You Are Here

Stewart Cole is impressed by James Pollock's essays ("an erudite accounting of Canadian poetic identity in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries") and poems ("an agile command of prosody and rhetoric") but he pushes back against Pollock's notion of the “work of art per se”:

Let me make my position on this clear: there is no “work of art per se,” in the sense that “per se” means in itself and so implies that a work of art that can in any way be isolated from the social conditions of its creation and/or reception. Such a notion—also embodied in Pollock’s conception of poetry as “an autonomous technology for producing aesthetic pleasure”—is a bourgeois chimera.

Cole continues:

In other words, what qualifies for us as “delight, originality, and imagination,” or which aspects of “verbal sensitivity and dexterity” we are most attuned to as any given person in any given time is significantly shaped by the political, social, and otherwise material conditions that produce both us and the art we encounter. This is why the best argument in favour of formalist practice remains a social one: that such practice does justice to poetry’s social origins and orientation, linking us rhythmically and rhetorically to a shared past and giving shape to our aspirations for communal futures. This is also why the most compelling argument advanced by the ‘innovative’ school against such formalisms is also precisely social: that the old forms stand at odds with our modern social formations, that we must seek out new forms to reflect our societal disorientation. These two positions might best be thought of as the two ends of a continuum, somewhere along which—whether they know it or not—most poets today situate their practice.

James Pollock

James Pollock has what one of my uncles would have called, with a laughing shake of his head, a "horseshoe up his ass." With the ink barely dry on its pages, Sailing to Babylon—his debut—nabs a nomination for this year's Govenor General's Award for Poetry. It then catches the attention of Michael Lista (no mean feat) who, in the National Post, praises its "vision of an old world, freighted with history, and still able to astonish itself with the novelty of its recurrence." Next month, James will publish You Are Here, a fearless, brilliant book of criticism on Canadian poetry that will help drag the whole sorry spectacle into the 21st century. He reads for the Atwater Poetry Project this Thursday. Don't miss it.

Sunday Poem

NORTHWEST PASSAGE

after Cavafy

The Franklin Expedition, 1845-48

When you set out to find your Northwest Passage

and cross to an empty region of the map

with a headlong desire to know what lies beyond,

sailing the thundering ice-fields on the ocean,

feeling her power move you from below;

when all summer the sun’s hypnotic eye

won’t blink, and the season slowly passes, an endless

dream in which you’re forever diving into pools,

fame’s image forever rising up to meet you;

when the fall comes, at last, triumphantly,

and you enter Victoria’s narrow frozen Strait,

and your Terror and Erebus freeze in the crushing floes;

in that long winter night among the steeples

of jagged ice, and the infinite, empty plain of wind and snow,

when the sea refuses to be re-born in spring,

three winters pass without a thaw, and the men,

far from their wives and children, far from God,

are murdering one another over cards;

when blue gums, colic, paralysis of the wrists

come creeping indiscriminately among you;

and you leave the ships, and set out on the ice,

dragging the lifeboats behind, loaded

with mirrors and soap, slippers and clocks,

into the starlit body of the night,

with your terrible desire to know what lies beyond;

then, half-mad, snow blind, even then,

before you kill the ones who’ve drawn the fatal lots,

and take your ghastly communion in the snow,

may you stumble at last upon some band of Inuit

hauling their catch of seal across the ice,

and see how foolish you have been:

forcing your way by will across a land

that can’t be forced, but must be understood,

toward a passage just now breaking up within.

From Sailing to Babylon (2012) by James Pollock.

(Painting: Caspar David Friedrich, "The Wreck of the Hope.")