Nuts and Bolts

Teaching Jim Johnstone's poetry collection Dog Ear to U of T undergraduates renewed Laura Ritland's appreciation for the book:

Each lecture started with the nuts and bolts of poetry—the image, poetic devices, meter, set forms – and moved into reading a poem from Dog Ear alongside something more traditionally canonical from Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets and Poetry anthology. For our lecture on imagery, we untangled the “white oak’s” branches of Johnstone’s “Ariadne’s Thread”; for metaphor, we looked at the “tuba, quartered” slipped within “Parenthesis.” “Drive,” read during our week on musical devices, was a favourite. The poem soars in long, songlike lines: “No one will find us in this city—not your valentine,/ not the line of dogs he’s chained by the throat.” Even if some students remained staunch enemies with prosody by that point, the music of Johnstone’s language wound its way into their hearts. All it took to enjoy these poems was to sit down and make the space to listen.

The Right Answer

Jim Johnstone argues that Don McKay was one of the first Canadian poets to reject Margaret Atwood's influential victimhood vision.

Before his first major coronation in Canadian letters—the 1991 Governor General’s Award for his seventh collection of poetry, Night Field—Don McKay was nearly indistinguishable from his subject matter. A naturalist whose poetry reads as if it’s part field guide, part rural love song, he camouflaged his identity in the language of his preferred landscapes. In doing so, McKay eschewed the garrison mentality that pervaded Canadian literature at the end of the 20th century. By taking up cause for the wilderness itself, he flipped the script provided by Margaret Atwood in Survival (1972), a book of criticism that wrestles with Canada’s literary identity. Citing examples from the national canon, Atwood argued that the central characters in Canadian literature were victims, and grim survival their chief concern. For McKay, who was busy reclaiming language as a means of communication with the environment, the physical world constituted his protagonist, one that’s continually victimized by human interference. This is clear in his second book, Long Sault (1975), where he lays out an ars poetica when he writes: “Here was a map coming out in dotted lines / to be filled in with the right answer. Here was a rapids in the noose.” While contemporaries like Al Purdy and George Bowering continued down the road paved by Atwood, McKay began filling in his figurative map with birds, beasts, and reparations to his surroundings.

Interpretive Powers

In an interview with Stewart Coles which appears on Boxcar Poetry Review, Jim Johnstone explains his notion of poetic "difficulty":

I'm not concerned with difficulty as much as I'm concerned with perspective. There's always going to be a gap between what a poem means to its author and what a poem means to an individual reader — to me that adds a layer of perception that makes difficulty a secondary concern. Poetry demands the interpretive powers of its readers, and I'm comfortable leaving that challenge in their hands.

Over at Maisonneuve, Johnstone talks to Chad Campbell about his relationship to revision:

Sometimes it feels like I spend all my time revising. That time feels like work. There’s a stark contrast between writing and revising as far as I’m concerned—writing is creative, joyous, almost ecstatic, whereas revising is necessary if you want to publish your work. There are times when I leave my initial draft in a journal and keep it for myself... I find holding back work refreshing; as long as they remain unseen, my poems belong to me completely. The same principle is necessary in a healthy relationship or friendship. Without mystery, the self can suffer.

Page-Turning Prayer

Andrew Brobyn unpacks one of the anxieties behind Jim Johnstone's "rationally painful" book:

As I close Dog Ear, the purpose of Johnstone’s page-turning prayer becomes clear; this is the perpetual, ritualistic practice of a writer conquering by writing that feeling that most afflicts writers—fear. Fear of being forgotten with death; fear of being not-gotten in life; fear of not fitting in with the rest; and fear not doing your best with the time allotted to you, regardless of what convention expects.

Oatmeal, Not Manna

In his introduction to The Essential Earle Birney, Jim Johnstone makes the case that Birney is not only "one of the finest Canadian poets of the 20th century," but maybe one of the most restless.

In The Creative Writer (1966), a collection of lectures that Birney prepared for the CBC, the poet asserted: "Living art, like anything else, stays alive only by changing." His poetry reflects this statement—Birney made significant edits to many of his most canonized pieces throughout his career, despite criticism. Birney’s Selected Poems (1966) can be seen as something of a sea change in this regard: nearly every poem in the book was reformatted to remove punctuation, with the notable exception of "David." The grammatical and typographical changes that began in Selected Poems were refined further in The Collected Poems of Earle Birney (1975), and it’s from this point forward in Birney’s bibliography that the poems in this volume have been chosen. The transformation of Birney’s work in the 1960s and 1970s was accompanied by a reevaluation of his poetics. He addressed this in the preface to Ghost in the Wheels: Selected Poems (1977), when he wrote: "I should say at the start that I don’t any longer like the words ‘'poet,' 'poems,' etc. They’ve developed pretentious connotations. I prefer 'maker' and 'makings.' They mean the same but the texture’s plainer, oatmeal, not manna."

Sunday Poem

THE APPROACHING CURVE 

You said we could be happy
anywhere. But here?
Scylla’s cavern haunts our map.
You said we could be happy
unlipped, unvoiced; left to clap
along or disappear.
You said we could be happy
anywhere but here.

From Dog Ear (Signal Editions, 2014) by Jim Johnstone

(Painting "Glaucus and Scylla" by  J.M.W. Turner, 1841)

Gala Signal Editions Launch in Toronto, April 11, 2014

(Left to right) Vincent Colistro, Michael Lista, Jim Johnstone and Jason Guriel.

Gala Signal Editions Launch in Montreal, April 4, 2014

Carmine Starnino

Jim Johnstone

Ed Carson

Jason Guriel

Catherine Chandler

Richard Greene

Sunday Poem

DRIVE

No one will find us in this city—not your valentine,
not the line of dogs he’s chained by the throat. My collar
blooms chin-high, is perfumed with lilac where you
finger buttons, parse leaves and hook a flush of green 

to my breast. Tell me you’re good. Tell me we’ll
lend our touch to the nearest MG, drive south on a
sucker bet until we run dry in the desert. There are
others who’ve come uninvited, who’ve come to free 

themselves from their slouching skin, lose their grip
and trace in a mess of coins. Here’s my loss—fist
lodged in the maw of the first guest to speak, our
honour run aground. To stay we’ll need to slap down 

the pin that adorns your jacket, bet against a snail being
able to survive the edge of a straight razor. I’ve been
told that nothing can live to know such a lean blade.
When we drive land rises and our hearts rise with it

From Epoch (Frog Hollow, 2013) by Jim Johnstone.

Bovinities and Grey Tote Launches

Deena Kara Shaffer with husband Andrew Lorrison and daughter Evelyn (Montreal launch)

Robert Moore, Judith Mackin and Chris Lloyd (Montreal launch)

Jim Johnston (Toronto launch)

Deena Kara Shaffer reading from The Grey Tote (Toronto launch)

Robert Moore reading from The Book of Golden Bovinities (Toronto Launch)

What's Jim Johnstone Reading?

First We Take Manhattan

The Best Canadian Poetry 2012 trip to New York last Friday—with well-attended launches at the Lilian Vernon Writer's House and the Corner Bookstore—was a triumph. That's Molly Peacock up there, standing beside me in front of the bookstore (they filled their window with our books, which was a lovely sight). We then celebrated in style with a three-course meal at Pascalou. You'll find a recording of our reading here.

Northern Poetry Review

April was the five-year mark for the online lit mag NPR, founded and edited by Alex Boyd. They've just updated the site with new material, including an interview with Giller-winner Johanna Skibsrud and poems by Linda Besner from her first book The Id Kid. Also on offer is Jacob McArthur Mooney's review of four chapbooks by Cactus Press. I was sent these titles last year, and enjoyed them, and fully intended to blog about them. Alas, life intervened. So I'm happy that NPR is giving the books some deserved attention (you can shop for them here). My favourite poets in the group were Marc di Saverio and Sarah Teitel (photo above). In fact, Teitel's poems so impressed me that I'm happy to announce her first book will be appearing with us in the very near future.

Recommendations

In anticipation of the GG shortlist announcement on Wednesday, I thought I'd take a moment to mention the Canadian poetry I enjoyed most this year.

Excluded is The Crow's Vow, a Signal book and therefore, according to industry etiquette, not eligible for objective recommendation. I would, however, like to make a plug (plea?) for Michael Harris's Circus which, except for a couple of notices, has been roundly ignored. And I think that's just criminal.

I suppose I should also disclose that I provided blurbs for two books on this list (Patternicity and Complete Physical). But I don't see why that should make any difference. I blurbed them precisely because I admired them.

For and Against (Goose Lane), Sharon McCartney.
Patternicity (Nightwood), Jim Johnstone.
Bloom (Anansi), Michael Lista
Welling (Your Scrivener Press), Margaret Christakos
Tiny, Frantic, Stronger (Insomniac), Jeff Latosik
Hump (Palimpsest), Ariel Gordon
Complete Physical (Porcupine's Quill), Shane Neilson