Sunday Poem

UNION LOCAL 64 

Last night I caught the boy I'd been
in fishnet and gutted him
on the government wharf
by the light of an oil lamp
hung from my dead father's hand. 

Above the dyke, over the road,
the town was just the same:
weeping willows, widows,
whale-stains on the cheesecloth walls
of the first houses
and an overwhelming sense
of a last breath being taken. 

The worst of it was
the ordinary blood
on the ordinary wood
and my father saying
as he gazed out to sea
"It's no good.
The companies won't pay.
They didn't pay for mine
and they won't pay for yours." 

I watched him through my mother's eyes
as he sighed and bent
to the stiffened body of our time
together not worth one red cent
to anyone and picked it up
and took his life and mine away again.

From Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief (Gaspereau, 2014) by Tim Bowling

(Photo by Barry Pettinger)

Sea Sick

Chad Pelley is impressed with the metaphor-making in Sue Goyette's new collection of poems:

In Ocean, Sue wades in metaphoric reaction to a life lived by the sea. The ocean is an image-and subtext-rich thing on the margins of her everyday life, and she plays off this, fishing fantastic parallels between the ebb and flow of the Atlantic and life itself. But this is not run-of-the-mill poetry in which the poet uses the ocean to reflect on one’s life, or the world, or our place in it—Goyette plunges much deeper than that, both stylistically and conceptually. She’s making up her own metaphorical ocean mythology in these poems, and it makes for vibrant, innovative poetry.

Chad Campbell doesn't think she pulls it off:

“Everything is connected!”, Goyette’s speaker proclaims, and yes, it is: because a world has been created in which there are no boundaries between anything—not dreams, matter, smells, senses, concepts, or memories—and their connections aren’t revealed because they are presented as fact. Goyette doesn’t have to ground or hone her metaphors, to fashion cohesive conceits, because she has created this world with a structure that implicitly excuses their failings and obscurities.

Sample poem: "The ocean is the original mood ring"

Sunday Poem

"THE OCEAN IS THE ORIGINAL MOOD RING..." 

The ocean is the original mood ring.
Often, and for days, it convinced us 

we felt an industrial grey malaise with a deep heart
of blue. The occasional whip of whitecap idea 

would bloom in our plans. We'd sit by its side
while it slept, our pens poised like fishing rods. 

When it granted an interview, it refused to talk
about its film credits or its accolades of full moons. 

It was more interested in talking about what we thought
it tasted like: fish or tears, it wanted to know. 

And it loved stalking us. Some of us would wake
with that rear-view feeling of being watched. We'd skid out 

of our dreams only to sink over our heads. When we could,
we'd spear a good conversation and carry it, wriggling, 

to its mouth. We'd find the bones of what we were trying
to say later, washed up on shore. We'd boil them to drink 

their broth then wake hungover from the truth. Some days,
the ocean would convince us we were green 

with many small ambitions, and other days we were used
aluminum foil, an offshore of seagulls dipping 

and stealing morsels of our memories. In this way, we knew
we were aging. Some days, if we were to believe it, we felt 

nothing but a progress of sky, a fleet of spaceships shaped
like clouds sailing out of our harbour in search of somewhere new.

By Sue Goyette from Ocean (Gaspereau, 2013).

Lazy Bastardism Reviewed

Jonathan Ball giveth...

"Starnino is a smart and savvy reader, with a stunning ability to attend to the smallest details. This fine sensibility allows Starnino, at his best, to recuperate the work of people that might actually need recuperating, like John Glassco, whose observation that “man ‘is destined for slaughter in the course of things’” won’t end up riding the bus anytime soon. Moreover, as everyone knows, Starnino shines on the attack. Here, he assaults Atwood, McKay, and Moritz. Although they are to some degree easy targets (Atwood for lazy languishment in simplistic political prose-with-line-breaks, McKay for devolving into self-parody, and Moritz for sham artistry), Starnino neatly dissects their development and the larger significance of the poetic trends they represent. At the same time, Starnino’s attacks are rarer, more nuanced, and fairer than in the earlier A Lover’s Quarrel (2004), and he has toned down the mean-spirited glee that sometimes surfaced in that earlier collection."

...and Jonathan Ball taketh away:

"The tragedy and triumph of Carmine Starnino are thus the same: once bitten, twice shy, he has avoided engagement with the avant-garde in this second collection. As a result, he has produced a better but less interesting book, because the real poets he should be grappling with are the ones that he does not understand, and so cannot engage. 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."

Sunday Poem

"MONTY REID ALWAYS READS THE CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTES FIRST..."

Monty Reid has poetry forthcoming in a number of magazines, both print and online. He can't remember which ones. He lives in Ottawa. Yes, he lives in Ottawa.  

Writing as George Bowering, Monty Reid has published almost a hundred books. Many of them have won awards. He was in the air force for a while. 

Monty Reid wasn't always this way. He used to browse through each new issue, reading what caught his eye, going back to re-read pieces, often reading through the entire contents. Now, sadly, sometimes he never gets past the contributors' notes. 

When it comes to books, Monty Reid prefers the acknowledgements. He likes that they have gotten longer. There are just that more people involved. He counts how many of them he knows. 

The most annoying thing at a poetry reading is the poet, not just the sound of the poetry reading. Monty Reid's most recent collection of poetry destroys the comfortable notions of personal identity descried and then rehabilitated by postmodernism.  

Monty Reid is best known for his translations from the Spanish. His expansions of Machado are used in schools through Castille and his exquisite rewrite of Lorca is forthcoming from a Granada publisher. He was assassinated in 1936.

From Contributor's Notes (2011) by Monty Reid.

Self-Promotion

The cover to my new book. More info here.

Sunday Poem

SPRING STORM

Yesterday I burned the toast

so I went down to the rapids.

It was not a bright morning.

Close to shore a small twig

spun on an eddy. The eddy

was frilled like a doily, and seethed.

The twig was helpless to go anywhere

except around and around.

On the horizon plumes of smoke

rose like poplar trees. There was

the sun, punched into the sky

like the sky's navel. The river,

pricked and lifted by windhooks.

Mist puffing up, the sky black then white.

Columns of air I could have walked

like pathways to waiting jets,

walked into the skyhold. I'm telling you:

then the river reared up like a dragon,

scales flapping, the sun, smoke,

the far faint islands, all

collapsed in the froth of its lashing.

I had never been so small,

atomic. I was tossed. I have to

say "maelstrom." I wanted out.

I wanted time to turn back.

When I felt the ground again I was

shaking. It seemed I could reach

in any direction and touch the opposite

shore, the islands, the mist and smoke.

The gaps among things had closed.

I'm telling you this because I have not

been able to separate them, and now

all wounds are nothing, are blips,

leaf-toss. Nothing resists.

When I leave, understand, I will not be gone.

From the chapbook Twenty Views of the Lachine Rapids (Gaspereau, 2012) by Susan Gillis.

Verbatim

"My feeling is: This is what we do, this is who we are, take it or leave it. I’m not going to get bullied into business practices which are not sustainable or redeeming just because they appear to work for large multinational firms. I’m going to keep working to make good books in a sensible and sustainable way, and looking for readers who believe in the sort of books we publish and the sort of way we publish them. It only takes several hundred such loyal and astute readers to sustain our work, not thousands."

Andrew Steeves, discussing the business model behind Gaspereau Press.

Good-natured poet

In today's on-line Globe and Mail, Paul Vermeersch raves about This Way Out, Carmine Starnino's new collection of poems from Gaspereau. There is no question he likes the book: "infectious bounce and thwack of his lines," "a sensory-rich tour," "free-wheeling and playful," "adroit internal rhymes," "craftsmanship of profound dexterity."

However, Vermeersch strongly feels there is a contradiction between Starnino's public persona as a critic ("tenacious provocateur") and his work ("he puts his creative money where his critical mouth is"). Vermeersch asks, "Is this as it should be?" (What kind of question is that?) Vermeersch prefers the "good-natured poet, full of beans." to what he calls the critic of "stringent critical dogma." Without debating the merits of his comments, or detracting from his wonderful review of the book, from my point of view, who cares? Isn't it only the poetry that really counts?