Hear It Sing

Kevin McNeilly reports on Stephen Burt's recent lecture at UBC called “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Place.”

He concentrated on the work of two key poets, for him: C. D. Wright and Mary Dalton. Quoting from Wright’s “Ozark Odes”—“Maybe you have to be from here to hear it sing”—Burt developed the homonymy of here and hear to suggest that Wright’s poems generate the textures and particularities of place apophastically, allowing the reader access through lyric attention, through the melopoeic richness of her geographically precise diction, to a phenomenologically rich encounter with that particularity. You hear the place, you sense it, palpably, in Wright’s words, despite and even because of her skeptical refusal to claim communicative success. The withdrawing “melt” of her language, in other words, is also recombinant and evocative, a plenitude. Burt gestured at Elise Partridge’s poem “Dislocations” (from Chameleon Hours, 2010 version) which also presents a “hybrid” form of lyric apophasis, refusing to lay claim to any naïve or grandiose transcendence while also, at a moment of surprising intensity, discovering how poetic intelligence still fuses to its descriptive objects, as “you feel your strengths intermingling.” One of the pleasures of Elise Partridge’s poetry, Burt said, is that its “attention to place does not preclude migration from one place to another,” and that some of her best work inheres in those transitions and intermediations. He concluded his talk with an investigation of some of the poetry of Mary Dalton. He was especially taken with how human geography and dialect words, in her poems, “imply the physical geography that the words produce.” He focused on the seductive estrangements of encountering the moments when she seemed to open her Newfoundland word-hoard. “Maybe you don’t have to be from there,” he concluded, “to hear it sing.”

Pleasure in Accuracy

Kevin McNeilly discovers Elise Partridges' 2008 collection Chameleon Hours, and admires what he dubs her mixture of "the serendipitous and the exacting":

Most of the poems in Chameleon Hours are elegies: meditations on loss, on the art of losing. They draw their passing, brief intensities from a heightened awareness of lived material detail, of “small things,” that comes in the wake of absence. Robert Pinsky praises this practice as her “art of noticing”: “Absence and failure are described [in Elise Partridge’s poetry] in a way that takes pleasure in accuracy: a considerable and original accomplishment.” Her poems, for me, evoke much more than mere pleasure, much more than an enjoyment of pretty craft, and her accomplishment is more than considerable: the crisp particularity of her characteristic line engenders a keen pathos in restraint, and unflinchingly confronts the hard expressive limits of her own mortality—“pretty or not,” as she puts it. In “Chemo Side Effects: Vision,” one of her pieces that Pinsky singles out for praise, she notes how there are “So many small things I still want to see”; the modulating vowels distilled from the long-I—the withdrawing, observant subject at the heart of this particular line attenuated into phonemic shivers, i becoming ah-ee, then lightly drawled into aw and i and braided through commonplace consonants, s’s and m’s and t’s—produce a palpable set of articulated, glassy shards on the teeth and tongue, small bursts of sense. Vatic wonder, under Elise Partridge’s pen, doesn’t so much diminish as gain a tensile acuity, a closeness.

The Unquiet Canadian

Kevin McNeilly seems conflicted about David Solway's criticism (he accuses him of "picking imaginary fights where he could be discovering imaginative vitalities"). But when it comes to his assessment Solway's antipathy toward cultural nationalism, he's bang on:

His essay “The Flight from Canada” offers a cogent and persuasive alternative to what he calls the “Canadian content syndrome,” a canonizing of Canada’s national literature based not on qualitative discriminations but on the mere fact of its being Canadian. Still, Solway doesn’t actually refuse a national cultural thematics so much as re-think it, carefully and provocatively. It isn’t, for him, a question of poetically formulating, or adhering to, an identity but of inhabiting its negation: “it is precisely the comfortless absence of a secure identity, the rootlessness, the sense of radical alienation which is our greatest gift and blessing.” He wants, he asserts, identity “solidly founded in difference.” He becomes ours, in a sense, by refusing us. But claiming a solidness for that foundation also distinguishes his work from more openly alternative poetics; difference, for him, means “that each poet can work up the materials of place and language into that signature alloy we call individual style”; flight is predicated on a thoroughly conservative cosmopolitanism, a flight made radical, in other words, only by its rootedness in the solid ground of a distinctive poetic diction. This conceptual mix may be, at its base, self-contradictory, but surely Solway has managed at least to point up a viable means of confronting poetically, formally, the question of a late nationalism, of the differential ethos of the Canadian.

Michael Lista vs Jan Zwicky: Reax

la_panique:

"The Good in Bad Reviews" is an excellent example of how negative reviews are sometimes more an exercise for the reviewer to flex and sharpen rather than really engage with the text.

E Martin Nolan:

Must the reviewer be the friend of the poet? Isn’t that a formula for forcing out bad positive reviews? And can one not negatively review out of love for poetry? Can one not see a book praised and say “I believe this praise to be false, and I take that as an offence to poetry, so this negative review is written out of love for the art form”? I think Lista was trying to get at that when he claims that a negative review can be just as “engaged” as a positive one.

Lorri Neilsen Glenn:

Hurling tomatoes (or swinging truncheons) tells us more about the wielder than the target. We know this: it’s a truism in psychology, education, and parenting so basic that it hardly bears repeating, but I will. If you’re quick to deflect any challenge to your way of seeing things and gain a certain frisson of delight (or release) in zinging others (the celebrated or the novice), and in bringing them down a peg -- too often a dudeliocentric way of reviewing and conversing -- then perhaps it’s time to ask: what emotions of your own are you not addressing? What are you afraid of?

Kevin McNeilly:

Lista seems to mistake his own meanness and invective for candour and critical acuity.

Matt Rader:

Lista is welcome to write all the negative reviews his truth loving heart desires. I fully support his right to do so. But the bit where he chastises Zwicky and wags his indignant finger at the unethical chutzpah of calling for a reviewing of silence strikes me as hilariously misguided. To use this platform to position himself as the emancipator of women from Zwicky's imperial shadow is comedy of the blackest sort. It behooves him to start listening to not just the words but the melody.

Jan Zwicky:

I share with Mr. Lista the view that works of art can shake us to our foundations, and that there is nothing wrong with admitting that we have been deeply moved by a certain writer. I’ll go further: such admissions are a form of excellence. I even agree that if you can’t bear to have someone “disclose” that they don’t like your work, you shouldn’t publish. Where he and I part company is over the idea that a kick in the nuts is a good way to start a conversation.