Infinite Feedback Loop

Lazy Bastardism was reviewed alongside new books by Glyn Maxwell and Mary Ruefle in the April issue of Poetry magazine. The conversation—held between Michael Lista, Ange Mlinko and Gwyneth Lewis—is utterly satisfying (and at times, for me, blush-inducing). One of the most interesting exchanges occurred over a few lines by Robyn Sarah that Mlinko first encountered in my book. Disappointed that Maxwell doesn't spend more time on the nuts-and-bolts of how metaphors are put together, Mlinko brings up Sarah:

To take as an example the lines I quoted from Robyn Sarah, was 
I really drawn to them because of the versification? 

at the back of the palate
the ghost of a rose
in the core of the carrot. 

Well, I admit, the anapest-ish bounce of those lines has something to do with their memorability, and the palate/carrot rhyme is indispensable, but the real achievement here is the oxymoronic yoking of the rose and the carrot (smell vs. taste; sweet vs. bitter; pretty vs. nutritive; pink vs. orange). Oxymoronic, but surprisingly true — 
I taste that rose now in raw carrots, indelibly. I think Maxwell would wager that the lightning-strike freshness of metaphor arose organically (no pun intended) from the modulation of the vowels and the fatedness of the rhyme. And there is a lot of truth to the idea that versification is a poetic machinery by which you find yourself saying smarter things than you would have otherwise (to paraphrase James Merrill). But I could just as easily posit that Sarah was actually cutting the top off a carrot, saw the radial symmetry of its core, glimpsed (at a lightning stroke) the visual rhyme with a rose, and constructed the musical lines to be the best container for this metaphor.

Michael Lista's reply:

I do think we’re drawn to the Sarah lines in large part because of the versification — it’s itself metaphoric. Yes, the “anapest-ish” bounce is part of it, but so too is the circularity and symmetry of (to use words Maxwell dislikes) the assonance and consonance (at, back, palate/ghost, rose/core, carrot) and that lovely slant rhyme of “palate” and “carrot.” The total effect is to give the aural, synesthetic impression of  both the cross-cut carrot and the spiraled petals of a rose. The metaphor is itself contained within a mnemonic metaphor, which makes forgetting the lines next to impossible. Today both bad free verse and bad formalism disappoint for the same reason: the form has been divorced from its metaphor. In the case of bad free verse, the form feels arbitrarily default, like a font. With bad formalism, it feels willfully decorative, like a font. When poems of each kind succeed, it’s because their containers — poetry
 is the only art form that is its own container — are constructed out of the materials of their contents, in a kind of infinite feedback loop.

Lazy Bastardism Review III

Two months ago, Kimberly Bourgeois asked me a bunch of very good questions about my new book Lazy Bastardism and I did my best to answer them. The result appears in the Spring 2013 issue of the MRB. One point that keeps coming up with readers and friends is how I've "mellowed." Kimberly, for instance, found my earlier essays (collected in A Lover's Quarrel) far more aggressive and wanted to know what had happened. My answer:

Age. I was younger then, and angrier. I was burning to change everything around me. I’ve since grown older, and realize that it’s harder—and more effective, in terms of the long game—to write essays and reviews that can so persuasively advocate their bias they’re able to change a reader’s mind about a poet, or cause readers to second-guess their assumptions. I now want to be in the persuasion business, not the pissing-off business. Though I do recognize that, sometimes, it’s impossible to do the former without the latter.

Lazy Bastardism Reviewed II

Brian Palmu is full of praise for the book, but takes issue with a few things, chiefly my thesis for why Montreal poetry is so distinctive. I think he underestimates the breadth of the code-switching that occurs in the city, but his point is well-taken:

"Speaking of disagreements, the biggest one I have anywhere in Lazy Bastardism comes out of this (mostly quoted) paragraph in the [Michael] Harris’ essay:“But this also reflects the culturally synoptic condition of most Montreal poets, who are constantly forced, on a daily level, to shift between different registers and syntaxes and thus are more open to cross-influences than they might have been had they lived in Toronto or Vancouver or Calgary. ... The city itself, in other words, lures our poems out of the verbal ghetto of what Solway has called ‘Standard Canadian Average’ “. Now this is an argument that is both ignorant and needlessly defensive. I’ve lived a half-century in Vancouver. It is now slightly over 50% Asian, and many of those immigrants have retained their first languages. But it’s not a new development, and it doesn’t pertain to one dialect or ethnicity. Growing up as a wee ankle-biting critic-in-formation, my friends were Fijians, Italians, Slavs, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, and Sikhs (as well as a few pasty-faced Brits and Scandinavians). I’m sure I picked up some hidden nuances in all the different cadences, syntactical emphases, cuss-vocabulary expansion, and emotional variance. And I’m sure many in Toronto could say the same since it’s a multicultural pot of stew. So Montreal’s situation in this regard is hardly unique."

Lazy Bastardism Reviewed

Jonathan Ball giveth...

"Starnino is a smart and savvy reader, with a stunning ability to attend to the smallest details. This fine sensibility allows Starnino, at his best, to recuperate the work of people that might actually need recuperating, like John Glassco, whose observation that “man ‘is destined for slaughter in the course of things’” won’t end up riding the bus anytime soon. Moreover, as everyone knows, Starnino shines on the attack. Here, he assaults Atwood, McKay, and Moritz. Although they are to some degree easy targets (Atwood for lazy languishment in simplistic political prose-with-line-breaks, McKay for devolving into self-parody, and Moritz for sham artistry), Starnino neatly dissects their development and the larger significance of the poetic trends they represent. At the same time, Starnino’s attacks are rarer, more nuanced, and fairer than in the earlier A Lover’s Quarrel (2004), and he has toned down the mean-spirited glee that sometimes surfaced in that earlier collection."

...and Jonathan Ball taketh away:

"The tragedy and triumph of Carmine Starnino are thus the same: once bitten, twice shy, he has avoided engagement with the avant-garde in this second collection. As a result, he has produced a better but less interesting book, because the real poets he should be grappling with are the ones that he does not understand, and so cannot engage. Everything Starnino loves in poetry—formal rigour, ambition, intellectual engagement with the world’s complexity, tactile and aural obsession with language—has become the domain of the avant-garde he hates."

Downtown Aplomb

Norm Sibum picks up Lazy Bastardism, and kinda, sorta, maybe likes it.

From what I have seen of the book, it appears to be written with uptown aplomb. Or perhaps it is downtown aplomb, with all the bravura of power drink venues and hot dog vendors and bored secretaries passing by (and poets even more bored, boredom being the acme of creative potentiality as per Mr Starnino in a philosophical moment): all that construction going on around Union Station, Toronto. It is written as if to speak of Canadian literature is the most natural of human acts, as natural an act as—you fill in the blank; as if there were to Canadian literature now a certain preeminence in much the same way as American literary critics of a by-gone time once accorded American authors of a by-gone time their God-given, constitutional right to preeminent centrality in the universe of literature: F Scott, for example, or Ernest or Mr Faulkner