the riot police are not welcome. former members of the regime are not welcome. troops are not welcome. broken toys are not welcome. torn clothes are not welcome. perishables are not welcome. with this sex they are not welcome. in that skin they are not welcome. without money they are not welcome. you are not welcome.</div>
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This passage, with its stock evocations of martial law, food banks, and gender/racial/class injustice, strikes me as the work of neither a restless experimentalist—that final turn to the second person is so expected as to be almost obligatory—nor a writer of much political depth. This is typical of the collection, and touches on perhaps the key shortcoming of <i>The Politics of Knives</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: most of its engagements with politics and violence remain purely theoretical, or more properly, purely verbal, so that we never sense the author’s investment in anything other than the somewhat patronizing constructs he cobbles together from the abstracted lexicons of these spheres of very real compromise, exploitation, and suffering. As a result, the book’s portrayal of violence rarely transcends the cartoonish—I’m reminded here of the Talking Heads’ jittery 1977 anthem “Psycho Killer,” a great song that (unlike </span><i>The Politics of Knives</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) entertains no incisive pretensions—nor does the book<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=956309061270042073" name="_GoBack"></a> end up being “political” any more than the death of a family pet is “tragic.” A partial explanation may reside in the passage cited at the top of this review. </span></div>
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In another, more recent <a href="http://www.openbooktoronto.com/news/writing_with_jonathan_ball" target="_blank">interview</a> with Open Book, Ball elaborates the theoretical underpinnings of <i>The Politics of Knives</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with reference to cultural theorist and provocateur Slavoj Zizek, who muses in his book </span><i>Violence</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that perhaps humanity’s unique propensity to violence as compared to other animals is rooted in our capacity for language. “When we name gold ‘gold’,” Zizek writes, “we violently extract a metal from its natural texture, investing into it our dreams of wealth, power, spiritual purity, and so on, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the immediate reality of gold.” Interesting stuff, to which Ball adds:</span></div>
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I think a further violence, a more personal and political violence, occurs when we use language to develop narrative. Even the simple story of our day invalidates other viewpoints on the external events, which are meaningless in themselves, and forces them into a sensible order. We use language, and narrative, to impose upon the world an order that suits us, and we use violence for this same purpose.</div>
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Several things chafe here. First, Zizek’s analysis of the violence of language—part of what he calls “symbolic violence”—is enmeshed in a larger analysis of its interrelation with two other forms of violence, namely “subjective” violence (that is, concrete violence perpetrated by an identifiable agent) and “objective” violence (that is, the violence of systems—capitalism, for instance). Zizek’s project isn’t primarily linguistic, then, but emancipatory: <i>Violence </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is only a tract about language to the extent that words undergird a whole matrix of inquity. That Ball extrapolates from Zizek to emphasize the “more personal and political” violence of narrative is actually a de-politicizing move all too common among liberal academics in their reception of theory that is, in fundamental ways, Marxist in provenance. Furthermore, it’s incoherent: yes, narrative can perpetuate violences—we see this every day in the selectivity of media reportage—but to go further and claim that “even the simple story of our day” is a form of violence because it “invalidates other viewpoints on the external events” is like saying that living and making choices is inherently violent to the possibilities we never actualize—that turning right constitutes a violence to whatever lies off to the left. (Hey, doesn’t Robert Frost have a poem about this?) And yet this is the meaning-vacuum into which </span><i>The Politics of Knives</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is theoretically sucked. Whether consciously or not, a sequence like “That Most Terrible of Dogs,” with its numbing inertia (“Waiting… Waiting… Waiting… Waiting… Waiting…”), seems written out of this conviction that narrative itself is inherently violent, so it refuses to provide more than a few abortive hints of a trajectory, spending itself instead in ominous hamster-spinning. Far worse—as I’ve said, “That Most Terrible of Dogs” contains excellent writing—is “K. Enters the Castle,” a sequence that re-imagines, over the course of nine page-sections, Kafka’s unfinished novel with its protagonist not as a searching, questioning, exasperated human being but as a silent camera, thus draining the story of all tension and leaving us to witness whatever filters through its roving lens:</span></div>
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Then into the Castle, its emptiness, gone the bustle and noise, gone officials and scribes, cold stone spread empty. Not a noise, not a breeze sifting snow. Camera tracks through its streets, up cold stairways, down corridors. Nothing to capture, all the Castle abandoned, crumbling walls and cathedrals, strewn with papers. Lifeless papers spilled through the courtyard. Papers stacked along halls. Papers swept into corners. Under dust, stone, shelves tumbled haphazard, sheets crumpled and torn. K. takes no photographs, nothing warrants recording. No shadow moves, not a paper flits free. </div>
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This is arguably the most dynamic of the poem’s nine pages—and yes, I know Ball is doing it on purpose, and yes, I agree that the choice of <i>The Castle</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, as Kafka’s great exercise in narrative frustration, is a clever one that might lend itself to a fantastic single page of poetic meta-commentary, but no, I don’t think this works. I think Ball—a writer with a demonstrated flair for compressed compelling narrative—has out-clevered himself here: a sequence whose impact resides in repeatedly informing one’s readers that nothing it brings to our notice is worth noticing lends itself to writing like the above paragraph, the loudest signifiers in which (“gone,” “gone,” “Not,” “Not,” “Nothing,” “Lifeless,” “no,” “nothing,” “no,” “not”) tell us all we need to know about it. The sequence even ends on the words “empty words,” as if to highlight its theoretical savvy; but in disavowing the violence of narrative, Ball perpetrates violence on his readers, treating us like proxies of the endlessly experimented-upon audiences of </span><i>Clockfire</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Out of the picture indeed. </span></div>
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And the static sadism continues. “He Paints the Room Red” meticulously sets out, over eight longer-than-usual pages, a vaguely Lynchian scenario of a nameless bald man whom we watch, via camera over the course of what the text tells us are several days, as he types in a hotel room, palm trees swaying outside the window, then finishes typing, paints the entire room red—window included, everything except the stack of typed sheets—then leaves the frame, returns undressed but bearing gas and matches, and sets the everything including himself on fire. The sequence intrigues, with the slowly unfolding hint of narrative allowing Ball some moments of grim tension (“In a buttoned shirt, wine-red, like the chair. Like the cans of unopened paint. Bright nightmares.”) until, in the closing section, he can’t resist haranguing his readers once again:</div>
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I do not know his reasons. I do not understand any of this. You’ll object. You’ll say: he’s your character. You’ll say: you wrote him, we read this, we know.</div>
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You will blame me, and maybe you should. You will say: where is our story? But you watched him. As he burnt it. And you did nothing, just like me.</div>
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I’m in a hotel, far from home. A palm tree sways outside the window. Does the palm tree understand? It was here the whole time too.</div>
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Yes Mr. Ball, we will blame you: for defaulting to a gimmicky self-reflexivity so overdone it’s arrière-garde by now, for pulling the old ‘you’re culpable for the violence you just witnessed’ trick on readers who just want you to <i>make something happen</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, for trying to ride bunk theory to real literary payoff. This from a writer who had the temerity to wonder, in a <a href="http://www.winnipegreview.com/wp/2012/11/lazy-bastardism-by-carmine-starnino/" target="_blank">recent review</a> of Carmine Starnino’s new book of essays </span><i>Lazy Bastardism</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, why Starnino “is wasting time on such losers”—a musing which, given that Ball immediately goes on to claim that “Starnino is at his worst in high praise,” leaves us open to infer that among the “losers” Ball alludes to one might include Margaret Avison, Earle Birney, Irving Layton, David O’Meara, Eric Ormsby, and Karen Solie—a clutch of the writers for whom Starnino reserves his highest praise. Later in the same review Ball claims that:</span></div>
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Everything Starnino loves in poetry — formal rigour, ambition, intellectual engagement with the world’s complexity, tactile and aural obsession with language — has become the domain of the avant-garde he hates. Everything, that is, <i>except</i> for deep-felt emotion, the one thing that might allow him to embrace and love these lefties.</div>
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For the record, I find the binary on which Ball repeatedly insists—between the “avant-garde” and those lyric “losers” he disdains—silly and unhelpful. And his attempt (“lefties”) to ally avant-garde poetics with leftist politics seems little more than a cynical ploy to tar with a conservative brush anyone who might dare criticize his aesthetic values. Let me assure you then: my poetic tastes (and, given Ball’s willingness to be dismissive of other writers’ imperatives, very likely my political beliefs) embody the leftist values of communalism, inclusivity, and solidarity far more than Ball’s do. But to wield his invidious distinction for a moment: I too admire the qualities he lists, and in the past year-plus have found my sense of poetry’s boundaries vertiginously shifted through the work of writers like Susan Holbrook, Erin Mouré, Lisa Robertson, and Jordan Scott (to name several who might be reductively classed among <i>the </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Canadian avant-garde). None of these writers eschews emotion; a major concern of a work like Mouré’s </span><i>The Unmemntioable</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, for example, is to probe the losses effected by the attempt to embody emotion in text, while the impact of Scott’s </span><i>Blert</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> partly depends, for better or worse, on our having forged an empathetic connection with the author, whose biographical stutter inspired the book. But of course I’ve also found rigour, engagement, ambition, and linguistic skill in much recent work that Ball, out of sheer blind dogmatism, would likely disdain. These qualities are not </span><i>the </i><span style="font-style: normal;">domain of the avant-garde, but rather the shared province of good poets, no matter where they may register on Ball’s quaint experiment-o-meter. </span></div>
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Unfortunately, these qualities are not even in thorough evidence in the self-declared avant-garde artifact under consideration here: while perhaps ambitious, <i>The Politics</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>of Knives</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> undertakes a narrowly cerebral approach to its complex concerns, resulting in language that, while often vivid, rarely stirs from its cold inertia long enough to be truly tactile. Even the title poem, which revels in the blunt physicality of words—</span></div>
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Grasp the sheath well as you <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% black;">ppppppppp</span>. Only in broken mirrors have the goals of assassins been realized. <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% black;">Pppppppppppppp</span>, every shard its own currency and <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% black;">pppp</span>, it is easy with a quality stone. </div>
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—remains so resolutely impenetrable that it ends up illuminating little about the violence of redaction other than how frustrating redacted texts are to read. Only in “Psycho” does Ball’s writing approach the haunting vitality of his best previous work. Even the theoretical aspect of this sequence comes off more successfully, as Ball cleverly employs the first-person plural (“When she’s gone we stay with him, through walls hear her moving. In holes place her eyes, her skin in black bra.”) to designate not just the film’s Norman/mother murderer, but the hungry eye of the lens and the viewer/readers behind it, whose thirst for flesh and violent spectacle implicates them in Marion Crane’s killing. (Though even here, this sort of point has been made much more cogently in theory, for example in Laura Mulvey’s classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”—which Ball, with his film background, has no doubt absorbed.) The highlight of the sequence—and arguably the book—comes with the sequence’s penultimate section, which lowers the theoretical mask and lifts into something approaching elegy:</div>
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She’s dead but her eye still drains open. She’s dead face perfect, the floor screen. She’s dead while the camera keeps looking, as we stalk through this room mopped so clean. Plastic, the car trunks her wet body. Knife-chewed flesh the swamp’s swallowing. She’s dead and this letter for her, hurts our ears but they can’t stop talking. Now employed the detective finds fresh death. Late-night snack, what long nights these have been. We can rewatch the scene with no music. We can watch and rewatch that same scene. She’s dead as they search through her cabin. She’s dead all this black for blood red. She’s dead though he knew of no money. They have her theories but she’s dead.</div>
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As in the entire sequence, the inventive syntax here nicely conveys the obsessiveness of the film’s murderer, the lens that shot the film, and its rabid fandom alike. And the details drawn from Hitchcock—“the swamp’s swallowing,” the car’s “trunking” of the body, “this black for blood red” (this last referencing the film’s famous use of chocolate sauce for blood)—are cast compellingly into text. The real triumph here, though, lies in the way Ball restrains what is throughout the book his overuse of anaphora, turning the device to ideal effect by ending the passage with three successive sentences beginning with “She’s dead,” followed by a final sentence that shifts the phrase to end—a mounting rise and fall that registers as almost ceremonious, dirgelike. “They have their theories but she’s dead”: this sentence might serve as a figurative critique of <i>The Politics of Knives</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as a whole, a book at its most affecting in confronting a humanity from which it seems, much of the time, determined to avert its gaze. But no doubt I’m just a conservative loser—oh yeah, I forgot one—who doesn’t understand. </span></div>
</span>Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-33382215151911688372012-10-21T12:23:00.000-04:002014-03-14T08:19:07.216-04:00Hot Button: A Review of Nyla Matuk's Sumptuary Laws<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b><i>Sumptuary Laws</i></b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b>Nyla Matuk</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b> (Signal Editions, 2012)</b><br />
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Cosmopolitanism is becoming something of a leitmotif in Canadian poetry criticism: in the introduction to their controversial British-published anthology <i>Modern Canadian Poets</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (Carcanet, 2010), for instance, Todd Swift and Evan Jones deploy the concept to justify their iconoclastic exclusions (Atwood, McKay, Ondaatje, Purdy, etc.); similarly, the publisher’s website describes James Pollock’s forthcoming </span><a href="http://porcupinesquill.ca/bookinfo3.php?index=278" target="_blank"><i>You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada</i></a><span style="font-style: normal;"> as “essays that explore the newer, more cosmopolitan and technically sophisticated generation of Canadian poets”; and although he uses the word "cosmopolitan" only once, the idea hovers ever-present behind Carmine Starnino’s recent characterization of the “Steampunk Zone” of contemporary poetry in his introduction to </span><i>The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (an essay everyone should read). Whether and why cosmopolitanism should </span><i>ipso facto</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> be considered a good thing is a question worth asking; given the readily forged linkages between cosmopolitanism and the economic phenomenon of globalization, for instance, could we not see an emergent cosmopolitan fetish as CanPo’s status-driven stab at global expansion, as likely to produce a poetry of the marketplace as one of (for lack of a better word) the soul? Skepticism aside, however, there’s little doubting the concept’s usefulness in characterizing some of the changes wrought in Canadian poetry and its reception over the past decade-plus, or that the best recent work to which the label might justly be applied—Jeramy Dodds’s and Linda Besner’s debuts jump out at me here—thrums with a vitality particular (and peculiar) to our moment while also seeming very likely to outlast it. </span><br />
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Into this charged context enters Nyla Matuk’s <i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a book cosmopolitan in a much more literal and thoroughgoing way than any in recent memory. While clearly indebted to fellow Canadian cosmopolites, it draws widely from Modernist influences; one hears echoes of the early Eliot’s wry urbanity, the enigmatic Imagism of H.D., and the playful psycho-eroticism of continental surrealism. Matuk’s status as a true citizen of the world extends beyond her influences, however, to mark her subjects, settings, and even diction. We get references to allusory standbys like Wordsworth, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud; to Rembrandt, Munch, and Akhmatova; as well as to less-referenced European figures like the Anatolian Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius and the French </span><i>fauviste</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> painter Raoul Dufy. We are whisked from Toronto – where Matuk lives and a good chunk of the book is set – to myriad elsewheres, from Ottawa and Montreal to New York, San Francisco, London, Copenhagen, Nice, Vienna, and Italy’s Salerno province. This globetrotting extends even to the book’s lexicon, vast and teeming with exotic derivations; the first poem alone contains the words “operetta,” “pistachio,” “ziggurat,” “Pagodan,” “louvers,” “chinoise,” and “canasta”—a not-untypical splurge of importations. If cosmopolitanism’s the buzz, then, </span><i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> seems likely to draw a swarm of critical attention.</span></div>
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To a certain extent, this is already happening. Michael Lista, a crucial tastemaker through his <i>National Post </i><span style="font-style: normal;">columns and poetry editorship at </span><i>The Walrus</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, chose two of Matuk’s poems as among the five finalists in his blind selection process for the inaugural </span>Walrus Poetry Prize<span style="font-style: normal;">. “Petit-mort” and “To an Ideal” are fine poems, doubtless worthy of such selection (they were wisely added to </span><i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> at the eleventh hour and fit very nicely), but in the context of the prize it’s difficult not to see them—and by extension, Matuk’s work generally—as part of a cresting wave. Though of course distinct in crucial respects, all five </span><a href="http://thewalrus.ca/projects/poetry-prize/" target="_blank">Walrus Prize<i> </i></a><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://thewalrus.ca/projects/poetry-prize/" target="_blank">finalists</a> broadcast their cosmopolitanism in flashing lights, foregrounding foreign places and/or non-English words while rhetorically favouring modes descended from the sort of urbane associative deadpan first bequeathed to English-language poetry through Eliot’s transfigurations of Laforgue, and later made inescapable in a more digressional form through the rise to prominence of the inveterate Francophile Ashbery. I’m not taking any issue with these selections—all five are very interesting poems, and any is worthy of winning such a contest—nor am I suggesting some insidious agenda on Lista’s part—tastemakers set forth tastes, and his evince considered cultivation—but it’s worth pointing out that despite the pluralistic worldview on display in each individual poem, the finalists as a group advertise less the diversity of poetic practices ongoing in Canada than aspects of a coalescing fashion. Did the four poets write their poems as conscious cash-ins on the increasing acclaim granted similar poetic strategies? Of course not. But there they are, being fêted for very real singularities that nonetheless serve to push many of the same hot buttons. Such is what Walter Benjamin called “the mute impenetrable nebula of fashion, where the understanding cannot follow.” (*)</span></div>
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Most poets want, at depth, to think of themselves as singular geniuses, and so contextualizing their work in relation to fashion risks, I know, seeming dismissive. This isn’t the case here: not in relation to the Walrus Prize<i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">finalists, the contest itself, or especially </span><i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. I’ve taken this circuitous way of approaching Matuk’s remarkable book for two reasons. First, because it will undoubtedly be read, praised, and critiqued within this fashionable context, but largely implicitly—and I think that making this context explicit will in fact allow the book’s considerable singular strengths to stand out more clearly, unclouded by (let’s put it plainly) hype. My impulse at air-clearing has personal roots, too: I first encountered Matuk’s work at a launch in Toronto for her substantial chapbook </span><i>Oneiric</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (Frog Hollow, 2009) and in hearing her read was immediately struck by the lushness of diction, the risky willingness to disorient rhetorically, and the overall impression of uniqueness her work conveyed. Having admired the poems I came across in intervening years—in </span><a href="http://notesandqueries.ca/three-poems/" target="_blank"><i>CNQ</i></a><span style="font-style: normal;"> and </span><a href="http://maisonneuve.org/pressroom/article/2011/sep/15/twp-poems-nyla-matuk/" target="_blank"><i>Maisonneuve</i></a><span style="font-style: normal;"> specifically—I caught news of </span><i>Sumptuary Laws </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in early summer and contacted Véhicule, who sent me review proofs back in July. So despite my characterization of her work as part of a current wave, I know that Matuk isn’t some janey-come-lately, and that her apparent fashionability is at least partly a temporal coincidence. Many poems from </span><i>Oneiric </i><span style="font-style: normal;">appear recast in </span><i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and have likely been brewing for pushing a decade. This is the antithesis of—to borrow a phrase Zachariah Wells’s reviews put in my head years ago—the “rushed-into-print” debut, and its long gestation pays off.</span></div>
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This brings me to my second, more immediately textual reason for approaching this book through the subject of fashion—one rooted in the utter appropriateness of the title. “Sumptuary laws” refer to laws designed to restrict excessive expenditures (in clothing, food, drink, household items, etc) in the interest of preventing extravagance and luxury, whether for religio-ethical reasons or to maintain visible class distinctions, upholding societal hierarchies. “Sumptuary” shares a root with “sumptuous”—which Matuk’s language frequently is—in the Latin verb <i>sūmĕre</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, to consume or spend—which activities her speakers frequently engage in or reflect upon. As crucial as what they consume materially, however, is what consumes them psychically: desire. The poems in </span><i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> continually stage our urge to sumptuousness—the ways we creatures adorn ourselves in the hungry eyes of the world—as the proxy of Eros. In vulgar terms, this isn’t insightful—we dress up in the hope that someone will want to undress us—but Matuk inflects this conundrum in myriad fascinating ways, with her view of the world’s sumptuous materiality as a front for erotic wants unfolding so expansively as to encompass even nature. Here’s the opening of “Poseurs,” a kind of skeleton-key poem:</span></div>
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Walking stick insects were a late childhood horror,</div>
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ugly as an umbrella’s disrobing.</div>
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Moths, with brown wings the prize of</div>
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Asian fan-makers, pestered them like paparazzi.</div>
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This free-verse quatrain touches on many of the book’s key motifs. The “Walking stick insects” are of course the eponymous poseurs, though unlike their human counterparts their pretensions are unintentional, inborn. Perhaps this is why they “were late childhood horrors”—because they seem to naturalize a fakery the child had already been taught to fear—though given the surrealist (and therefore Freudian) influence pervading the collection, one can’t be remiss in linking “stick” to phallus. The next line confirms this, with “ugly as an umbrella’s disrobing” evoking both a seductive undressing and a stripping-down of the ladylike parasol to a long rod. (Guffaw if you will, but barring such a reading the simile lacks precision: Matuk has a skill with superficially imprecise similes that often end up being, on closer examination, grotesquely apt.) That even brown-winged moths, the drabs of the insect world, should end up of fashionable use to “Asian fan-makers” fits perfectly with the book’s consuming cosmopolitanism. But perhaps the moths deserve their mass extermination—how many wings to make a drawing-room fan?—pestering the walking sticks “like paparazzi” as they do. Desire and revulsion, elegance and violence, spectatorship and the dark theatre of the mind: Matuk’s speakers continually flit among these polarities. And yet I risk making the book sound too serious, for <i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is characteristically playful in its probings, often emanating a kind of sardonic glee. “Poseurs” continues:</span></div>
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That Peruvian variety, a race almost entirely female, </div>
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would come down from the Morello cherry long after sunset;</div>
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after the plums turned the humid blue they want to be,</div>
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after trees sighed and inhaled the nearby jasmine, blooming </div>
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nightly to dream-lives as smooth-complected date palms</div>
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for some caliph’s odalisque</div>
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or the low-stress Oregonian monkey-puzzles,</div>
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a species whose softly-prickled, rounded shoehorn limbs</div>
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propose new kinds of orgasm.</div>
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Ouch—but ooh. Conceptually speaking, what are we to make of this? As we watch an “almost entirely female” race of moths (or is it walking sticks?) “come down” from the “cherry” amid “humid blue” plums and post-sighing trees, should anything be tingling other than our pleasure centres? When the grammar breaks down at “blooming / nightly to dream-lives as smooth-complected date palms…” do we care? Or has the spell been sufficiently cast: are we as commoners genie-lamped to some “caliph’s odalisque,” dumb with wondrous incomprehension and rapt at the insertion of <i>Araucaria araucana</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the puzzling apotheosis of the phallus? For the record, I find this passage utterly convincing, as its rhythmic weft, its touch of breathless anaphora, and its almost Keatsian luxuriation in image-words comprise something both aesthetically admirable and sensually immersive, both skillful and sexy. So when the poem shifts modes in its final verse paragraph, I can’t help but feel a bit let down:</span></div>
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Walking stick insects</div>
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were squibs sent from the natural world,</div>
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little stand-up comics </div>
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fashioned after mutineered twigs. Given half a chance,</div>
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the poseurs would neither walk nor meander,</div>
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neither perambulate nor otherwise imitate</div>
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Wordsworth or Nietzsche. Like the wives of 17th century</div>
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men of garden science, they loitered and lolled</div>
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between vivariums and cabinets of curiosity,</div>
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dividing their time between joy and sloth.</div>
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The poem no doubt needs a rhetorical shift at this point, but the return to the flatly declarative here rings, well, flat. The simple past “were” is one of weakest verbs in the English language, lacking even the ontological absoluteness of “are,” much less the torque of any more kinetic choice. So despite the interesting diction for which Matuk can always be relied upon (“squibs,” “mutineered”) those first four lines not only tell us very little—walking stick insects look like walking sticks?—they also deflate the sensual delirium of the previous verse paragraph. The next two lines, with their showy piling-up of near-synonyms (“walk,” “meander,” “perambulate”), sound like wheel-spinning, an expert wordsmith hammering at a heatless forge. The references to Wordsworth and Nietzsche establish intellectual cred, sure, but why—because they liked to walk? (Yes, that is why: the explanatory Commentary at the back of the book tells us so. More on that later.) The final three-plus lines find Matuk regaining her command—there’s her talent for simile again, and her skill at fleshing out decadence—and the poem ends brilliantly, with “dividing their time” evoking the jet-setting lifestyles of hipster youth and socialites alike, implicitly casting “joy and sloth” as locales rather than just states of being. Overall, “Poseurs” is a magnetic, erotic, virtuosic poem that briefly lapses into a flatness which—while unable to detract from the brilliance of its climactic middle section—nonetheless undermines the overall effect of the whole. </div>
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With the caveat that Matuk’s best is as good as anybody’s—make no mistake, <i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is a signpost book deserving of wide attention—the sentiment of that previous sentence could serve to characterize much of the collection. This tendency to lapse can at least partly be attributed to Matuk’s approach to form: besides a single loose pantoum (the excellent “Freudian Slips,” which begins and ends with the killer line, “Forgetting: that terrible liar”) none of the book’s poems operate within strict formal constraints, with many of them in a free verse so free as to seem almost random. Granted, Matuk’s defined sensibility serves to unify these poems beneath any apparent formal randomness; but combined with her associative approach to rhetoric, this dearth of visible structure means that many pieces seem on the verge of unhinging into incoherence. Of course, this is part of what makes the collection so exhilarating: at its best moments one feels oneself, as reader, caught at the centre of a linguistic whirlpool, head just above water, revelling in the risk and tumult of it all. But as Eliot quipped, “</span><i>Vers libre </i><span style="font-style: normal;">does not exist”—by which he meant it </span><i>should </i><span style="font-style: normal;">not exist, in the sense that “the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the ‘freest’ verse”—and occasionally in </span><i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, one feels the absence of that or any other formal ghost, so that the poem seems held together by little other than the force of Matuk’s personality. This is likely why those pieces that find her imposing stricter shape on her free verse resonate as some of the book’s strongest. Here in its entirety is “Lust,” a clear highlight: </span></div>
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The remarkable undulating hunt-lights of Japanese sting-jellies,</div>
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whose beige vein-membranes glimmer as the patina</div>
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of a vampire’s salve on a bee-stung labial lip </div>
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behave such as vague swimmers—zombie-safes—</div>
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sluggish from a century of patience, and the dream of satiety.</div>
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Casting wants character-actors at a cocktail lounge.</div>
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These horny chandeliers, snail-antennae reeling in champagne,</div>
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move forward like sharks after a foaming nutritional purse,</div>
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<i>cinema vérité</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Imagination’s picture show.</span></div>
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How deep is the ocean? Where does the corner </div>
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of my mind meet the false dilemma? Oily canister,</div>
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stormlight flicker! I don’t trust you; then, I do.</div>
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Matuk’s choice to constrain herself into tercets here helps unloose a tensile rhythmic energy, as her always-compelling diction tautens against the borders of her imposed form. Urged to rein itself in, “Lust” vanquishes any hint of the prosy or meandering, issuing in a brilliant distillation of Matuk’s aesthetic. Note how the play of assonance, alliteration, and internally echoing consonants heightens the menacing eroticism of the first five lines (“undulating hunt-lights,” “beige vein-membranes,” “vampire’s salve,” “labial lip,” vague/safes/patience/satiety, swimmers/safes/sluggish/satiety); how alliteration is skillfully turned to an almost-opposite, satirical purpose in line six (“<i>C</i><span style="font-style: normal;">asting wants </span><i>c</i><span style="font-style: normal;">hara</span><i>c</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ter a</span><i>c</i><span style="font-style: normal;">tors at </span><i>c</i><span style="font-style: normal;">o</span><i>c</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ktail lounge”); how the surrealist obscurity of the imagery doesn’t feel at all excessive or indulgent when conveyed so rhythmically (the third tercet resonates with the odd mix of precision and disorientation that marks Dalí’s best work, while also sounding uncannily like Marianne Moore); and how the dime-turns of the final tercet—first to the interrogative mode, then to the exclamatory, then to the first-person declarative—ring as both artistically calculated and instinctually right, concluding the poem on a note pitched between vulnerability and abandon that feels emotionally earned. At her best (as here), Matuk succeeds in making poems that both illuminate the desire inherent in language itself—the way words, hopelessly smitten, thrust out to possess their referents—and display that desire ecstatically at work in the world, with all the happy damage it does to us.</span></div>
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The ending of “Lust” highlights a crucial fact about <i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: for all its verbal dynamism and hot-button sense of Now-ness, the collection emanates from a lived emotional core. Though its first section (of which “Lust” is the title poem) dwells primarily in present-tense and future-driven wanting, as the book proceeds through its four main sections the poems increasingly desire backwards: remembering, regretting, longing for when things were better. For the most part, Matuk’s savvy, self-reflexive approach ensures that her speakers’ yearning doesn’t lapse into unironic bathos (I’d single out “Return to Metcalfe Street” as the one exception to this: it’s tough to end a poem on the line, “And so far from home” without importing a freight of sentimentality that has no place in so agile a collection). Instead, they usually remain wisely wary of their own impulse to nostalgia; poems like “The Hashish of 1975,” “The Dream of Driving on Dupont Street,” “Weston Road,” and “Tragedy of Two” convey memory’s oneiric pull upon our present selves with vividness and originality, never giving over to the easy heart-tug. Out of the juxtaposition between such poems and more carnivalesque pieces like “Poseurs” and “Lust” (plus “Aquarium,” “Spring,” “Petite-mort,” “To an Ideal,” and “Revolution”—all very strong entries in that mode), a clear but ambivalent worldview emerges: one that cavorts in the multifariousness of things while also feeling a keen disappointment that such cavorting shouldn’t amount to something more lasting. “Flaccid” sets this out the latter half of this equation relatively straightforwardly:</span></div>
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Like a crest falling in a foghorn,</div>
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or the bottom of a bad year in wines,</div>
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or anemic pomegranate seeds in a beanbag paunch:</div>
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we remember something working before.</div>
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We collect figurines, pre-downturn memorabilia,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
treating the past as a lesser limb lost to greater symptoms.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
Just part of life’s animal, an invertebrate</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
with a blue-cast face. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
The decision doesn’t surprise us,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
and we accept that our habit for hope,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
haunching merrily along,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
will sometimes wheeze for breath</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
or other richly oxygenated highs, playing straight man</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
to a more capable punchline.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
Too much light sheds truths.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
Dried plums. The prick of a crispy husk.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
Nothing that won’t come back again.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
Nowhere to go but up.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This poem sets me on a fence. On the one hand, its precision amid loose quatrains makes it another felicitous example of Matuk freeing rhythmic energy through formal constraint. So much is skillful here: the string of three deft similes that begin the poem, the way the second quatrain’s simile (“the past as a lesser limb lost to greater symptoms”) is quickly warped and darkened through a surreal metaphor (“an invertebrate / with a blue-cast face”), the canny shift to monosyllables at the moment of truth (“Too much light sheds truths”), and the somber pinpointing of those truths through sentence fragment—a device Matuk uses sparingly and, therefore, effectively (“Dried plums. The prick of a crispy husk.”). On the other hand, in too neatly summing up the poem’s roots in dissatisfaction and deflated hope, the poem’s last two lines risk revealing that not much is going on here thematically: things used to be better, they’ve steadily gotten worse, we’ve hit bottom, “Nowhere to go but up.” On one hand, this ending can be dismissed as an egregious cliché. On the other hand, one might argue that the worn phrase is earned, and indeed rescued into freshness, by the obvious vitality of what precedes it. See the game I’m playing here? On one hand, on the other hand, on one hand… Matuk’s work continually raises aesthetic questions, prompting us to examine where we stand in relation to the choices it embodies—and this, I would argue, is a telling sign of <i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;">’s essential excellence. With mediocre poetry, we either can’t see significant evidence of the poet’s grappling with the many spectral aesthetic possibilities she may or may not have actualized, or </span><i>we don’t care</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> because her choices aren’t made with great enough talent or high enough stakes. In Matuk’s work, however, talent and stakes are everywhere, leading us as readers to fully invest in the aesthetic risks she takes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No risk is likely to prove more divisive than her choice to include an 11-page Commentary as the book’s fifth section. Alternately elaborative, explanatory, and tangential, the Commentary—while not at all smacking of the self-canonization that inflects, for instance, Eliot’s notes to <i>The Waste Land</i><span style="font-style: normal;">—troubles one’s sense of Matuk’s commitment to what emerges over the course of the collection as a fairly unified aesthetic: an urbane, surrealist-influenced, lexically ingenious whip-smartness shot through with a beating-heart desire. Take this exemplary verse paragraph from “Theory”: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
Say your octopus, neglected for some months,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
leaps out of the living room tank,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
and flails on the furniture, settling on the floor like a thing</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
that claims not to be a pipe.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
This is the Real, the Vegas floorshow</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
materialized from a bubbling cauldron,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
a showpiece you consider décor and therefore, life. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I cite this passage first to highlight its strength and typicality: we get the octopus, Art Nouveau’s go-to symbol of uncontrollable feminine sexuality; we get said octopus characterized as the Lacanian Real, the very source of consuming desire; and we get it further characterized as “a showpiece you consider décor and therefore, life”—a line that epitomizes the collection’s animating fever-dream of style collapsing into substance. And of course we also get the allusion to Magritte—which brings me to my second reason for citing this passage. Rather than allowing us to feel clever for spotting this allusion, the Commentary instead glosses the phrase <i>claims not to be a pipe</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in the following way:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
René Magritte’s painting “La trahison des images” (1928) is of a pipe and shows this text in cursive: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” It makes me think of theories, because they are a conglomeration of portrayal and conjecture about a thing, but <i>not that thing</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Granted, one could only feel mildly clever for spotting this allusion (given the surrealist provenance of <i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Magritte’s most famous work is not exactly an unexpected point of reference), but nonetheless I believe that rather than explaining in any fruitful way, such a note actually ends up denying readers something. I felt this more keenly in regards to the poem “Detachment,” when I immediately recognized “taxidermied emu heads” on the wall of a bar to refer to Bily Kun, a Mont Royal it-spot that was a regular novelty stop of mine the year I lived in Montréal. Here I felt I’d shared something with the poet, a kind of in-club secret, only to be disappointed to find the reference explained for the uninitiated in the Commentary. But beyond these personal (and okay, maybe petulant) reasons for begrudging the explanatory notes, there’s also the sense I get of Matuk betraying her own risks: the poems of </span><i>Sumptuary Laws</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> frequently exhilarate in their willingness to take us to the dizzying brink of incomprehension before yanking us back, and too many of those precipices get explained into safety here. There is, however, more than just explanation going on in the Commentary. In glossing the quietly devastating book-ending poem “Wishful Thinking,” for example, the note homes in on the speaker’s claim that “it costs almost nothing // to get to perfume country” (presumably from Nice, where the poem is set). Rather than simply explain what is meant by </span><i>perfume country</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the note finds Matuk spinning out a two-paragraph anecdote, travel-lit style (“My small 2-star hotel stood in a shabby street near the </span><i>gare</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Nice-Ville”), first about a trip to the French Riviera she took in May 2007, and then about her wistful relationship with Jean-Jacques Beineix’s film </span><i>37°2 le matin</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (</span><i>Betty Blue</i><span style="font-style: normal;">). Reflecting on the “flood of tears” that afflict her every time she watches the film, Matuk writes:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
Is it because the film shows what I believe, that nothing beautiful can last, that if it is beautiful, it must be fleeting? It’s the same mnemonic flood one has on smelling a perfume from long ago—<i>some imprecise sense of loss</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, of a particular time and place (or person) possesses the mind. This flooding sense of the forlorn runs deep in my imagination merely due to what remains, what lingers, though it is never apparent to me that this feeling is not wishful thinking. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These serve as the last words of the collection. While I find the voice that emerges here (and throughout the more anecdotal notes in the Commentary) appealing in its emotional directness<style>@font-face {
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(*) Obviously I wrote the first part of this piece before
the Walrus Poetry Prize was awarded. Congratulations to the winners. </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"></span>Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-30417613783053199022012-09-16T13:23:00.000-04:002014-03-14T08:19:33.214-04:00Achieving the Unparaphrasable: A Review of A.F. Moritz's The New Measures<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b><i>The New Measures</i></b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b> A.F. Moritz</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b> (Anansi, 2012)</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br />
<i>Poetry is an enactment of hope which is already the thing hoped for. Such is great poetry, prophetic poetry, the poetry of a Wordsworth or a Milosz. Poetic prophecy brings a possible future into a restrictive present, discovering and restoring vivacity in the midst of deathliness.</i><br />
— A.F. Moritz, from “<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/238054">What Man Has Made of Man</a>,” an essay published in the November 2009 issue of <i>Poetry</i><br />
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The epithet “the last Romantic” has been widely applied: to
Yeats, to Stevens, even to Philip Larkin, serving to broadly signify poets’
longings to return to or achieve anew a state of relative purity (whether
paradisal Eden or utopian New Jerusalem), their hopes that the individual
poetic mind might access and communicate truths to help midwife this societal
rebirth, and their reluctant, resentful awareness that modernity scoffs in the
face of such pretensions. There will likely never be a “last Romantic,”
however, because at least some small contingent of poets—and these days, at
least in the English-speaking world, it seems increasingly minute—will forever be
dreaming of reenchantment, revolution, the great reconciliation that seems to
quiver at the distant verge of possibility, leading them to wonder aloud how
their humbled art might help sing it into being. The early Yeats perfectly
exemplifies this vision of poet as societal renovator. Taking seriously
Shelley’s claim in his <i>Defence of Poetry</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
that “The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a
great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry,”
Yeats’s early prose writings abound in visions of an Irish people alerted to
their underlying unity through a shared repository of poetic images and symbols—and
his poetry continually embodies this ambition. A poem like the perennial
anthology piece “<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172053">The Lake Isle of Innisfree</a>,” for instance (“I will arise and
go now, and go to Innisfree”), resounds much more forcefully in this
cultural-nationalist context, with Innisfree symbolizing both the speaker’s
individual desire to escape the urban world to a solitary pastoral idyll—Yeats
wrote the poem during a period of homesickness while living in London in 1890—and
the communal desire of the Irish people to reinhabit their pre-British
identity. Like much of Yeats’s early work, this poem thus aspires to effect
what Marxist theorists term “the education of desire”: without propagandizing,
it urges readers—through its imagery, its melodiousness, its structural
harmonies—to desire along with the speaker, to co-inhabit the tragedy of his
(and indeed the Irish people’s) fruitless paradisal hope. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To a certain extent, all poetry operates this way, as Auden
acknowledges when he claims (apropos <span style="font-style: normal;">of
Yeats in fact) that “Poetic talent … is the power to make personal excitement
socially available.” The difference with the strain of Romanticism that I'm identifying, however—and the
subsequent poetry that reverberates most strongly with its revolutionary
energies—is that by making the poet’s excitements available, it hopes to effect
an appreciable </span><i>change</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> on the
reader, and further, the world: not just aesthetically, but (for lack of a
better word) morally. It is within this late-Romantic context that we can most
beneficially read A.F. Moritz’s poetry, particularly the three recent
collections I have come to think of as his ‘Anansi trilogy’: </span><i>Night
Street Repairs</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (2004), the Griffin
Prize-winning </span><i>The Sentinel</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
(2008), and now his latest, </span><i>The New Measures</i><span style="font-style: normal;">—books which continue his trajectory (beginning, I
think, with 1994’s </span><i>Mahoning</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) of
de-emphasizing the strong surrealist and symbolist orientation of his earlier
work in favour of a more penetrable, immediate, even urgent aesthetic. (*)
Although displaying a thoroughly postmodern self-consciousness as to poetry’s
perceived futility, Moritz’s recent work resounds with social hope, evincing
everywhere the residual wish that poets might in some respect prove “unacknowledged
legislators” after all. Take the first verse paragraph of “The Hand,” from this
latest collection:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
I sing in the absence of
disaster. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
And the absence is a stockade
without a fence,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
safe little enclosure of boundless
danger</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
to the animal that runs</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
everywhere, mountains, meadows,
woods and waters,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
the fiery upper air, and pauses to
wander,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
bowing the neck to the flowering
grasses</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
that strain up to his teeth and</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
to the mouth of stars: shadow—a
gate, and a trail</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
vanishing in and in.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That first line is brilliant: besides the assonance of “<i>ab</i><span style="font-style: normal;">sence” and “dis</span><i>as</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ter” (assonance, along with alliteration, serve as
the passage’s main means of sonic coherence), there’s the way it subtly evokes
the oratorical blank-verse tradition both metrically and through its diction
(with “sing” echoing the Miltonic invocation), and the way the multivalent
preposition “in” sets up the paradoxes of open confinement that follow (“stockade
without a fence,” “safe little enclosure of boundless danger”). Finally, notice
how “the absence of disaster” both highlights the potential obsolescence of the
poet-as-prophet—i.e., if there’s no disaster to prophesy, what is his role?—while
also hinting at the imminent presence of such disaster, as if any moment the
apocalypse will arrive to validate his ominous intonements. As the passage
continues, our sense of who or what is being held captive by disaster’s absence
is deliberately toyed with: the definite but unspecific “the animal” and “the
neck” become “his hand,” serving to communicate the sense that all the animal
kingdom finds itself in this vast captivity while also finally humanizing the
captive creature, merging him with the poet himself—a reading supported by the “gate”
and “trail,” which evoke a Dantean ‘life’s journey’ or ‘life’s road’ (</span><i>cammin
di nostra vita</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, from the first line of the </span><i>Inferno</i><span style="font-style: normal;">). The images of “fiery upper air” and “flowering
grasses / that strain up to his teeth and / to the mouth of stars” are vintage
Moritz, the sorts of images that can serve as litmus tests for the likelihood
of one’s appreciating his work. Contemporary ears so relentlessly attuned to
irony might hear such lines as highfalutin, full of empty portent (as if
echoing Milton or Shelley is, like, so passé) rather than hearing in them an
authentic desire—in my view one of the repeatedly achieved ambitions of
Moritz’s work—to reinfuse the world with wonder on (yes, I’ll say it) a cosmic
scale. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But Moritz isn’t just some neo-Romantic throwback, shutting
his eyes to the world at hand to indulge in outmoded apocalyptic fantasies. Not
only is his subject matter increasingly in step with central cultural concerns,
his mosaic dialogue with the Western canon extends to his contemporaries as
well. Here’s the rest of “The Hand”: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
The absence is a frame not frame</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
for a picture that likes to expand
to the four</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
corners, quarters, oceans, and
winds. Even the light</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
on the face of the picture </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
and the unpainted weave at its
back</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
are part of an open frame</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
for the desire of color to run</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
to earth’s center and up past
space.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
Tomorrow—its coming—its
closing—its hand.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
But disaster is not yet here.
Untouched</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
for the moment I sing in the
absence.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
The perimeter doesn’t exist. The
sun shines</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
on endless eastern waters, shines
overhead,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
shines on western waters, darkness
comes,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
its low globes shine, and then the
shining sun</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;">
on the eastern waters. Nothing
escapes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The second verse paragraph begins by furthering the central
paradoxes of the first (“a frame not frame”), introducing a new metaphor of the
world as a painting that strains at its lack of frame—which is the absence of
disaster. Of course there’s a great deal enigmatic in this passage, some might
say needlessly, but such a critique would neglect the skillful modulation of
syntax here (and indeed throughout Moritz’s work). While the first verse
paragraph used a run-on sentence to convey the boundlessness it discussed, here
a similarly protracted syntax both extends that strategy and works to depict a
mind teetering at the lip of the ineffable. Rendered without line breaks, the
central sentence of verse paragraph two reads as follows: “Even the light on
the face of the picture and the unpainted weave at its back are part of an open
frame for the desire of color to run to earth’s center and up past space.”
Whoa. If you aren’t excited by the ambition it takes to even attempt to express
whatever this means, I’m sorry for you—and you’re definitely not Moritz’s ideal
reader. This isn’t just the kind of sentence that gets prose writers lauded as
‘master stylists’; there are also real ideas here, inextricable though they may
be from the poet’s attempt to wrest them from the imaginative ether into the
actual. Let me give this a try: so the paradoxical “open frame” of disaster’s
absence includes both “the light on the face of the picture” (i.e., the visible
world) and “the unpainted weave at its back” (i.e., the molecular and genetic
structures that underpin visible phenomena, with “weave” evoking the
double helix of DNA). In other words, the absence of disaster is an unframing
frame that includes everything within it, which is all “part of an open frame
for the desire of color to run to earth’s center and up past space.” Taking “color”
as a metaphor (or more properly, metonymy) for the verdant living world, what
is being asserted here is that this verdancy desires to spread indefinitely,
but that the absence of disaster sets an invisible frame around it in the mind
of the speaker, to whom (as I have discussed) disaster’s absence implies its
imminence. Put rather too simply, the speaker’s sense of looming disaster
prevents him from fully revelling in the unboundedness of the world’s “desire.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After the syntactic urgency of this revelation, the last two
almost-formalized quatrains play variations on this theme that display Moritz’s
formal dexterity: from the way the Dickinsonian “Tomorrow—its coming—its
closing—its hand” provides a welcome rhythmic respite from the run-on syntax of
the previous verse paragraphs while effectively conveying a climactic sense of
impending; to the way each line of the final quatrain is divided by a caesura
into a western and eastern half, thus mirroring the cyclicity of its subject
matter. The closing figure of an ever-arriving tomorrow from which “Nothing
escapes” resonates as both hopeful (the sun’s cycle will continue) and, oddly,
ominous (we will continue to be relentlessly encycled by the sun). “The Hand”
is thus a paean to our age of global warming and the sense of ethical paralysis
it can engender: only through a renewed sense of wonder in the world can we
avert environmental catastrophe, but the possibility of such catastrophe is
precisely what dilutes our wonder. (Like the way that, past a certain age, it
can become hard to continue relationships we know we can’t commit to.) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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And yet, despite the pains I’ve taken to unpack what “The
Hand” is up to, my reading ultimately rings as reductive—as, to a certain
extent, any paraphrase of a poem must. With Moritz’s work, however, such
reductiveness is compounded because he wants not just to communicate deep
insight, but often, to convey with immediacy the mind’s wrestling to communicate
what lies just beyond its hold, its dizzying sifting-through of figurations
that flit upon without landing on what precisely it wants to mean. The
relentlessness of Moritz’s pursuit (and, I would argue, achievement) of the
unparaphrasable allies him with one of his even more acclaimed contemporaries:</div>
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They are preparing to begin again:</div>
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Problems, new pennant up the
flagpole,</div>
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In a predicated romance.</div>
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About the time the sun begins to
cut laterally across</div>
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The western hemisphere with its
shadows, its carnival echoes,</div>
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The fugitive lands crowd under
separate names.</div>
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It is the blankness that follows
gaiety, and Everyman must depart</div>
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Out there into stranded night, for
his destiny</div>
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Is to return unfruitful out of the
lightness</div>
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That passing time evokes. It was
only </div>
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Cloud-castles, adept to seize the
past </div>
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And possess it, through hurting.
And the way is clear</div>
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Now for linear acting into that
time</div>
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In whose corrosive mass he first
discovered how to breathe.</div>
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This is the opening two-thirds of “The Task,” the first poem
in John Ashbery’s remarkable fourth collection, <i>The Double Dream of Spring </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(1970). Notice the similar means by which he and
Moritz manage their ostensibly free verse: the opening line evoking blank
verse, the use of alliteration (preparing/problems/pennant/predicated) and
assonance (fl</span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">gpole, rom</span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">nce, l</span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">terally,
sh</span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">dows, bl</span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">nkness, Everym</span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">n, p</span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ssing, c</span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">stles, </span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">cting,
m</span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">ss) to subtly unify it, and
most crucially, the ambition, intellect, and linguistic skill to attempt to
formulate, at whatever length necessary, the never-before communicated (“It is
the blankness that follows gaiety, and Everyman must depart out there into the
stranded night, for his destiny is to return unfruitful out of the lightness
that passing time evokes.”). I’ll spare you my close reading of that one—of
course many are possible—but suffice it to say that both Moritz and Ashbery
repeatedly highlight one of poetry’s great lessons: that a thought uttered in
two different ways is not the same thought at all. And despite their
significant differences in tone and focus, both Moritz and Ashbery recognize
(and here I’d include someone like Geoffrey Hill as well) that one of poetry’s
noblest capacities is to expand our sense of what it’s possible to say and,
thereby, to think.</span></div>
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In “The Hand” as throughout his work, Moritz is an
apocalyptic poet in the richest sense of the term, with <i>apocalypse</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> resonating in its colloquial sense of a grand
destructive event, but more crucially, in its root sense of uncovering or
revelation. And if we wish to follow his speakers’ peeling back of their
perceptual onion-skin, we must do some peeling of our own. Perhaps
surprisingly, too, this process—though no less likely to leave one’s eyes
blurry—has become more rewarding with each successive Moritz collection, as his
characteristic mood comes to seem more and more in step with the zeitgeist. (Or
at least a crucial aspect of it: my two favourite films of 2011 were </span><i>Take
Shelter</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and </span><i>Martha Marcy May
Marlene</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, so take from that what you will.)
Whether because the poet himself has taken pains to more directly address
central cultural concerns, or because his aesthetic very early on embodied
undercurrents that have gradually bubbled to the culture’s surface, </span><i>The
New Measures</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (his 16th(!) collection) finds Moritz at the height of
his relevance. Which brings me to the essence of my retort to those who might
persist in accusing his work of obscurantism: read more carefully. It’s become
fashionable in certain circles to pretend we’ve moved on from</span>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">the potent mix of
difficulty and seriousness that work like Moritz’s embodies</span><span style="font-style: normal;">, and to regard poetry that doesn’t ‘entertain’ us in a fairly
immediate way as musty and/or indulgent. This attitude has helped lead to the
current burgeoning of work dripping with showy metropolitanism and pop-cultural
references, desperate to claim its relevance in negotiating our late-capitalist
funhouse, but too often mistaking capitulation for critique. Moritz, on the
other hand, simply doesn’t seem interested in the coveted proverbial ‘audience that
doesn’t usually read poetry’, and his critique consists of ignoring our
market-driven culture’s many hollow frivolities and instead cutting at the
universal urgencies often obscured by such clutter. This isn’t to say that </span><i>The
New Measures</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> isn’t entertaining: on the
contrary, it teems with arresting images, fresh optics, and panoramic
thought-spaces. But in our current poetic milieu, it's also radically serious. It may seem odd that I’ve cited only one poem from the
collection in this review, but I’ve done this intentionally. “The Hand” is not
the ‘best’ poem in the collection; in fact, it’s utterly typical of the deft,
vivid, deeply searching work to be found throughout—and of the rewarding
demands these poems make upon us. This touches on something else Moritz and
Ashbery share: because of their difficulty, their staggering range of
reference, and the persistence of their characteristic tones, both will always
be a lot easier to caricature than to read closely. But I’d be willing to bet the lens of posterity will read them very closely (and kindly) indeed. </span></div>
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(*) Obviously I am not the first
critic to cite Moritz’s relation to Romanticism. In an article entitled “Riddle’s
Raw Material: A Rebuttal” in the December 2004 issue of <i>Books in Canada</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Chris Jennings makes this connection, but does
not elaborate it with the same emphasis or to the same degree that I do here. Jennings’s essay is itself a rebuttal of an essay appearing in the same issue
by Carmine Starnino, a skeptical review of </span><i>Night Street Repairs</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> entitled “Speaking in Human Language,” in which
Starnino places Moritz’s work in the context of a Mallarméan Symbolism.
Together the two essays represent the most considered engagement of Moritz’s
work to date. Unfortunately they are not available online, but are well worth
seeking out—Starnino’s for a compelling delineation of Symbolism’s borrowing of
the trappings of religious mystery and Moritz’s debt to this lineage
(counterpointing much of what I claim here), and Jennings’s for convincingly
arguing that this framework is overly reductive of Moritz’s work, which draws
from a much wider spectrum of traditions. </span></div>
Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-80004258304467829322012-08-07T19:20:00.000-04:002014-03-14T08:19:45.263-04:00The Collection as Companion: A Review of Darren Bifford's Wedding in Fire Country<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b><i>Wedding in Fire Country</i></b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b>Darren Bifford</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b>(Nightwood, 2012)</b></span><br />
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A disarming sincerity suffuses Darren Bifford’s debut collection. Or perhaps I should say</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">—</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">respecting the proverbial distance between poet and persona</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">—</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">a disarming <i>illusion</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of sincerity. In the case of this book, though, such hedging is hard. Much of </span><i>Wedding in Fire Country</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> takes no pains to distinguish the voice of the poems from Bifford himself, so that one continually feels witness to a young poet’s struggle to transfigure his richly lived experience into memorable art. The biographical details the paratext gives us—Bifford originally hails from Summerland, in the Okanagan Valley; he is married to a woman named Iris; they currently live in Montreal—end up informing our reception of the poems because so many of them take such facts as context, and thus encourage us not only to care about the poet’s life, but to invest in whatever degree of artistic distance he manages to achieve. Some poems initially read like merely skillful anecdotes, while others effect quite startling shifts into the surreal, and it is the interplay between these two poetics – earnest anecdotalism and searching aestheticism – that defines this collection: Bifford tells stories about his life while striving, as an artist, not to bore us with stories about his life.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">The title poem succeeds at this in subtly stunning fashion. Its opening lines illustrate several key elements of Bifford’s poetics:</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">We pretend the water bombers are buffalo</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">bellying the lake, which they slurp sloppily.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Sloppily we suck at our beers and cut into</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">my father’s steaks. The fires in the mountains</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">are at first far enough away we don’t notice them.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">The smoke they issue is barely distinguishable</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">from the white clouds, except by the way it gathers</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">instead of dissipates, as clouds will do after storms.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">I am here and you are comfortably beside me.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">We’ve flown to our wedding and everyone is coming.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In a Canadian poetic milieu increasingly enthralled with surface flash, this is refreshingly understated, with odd touches lifting it above the quotidian: the disjunctive comparison of water bombers (aircraft that take on water to fight forest fires) to buffalo (land animals), the appropriately sloppy repetition of “sloppily,” the minutely observed distinction the speaker makes between smoke and clouds. And yet the poem remains firmly rooted in experience, exhibiting a social warmth that radiates from the collection as a whole, a calm conviviality that lets us know the person behind these poems isn’t afraid to speak as himself, doesn’t feel the need to lacquer his work with artifice. Bifford places himself in a long line of writers—from Frost and Williams, to Kerouac and O’Hara, to someone like Charles Simic today—whose artistry partly consists in concealing their artistry, in fostering the illusion of straight talk. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This isn’t to say, however, that <i>Wedding in Fire Country </i><span style="font-style: normal;">doesn’t sometimes lift into a more self-consciously poetic register. In fact, the moments when it does so stand among the book’s finest, effecting tonal shifts so gradually and subtly built up to that their arrival leaves us not only thrilling at their unexpectedness, but admiring Bifford’s skillful, restrained sense of pace. As the fifty-odd-line title poem continues, for example, the backdrop of encroaching forest fires casts a looming sense of menace over the titular wedding; rather than drift into darker territory, however, the reprieve of a summer shower (“Look, it’s raining! / This is a fine thing, considering the fires. Under the umbrella / you are huddled in your white fine dress”) exalts the speaker into a rapt inhabitation of the celebratory moment (“and our friends / are throwing wet confetti, and see!—there is my father / and your father joyous with one another”), leading into an absorbing poem-ending meditation on patrimony, matrimony, and the elemental nature of love:</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I am the son of my father and you are the daughter of another.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">There is a difference between us that is distinct from the troubles</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">of mountains and deer. Now here I am talking about deer.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">We are distinct from the deer, who are the siblings</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">of the slender trees that are courted by the wind,</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">and when so courted, do not totally resist its ravishments.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The wind is close in kind to the breath of the sky,</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">which is all the extension but not the progeny of anything</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">other than itself. For the wind is the fury and the author</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">of the way your hair flirts by not staying in one place</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">but flits above your eyebrows and ears. I wish at this time </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">to be the courter of your hair and the comforter</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">of your whorled ears. For tonight we’ve sojourned</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">close in that place where the fire’s herd freely roams.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">For a poem that begins almost prosaically to end so convincingly in the vatic mode is a feat in itself, but it’s the gradualness, the naturalness, with which the speaker comes to adopt the voice of seer that so impresses here. The sense of occasion Bifford builds through telling details over the poem’s first two-thirds makes this closing shift to a Shelleyan communion with nature feel, however improbably, earned. The poem convinces us that a man at his wedding, surrounded by loving family, apostrophizing his bride as forest fires smoulder, partly quelled by rain, in the distance, would utter these thoughts—or at least <i>this</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> man would. And yet for every element that asks us to take this seriously as a meditative flight—the copious alliterative repetitions (daughter/ difference/distinct/deer/distinct/deer, wind/wind/wind) and pairings (flirt/flit, courter/ comforter), the lush diction (slender, courted, ravishments, whorled, sojourned), and the animistic personification of nature (“the breath of the sky”)—there are aspects that undercut this Romantic seriousness: the way the long lines stilt the visionary momentum, for example, or the stiff phrasings their length seems to encourage (“There is a difference between us that is distinct,” “I wish at this time”), or the speaker’s second-guessing of himself, as if half-ashamed of his rhapsody’s indulgence (“Now here I am talking about deer”). Here and frequently throughout the collection Bifford keeps us intrigued as to whether he’s impervious to postmodern irony or subtly embodying it. </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The book’s longest pieces—especially the title poem and “Near Coral I Listen for Trains” (one of a strong trio of poems selected over at <i><a href="http://joylandpoetry.com/stories/vancouver/selections_wedding_fire_country">Joyland Poetry</a></i><span style="font-style: normal;">)—are among its clearest highlights, with their wide loping lines allowing Bifford the space to effect the subtle conceptual and tonal shifts at which he is already so adept. So fascinating is the mind on display in these longer pieces that I could readily imagine this version of Bifford producing a book-length meditative poem along the lines of A.R. Ammons’s </span><i>Sphere</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> or </span><i>Garbage</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. (I’d read it.) The shorter lyrics in </span><i>Wedding in Fire Country</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> present a different Bifford, one less given to the absurdist turns and metaphysical speculations that lend the longer poems their moments of greatest uplift, yet at the same time a more focused and intimate poet. This sense of intimacy arises not just out of so many of the poems’ apparent biographical sincerity, but out of the warmth and intensity with which they dialogue with other writers. Bifford has clearly studied his craft with reverence, and like many debut collections, </span><i>Wedding in Fire Country </i><span style="font-style: normal;">teems with intertexts; authors cited in epigraphs, apostrophized, or otherwise referenced include: Robert Lowell (twice), Walt Whitman (twice), William Faulkner, Robert Kroetsch, Charles Simic, the Beats, and most crucially, Czeslaw Milosz—who is addressed at length in the nine-poem epistolary sequence “Letters to Milosz,” the first of which illustrates Bifford’s short-lyric technique at its most forceful:</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">A circus swaggers into town. Its tents</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">flop down like the lopped-off ears of giants.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Stink smears the air, spreads like a rash:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">elephant shit and elephant skin, smells </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">of lions and tigers in crated dens. Shriners</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">go dwarfed under red dummy hats,</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">trace circles around the stage in their golf carts.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">All’s a bestiary parcelled into tricks and danger</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">for a kid’s vacant imagination, who stares</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">and slops hot toffee into his mouth.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Smoke pilfers a darkening purple sky</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">and disappears through a hole in the sky.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What isn’t here for you, Milosz? Either </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">we despair or we forget about it. Forget about it.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This poem leaves us with pregnant questions, most immediately: Why does the speaker turn from this circus to address Milosz? Is the circus an extended metaphor for the carnivalesque human condition amid a culture of spectacle, environmental degradation, and interspecies exploitation? Is Milosz, then—whose poetic reputation is inextricably bound up with his perceived status as a moral authority—being appealed to by the speaker as someone with the capacity to perceive what is missing from this empty extravaganza? At no point in the sequence is it ever entirely clear why Milosz in particular is being addressed, but like the above example, all nine poems impress with their imaginative vividness, their descriptive precision, and the speaker’s authentic-seeming confrontation with feeling existentially bedazzled by the world’s crush and clamour. Which is not to deny that I find certain of the poems’ aspects problematic. In the above piece, for example, I can’t fathom why Bifford chose to end two consecutive lines with “sky,” except perhaps to prepare us visually and aurally for the repetition that ends the poem. In that latter instance, though, the fact that “forget about it” registers in two different modes—first declarative, then imperative—makes it incredibly effective, while the repetition of “sky” just feels clunky. On the other hand, anyone who has read <i>Wedding in Fire Country </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in its impressive entirety will trust that Bifford knows this, and that for some thought-out (but inaccessible, at least to me) reason, he consciously </span><i>chose</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to risk that clunkiness. </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I could offer similar caveats to most of the reservations I may have about the collection. Take the poem “Late Summer,” for instance:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Once in a kitchen I was most of the night<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">at the refrigerator stacking beers and the party<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">kept going on. Thus, early in the morning,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I also was dancing. That August<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">would not stop being exactly itself: turning<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">back around and stopping at the house for dinner,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">always the same dinner: chicken, steaks, peppers<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">grilled well in olive oil, plus beers so that now<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">when I think about things it’s blurry<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">what we did and where we were. Tennis,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">sure, and I’ll continue to be very poor at playing<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">against you as the great dusk north of the city lapses<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">our last serve, volley, and its all-night again<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">and everyone is staying in.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">To paraphrase Randall Jarrell’s criticism of Auden’s later work: the poetic pressure here is not high. This poem is anecdotal, lacks sonic torque, and contains virtually no figurative language (though there may be an implicit personification in the “lapsing” of the “great dusk”). On the other hand, there are only a few such poems in <i>Wedding in Fire Country</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and they all serve to pace and diversify the collection, relieving the tensile energy of the many more forceful metaphoric and rhetorical performances—as if the book were a body in motion, muscles contracting and relaxing in necessary rhythm. My initially indifferent response says as much about the poetic milieu in which I am entrenched as it does about the quality of “Late Summer.” Just as I agree less and less with Jarrell’s ungenerous assessment of later Auden, I find myself more and more wary of how transient parochial fashions influence my own critical sensibility. In other words: Does the "poetic pressure” always need to be “high”? Many Canadian poets of Bifford’s generation and younger (it's my generation too—he was born in 1977, I in 1978) have been tending to favour a kind of surrealism-lite: wry, off-kilter, never too serious, clever rather than strictly intelligent, favouring associative leaps over sustained development, often wedded to sonic strategies that virtually fetishize a Hopkinsesque coiled sonic tension, and rarely favouring a common word when a baroque one can be rooted out. This line of development has produced some excellent work (and will doubtless continue to do so), but we’re approaching the point where what may have once been innovation risks ossifying into mere fashion. We can’t ignore the fact that many of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century—Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Moore, Millay, Riding, Auden, Bishop, Layton, Page, Merrill, Walcott, Ashbery, Hill, Plath, Heaney, Muldoon, Duffy (to rattle off a quick and incomplete personal canon)—often pursue virtually opposite aesthetic strategies to those listed above, and still have an infinitude to teach us. This touches on part of what so distinguishes </span><i>Wedding in Fire Country</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and makes it one of the most refreshing and interesting books I’ve read this year: it is resolutely unfashionable, presenting instead a young poet mapping out and bouncing off his own personal canon, one that includes some important voices—Robert Creeley, for instance, or even Jack Kerouac—that are resolutely out of vogue among our younger poets, especially in the eastern half of the country. Now I’m not claiming that “Late Summer” is a particularly strong poem—in fact it’s probably the least strong in the book—but I’d never describe it as “weak” either. Besides its pacemaking function, it does have its virtues, managing to convey quite lucidly a particular stage and style of living without lapsing into saccharine nostalgia, and exhibiting the same refreshing attention to friendship, food (plus beer—a man after my own heart!), and simple human enjoyment that also enlivens many of the collection’s more powerful pieces.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I’ve repeatedly emphasized the impression of sincerity, authenticity, and intimacy one gets from <i>Wedding in Fire Country</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Though this is accurate, it’s not the entire story. Along with the many epistles, apostrophes, and slices of biography that make up the bulk of the collection, there are a solid handful of dramatic monologues, including the poem that first introduced me to Bifford, “Wolf Hunter,” which won the </span><i>Malahat Review</i><span style="font-style: normal;">’s Far Horizons Award for poetry in 2010, and served as the title poem for his Cactus Press chapbook later that year. It’s a <a href="http://web.uvic.ca/malahat/announcements/bifford_final.html">remarkable poem</a> which, though it wavers slightly in voice somewhere between the colloquialism of the hunter (“Fuel runs low / and we gotta be back before dark”) and a more self-consciously poetic speaker (“time like a room we enter / together, a second or so before I pull the trigger”), convincingly thrusts us into the unsettling (and increasingly unsettled) perspective of a man hunting a helpless wolf from a plane. The companion piece, “Wolf Hunted,” though just as deft perspective-wise, fails to fully convince because it is written in virtually the same voice as “Wolf Hunter.” I find it difficult to accept, for example, that while frantically running from the “relentless stutter” of a looming plane, a wolf would observe with such equanimity: “The treeline, possible / cover, thick lodgepole pine (where I aim this sprint), / is like dark water stood on end.” On the other hand, that last simile is one of many smart, arresting moments in the poem—so what I’ve identified as its shortcoming is more an aesthetic choice I fail to relate to, one which raises theoretical issues about the dramatic monologue as a genre that extend well beyond Bifford’s work. For me, the pleasure of reading the form’s master practitioners, from Robert Browning to Carol Ann Duffy, largely derives from witnessing them not just inhabit a exterior perspective, but adopt a voice to match it. “Andrea del Sarto” sounds nothing like “Caliban upon Setebos,” and for good reason: one is delivered by an eloquent Renaissance painter wracked with professional and erotic jealousy he’s trying to suppress, while the other issues in a guttural first-person-pronoun-less spew from a subhuman creature musing on his monstrous god. Even Ted Hughes in “Hawk Roosting” (perhaps the most immediate forebear of “Wolf Hunted”) uses vocal poise not as a default, but to ironically convey the utter yet deluded assurance the hawk feels in its own supremacy (“Nothing has changed since I began. / My eye has permitted no change. / I am going to keep things like this.”). In “Wodwo,” on the other hand, Hughes adopts a much less rooted voice for his nosing forest creature (“Do these weeds / know me and name me to each other have they / seen me before, do I fit in their world?”). If I seem to be holding Bifford up to an awfully high standard here—and it’s not just him: I had a similar issue with the monologues in the first section of Amanda Jernigan’s otherwise amazing debut </span><i>Groundwork</i><span style="font-style: normal;">—please know that I’m doing so because his writing warrants such respect (as does hers). Furthermore, Bifford proves himself more than capable of deft ventriloquism elsewhere in </span><i>Wedding in Fire Country</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: in a series of three poems spoken from the challenging perspective of Faulkner’s Dewey Dell, for instance, or more subtly in the eight-line gem “Nightmare”:</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What is that knocking, mother?</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It’s the wind’s knuckles rapping at the window, my son.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What is that squeaking, mother?</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">That’s the procession of the mice within the walls, my son.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What is that rotting in the basement, mother?</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Those are harvest apples in a bucket, my son.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Who are the men crouching at the door, mother?</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">They are my friends, my son. And they’re coming. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Not until we reach the end of this deliciously sinister poem do we realize that the “mother” is in fact the “nightmare” of the title, and that the “friends” who are “coming” are likely monstrous manifestations of the terror such bad dreams bring. But Bifford isn’t just giving voice to a fearful abstraction here; he’s ventriloquizing a whole tradition of macabre call-and-response poems, from the anonymous Early Modern ballad “Lord Randal”—<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">“O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And where ha you been, my handsome young man?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">“I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">For I'm wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">—which ends with the young lord poisoned by his lover, to Auden’s “O What Is That Sound”—<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">O what is that sound which so thrills the ear<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Down in the valley drumming, drumming?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> The soldiers coming.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;">—which ends with the first lover abandoning the second to execution by the soldiers who will soon burst through the door. That Bifford’s entry into this tradition feels both deliberate and utterly at home in <i>Wedding in Fire Country </i><span style="font-style: normal;">testifies to how skillfully he has paced and ordered the collection so as to allow it to accommodate a great diversity of approaches (a diversity to which I cannot do justice even in this fairly lengthy review) while somehow feeling all the more unified for its scattershot approach. If urged to explain this paradox, I’d say that Bifford’s engagements with so many forms, voices, and traditions rarely feel programmatic—that is, they rarely strike one as abortive “experiments” but rather as considered, mature, fully realized undertakings—and so one is consistently left with the impression of authenticity to which I’ve so often alluded here. Reading this collection, I feel communicated with, and indeed, carrying it around for several weeks to dip into during my spare moments, I came to feel companionate towards it, as though the poems’ frequent depictions of people enjoying each other’s company had bled into my consciousness, tingeing my worldview with its sociability. I suspect that </span><i>Wedding in Fire Country</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> will have a similar effect on anyone who spends some real time with it, and I heartily recommend doing so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-68952658118728953822012-07-11T07:19:00.000-04:002014-03-14T08:20:02.338-04:00Babelogue of a Consummate Professional: A Review of Erin Knight's Chaser<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9eBecH5FLPtNZk-t8Wu_hO9XiAnlEPHQdwKwp7YcH6bETK5K7RBe2kEp45DafUtLTdfTVqrosYSdFQvBcf_cIkohUEwV26eVliEr6V2AxWqVcr3v2aWb0hBhF2Rme80fVSHGvLaIPFQI/s1600/Chaser.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9eBecH5FLPtNZk-t8Wu_hO9XiAnlEPHQdwKwp7YcH6bETK5K7RBe2kEp45DafUtLTdfTVqrosYSdFQvBcf_cIkohUEwV26eVliEr6V2AxWqVcr3v2aWb0hBhF2Rme80fVSHGvLaIPFQI/s200/Chaser.jpg" height="200" width="129" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b><i>Chaser</i></b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b>
Erin Knight</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b>
(Anansi, 2012)</b></span><br />
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Erin Knight’s second collection, following the Lampert-shortlisted <i>The Sweet Fuels</i> (Goose Lane, 2007), marks both a logical next step and an extraordinary departure. In terms of subject matter, her debut often spanned familiar CanPo territory—the insights of nature, the lessons of family, the lure of home—and yet swerved well clear of cliché through the twin virtues of a) a voice that turned resolutely unsentimental at just the right junctures, and b) a deft, unconventional handling of metaphor. Beyond its skillful traversal of conventional material, however, <i>The Sweet Fuels</i> also undertook a rather singular engagement with the confusions of the body: the ways that momentarily misstepping, mishearing, and misfeeling can suddenly exile us from ourselves. This strand of inquiry produced many of the book’s most arresting tropes: “The Lesser Vowel Shift,” for example, cast “the difference between breathe / and breathing” as “the little e – a chipped tooth / in a cup of milk”; “Trinity of the Ear” figured the cochlea’s inner workings as a holy labyrinth akin to those carved in the floors of medieval churches, envisioning “the quiet, pious hairs of the ear” as they “kneel at their tiny altar”; and “Wind-over-Wave” turned on a runner’s thirsty characterization of “Water / as charity, as the body / yearning for stasis,” going on to claim that “The body approaches the ocean / through the blood: its salinity / equal to the salinity of the sea.” The frequency of such searching formulations (I could cite many more) set <i>The Sweet Fuels</i> apart among its similarly meditative peers as an unusually accomplished debut, and marked out Knight as a poet to likely regard in terms of <i>career</i> rather than just <i>collection</i>. <br />
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<i> Chaser </i>fulfills this promise immensely. In amplifying her debut’s preoccupation with the body’s small betrayals, Knight has produced a timely and enthralling meditation on disease: in this case, consumption—of both the tubercular and late-capitalist varieties. But (and this is one of the book’s great strengths) the meditation rarely emanates from the poet herself. Instead, Knight frequently channels a spectral panoply of canonical “cure chasers”—Keats, Kafka, Katharine Mansfield—building poems around fragments of their writings to chronicle the warped psychologies of those who travel not to clear their minds, but to clear their lungs. In her jacket blurb for <i>Chaser</i>, Susan Holbrook rightly notes that Knight’s two books are united by “a spirit of intrepid, open-eyed research,” and this is especially true as relates to the motif of travel. While many poems in <i>The Sweet Fuels</i> took their genesis from the poet’s own experiences in Latin America, and thus trafficked in fairly well-worn models of self-exploration, others (particularly in the book’s closing Part III) donned masks to more effacingly inhabit the places travelled to and the historical figures enmythed there. This resulted in many of the collection’s most vivid highlights: the playful English-to-Spanish-back-to-English “Milagro por el nevado in Three Translations,” the conquistador-inhabiting “The Word According to Hernán Cortés,” and its companion piece, the pithy, devastating “Teosinte”—worth quoting here in full:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Many are deliberating the ancestry of corn.</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">One man has chosen to hold out his thumb</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">so that we might all consider the centuries</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">that had been spent waiting for the first ear</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">to reach that size. Then at last all its sexual organs</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">turned female and it was saved from itself</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">by husbandry, like mothers, drawn out of caves</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">bearing baskets of maize. It is true</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">that our best stories are apocryphal.</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">After his years away, they asked Cortés,</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">What is Mexico like? He tore a page from the book</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">that lay open on the table, crumpled it in his fist</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">and dropped it to the ground: It’s like this.</span></span></span></div>
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Though technically spoken in the first-person plural, the poem masterfully shifts nouns and pronouns to evoke a broad socio-historical context within a very small space. Beginning in the third person with “Many” and “One man,” it shifts briefly to the poem’s central “we” before returning to the third person to offer first an objectivized account of the domestication of corn, then (after dipping quickly back into the “our”) a revealing anecdote about Cortés’s triumphant return from Mexico, finally allowing the conquistador himself to usurp the speakership for the poem’s last three, self-incriminating words. “Teosinte” stands as a brilliant 13-line object lesson in manipulating point of view to lend a short poem panoptic scope. And much else here intrigues: the way “first ear,” left hanging enjambed, hints that the poem’s “apocryphal” story may never before have been heard; the allegorical resonance between corn’s “husbandry” and Mexico’s colonization; and the subtle Borgesian suggestion—inherent in that final “this”—that the page Cortés tears out and crumples might be the very one on which the poem itself is printed.<br />
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Though more often in the “I” than the “we” of “Teosinte,” it is this elusive brand of voice that Knight both extends and fractures in <i>Chaser</i>: a kind of paradoxical first-person objective, spoken through personae at once disclosing and closed, self-revelatory and strangely alien from what they reveal. The book’s prologue, entitled PREDIAGNOSIS, directly establishes the hypochondriacal mood that carries throughout. Consisting of a series of brief, fractured lyrics all umbrella-titled “<i>Lender of Last Resort</i>,” it projects voices—or perhaps just one voice: we’re never fully sure—meditating on various stages of an illness both pulmonary (“A cattarh of the apex of the lung”) and, as the sequence builds, existential. This movement culminates in “(<i>Lender of Last Resort: Self</i>),” setting out the book’s central conceit with what becomes its characteristic elusive precision:<br />
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Like all spenders I am ill, I philosophize<o:p></o:p></div>
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out of my attachment to everything<o:p></o:p></div>
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Trees, flowers, thrushes, spring, summer,<o:p></o:p></div>
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verses, etc.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I will be as patient in illness as I am able<o:p></o:p></div>
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But the lungs are entirely destroyed,<o:p></o:p></div>
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the cells quite gone<o:p></o:p></div>
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And the rush for liquidity is on<o:p></o:p></div>
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Lender, increase my bewilderment<o:p></o:p></div>
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Confess what these instruments have concealed<o:p></o:p></div>
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Formally, “(<i>Lender of Last Resort: Self</i>)” is typical of the entire collection. It’s as though Knight has taken the more traditional lyric modes of her debut and redacted, splayed, and spectralized them, leaving them sounding as though spoken down a slightly distorting tunnel from another time: not the past exactly—though the consumption motif and frequent twinges of antiquated diction (“the cells <i>quite</i> gone”) do cast a vaguely Victorian air over the proceedings—but rather an alternate present, where a blood-stained handkerchief just as likely belongs to a sudoku-addled business traveller as a classicly doomed bohemian. Except for the “gone”/”on” end rhyme (rhymes of any sort are rare in <i>Chaser</i>), the poem isn’t musical in any overt, formalist sense; but it’s extremely well orchestrated. Notice, for instance, the weird ambiguity of “I philosophize / out of my attachment,” with “out” meaning both <i>because of </i>and <i>away from</i>. Or the deftly repeating stress pattern of “Trees, flowers, thrushes, spring, summer, / verses”; the clever punning on “patient” and “able”; the arresting shift from lung fluid to financial “liquidity”; and the commanding apostrophic turn to the mysterious entity (god or bank manager?) addressed solely as “Lender”: here as throughout <i>Chaser</i>, Knight displays an extraordinary attunement to linguistic slippage, and to the compellingly estranging effects that can be produced through an admixture of verbal precision and judicious randomness.<br />
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You’ll notice the words “precision” and “judicious” feature prominently in the preceding line. Recourse to such Latinate descriptors is virtually unavoidable in discussing <i>Chaser</i>. I’ve touched on how deeply the collection is informed by research, and indeed a list of reference works important to its composition appears in the back matter: the above-mentioned Keats-Kafka-Mansfield material, as well as scholarly volumes on tuberculosis, pandemics, and financial crises. Although Knight takes successful pains to imbed and bury this research—rather than, for example, explicitly alluding to or (as Anne Carson often does) citing her sources within the poems’ bodies—a cerebral tone permeates <i>Chaser</i>, serving notice that this is a book written by an intellectual, or more properly, a <i>professional</i>. Now I realize this could sound like a backhanded compliment, but it’s not. What I mean is that the book so seamlessly weaves secondary research into its more strictly poetic elements—its fragmentary voices, its elaborate figurative scaffolding, and its uneasy, halting sonic patterning—that it quickly and irrevocably earns our readerly trust. After three close readings through, not one line in <i>Chaser</i> strikes me as ill-considered. Even when I’m mystified (as I must admit I am by at least a solid handful of pieces), it’s not a frustrating bafflement, but rather the kind of mystification that leaves one questing after the meaning one knows must lie just beyond the mind’s grasp. In addition to winning us over with its verbal precision (there’s that word again), its unexpectedness, and what Holbrook calls (in one of the most considered and accurate jacket blurbs I’ve ever read) its “willingness to be waylaid by the unforeseen,” <i>Chaser </i>manages to be such an uncommonly affecting book because the metaphorical connections it makes feel not just aesthetically seductive, but somehow objectively apt. In carrying the bodily affliction of consumption across to the psychosocial one, in carrying the phenomenon of tubercular “cure chasing” across to the tribulations of 21st-century tourism, and in setting into orbit around these central conceits obliquely related motifs of vaccine development, outbreak management, tulipomania, the postmodern need for speed, etc.—Knight frequently seems not to forge new associations, but to illuminate ones that already persisted unseen.<br />
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Nowhere is this metaphorical aptness more exhilaratingly embodied than in “Travelogue of an Amorous Consumptive,” which opens with what might just be a genius metaphor for contracting TB (“In Paris I too come to love / the red geranium”), and phases gradually from this<i> bal musette</i>-tinged imagery (“The corkscrew is lost, / the concierge philosophical”) to an enigmatic meditation on the germ-dangers of modern air travel (“A man deplanes in Beijing / with a temperature spike // pandemic alerts rise to level five”). I will not quote any further from this poem because its short lines, relative length, and above all its sheer persuasiveness—metaphorically, rhetorically, sonically—demand it be read in full. As a fellow poet I envy it more with each revisiting. So to anyone who has reached this point in the review and is considering checking <i>Chaser</i> out, I request that you head to your chosen bookseller, pull it off the shelf, and read the first 17 pages, which cover the PREDIAGNOSIS section and “Travelogue.” I suspect you’ll then want to read the rest.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">But wait, you might interject, is this book egregiously front-loaded, and if not, why have you only discussed its opening poems? To be honest, this is a difficult issue, and touches upon one potential resistance I can see readers having to <i>Chaser</i>. It’s not front-loaded at all, its high quality persists throughout, and yet because of a certain tonal uniformity, the collection can seem as though it flags in the middle. On my first two readings I stopped at the exact same poem, “Zone of Inhibition,” on page 49 of 86. When I took the book up again several days later, however, page 50 felt as fresh as the beginning initially had. The collection’s relative sameness of tone, I realized, is in the service of a pretty dazzling multidimensional coherence: its three main sections (my descriptions are inevitably reductive)—I HOPE THE SEA AIR WILL ACT AS PHYSICIAN, on illness and travel; LACUNA IN PRODUCTIVITY, on the science of cure-seeking; and MUST SEE BANKRUPTCY FRIDAY BETTER STAY REPLY, on financial panic as illness—together constitute an unusually coherent <i>book</i>. Not just a <i>collection</i>, with the sense of miscellany that often entails, but something that comes, if not full circle, at least, well, mostly oval. Given the diversity and dramatic potential of its subject matter, any more marked tonal shifts would have inflected <i>Chaser</i> with a sense of the carnivalesque, whereas Knight clearly aims at something more intense and sustained. Above all, this book earns being called a work of art: an engaged and relevant vision fleshed out with research and executed with consummate professionalism by a poet willing to be led, often at the aptest of moments, by her own more erratic side. Because it was released in an Anansi spring season that also featured books by Dennis Lee, A.F. Moritz, and Erin Moure, perhaps it’s little surprise that while its launchmates have all been reviewed in national publications, <i>Chaser</i> (until now) has gone virtually uncommented upon. But I’m here to tell you the silence is unwarranted. I’ve read all four books, and Knight’s readily stands alongside those of her illustrious peers. Need I explicitly urge you to read it?<br />
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</span></span></span>Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-956309061270042073.post-21719277062222404772012-07-09T16:56:00.000-04:002014-03-14T08:20:19.417-04:00An Open Address to the Poetry Community in Canada<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Too many books of poetry in our country are released to no comment, languishing until eclipsed by the next spring/fall cycle of indifference. As a poet and avid reader of our poetry, I have started </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><i>The Urge</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> as a forum in which to express, in detail, my considered engagement with a single book per month—a book from the current poetry-publishing season that I feel deserves more (or a different sort of) attention than it has heretofore been afforded. This should be simple. But because entering the literary blogosphere raises all sorts of (in some ways quite justified) questions about ulterior motives, I will answer some of the most obvious ones below.</span></span><br />
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<i>What sorts of books will you review?</i></div>
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As I say above, all reviews on this site will be of books from the current publishing season. They will appear monthly, and will all be in the neighbourhood of 2000 words, so as to allow plenty of space for thorough engagement. My aesthetic preferences are by no means straightforward. I hope they’ll become clear (but not so clear as to become dogmatic) through my reviews. As a critic with an authentic interest in and sound foundational knowledge of a wide variety of poetic traditions in English, I’ll attempt to engage an appropriate breadth of poetries. One crucial stricture I’ve imposed on this site arises out of the important awareness-raising work of the recently formed <a href="http://cwila.com/" target="_blank"><i>Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA)</i></a><span style="font-style: normal;"> initiative (which I first encountered on Sina Queyras’s routinely engaging <a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.ca/" target="_blank">Lemon Hound</a> blog): I will review 50% books by women and 50% books by men.</span></div>
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<i>Why not simply review books for the existing literary journals in Canada? Aren’t they always looking for reviewers?</i></div>
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Yes they are, but I want my reviews to appear like clockwork each month, and online. I find the paucity of online discourse surrounding poetry in Canada—especially given the diversity and quality of what’s being written right now—incredibly discouraging, and I believe that the more regular, engaged, easily-retrievable-through-google reviewing venues we can establish, the healthier the artform and its attendant community will be. Besides their relative infrequency, the problem with the lit journals is that their review sections are not always available online, and thus not accessible to the late-night idlers (I am often one) who find themselves wanting to see if anyone has reviewed that really compelling or mystifying book they just read, hoping to test their as-yet unformed critical rehearsals against a more composed and concerted engagement. This is not universally true, of course: <i>The Malahat Review </i><span style="font-style: normal;">posts their reviews online, </span><i>Prairie Fire</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> makes their </span><i>Review of Books</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> accessible as individual pdfs, </span><i>Arc</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> makes some available, and there are other examples. But too often, reading journal reviews requires actually having a copy of the journal in hand. So I very much look forward to Michael Lista’s monthly column on </span><i>The National Post</i><span style="font-style: normal;">’s </span><i><a href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/category/arts/afterword/">Afterword</a> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">blog (arguably the only regularly appearing online engagement with poetry in our country of any significant critical depth), and find myself reading with weird eagerness even </span><i><a href="http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/">Quill and Quire</a></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span id="goog_662997882"></span>’s capsule reviews, sundry irregular blog posts of varying quality, and (when it gets really bad) trolling Twitter for abortive blurts of appraisal. Thus afflicted, I’ve decided that some of this time would be better spent writing reviews myself. Thus </span><i>The Urge</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span></div>
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<i>Speaking of Mr. Lista, where do you stand on the recent negative-reviewing brouhaha?</i></div>
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Because I respect the work of all the involved parties, I find myself firmly unencamped. I already know the first three books I’ll be reviewing: one I’ve read many times, one I’m two-thirds of the way through, and one isn’t out yet. In the case of the latter two, I decided to review them before having read them because, having previously encountered the poets’ work in other venues, I already know them as writers with whom I want to more thoroughly engage: not necessarily out of sheer enthusiasm, but out of a sense that their work raises important questions (aesthetic and otherwise) that I and my potential readers could benefit from further exploring. If it turns out that I don’t find their books as compelling as I think I probably will, then my reviews will contain at least some of what might be construed as negativity, and of course that’s fair. As on many subjects, W.H. Auden delivers a close-to-authoritative statement on the positive vs. negative reviewing dilemma:</div>
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To write about a poet for others who have not yet read him is not criticism but reviewing, and reviewing is not really a respectable occupation. When a critic examines the work of a well-known poet, he may, if he is lucky, succeed in revealing something about it which readers had failed to see for themselves: if on the other hand what he says is commonplace or false or half-true, readers have only themselves to blame if they allow themselves to be led astray, since they know the text he is talking about. But a reviewer is responsible for any harm he does, and he can do quite a lot.</div>
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A “good” review urges the public to buy a book, a “bad” one tells them that it is not worth reading. It does not matter very much if a reviewer praises a bad book—time will correct him—but if he condemns a good one the effect may be serious, for the public can discover his mistake only by reading it and that is precisely what his review has prevented them from doing.</div>
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“Two Ways of Poetry” (1960)</div>
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Suffice it to say that I know that what I’m pursuing here is the unrespectable practice of reviewing, but that my reviews will at least aspire towards criticism (and respectability) by helping readers to feel much closer to having read the poet, and by not only articulating judgements but illuminating the grounds upon which those judgements are made. I take seriously the harm a bad review can do—particularly, given the state of reviewing in this country, since it may be the only review a book will receive. That said, I would certainly never promise never to write one. </div>
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<i>Isn’t this just your personal blog? Why give it a fancy name?</i></div>
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Blogging is not in my temperament. I’ve never been on Facebook, never even owned a cellphone. Overall, I’m simply not very plugged in, nor do I want to be. Beyond the basic bio, you will not find anything directly about me on this site; what snippets you do learn, if you choose to read my invested engagements with the writing of my contemporaries, will be gleaned by inference. So <i>The Urge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is both a description of the site’s genesis, and a distancing mechanism: not only do urges drive us all, but I do hope to do quite a bit of public, outward urging on this site. Beyond the potential narcissism of believing I have a worthwhile critical voice to contribute, this is not a narcissistic venture, not an extension of “social media” or an exercise in “image management.” And while of course you’re welcome (and probably wise) to doubt that, I think my reviews will demonstrate my true and fairly simple motive: I read things that I’d like to see written about, but they aren’t being written about, so I’m writing about them myself. Which brings me to another (and I hope eventually more crucial) reason to name this more like a magazine than a blog. If at any point</span><style>
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</style><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">—</span><span style="font-style: normal;">and I know this can only happen after a while, once readers realize this is indeed a legitimate venture</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">—</span><span style="font-style: normal;">someone out there wants to join me in committing to write a review per month, then I encourage them to contact me. This begins as my forum, but I’d like it to become </span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> forum. </span></div>
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<i>Okay, but as of now this is much ado. When will your first review appear?</i><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></div>
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I’ll post my first review in two days, on July 11th, of Erin Knight’s <i>Chaser</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (Anansi, 2012).</span></div>
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</span>Stewart Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730204762994543300noreply@blogger.com