Genuine Primitive

Jeffery Donaldson admits his early ambivalence about John Thompson's poetry:

I’ve been slow, lazy even, in coming to Thompson’s work. I felt I understood his place in the big picture. He was gathering up the energies of the Poundian Imagist and Vorticist movements from the teens and twenties, shaping a hybrid sixties expression of them in familiar nature poems that were complicated by cryptic psychological interventions. The quintessential Canadian themes were there: bone, wood, axe, hammer, chopping, digging, the underground root, the buried specimen. It is the work of a genuine primitive looking to build simple sustaining structures out of the materials of nature. I felt I understood the experiment: the poems were an exploration of the spare style (“laconic, controlled, percussive,” is Sanger’s excellent formula) leaning in the direction of the private, enigmatic, and recondite. I was stuck between feeling that his poems were either too hard or too easy, that I didn’t have the patience for either, and didn’t in any case know how to decide.

He seems to have come around—a little:

It may be that Thompson left us the best key to his poems in the title of his first book, At the Edge of the Chopping There are No Secrets. Thompson tried to work at the edge of the chopping, to find a way of getting words to say something that they weren’t already going to say. To chop away at their own underbrush, make new clearings. Poems that cut and split and pile: breakings-off, severances; out of it, a whole assembling. What is rightness but that feeling of astonishment when the axe falls keenly, just so?

(Photograph by Thaddeus Holownia of the Jolicure woods, site of John Thompson's former home)

Ghostly Encounter

A lovely radio interview by Jeffery Donaldson about his book of essays, Echo Soundings.

 

“Why the heck didn’t they just say so!”

In an excerpt from his upcoming collection of essays. Echo Soundings, Jeffery Donaldson flags an important truth about the art.

Poems are made of words, words that are everywhere outside you and inside you. We are in the midst of words. They do things, tell us things, tell us to do things, convey information, cajole, argue, and convince; they lie and feint and finesse; they go before and between; they explain and justify; they are well nigh indistinguishable from our thoughts and perceptions, our mindset, the culture we inhabit. The poem sits in the midst of all this verbal noise. It is hard not to assume that poems are trying to do the same thing in the world as other linguistic conveyances. So much of our criticism about literature and our teaching of it falls back on the assumption (often useful, as far as it goes) that the task of a poem, just so, is to convey information, convince you of something, argue a truth, compel or command, sway a disposition. But it can seem to do so very poorly, since it often makes so much fuss about the business. It seems coded by nature to make its own kind of trouble. Keep the teachers in business. Confronted thus, a young student thinks, quite reasonably: “If that’s what the poets meant, why the heck didn’t they just say so!” Poems are out of their element, in over their heads when they try to do the work that an instruction manual, a conceptual argument, a treatise, a political speech, a weather or news report, a science experiment will do much better.

Sunday Poem

SLACK ACTION 

It goes through my mind like a train at night,
the train my father rode in the night, his mind
a train of thought far from where he rode. 

When I pull into the seniors' home I like to feel
the car drift in abeyance round the last corner,
another touch to come nearer, the braking slide 

into parking easements and an end. Forty-two
years he leapt among the tracks, nights, to cobble
things together, shuffling boxcars and flat cars, 

dealing their lengths part way into sidings—join
and hinge, muster and release—climbing the ladders
free of his uncouplings. It took some sorting out. 

He listened hard for the word come down
from the Dispatcher. Too heavy now for the staff,
he has to wait for the machine that will hoist him, 

strapped, over to his chair or back to bed again.
A sandbag, his sullen mass slumps into the lift
and rises sloppy and unresisting. He goes with it 

staring in disbelief. I am borne here. For us,
mother and wife are let go, the love-ties
grappled loose in unbroken entanglements, 

our new solitudes gathering and fanning out.
When the sliding door whispers open for me
—in hand his double-double and an apple fritter, 

unlooked-forward-to, like a pill that you take—
I enter with purpose but am halfway off again.
Our family is convergence and divergence both. 

I have a photograph of him in mind, a man
in his prime leaning out from the boxcar's ladder,
signalling ahead the slow recessions, the gaps 

and clearances, the thrown switches and coupler
knuckles ... ten feet and closing, five feet, good.
His grief looks poor on him. Plan was he'd be 

the first to go—with drinks and smokes, half by
his own wishing—and Mum's years would ease
ahead of him by whole decades. But after 

Alzheimer's and a kidney ache, her body still shining
with something fifty about it went off and left him
cajoling his clogged arteries past eighty and beyond. 

We never spoke of this, but I always imagined
those seemingly endless trains he assembled
in the night, a hundred cars and counting, 

how, when the engine pulls up a little
and the cars buckle forward in succession
but have not yet stopped before the hogger guns it, 

it must be that all the fastenings along
let up in turn and spread fresh gaps throughout.
Cars and clusters of cars at once go 

clutching and unclutching down their length.
And I try to picture how, the jolting instress
unravelling, their reciprocal momentums 

would meet and intermingle, the forward push
backing into slows, and the slows pulling off
pulling forward ahead of their kickbacks and jostles, 

and you would hear the whole thing down the line
at once parting and gathering, the entire train
getting on, undecided. But how too, if you really 

listened for it, there would be single cars hidden
in the midst, scudding alone, neither pushed
nor pulled, left gentled into hiatus, coasting free 

an instant in the long line's accordion folds'
uneasy breathing. A hovering out of waiting,
the glide getting on in the inertia, itself still moving. 

He comes to with a jolt. I take in my stride
his pantomimed 'Look who it is!' and we embrace,
our private journeys sallying up behind us 

in opposite directions, gently coupling. Not
a greeting or farewell, but a staying that is
neither between us. He keeps me close, and not 

to come undone, I tell him what I've been
thinking about the train. 'Slack action, it's called,'
he says, and lets his arms fall open around me.

From Slack Action (The Porcupine's Quill, 2013) by Jeffery Donaldson

Sunday Poem

WIND

Forty paces from the house I live in,

across the street, beside the stone wall

of mottled grey boulders cobbled into place,

the men appear once more, the ones who come

without a word or sign to stand beside

the tall, medieval, wooden catapult

wheeled on stone wheels down the street in the dark

from across the bare outlands, stopping there

opposite my house, beside the stone wall,

and together load awkward, unwieldy

sandbags that are the size of dead bodies

onto the catapult and launch them one

after another against the house front,

and sometimes one of them will come straight up

to the house and bang on the window panes

with his bare fist and then go back to his place,

and when I have just about had enough,

they will suddenly stop, break up, and go,

and just leave the sandbags and the catapult

where they lie, if you can believe it.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Jeffery Donaldson