Monkey Ranch

Julie Bruck's GG-winning Monkey Ranch was, for some, one of the best poetry books of the year—a return to form after a 13-year interruption. Stewart Cole, however, lay outs some of his concerns with the book:

"When thinking of traditions or poets to which I might ally Bruck’s work (besides the lineated near-prose that characterized much of the dominant mode of Canadian poetry from the 1960s to at least the 1990s), I settle on Elizabeth Bishop, who serves as the subject of a poem in both The End of Travel and Monkey Ranch. Indeed, Bruck's prosy free verse stands above so much similar work because of her Bishopesque powers of observation and phrasal care. On the other hand, however, Bruck is like Bishop purged of not just her formal virtuosity—Bishop excelled at even the most difficult fixed forms, while Bruck doesn’t attempt them—but her eccentricity: nothing in Bruck's body of work is as unabashedly strange as 'The Man-Moth,' for instance, nor does she favour the sort of daring rhetorical leaps that lift 'The Fish,' for example, into its 'rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!' moment of transcendence. Instead, whether formally, rhetorically, emotionally, or politically, Bruck's work tends toward the safe route, rarely off-putting readers with any outlandishness, but lacking the sense of hazard that marks the artform at its best. To use a sports analogy: Bruck’s poetry often reads like it's playing not to lose."

Verbatim

"I think the biggest challenge, for poets of any level of experience, is to both constantly expand their awareness of the traditions every poem talks back to, while writing playfully, with no monkey on the shoulder. We need the examples of our forebears to enlarge our sense of the possibilities for each poem, and yet we must trudge ahead, as Paul Muldoon puts it, with “a kind of willed ignorance.” It’s a crazy-making contradiction, but I think it’s essential. This is something I’ve had to learn and relearn. It’s endless. Read widely. Write wildly. Read. Repeat."

Julie Bruck offers up advice to aspiring poets.

Sunday Poem

SEX NEXT DOOR

It's rare, slow as a creaking of oars,
and she is so frail and short of breath
on the street, the stairs -- tiny, Lilliputian,
one wonders how they do it.
So, wakened by the shiftings of their bed nudging
our shared wall as a boat rubs its pilings,
I want it to continue, before here awful
hollow coughing fit begins. And when
they have to stop (always), until it passes, let
us praise the resumed rhythm, no more than a twitch
really, of our common floorboards. And how
he's waited for her before pushing off
in their rusted vessel, bailing when they have to,
but moving out anyway, across the black water.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Julie Bruck.

Coming Attractions

I’m nearly a month late in posting this, but I want to thank Jacob McArthur Mooney for including Mark Callanan’s upcoming book on his list of 2011 recommendations.

For anyone on the lookout for more CanPo offerings, we’ve assembled a really solid roster next year, with Asa Boxer and Linda Besner teaming up this Spring (her cover above). Anita Lahey joins Mark in the Fall.

I’ll be first in line for Julie Bruck’s Monkey Ranch, to be published by Brick (check out the Fall issue of Maisonneuve for some wonderful poems from the book). In the meantime, I’ll point poetry fans to the John Glassco biography A Gentleman of Pleasure, by Brian Busby, out in March from McGill-Queen's University Press, as well as my own selection of Glassco poems that Frog Hollow will be publishing around the same time.