Qu'est-ce que c'est?: A Review of Jonathan Ball's The Politics of Knives

The Politics of Knives
Jonathan Ball
(Coach House, 2012)

In an April 2011 interview, blogger Kevin Spenst asked Jonathan Ball, “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:

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.

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 insincerity such a designation implies—it seems dogmatic, smug, and lacking in historical awareness to dismiss wholesale one of poetry’s chief wellsprings since antiquity.

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 not 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 Defence of Poesie) 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.  

Ball’s first book, Ex Machina (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 CV2, “that we are the reproductive organs of poems … and that poetry might thus be considered a parasitic type (domain? kingdom? class?) of organism.” Ex Machina 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:

The poem is written.^[51]

I then move to section [51], as directed, and read not the first but the second line:

It is the root, the cause of authors.^[57]

Turning to section [57], my eye is caught by a longish paragraph that serves as its fifth unit:

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 reading mutates into a more virulent form, writing.^[02]

Section [02], second line:

The book that you write, to discover.^[52]

…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, Ex Machina 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 Ex Machina 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 Clockfire (Coach House, 2010).

It isn’t difficult to see why Clockfire 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, Clockfire 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:

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?’

            The audience write down their names and choices. The ushers gather their responses and relay these to the actors in the green room.

            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.

            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.

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 as 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 the 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 Clockfire, 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 Clockfire are imagined as having unwittingly bought into some grotesque Faustian gambit—but on the other hand, in taking up (like all of Clockfire’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 Clockfire resounds as a marvel of relentless imaginative energy and eerie verbal precision, a book that bears comparisons to Borges’s unclassifiable compendia A Universal History of Infamy and The Book of Imaginary Beings.

The Politics of Knives is another matter. Unlike Ex Machina or Clockfire, 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”:

First Manifesto

When she spoke, she did not speak

but with exhalation of wires.

Twelve awaited another.

When the process proposed.

Left her nothing but

time-limited amounts.

So iron sought skin.

And she said, ‘I shall leak

oil and wars for oil.’

Then a no-place gathering.

‘If I must be a muse,’ she said,

‘then I will be terror.’ And came.

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^st-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.

As it stands, too many pieces in The Politics of Knives 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:

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.

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 The Politics of Knives: 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 The Politics of Knives) entertains no incisive pretensions—nor does the book 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.

In another, more recent interview with Open Book, Ball elaborates the theoretical underpinnings of The Politics of Knives with reference to cultural theorist and provocateur Slavoj Zizek, who muses in his book Violence 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:

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.

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: Violence 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 The Politics of Knives 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:

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.

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 The Castle, 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 Clockfire. Out of the picture indeed.

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:

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.

    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.

    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.

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 make something happen, for trying to ride bunk theory to real literary payoff. This from a writer who had the temerity to wonder, in a recent review of Carmine Starnino’s new book of essays Lazy Bastardism, 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:

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, except for deep-felt emotion, the one thing that might allow him to embrace and love these lefties.

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 the Canadian avant-garde). None of these writers eschews emotion; a major concern of a work like Mouré’s The Unmemntioable, for example, is to probe the losses effected by the attempt to embody emotion in text, while the impact of Scott’s Blert 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 the 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.

Unfortunately, these qualities are not even in thorough evidence in the self-declared avant-garde artifact under consideration here: while perhaps ambitious, The Politics of Knives 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—

Grasp the sheath well as you ppppppppp. Only in broken mirrors have the goals of assassins been realized. Pppppppppppppp, every shard its own currency and pppp, it is easy with a quality stone. 

—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:

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.

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 The Politics of Knives 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. 

Hot Button: A Review of Nyla Matuk's Sumptuary Laws

Sumptuary Laws
Nyla Matuk
(Signal Editions, 2012)

Cosmopolitanism is becoming something of a leitmotif in Canadian poetry criticism: in the introduction to their controversial British-published anthology Modern Canadian Poets (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 You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada 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 The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 (an essay everyone should read). Whether and why cosmopolitanism should ipso facto 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.

Into this charged context enters Nyla Matuk’s Sumptuary Laws, 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 fauviste 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, Sumptuary Laws seems likely to draw a swarm of critical attention.

To a certain extent, this is already happening. Michael Lista, a crucial tastemaker through his National Post columns and poetry editorship at The Walrus, chose two of Matuk’s poems as among the five finalists in his blind selection process for the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize. “Petit-mort” and “To an Ideal” are fine poems, doubtless worthy of such selection (they were wisely added to Sumptuary Laws 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 Walrus Prize finalists 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.” (*)

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 finalists, the contest itself, or especially Sumptuary Laws. 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 Oneiric (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 CNQ and Maisonneuve specifically—I caught news of Sumptuary Laws 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 Oneiric appear recast in Sumptuary Laws, 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.

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 sūmĕre, 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 Sumptuary Laws 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:

Walking stick insects were a late childhood horror,

ugly as an umbrella’s disrobing.

Moths, with brown wings the prize of

Asian fan-makers, pestered them like paparazzi.

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 Sumptuary Laws is characteristically playful in its probings, often emanating a kind of sardonic glee. “Poseurs” continues:

That Peruvian variety, a race almost entirely female,

would come down from the Morello cherry long after sunset;

after the plums turned the humid blue they want to be,

after trees sighed and inhaled the nearby jasmine, blooming

nightly to dream-lives as smooth-complected date palms

for some caliph’s odalisque

or the low-stress Oregonian monkey-puzzles,

a species whose softly-prickled, rounded shoehorn limbs

propose new kinds of orgasm.

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 Araucaria araucana, 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:

Walking stick insects

were squibs sent from the natural world,

little stand-up comics

fashioned after mutineered twigs. Given half a chance,

the poseurs would neither walk nor meander,

neither perambulate nor otherwise imitate

Wordsworth or Nietzsche. Like the wives of 17th century

men of garden science, they loitered and lolled

between vivariums and cabinets of curiosity,

dividing their time between joy and sloth.

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.

With the caveat that Matuk’s best is as good as anybody’s—make no mistake, Sumptuary Laws 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, “Vers libre does not exist”—by which he meant it should 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 Sumptuary Laws, 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: 

The remarkable undulating hunt-lights of Japanese sting-jellies,

whose beige vein-membranes glimmer as the patina

of a vampire’s salve on a bee-stung labial lip 

behave such as vague swimmers—zombie-safes—

sluggish from a century of patience, and the dream of satiety.

Casting wants character-actors at a cocktail lounge.

These horny chandeliers, snail-antennae reeling in champagne,

move forward like sharks after a foaming nutritional purse,

cinema vérité, Imagination’s picture show.

How deep is the ocean? Where does the corner

of my mind meet the false dilemma? Oily canister,

stormlight flicker! I don’t trust you; then, I do.

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 (“Casting wants character actors at cocktail 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.

The ending of “Lust” highlights a crucial fact about Sumptuary Laws: 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:

Like a crest falling in a foghorn,

or the bottom of a bad year in wines,

or anemic pomegranate seeds in a beanbag paunch:

we remember something working before.

We collect figurines, pre-downturn memorabilia,

treating the past as a lesser limb lost to greater symptoms.

Just part of life’s animal, an invertebrate

with a blue-cast face. 

The decision doesn’t surprise us,

and we accept that our habit for hope,

haunching merrily along,

will sometimes wheeze for breath

or other richly oxygenated highs, playing straight man

to a more capable punchline.

Too much light sheds truths.

Dried plums. The prick of a crispy husk.

Nothing that won’t come back again.

Nowhere to go but up.

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 Sumptuary Laws’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 we don’t care 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.

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 The Waste Land—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”:

Say your octopus, neglected for some months,

leaps out of the living room tank,

and flails on the furniture, settling on the floor like a thing

that claims not to be a pipe.

This is the Real, the Vegas floorshow

materialized from a bubbling cauldron,

a showpiece you consider décor and therefore, life.       

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 claims not to be a pipe in the following way:

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 not that thing.

Granted, one could only feel mildly clever for spotting this allusion (given the surrealist provenance of Sumptuary Laws, 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 Sumptuary Laws 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 perfume country, 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 gare 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 37°2 le matin (Betty Blue). Reflecting on the “flood of tears” that afflict her every time she watches the film, Matuk writes:

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—some imprecise sense of loss, 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. 

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—especially as juxtaposed with the more concerted elusiveness of the poems—and while I do admire the skill with which Matuk circles the long note back to both its ostensible purpose (to gloss “perfume country”) and the title of the poem it annotates (“Wishful Thinking”), this door out nonetheless leaves me exiting the book uneasy. Doesn’t the poem—which as I’ve said, is excellent—traverse this emotional terrain more affectingly? Don’t poems derive much of their power from what they leave unsaid? So as much as the closing Commentary may lend the book a certain postmodern cachet—as genres collide, with Matuk’s poetic and discursive voices interwoven—I ultimately would have preferred a slimmer, more enigmatic volume, one that more fully inhabited the seductive sense of hazard embodied in the poems. Still, though the Commentary ought to be addressed, it need not be dwelled upon: the poems are the crux here, and they comprise a collection of almost limitless intrigue, in an unusually singular and compelling voice.

---

(*) Obviously I wrote the first part of this piece before the Walrus Poetry Prize was awarded. Congratulations to the winners.

Achieving the Unparaphrasable: A Review of A.F. Moritz's The New Measures

The New Measures
A.F. Moritz
(Anansi, 2012)

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.
— A.F. Moritz, from “What Man Has Made of Man,” an essay published in the November 2009 issue of Poetry
 

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 Defence of Poetry 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 “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” 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.

To a certain extent, all poetry operates this way, as Auden acknowledges when he claims (apropos 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 change 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’: Night Street Repairs (2004), the Griffin Prize-winning The Sentinel (2008), and now his latest, The New Measures—books which continue his trajectory (beginning, I think, with 1994’s Mahoning) 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:

I sing in the absence of disaster.  

And the absence is a stockade without a fence,

safe little enclosure of boundless danger

to the animal that runs

everywhere, mountains, meadows, woods and waters,

the fiery upper air, and pauses to wander,

bowing the neck to the flowering grasses

that strain up to his teeth and

to the mouth of stars: shadow—a gate, and a trail

vanishing in and in.

That first line is brilliant: besides the assonance of “absence” and “disaster” (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’ (cammin di nostra vita, from the first line of the Inferno). 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. 

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”:

The absence is a frame not frame

for a picture that likes to expand to the four

corners, quarters, oceans, and winds. 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.

Tomorrow—its coming—its closing—its hand.

But disaster is not yet here. Untouched

for the moment I sing in the absence.

The perimeter doesn’t exist. The sun shines

on endless eastern waters, shines overhead,

shines on western waters, darkness comes,

its low globes shine, and then the shining sun

on the eastern waters. Nothing escapes.

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.”

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.)

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:

They are preparing to begin again:

Problems, new pennant up the flagpole,

In a predicated romance.

About the time the sun begins to cut laterally across

The western hemisphere with its shadows, its carnival echoes,

The fugitive lands crowd under separate names.

It is the blankness that follows gaiety, and Everyman must depart

Out there into stranded night, for his destiny

Is to return unfruitful out of the lightness

That passing time evokes. It was only

Cloud-castles, adept to seize the past

And possess it, through hurting. And the way is clear

Now for linear acting into that time

In whose corrosive mass he first discovered how to breathe.

This is the opening two-thirds of “The Task,” the first poem in John Ashbery’s remarkable fourth collection, The Double Dream of Spring (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 (flagpole, romance, laterally, shadows, blankness, Everyman, passing, castles, acting, mass) 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.

In “The Hand” as throughout his work, Moritz is an apocalyptic poet in the richest sense of the term, with apocalypse 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 Take Shelter and Martha Marcy May Marlene, 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, The New Measures (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 the potent mix of difficulty and seriousness that work like Moritz’s embodies, 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 The New Measures 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.

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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 Books in Canada, 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 Night Street Repairs 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.