Critical Community

Phoebe Wang describes the reasons for her foray into poetry reviewing:

I began writing reviews in 2012 after becoming aware of VIDA’s and CWILA’s annual reports on the low percentages of female-authored books reviewed by major literary publications. It’s not the reviews themselves that matter as much as the fact that so many young women, myself included, fear misreading work or becoming entangled in a literary feud or simply don’t find writing criticism appealing. But criticism and reviewing in Canada is tied up in whole apparatus of validation: anthologizing, prize-giving, popular consensus, university curriculums and canon-formation. I feel I have no choice but to participate in whose poems gets read, reviewed, included, studied and taught, if I want to see literary criticism in Canada reflect the enormous range of human experiences contained by its borders.

Oh, Please

Quincy R. Lehr. delivers a stinging post-mortem on New Formalism, describing it as a spent force:

Literary references, parodies, and revisitations abounded in New Formalist poetry. The effect, though, was frequently that of reading a Fodor’s guidebook rather than living in a place, a romp though the museum of the Tradition rather than an engagement with the European past extending into the present. Many New Formalists developed a particular fondness for the Canon Poem, a slightly rejigged account of an ancient myth either done straight or folded into some scene of middle-class banality. Some poets were able to make the canon poem at least episodically interesting (notably A. E. Stallings in her first book, Archaic Smile, though the sheer number of the things got numbing at times), but at its worst, the canon poem reflected a sort of prissy preciousness. Take these lines from the poem “To Her Book” in Catherine Savage Brosman’s Breakwater:

Farewell, then. May your readers be those birds
which by an Orphic song were freely caught,
embracing as their own the poet’s words,
the very shape and countenance of thought.

Oh, please. One thinks of an amateur Renaissance music ensemble in some out-of-the-way minor university town, eking tunes out of viols and sackbuts and utterly convinced that they are somehow contributing to the preservation of the Great Western Tradition.

(Illustration by John Holcroft)

Sunday Poem

ELEGY WRITTEN IN NOTRE-DAME-DE-GRÂCE PARK 

The park's trees are still green, but fall advances
pushing night ahead of it. You see it
in the faces of people still surprised
to see evening gnaw away at the afternoon.
By six o'clock—no, earlier, and earlier still,
daylight flies off over the rooftops. You say
almost in silence to yourself: "Soon,
we'll be plunged into icy gloom, Adieu,"
and the rest you know by heart. These words
twirl around the alexandrine the way
a tendril climbs a post. They come
in clusters—three, six syllables—blossom
in the rhyme's bouquet of phonemes.
Even if we could, we wouldn't dare
write today in this language of the gods.
The gods have fled into
the foliage overhead, while you
halt in the field, in the middle
of a patch of shadow, stuck there
like a boundary stone, gaping,
struck by the stupor of the elegy. Soon
We'll be treading through wet leaves,
pushing what's left of summer with a boot
in the immense twilight where we'll come to feel
that life is but a matter of a day,
that all things born must perish,
that tasks are all in vain,
that one knows nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
What am I doing in this park,
trotting out these hackneyed tropes?
Fall, evening, the end of all of it....
It's getting late, rain is on the way.
I'll catch cold if I don't go back home.

From Montreal Before Spring by Robert Mélançon (Biblioasis, 2015), translated by Donald McGrath.

(Photo by Stephane Venne)

Rivals

Susan Lindsay sheds light on Derek Mahon's competitiveness with Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney by retelling an incident where Mahon refused a 'second-place' prize:

I was listening to poet Derek Mahon’s controversial biographer, Stephen Enniss, last night—as he was interviewed by Vincent Woods on Arts Tonight on RTE Radio 1*. Savouring the pleasure of hearing Derek Mahon himself, in excerpts from previous interviews and hearing him read a few of his poems. Stephen Enniss acknowledges that Mahon and Seamus Heaney were good friends but also, inevitably, rivals. He linked the withdrawal of Derek Mahon from the public sphere of poetry, including his refusal of an OBE from the Queen of his birth-place, Northern Ireland, to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Heaney. The wisdom of which withdrawal Enniss absolutely regrets and he hopes his book will provide a counterbalance, keeping Derek Mahon’s poetry closer to the foreground of international attention. It will be good if it achieves that although the poems speak for themselves.

(Portrait by Anthony Palliser)

Vendler Venting

Calling her criticism "condescending waffle," Daniel Swift spells out his unhappiness with Helen Vendler's new book of criticism, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar:

This is a collection of essays and reviews from various magazines and occasions, and they apparently have not been edited for republication, so the tone varies considerably. Occasionally, Vendler sounds as though she is addressing postgraduates; occasionally, her claims are so bland that she might be composing a Wikipedia entry (on The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: ‘it revolutionised modern verse’). Some of the pieces are superb: a powerful essay on how Robert Lowell’s poetry uses syntax to perform the feeling of depression, and an amazingly subtle account of ‘if’ and ‘but’ in the poems of Wallace Stevens. These essays have only one thing in common: they are all about poets Vendler loves. But—in contrast to the recent essay collection by the poet and translator Michael Hofmann, Where Have You Been?, which covers some of the same ground—she never makes you want to go away and read the poets she has been discussing.

Mucky Little Pond of Confusion

Brooke Clark sees Lucie Brock-Broido's poetry as an example of "High Fakery":

“It was always autumn in the paraphernalia of my laudanums.”

That’s the opening line of the poem “We Have Always Lived In The Castle,” from Stay, Illusion, and if I had to pick a single line to sum up Brock-Broido’s style, I might pick that one. It’s not that the line is obscure; obscurity happens at times in poetry, and it’s our job as readers to try to make what we can of it. And we can try: I know what laudanum is; but what are laudanums? Paraphernalia could be objects used to take the drug (like a junkie’s kit); but how is autumn in these objects? And why autumn? Just for its poetic sheen of a slow sinking into death (one of the concerns of this collection)? For the jingle the “um” ending makes with the end of “laudanum”? And why always? The effects of the laudanum make her feel like it is always autumn? This is a possible interpretation; but if that’s what you mean, there are better ways to say it.

But in trying to make sense of the line, we are following a false path, because in fact this line has been carefully constructed to have no sense. This is not a line that is trying to say something and failing, or that is saying a complex thing in a difficult way; this is a line that is trying very hard not to say anything in a very specific manner – namely, a manner that one might deem “poetic.”

This is the essence of a poetic style that I think of as High Fakery: poetry that is very self-consciously “poetic” in terms of its diction, its use of imagery and metaphor, and the way it seeks out high-sounding obscurity that could be taken for profundity but is generally just an ornate casing for vacuity. Each poem has a well-worked surface of apparent poeticism, but if you fix it with a steady critical gaze, it will crumble to dust and blow away because there is nothing inside it—no meaning, no passion, no vitality to animate the words—the language is dead and embalmed, each poem an exhibit in a silent, sepulchral museum consecrated to the poet’s idea of herself as “a poet.”

He continues:

Truly great, difficult poetry is always the result of a writer trying to communicate clearly (with perhaps a few exceptions—Lycophron?); the difficult surface is the knotty result of the writer’s struggle to convey a complex idea or emotion. Obscurity such as Brock-Broido’s is the opposite: it is an obscure surface that is applied over the top of an absence, to try to conceal that absence. Great poets write obscurely when they are trying to communicate clearly; bad poets write obscurely when they are trying to cover up the fact that they have nothing to communicate.

This is not poetry written for readers who actually love genuinely good poetry; rather it is written for readers who affect an interest in poetry without really knowing anything about it or having any desire to find out. It’s the sort of thing you can read on your couch in an afternoon without really paying it much attention, and then later, when you go out to a dinner party, you can mention that you read it, and your friends will be impressed that you are “interested in poetry”. It is all about the language on the surface, designed for those who read poetry as if they were bathing in—I was going to say an ocean of incomprehensibility, but it’s really more like a mucky little pond of confusion.

Losers

Derek Webster on the myth of "power" in the poetry world:

Here are things that deserve the word “power”: armies, missiles, accelerating cars, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, hydroelectric dams, prime ministers, rocket launches, black holes, and gamma rays. In the poetry world, much of what we call “power” is just rung envy in authors looking up the ladder. To the unpublished poet, magazine-poets have “power.” To the magazine-poet, those with books have “power.” Have you been asked to judge a contest? Then you must have “power.” Canadian poets will point south to their more celebrated American counterparts: they wield it. But even poets with multiple books will tell you it's the publishers who wield “real power.” Or is that the tastemakers at big-circulation newspapers, websites and magazines? Or the Canada Council, without whose support none of this vast nefarious apparatus of “power” could exist? It’s hard to keep track of all the power-lunching people with a finger in the pie. But for the word “power” to be meaningful, it helps if there’s something to lose, some counterbalancing, non-power position that shows a demonstrable drop-off or significant opportunity that someone has lost by not having, or not being favoured, by “power.” And yet for every contest winner or hired professor, there are dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of losers; and for every annual new winner, thousands of losers remain the same. Suddenly it’s very hard to tell who is winning from who is losing, because everyone is losing. Among writers, powerlessness is the general state of being. All of us are losing, almost all of the time. Back when Jon Stewart was an up-and-coming comedian in the early 1990s, half a dozen years before the success of The Daily Show, he got invited to do his comedy routine on The David Letterman Show. He was ecstatic: this was his big break! On the fast track to success! After the show, when the adrenaline wore off, back in his hole-in-the-wall illegal sublet, he realized nothing had changed. Same person, same problems, powerless as before. If Letterman didn’t change Jon Stewart, imagine how powerless a Canadian poet remains, post-publication. We are Pluto, orbiting a distant, shining sun. We aren’t even a planet anymore.

(Illustration by Guy Billout)

Sunday Poem

BARGING IN

All afternoon wide Port Moody's schooner

baits my interest. Lithest, no schooner

clips along beside her, each schooner

daft as a flat ale, or some Moses schooner

edging out Nile-lazy. Hot gusting swells, and schooner

facile in the morning grows afternoon gauche, tho' schooner

given half a chance might schooner

half a chance redeem, I chide. Hitting Big Schooner

Island out near Halifax. Or Schooner

Joliette I imagine whale watching, tall Schooner

Kootenays, or Confederation Schooner,

legislative big bateau Senate Schooner

marking off the long territories, Schooner

northwinding runs out of breath, Arctic schooner

opposed, motion melted and defeated, Schooner

parliament won't let anyone new aboard the schooner:

quaint policy that'll bite back schooner

rather than later. I look again, blue schooner

slipping down the dime, jingling schooner

to jingling schooner, & think of old Mac, one schooner

under the flag and crown. Bowing out, schooner

veers portside at the thought. Then bright red schooner,

wagon-red, grabs the knots Schooner

X laid out, like Bell's tin cable. Schooner

yowling starboard, then flanked, schooner

zinger received, copy: never go it alone, schooner.

From Concordia University Magazine (Spring 2015) by Jacqueline Hanna. Hanna received Concordia University's 2014 Irving Layton Award for Poetry, handed out each year to an undergraduate student.  

Utter Shit Trenches

In the first of a two-part series, Spencer Gordon takes stock of his time teaching at colleges and universities. Spoiler: it sucks.

At Humber, my female colleagues were like war veterans, often enduring daily theatres of unrelenting misogyny. One friend had a condom (casually) hurled at her. Another was grabbed by an irate boy, her arm yanked back because she wouldn’t continue entertaining his demands for a higher grade. Professors and doctors (these are geniuses) are called “miss” and “hey you” and the old fashioned “bitch.” I’ve heard male students loudly talking about gang raping their teachers—my colleagues, coworkers, friends. I’d see them walking through hordes of leering males and actually fear for their safety. It’s enough to send you into a bloodlust. The atmosphere can be unbelievably hostile at a college, and this is usually a college issue, but it certainly spills into the university and into continuing ed. To get a better position elsewhere, with more insidious, palatable forms of misogyny, one must often work through the utter shit trenches (or become stuck there). It is 100 percent more difficult for women. How they endure, persevere, and not kill these boys, I don’t know.

The Uselessness of Poetry

Paul Muldoon doesn't think poetry is necessarily good for anything:

Though I think it’s true that poetry may help us to understand aspects of the world and think about the world in unexpected, revelatory ways, I’m not sure if I have ever quite accepted that it has a use, that there’s a utility in terms of helping us live our lives. That is certainly a theory of poetry that we’ve seen have some currency, and indeed I think Seamus Heaney probably believed something along those lines. It’s a tradition in recent years that one can see extending through Seamus to people like Czesław Miłosz. It’s a theory of poetry which suggests that it might be able to truly bring us succour and solace, almost religious benefits. But, however attractive it might be as an idea, I’m not sure if it quite works. I go to poetry for engagement with language and for revelations that are momentary rather than longer-term. It may be that the moment can be repeated or extended. But the moment in which we accept that the flea, according to John Donne, is a marriage-bed and a temple is a moment that is quite fleeting. It’s a moment that embodies a truth, but I’m not sure if it’s a truth that truly helps us live our lives.

Cast-Off God

Partisan rounded up a series of appreciations and remembrances of American poet James Tate, who died July 8, 2015. Here's is Joan Houlihan's contribution:

I never got over “The Lost Pilot.” By that I mean, James Tate's early poem had such an impact on me that I found it difficult to love his later work. I did spend many hours at my office desk in the '80s trying to stifle my laughter reading Shroud of the Gnome, and through the '90s I continued to read his work, marveling at his powers of invention, but I never returned to that original state of bedazzlement. As a poet, I fully understand the drive—the need—to change and experiment in one's art, but as a reader, I remained forever in love with the magic he conjured in that early poem: the dead father, orbiting like a cast-off god, the surrealism of the son’s imaginings of his face, preserved ("it grew dark / and hard like ebony") the control of line and deft line breaks—and especially the speaker's enormous yearning for the dead father, forever flying, never dying, preserved in his imagination. Tate's voice in that poem, fantastical and lyrical, passionate and intelligent, put this reader into a dream of life that was realer than life in its portents, regrets and tragic humor. Thank you, James Tate.

Say What's True

Robin Richardson thinks poets would do well being a little more unsympathetic in their work:

The unsympathetic writer is concerned, in a JFK sort of way, less with what the poem can do for her, and more with what she can do for the poem, and thus for the reader. The unsympathetic poet enters into the frightening territory of writing the truth of who she is and sees, regardless of the acceptable or admirable norms she’ll find approval in. When we enter into this realm of unsympathetic we sacrifice our desired self image in order to provide what very few do: truth. When we write without the censorship inherent in a ploy for likability we are free, admittedly frighteningly so, to show those things so few ever see, to add to the richness and diversity of the human experience. We promote empathy through exposure to those whose perspectives differ from our own while creating a haven in which those readers who resemble us find solace in the knowledge that they are not alone.

The unsympathetic writer offers Berryman’s terrifying comfort. She uses herself as a tool, pillaging personal experience, opinions, anxiety, obsession, and uncertainty. She knows that it’s not about her, that no one cares how well she looks. She knows that to reach the reader, the way she, as a reader would want to be reached, she must abandon her ego and say what’s true regardless of anticipated backlash.

(Illustration by Stefan Tosheff) 

Asking the Right Questions

Can literature, like religion, bring us transcendental truths? James Wood believes so:

If you look at a novel like To the Lighthouse—one of my favorite of all books—it asks exactly the same question Psalm 90 asks: What will endure of us? What will last after we’re gone? Psalm 90 says, in effect, nothing, because we give it all up to God: “A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday.” The modern novelist—who can’t rest assured of cosmic governance—looks around in a more secular way and says, What will survive of us? Not houses. If left alone, they begin to fall apart very quickly. Perhaps children, except that they can be killed off in the First World War or die in childbirth, as happens in the middle of To the Lighthouse. Probably not works of art either, unless they’re very great works of art, like Shakespeare’s plays. So the answer is a very bleak one—without consolation, without transcendent truth of any kind. But remember that Chekhov said the writer’s job is not to provide the answers, but to ask the right questions.

Yet he argues a great deal separates literature from religion:

One difference is that religious answers are absolute and—in their way—consoling, but awesome. Literature cannot offer this final answer or final command. I’m really interested in that. In the Gospels, Jesus’ command is to revolutionize your life. That command is absolute and life-changing and soul-shattering. If you don’t follow it, your eternal soul may be at risk. What is the command of literature? There is a command, I think, but it has much less authority. It’s about persuasion, it’s about asking you to put your trust or faith in something you know has been invented. At any moment, you can put the book down, walk away and refuse to continue believing in the invented reality you’ve just been inhabiting.

Nose Dive

Philip Marchand tracks the decline and fall of Northrop Frye:

It has become a commonplace for academics and intellectuals to dismiss Frye as outmoded, full of bad, bourgeois habits such as transcendent humanism, liberalism and so on. His reputation has gone for a nose dive. Critic Terry Eagleton—Frye called him a “Marxist goof”—famously asked the rhetorical question, “Who now reads Frye?” A much more formidable figure, the late critic Frank Kermode, in a 2006 interview, commented, “Frye is now a name that you never hear mentioned.” In a 2005 issue of Commentary, editor Joseph Epstein listed Frye among a group of critics that have been “fading from prominence and now beginning to fade from memory.” In short, Frye’s bones have been pulverized in the mills of academic fashion.

James Tate 1943-2015

Where Babies Come From from Zachary Schomburg on Vimeo.

How to Get There

In an interview with Laura Ritland, Rhea Tregebov defends creative writing workshops:

We don’t question “can you teach dance,” “can you teach visual arts,” “can you teach how to make films.” You can’t implant talent in people, but you can nurture it in people. And over my career, I’ve seen many, many kinds of talents—talent for narrative, metaphor, people with high concept poems, intense thinking, and so on. It’s been rewarding to teach these talented people, but it’s also rewarding to teach students who come in a little more shaky but are so devoted to developing their craft, and work so absurdly hard. I mean, the talented students also work hard! But it’s incredible to watch people who really have something to say. To watch the students who really are driven. They have something to say that might be incredibly hard, and they are going to find a way to express that.

So I can teach them how to use the line, and I can teach them about syntax; or I can tell them about the deictics of their poem, and I can give lectures in workshop. But a part of that whole educational process is helping them understand their project: what they are trying to talk about, what they need to communicate, and how to get there.

Rays of Energy

Don DeLillo on what makes David Foster Wallace's voice "American":

His work, everywhere, tends to reconcile what is difficult and consequential with a level of address that’s youthful, unstudied and often funny, marked at times by the small odd sentence that wanders in off the street.

‘Her photograph tastes bitter to me.’

‘Almost Talmudically self-conscious.’

‘The tiny little keyhole of himself.’

A vitality persists, a stunned vigour in the face of the complex humanity we find in his fiction, the loss and anxiety, darkening mind, self-doubt. There are sentences that shoot rays of energy in seven directions. There are stories that trail a character’s spiralling sense of isolation.

‘Everything and More’. This is the title of his book on infinity. It might also be a description of the novel Infinite Jest, his dead serious frolic of addicted humanity. We can imagine his fiction and essays as the scroll fragments of a distant future. We already know this work as current news—writer to reader—intimately, obsessively. He did not channel his talents to narrower patterns. He wanted to be equal to the vast, babbling, spin-out sweep of contemporary culture.

Why Should Anyone Care About Your Poem?

Sunday Poem

MERMAID 

On the black shore of Kiluea, her gills flower
and suck. A hollow forming beneath the body,
the body sinking with the tide. As if the land
wants to bury the evidence, wants to hide
the thing beneath itself, drag it under the blue.
Or at least split open the fin, give her a set of legs 

to die with. The order of things requires legs
to explain the clavicle, the bipedal spine, the flower
of her areola, shrivelling like delphiniums, blue
as the night, as the water, as the body
drying to wax. Death is so good at hiding
itself, the way a wave knocks you to land, 

how a current steals you from land.
She could have up and left, if she'd had the legs.
We can’t turn from a riptide, either. Can’t hide
when the ocean decides to own us. Death flowers
in the lung, in the pulmonary. That’s how it is with the body;
a favourite organ turns itself blue. 

At first it’s impartial, a blue
of hesitation, a hint of survival. Then the land
swallows itself dark, which is to say the body
admits it can’t walk back to the water, can’t grow legs
on demand. She is positioned like a cut flower,
photographed. Maybe she wants to hide, 

but no one wants this to be hidden.
Except the shore, the unsettled water, all that blue
shifting sand beneath body. The crowd flowers
around her, clicks and touches, while the land
tries to offer her back. Tries to fasten itself legs
to move her, to reclaim the body. 

This inexplicable body.
Long tail knotted into tail, hiding
itself as we hover in skirts, our legs
finned together. So hot we're bluing
at the seam, complaining about the land
that's offered her up like a flower. 

Some artist finned those legs together, forged us her body.
The way a man seeds flowers in rain, waiting for the hidden
to open its blue, for a reason to pause and turn awestruck to the land.

From The City Series: Vancouver (ed. Michael Prior, Frog Hollow, 2015) by Alessandra Naccarato

(Painting by Francesco.)

Strange True Places

Reviewing the book for Arc's summer issue, Heather Spears celebrates Jason Guriel's new collection Satisfying Clicking Sound:

For Jason Guriel, chance verbal encounters are a primary source of his inspiration. Here’s an instance where the cliché, tickles his fancy, revives itself: it describes so exactly how this poet works—or rather, plays. He takes a phrase that does just that and runs with it, and the results are wonderful, startling, and unexpected (I am avoiding the book reviewer’s favourite word here, though it would for once be appropriate). In some poems he appends the longer quote after the phrase which delighted him, and the spinning of the poem proceeds.

Guriel would not have left this cliché alone either. Like Robert Lowell (I look, and turn up by chance “as if my hand were at its throat”), Guriel brings outworn phrases to the shining surface of the language, fools around with them, upturns them so a new meaning, a new insight appears. Is this a device and does it have a name? It has a punch that a new image can hardly compete with. A satisfying clicking sound. The first poem’s title “The Buried Hatchet” sounds mundane but comes alive with the first line: “begins to biodegrade,” and ends with another brilliant turnaround—I would add this and more examples, but they should be read where they belong. Otherwise I would be like the reviewer of a comedian who retells all the best jokes and takes the credit.

Guriel’s poems are short, with short lines. His diction in impeccable. He writes tight verse and quatrains as effortlessly as, to name a contemporary, Vikram Seth. Or many an old master—let’s say R. L. Stevenson.

Guriel reinvents the body. In “Claustrophobia” the sense of boundaries is eerily warped:

You step into the plaster
cast of yourself,
the doors close behind,
and everything’s snug;
your penis finds
its sheathe, your lips
their depression

I am always interested in body perception because I teach drawing, and observe firsthand how people’s idea of the named and partitioned body interferes with their ability to draw it.

So I am specially intrigued when I come across the word “sleeve” in two poems, and see how Guriel, again with broken and reassembled clichés, moves our attention away from the hands, into and past the extension of the wrists, the nameless source of gesture. “The trick to writing / well isn’t up / the sleeve. It is / the sleeve that fluffs up / the flourish.” (“John Hancock’s John Hancock”) and (“Hands Playing Haunting Chords”) that “cannot help the soul / that’s up the sleeves, / and cannot help / but fall as fists—off / and on and off / the beat."

I am floored: how does he know stuff like this? What he does is more than playfulness. Reading him is to have your eyes cleared of junk, to be led into strange true places you never noticed before. I am sure that writing is for Jason Guriel “a special kind of happiness.” He was recommended by John Barton and I am grateful. I am delighted to make his acquaintance.

So Sorry!

Sue Goyette apologizes:

We’re sorry we’re so sorry but we are sorry. It’s a Canadian thing like tourtière or Irving. Picture a moose trudging through tundra towards another moose, antlers grazing maple trees that haven’t been cut down yet, the snort of exertion, the clomp of intent. That’s us trying to find each other in this wilderness so we can apologize for something: standing too close, standing too far. Being hard to find in the appointment thicket of our days. We’re sorry one of us invented frozen fish fillets because single-portion frozen dinners invented a new loneliness and the lonely bone, they say, is connected to the drinking bone. The rest, well, the rest is history. Our apologies are welcome mats and engagement rings. The tiebreaker in overtime. Pierre Berton’s bow ties. Meaningful. We take an eternity to back into a parking spot and then feel sorry for all the unparked cars still circling; we’re even sorry for feeling a little lucky. And though having a pocketful of loonies is a good thing here, it sounds like something we should apologize for.  

From outskirts (Brick, 2011).
(Illustration by Julien Decaudin)

Tweet of the Day

Increasingly bored of *finicking* reviews (I've written them): the crumbs of praise and blame. Just like the book or don't like it already.

— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) July 1, 2015