Patchwork Poetry

Working with Mary Dalton on her new collection, Hooking, brought into sharp relief how little I knew about the cento. Over at Oona, a blogger makes a case for the form's cultural relevance:

 In an age of sampling, remixes, & flarf, the renaissance of the cento, a form that dates, one way or another, at least to ancient Greece, is oddly apt. The possibilities of this kind of poetic collage are dizzying.

Marie Okáčová zooms in:

I believe that the cento, rather than being an eccentric curiosity devoid of all literary value, is primarily a kind of intricate and actually perfectly legitimate play with language, which reflects its principles of operation. Being in fact the embodiment of absolute intertextuality, the patchwork poems implicitly question every notion of literary originality because they emphasize the interdepenence of individual texts representing different literary meta-languages. The cento is therefore "recycled" art only in a more conspicuous way than the rest of literature inevitably is; this, however, does not mean that a work of literature can actually never be original and inventive. In fact, as an example of intertextuality par excellence, the patchwork poetry is, at least conceptually, a highly innovative literary form.

Sunday Poem

BRAID 

a.
There are others besides you who have worn that look—
peeking through the window-grille,
and in that place,
the mouth moving uniquely with each dialect.
Shall I tell you the secret
I braid by rote? Rough memories coiled like rope:
a fevered memory of
mild, mild eyes ricocheting off his fate;
a body riding up over the hood,
bleeding into the soft grass.

b.
This brings nobody peace, The ancient war
leads you through the streets of this shady city.
They somehow look as if they knew, except
the nude hills come back and the sleepless
stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
After a while,
the matches, the wrong key-rings,
the lucky ticket with the right signs
are stuck. They can’t join the flag-waving;
they stiffen, when they should bend.

c.
Omega’s long last O, memory’s elision
jostle the vessel he cannot refill.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,
like a furious pink rabbit from a hat.
She buys up all
the notion of what his whiskers would feel like—
smack! Oh, attaboy, attaold boy.
Lost to TV reruns flickering overhead.
The point was to react,
to an ocean, or sorrow.

d.
You could be waiting for a tailor
that made the sky.
Listen: the heavens hiss—
and when one of the lookers Lily asked me what the hell
came late and will probably leave early,
I looked around at nothing.
Like an album: there: elf-child with dog—
little bastards. It was impossible to tell
and you are someplace else and thirty-three.
You’re running out of things to try.

e.
Mysterious voyagers from outer space
wrap their wings in sun-splints,
shuffle. They laugh together; their money shrinks.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk
or shrewd donkey,
to work green magic on my flesh.
Monarchs are falling,
trailing through ditches of water and nevus-ied grapes.
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
without you, the endless guessing.

From Hooking: A Book of Centos (2013) by Mary Dalton. (See book for source list of individual lines.)

Alcuin Award Winner

I've just learned that Mark Callanan's chapbook, Sea Legend, published by Frog Hollow Press, has won an Alcuin Award for design.

The chapbook had already been shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and also enjoys the rare honour of being completely sold out. An e-version is available here.

Signal Editions is publishing Mark's second book, Gift Horse, this Fall.

Show and Tell

Patrick Warner and I both launched our books of poetry in St. John's on Tuesday at The Ship Inn (Me: This Way Out, He: Mole). It was an awesome night, with many of the city's literary mainstays in attendance and much debauchery. How much? Too much, apparently. I woke the next morning to the discovery that Lisa Moore autographed my arm. I have no memory of this. But I have a photo! Man, I love St John's.

A blast out of the gate

Below you'll find a review of Mary Dalton's Red Ledger by Janet Fraser taken from the most recent issue of the Newfoundland and Labrador Studies (Volume 23, Number 1 , 2008). The review mentions the "artful mixture" of new and old poems in the collection. I appreciate the compliment, but the reprints were simply the most practical way to preserve important early poems in a new book that would circulate more widely and enjoy a longer life than Dalton's first two.

Having read all four of Mary Dalton’s poetry collections, I think that her fourth book, Red Ledger, being greater than the sum of its parts, is her best collection to date. There is no subtitle to let readers know that this volume is an artful mixture of new poems and poems culled from her first two books, but those who know Dalton’s work do not have to look at the publisher’s acknowledgement to realize that the book editor has done a magnificent job pulling together what is best in her poetry. As a result Mary Dalton has achieved an intensely focused social and geopolitical take on Newfoundland such as has not been seen since the days of Percy Janes, Harold Horwood, and E. J. Pratt.

To try an analogy of Olympian effort and competition (because I do believe that many Newfoundland writers are attempting to become the next internationally recognized Great One), it is as if Dalton won bronze with her first two books, silver with Merrybegot, and has stepped up to the podium for gold with Red Ledger. There are no stand-out poems in this collection because each poem blasts out of the gate and wins the race with perfect form and passionate determination. No matter whether the poem is comic, romantic, ironic, or satiric (and Dalton knows her Frye!), no matter whether the poem is broadly social/political, geographic, or autobiographical, Dalton’s aim is always to carry forward what she knows and feels about Newfoundland.

And what knowledge, what feeling! There are the opening love poems, with their saucy invitations ("What sort of woman would you fancy, Nelson?"), meteorological linguistics ("It’s too hot for irony — / the yarrow droops / in a bald declarative" — from "Here in the Dog Days") and salty images and metaphors:

Desire
has the taste of salt,
pulses like the sea-anemones —
a salt orchestra —
the cool-green swing of Keith Jarrett.

(To Conjure the Salt)

Although Dalton rarely enters autobiographical territory, I am interested in reading more poems like "The ’Forties" and "Paterfamilias, A Portrait". I’m still thinking about Dalton’s beautiful young Dick Tracy and Ingrid Bergman parents and the end of their days, Mother setting immaculate tables and tying her crippled husband’s shoelaces and Father "moving in the cage of his days".

My favourite poems are the two long and wildly imaginative sequences, the geographical "I’m Bursting to Tell: Riddles for Conception Bay" and the homage to fellow icon of the imagination, the Frygian poet James Reaney, "Reaney Gardens". What I love best about Newfoundland writers is their ability to make one laugh out loud. (Recently I had the delightful experience of reading Agnes Walsh’s essay on her father’s fridge box and laughing hysterically in the middle of a busy library.) I was holding my stomach as I read Dalton’s "Ignoramus" in "Reaney Gardens."

Of course Dalton’s political poems are brilliant, funny, poignant and rousing. I have only one quibble. It seems to me that Dalton does not take risks in her political poems. She attacks the many injustices that have been heaped on Newfoundland by mainland Canadians and who could argue with that? But the tone of the poems indicates to me that the poet does not consider the fact that most of these injustices have also been perpetrated on her fellow mainland Canadians. Also, she takes aim at goofy, ignorant, arrogant, and usually well-intentioned mainland social workers and tourists. What about the fact that many urban Newfoundlanders have become arrogant and ignorant about their fellow rural Newfoundlanders? And why is there no mention of all of the lazy, useless academics from the mainland who have spent their adult lives at Last Chance U making big bucks and hating the place?

Perhaps I am not being entirely fair to Dalton. I love the last poem in the book, "Gallous".

I myself was one who could see only gallows driving through the wind-swept and bleakly beautiful Gallow’s Cove. Dalton is hard on herself, the sixteen-year-old "vastly superior" Newfoundlander who cringed at the names rolling off her neighbours’ tongues. But now the poet who leapt into the mainland world that malignantly caricatures her country (not province!), has grown to love her people and their language.

Now she can hear
how they kept safe with them
Maire and Seamus, even
those far-off Normans of Autun —
swaying in time, in the intricate
galliard of their gallous, gallous tongue.

(Gallous)

Riddle Me This

Mary Dalton has been on a riddle-writing jag ever since publishing a cycle of them in Red Ledger (and she's had the bug even earlier if you include the compact eccentricities of the mini-monologues in Merrybegot).

Running the Goat, a letter-press publisher based in St. John's, has put out a book of 26 new riddles by Mary called Between You and the Weather. As a bonus, this limited-edition (only 150) includes original wood engraving by Wesley W. Bates.

I daresay the new riddles are very good, if deliciously harder then the Red Ledger sequence, but only because many of them tap into the original linguistic spirit of the form, which was about strangeness rather than cleverness. I'll be nice, and post an easy one.

Chappie price is $45, and apparently includes shipping. If you can show proof of purchase, I'll throw in a free copy of Red Ledger.

Effin' good

I'm a little late with this, but want to put in a good word for the second issue of Riddle Fence, the smart new Newfoundland literary magazine. A couple of Signal poets make an appearance. Jason Guriel (whose Pure Product is slated for Spring 2009) reviews George Murray's The Rush to Here, and John Steffler (Helix: New and Selected Poems) has four poems.

Highlights also include poetry by the now Montreal-based Danielle Devereaux ("You'll know me when I'm / an old woman. I'll be the one with ratty / fingernails. Jowls."), David O'Meara ("The numbers predict tomorrow / will be cold, with a chance of rain") and David Hickey's hilarious baker ditty ("Even the baker hates me now / Even the baker hates me / Even the baker hates me now / For sins against Lord Bread").

The standout piece, however, is novelist Joel Thomas Hynes' torrentially abusive manifesto, "God Help Thee." Maisonneuve has bravely reprinted it on their website. Or you can hear Hynes' recitation of it -- as well as purchase the MP3 download -- at Riddle Fence.

Twofer

Not sure how I missed this, but back in October poetryreviews.ca reviewed two of our poetry books, Red Ledger by Mary Dalton and Standing Wave by Robert Allen. Money quotes below.





"[Dalton] displays a wonderfully unstodgy maturity in tackling the erotic, the historical and the socio-political environment of her home province in stanzaic poetry, rants and folkloric parables...This collection is entirely enjoyable, thought-provoking and well told."














"[Allen's] references favour present culture—including CNN, Tinkerbell, Satie, Billy Collins, Davey Crockett, and the Titanic—over the past. Yet there are echoes of Shakespeare in the repetition of the north-north-westerly wind direction, with traces of nursery rhymes and the Bible."