Vowel Colour

Alex Boyd has been busy archiving content from his now defunct Northern Poetry Review mag. Some nice rediscoveries to make, including a lovely interview with Elise Partridge which includes this interesting observation:

Can devices like vowel-color and so on really express meaning? There’s something inexplicable about it all, but I would certainly agree that syntax and sound can. Would the Duke in Browning’s “My Last Duchess” have such icy control of his syntax if he were despondent about his late wife, rather than angry enough to have had her murdered? If you look at the syntax and listen to the sound in sections of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A. H. H.” or his “Now sleeps the crimson petal,” for example, you can make an argument about how vowels, consonants and syntax help convey such emotions as resignation and despair or tenderness and eager anticipation.

(Photograph of Alfred Lord Tennyson)

Verbatim

"These are what the poet Peter Sanger might call ‘civilizational’ stories: they gather in to themselves about as much as a story can hold about the experience of being human. Which is, of course, an exclusive and exclusionary experience -- so no one story can tell it all. Still, we construct these arcs, these myths. Their capacity is the capacity of human life: finite, but, to us, all there is."
Amanda Jernigan on her attraction to stories like the Iliad.

The Problem of "Unquestioned Fandom"

The existence of Richard Outram: Essays on His Work is an exciting sign, one that proves there can indeed be second acts in Canadian poetry. But Jacob McArthur Mooney's review in NPR astutely points to one of the few (and perhaps unavoidable) weaknesses of the book:

The collection as edited by Ingrid Ruthig is therefore written for lovers of Outram's work. It assumes that nobody much else is going to pick it up. Probably, this was the correct editorial path, but once Outram himself gets out of the way after Michael Carbet's interview, a real mantra of exceptionalism sets in. Robert Denham's historical account of the Outram-Northrope Frye relationship is plenty interesting, as is Amanda Jernigan's piece of the macroeconomics of sequencing and Jeffrey Donaldson's extended-metaphor-on-the-subject-of-metaphors, but they all start from such a place of unquestioned fandom that they don't necessarily open a lot of doors to those of us who (and here I announce my own biases) loved Hiram and Jenny but found the dour fairy tale stuff in Dove Legend and the clippity-clop rhyme schemes that come and go in every Outram book to be only about half as perfectly crafted and subtle as their creator likely did. This is the problem, really, of claiming a canonical space for a writer who never captured enough critical attention in life to have it guaranteed to him in death, however warranted that attention might have been. His acolytes have to spend so much time repeating judgements of quality that the rest of us are left with little concrete reference points to compare him to.

Verbatim

"I'm interested in the everyday, in how people express themselves, often more profoundly than we realize, using common language. I think that too often we dismiss the meaning of what people say because it is expressed ineloquently or without sophisticated language. This is a real problem for me. I think everybody has something interesting and smart to say; it's just sometimes a matter of listening a bit harder."
Leigh Kotsilidis discussing her first book of poems, Hypotheticals.

Northern Poetry Review

April was the five-year mark for the online lit mag NPR, founded and edited by Alex Boyd. They've just updated the site with new material, including an interview with Giller-winner Johanna Skibsrud and poems by Linda Besner from her first book The Id Kid. Also on offer is Jacob McArthur Mooney's review of four chapbooks by Cactus Press. I was sent these titles last year, and enjoyed them, and fully intended to blog about them. Alas, life intervened. So I'm happy that NPR is giving the books some deserved attention (you can shop for them here). My favourite poets in the group were Marc di Saverio and Sarah Teitel (photo above). In fact, Teitel's poems so impressed me that I'm happy to announce her first book will be appearing with us in the very near future.

Greene Interview

Over at Northern Poetry Review, Carmelo Militano interviews Richard Greene on his GG-winning book, Boxing the Compass.

"Here are all these Canadian poets -- I'd say nearly half -- entertaining religious beliefs that they fear to talk about in poetry. It is like earlier centuries fearing to talk about sex in poetry. Even so, technique is learned from other poets, and if the religious themes are in disrepute, it is very hard to develop, in relative solitude, a technique for addressing them. It is something I think about a fair bit."

More here.