Canadian Oresteia

Robert Moore praises Chad Campbell's debut Laws & Locks:

As family drama—the family as the source of a curse passed from generation to generation—Laws & Locks is a Canadian Oresteia, only without the laughs of the original. There is in the entire volume, so far as I can tell, no lapse into the humourous or even the vaguely ironic (Nabokov’s line from Speak, Memory, “In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much,” could easily have made it to the shortlist for this volume’s epigraph). It is a very dark book. Over the course of its progress through two centuries of Campbells, very little emotional or intellectual light mitigates the gloom of the book’s opening reminder that death is only a breath away or that Canada, for all its apparent promise to an immigrant, “was a thought/ that couldn’t stopper the dark/ rank water of a dark/ rank hold.”

Along with the consistency of shadow, neither the basic subject matter nor the point of view, tone, or essential scheme of techniques of this collection much varies. And this, I think, is one of its strengths, especially for a first book. Campbell isn’t about to be distracted from his solemn agenda by the merely arcane. (This is the advice he tacitly offers in “Lighthouse Beats” to poets whose tastes might run to the postmodern: “Too easy to write of oddities, catalogue curious things—/ mistake a peculiarity of vision for feeling.”) As a result of this discipline, Laws & Locks isn’t what so many debut collections tend to be: a potpourri of voices—of attitudes either struck or borrowed—from a poet who has yet to find his or her own. These poems, rather, read as if they sprang fully formed from the settled and accomplished brow of a mature, mid-career poet.

Atlantic Cannibalism

Mary Dalton celebrates Frank Barry's flesh-eating play, Wreckhouse, first performed in St. John's in 2002:

Bringing to bear on his creation a wide-ranging knowledge of modernist and contemporary European drama, Barry draws on Brecht and Beckett, among others, in creating a surreal world, a postindustrial wasteland inhabited by a small band of cannibals who survive by trapping stray tourists, dancing them through mockeries of the usual tourist rituals, and cooking them up at a "folk feastival." The premise is grim indeed, but the analysis is astute, and the language play is stunning. In addition to its other strengths, Wreckhouse captures the fizz and spit, the ragged energy, of Newfoundland speech. With Early Newfoundland Errors, a later radio play by Ed Riche,Wreckhouse casts a cold eye on the way we live now. It is at once a dazzlingly funny play, and one of the darkest works in the literature, as bitter a piece of social commentary as Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Christopher Bond's play Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

(Illustration by Alberto Elia Violante)

Losers

Derek Webster on the myth of "power" in the poetry world:

Here are things that deserve the word “power”: armies, missiles, accelerating cars, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, hydroelectric dams, prime ministers, rocket launches, black holes, and gamma rays. In the poetry world, much of what we call “power” is just rung envy in authors looking up the ladder. To the unpublished poet, magazine-poets have “power.” To the magazine-poet, those with books have “power.” Have you been asked to judge a contest? Then you must have “power.” Canadian poets will point south to their more celebrated American counterparts: they wield it. But even poets with multiple books will tell you it's the publishers who wield “real power.” Or is that the tastemakers at big-circulation newspapers, websites and magazines? Or the Canada Council, without whose support none of this vast nefarious apparatus of “power” could exist? It’s hard to keep track of all the power-lunching people with a finger in the pie. But for the word “power” to be meaningful, it helps if there’s something to lose, some counterbalancing, non-power position that shows a demonstrable drop-off or significant opportunity that someone has lost by not having, or not being favoured, by “power.” And yet for every contest winner or hired professor, there are dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of losers; and for every annual new winner, thousands of losers remain the same. Suddenly it’s very hard to tell who is winning from who is losing, because everyone is losing. Among writers, powerlessness is the general state of being. All of us are losing, almost all of the time. Back when Jon Stewart was an up-and-coming comedian in the early 1990s, half a dozen years before the success of The Daily Show, he got invited to do his comedy routine on The David Letterman Show. He was ecstatic: this was his big break! On the fast track to success! After the show, when the adrenaline wore off, back in his hole-in-the-wall illegal sublet, he realized nothing had changed. Same person, same problems, powerless as before. If Letterman didn’t change Jon Stewart, imagine how powerless a Canadian poet remains, post-publication. We are Pluto, orbiting a distant, shining sun. We aren’t even a planet anymore.

(Illustration by Guy Billout)

Whitman's Project

Lawrence Kramer believes Walt Whitman was wrong to absorb his stand-alone collection Drum Taps—a raw look at the U.S. Civil War— into his ground-breaking opus Leaves of Grass. Reviewing Kramer's reissue of the lost collection, Jack Hanson disagrees:

Perhaps the cause for the new-found solemnity is not a deflation of the spirit, but rather the emergence of a more complex poetic landscape in Whitman’s oeuvre that is deeper, more coherent, and even more inclusive than many champions of his work realize. In this scenario, Whitman’s rearrangement of Drum Taps, and his inclusion of it in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass, is no denial of the darkness, but instead an embrace of it as an essential part of his poetic project.

Hating the Haters

When Jason Guriel tweeted his unhappiness with the poetry reviews on Slate, Jonathan Farmer, the site's poetry reviewer, took notice. The result? A utterly fascinating—and pointedly diplomatic—exchange on the nature of reviewing:

Guriel:

None of your reviews, in and of themselves, are particularly egregious. As one-offs, they are clear and articulate, with stylish turns of phrase. But in the context of Slate – a magazine I go to for lively, feisty prose – your reviews strike me as, to quote the Tweet, "conspicuously safe," especially in the aggregate. You like a lot, but hate very little. When you write, "It's hard to resist, but it's also a stretch, this sense that if we can keep other people from loving what they love, we can get back to – or on to – something worthy of us, at last," I'm put on red alert and in mind of recent the debate about smarm, snark’s antimatter. Who's keeping anyone from loving what they want to love? Critics who steer me away from the bad (by acknowledging it) and towards the good are, in fact, teaching me how to love. In other words: don't hate the haters.

Farmer:

I'm not sure I can think of any examples of a review that feels legitimately skeptical to me, though I'd be very curious to read one. To expand on a point I made in an earlier email: I think there are all kinds of ways in which a poem can create value for someone, and very few of them do me or anyone else any harm. There are plenty of people who love a style of poetry that seems, to me, excruciatingly unambitious and aurally inert. And yet there are these large (at least by poetry standards) communities of people who are deeply invested in this kind of poetry. Are they deluded, ignorant, inferior? Maybe. Or more likely their needs are just different from mine. Either way, I think any attempt to say, publicly, that this has no value would have to reckon with the fact that so many people value it.