Sunday Poem

SUFFER THE LITTLE ONES

Bring on that horizon with its filmic infinity.

Let us not speak of one sparrow, 

for there are always at least two or three, and if I see one, 

feather-tarnished and head slumped, 

I infer the logic of its fall a posteriori. 

I saw my father falling but could not catch him, 

the tubes and the breathing mask sustaining 

and draining life from him, an arrhythmia words 

cannot have. I understand the original sin of words. 

Each day I write out my punishment on a blackboard: 

chalk and the taste of chalk and the taste of ashes, eat, for this is my bread. 

I understand this in concreto and in individuo, for inanimate is the compass 

and its measure, one leg in love and the other in argument, so I travel. 

Where are you, father, ideal of the circle and the fixed point? 

I’m leaving the city of your birth, pushpin on a map, 

and I am driving to the periphery on a long straight road. 

To either side canola and its indescribable yellow,

butter and eggs and boyhood, sunlight through a magnifying glass,

the incandescence just before the paper burns, the ant curls into its crisp inferno. 

There is nothing but pavement and canola and beyond that there is nothing 

but the limits of nothing receding into the nothing beyond that. 

Though why would I think of nothing when everything is before me 

on a dinner plate, flowering, blossoming, burgeoning—I sing to the blossoms 

and they sing again a second verse. We sing for what it comes down to,
that the flowering of yellow embellishes reproduction. 

Or so the philosopher says: organon and dialectic and the earth’s fragile soil. 

How do we plant ourselves in the thick earth?

We do not, for we are condemned to movement, to walking, to naming the things of the earth. 

But I’m not walking, I’m driving, both hands on the wheel. 

In the fields someone has named names: Canadian Oil, transgenic. 

I am arrested, for they are damned beautiful, each flower a fleck of glory.

There is a Japanese song for children in praise of canola. 

A friend of my father’s sang it to me once.

From The Critique of Pure Reason (Frog Hollow, 2013) by Ross Leckie

Michael Lista vs Jan Zwicky: Reax II

Emily M. Keeler:

The snarling and gnarling and high-flying literary references. The deft punches and blocks, the brutal elegance of this dance of impassioned jabs and jeers. For me, at least, this is one of the joys of great criticism, even at its most negative. At its best you get to watch fine minds sharpening themselves on the world. What could be more thrilling?

Heather Jessup:

I am left wondering what is wrong with Jan Zwicky’s idea that when reviewing we listen. What is wrong with her suggestion that “we give over our attention fully to the other, that we stop worrying about who’s noticing us, that we let the ego go”? We make better lovers when we listen. Isn’t the most mind-blowing sex had when we aren’t worried about what we look like naked or what others will think hearing our pleasure from the open fire-escape window? What I have heard from listening to Zwicky’s essay is not to keep my mouth shut, but to endeavour to find genuine delight in the texture and impulse of the words before me.

Ross Leckie:

I know all language is rhetoric and that I have deployed a variety of stratagems in my own commentary. I also realize that it is my temperament to prefer informative and analytic reviews to scorched earth polemics. I will still admire Michael Lista when he writes a positive review. When he writes one such as the one of Bruce Taylor, he is generous, intelligent, thoughtful, insightful, and unabashedly joyous. And we need more of that in our poetry reviews.

Sina Queyras:

To be fair, it seems to me that at the core of Mr. Lista's original piece there was a good question: why is Zwicky suggesting silence to women at a time, and in a space, set up to encourage women to speak? This point comes up, but it seems to me that ultimately it's used as a shield to bring up, once again, an old argument taken up by a coterie of poets over the years; an argument I find a diversion and unhelpful, the argument for the negative review. Why? Because who on earth doesn't want to see truth in reviewing? Who on earth doesn't want the best for our literature? Who on earth wants a review culture of gloss and back patting? Of lies? Who wants nice and empty? Being nice serves no one.

CDNPoetsPettingCats:

Would kill for a conciliatory cat-petting photo session between Michael Lista & Jan Zwicky.

Warren Heti:

There is a prejudice, in this culture, and especially in the institution of the university, that understanding *requires* criticism; and so we like to teach something that we call "critical thinking." And I hasten to affirm the usefulness of such thinking! It can be indispensable, for instance, in redirecting attention to thoughtless reflexes of oppression. But it becomes destructive when it is mixed with the assumption that it is a universal instrument —when it becomes an addiction. Many things can be more fairly, more clearly understood, as Rilke says, by love.

Stephen Marche:

The Zwicky piece is at least an open defence of the anodyne which has always been Canlit's unexpressed wish and curse.