In a recent interview, Karen Connelly describes the changes she's seen in Canadian poetry:
Obviously, the influence of the academy and postmodernism have changed The Canadian Poet. Compared to when I started writing and going to poetry readings thirty years ago—I went to my first readings when I was about 13, and I am now 44—I understand less of what I hear. And I feel it less. You’d think that after more than thirty years of reading and listening, I would be more clever, but I do not understand what some poets are trying to tell me. So I remain curious, puzzled; I try not to be too judgmental. The people I brought with me recently, to group poetry readings in western Canada, the people who support my work and and have always read it (family, friends) are people in various professions and the trades; they, too, had no idea what a good number of my fellow poets were trying to tell them.
The poets were working in conceptual and avant-garde modes, employing intellectual conceits and sometimes powerful, complex ideas; they were playing with those ideas through original language. Fascinating work, pyrotechnical, investigating language and science and social media. I could appreciate it with my brain but not feel it in my guts. I could play along, because I am interested in language being stretched and used and broken open. But my cop sister and my welder niece, and the builder who used to shovel my mother’s front steps, and even the museum curator in Winnipeg—had no idea what my fellow poets were up to. They listened and felt alienated, outside.
It is important to me that anyone who reads English reasonably well can enter my work the way you enter a room, simply, through the door or (if you are locked out) through the window. No one understands everything in a poem, just as we don’t understand everything in a room that is strange to us, full of someone else’s history and personal objects. That not-knowing is what makes poetry useful and delightful. But you have to be able to be in it somehow, even in its strangeness, and at least in its music, its lyricism. There must be a way to enter.
THE SPEED OF RUST, OR, HE MARRIES
It rains.
My heart disintegrates for other reasons
while the bald eagle gazes at me
from the lifeguard’s chair.
His head is not white but scuffed, dirty.
He may look like a bird of prey but in fact
he is a fifty-two-year-old man
who has just crawled out of bed
with a hangover and a wife
he never loved well.
Whatever
was fine weather
in his life has turned
to the swamp-sky of March,
rain in April, through June,
and tomorrow is the first of July
though it’s hard to consider
celebrating Canada Day
with anything but a scream.
Which the bald eagle does:
the serrated thrust of his voice
shreds the grey light as he opens
his wings and lifts, lifts,
heaves himself into the heavy air.
There he goes, flapping over our stunned heads
toward the jungle that stalks Vancouver
like a panther, the same jungle
I fought in cold blood this morning,
so much fierce bamboo.
You and I walk the wide sand flats,
slick grey acres of seaweed,
cracked shells, crabs scuttling sideways
like our desire. We are so close
to the barges that we see
a modern galley slave moving
feverishly about on the long deck.
He is silent in labour, I am silent
in sympathy, listening to you tell
how you think maybe you can’t marry her.
I suddenly remember my hedge clippers
lying on the grass in the back garden.
Tools rust if you leave them out
in this rain. They teach us, every year,
not to do it again.
Why it’s all wrong takes so long to explain
that the tide begins to slide in around our cold feet.
You could save yourself by drowning
but do not: we walk back to the stony shore
littered with condoms and weddings,
one of which will take place in exactly
forty days. You ask, a tear in your eye,
How much longer will it rain?
I reply, You’re lucky enough
to have choices. Old lover,
surprise yourself and make one.
Useless advice, like all advice
must be at this moment. You wring
your heart on the beach while on the far shore
landmines explode, men labour on
prison ships, children drown in wet sand
similar in weight to this wet sand
but lethal, marbled with blood,
impossible to walk away from.
You say you cannot walk away.
I say I know, I know, and think again
of my clippers in the grass,
the speed of rust. I say,
You are a good man
and she is a good woman.
Kissing you goodbye, I wonder if
that is how bad marriages are made:
the hungry shovel of the heart
wants to break the clean surface of goodness,
get to the rich filth underneath.
I like how mistakes wait in our hands
like the orchids we crave for their beauty
though we don’t know how to grow them.
I like that we want to learn.
I love how we fail.
