Cultivating Disaster

Michael Lista praises Joshua Mehigan's new book, Accepting the Disaster, for the way it "tames the chaos with technique":

Mehigan represents a vital alternative to the canard that the only way to faithfully represent the messiness of contemporary life is with messy writing, the pseudo-profundity of the self-indulgently obtuse, a pathologically American idée fixe that’s dominated the last hundred years of poetic thinking and can be traced from T.S. Eliot through Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery and so many MFA theses. “Because forethought and discretion rarely appear in my personal life,” Mehigan writes, “I like to cultivate them in my poems.” It’s precisely because Mehigan is so well acquainted with disaster and disorder that he records them so painstakingly and precisely, according them the memorability they deserve.

What is Perfect?

During a tête-à-tête with Adam Dickinson, Trillium-winner Souvankham Thammavongsa reveals some of the back-story to her poem "Perfect."

It took me a long time to write “Perfect.” Almost twenty years. I didn’t want it to be a confessional poem. Too easy. I didn’t want the emotional weight to carry the poem. Too easy. I didn’t want the event to be the point. Too easy and depressing. We read not because we want to feel guilty or terrible about our lives. I didn’t want to do that to a reader. It’s so narrow—it’s not what I hope for from literature or language.

For me, this poem is about what happens to the word perfect. What light does to the word perfect. As a title, it is the first thing we see. Perfect. What is perfect. We are in the dark about what is perfect here. We continue because we want to get to the part where things get better. We, as readers, hope for that. And it takes a long time before we see the word perfect again in the poem. By the time we get to it, we’ve been through the things the person in the poem has been through.

I started with the question, if you knew this would be your life, that this is what would happen to you, would you choose it if you could? The question is a hopeless one because we know you don’t get to choose like that. We don’t get to choose what has already taken place. This is where all the sadness takes place. It isn’t the event at all.

The people in the poem are in the dark about where their lives will go, what will happen to them, even the person who asks, “How’d you get perfect?” is in the dark but the person telling this story is not. She knows this moment in time means something. She knows what light she gets will be hers to use. Light as a tool, as knowledge, as understanding. 

The economy of the poem—the look of it, it’s dense with a lot of words, it’s visually heavy, it’s “rich” but what you read is actual poverty. It looks like a block of text and it blocks out light on the page. Not only do poverty and restriction form the structure of the book and the poem; they are also the very subject of this poem.

Throwing The Fight

Reviewing what he calls poptimism's "major text," Jason Guriel thinks Let’s Talk About Love—in which Carl Wilson undergoes a taste experiment and develops a grudging respect for Celine Dion's music—is too "overdetermined" to be trusted.

Even more predictable is a tendency to suddenly reverse course on an argument. Wilson is always doubling back, as if anticipating your objection; he’s always armed with yet another study, another counterargument. You shouldn’t enjoy that shot at Oprah Winfrey for long; several pages later, Wilson will call attention to his snobbiness, implicating your own. Nor should you entertain the thought that there’s something snobby in his anti-snobbery; Wilson will soon enough interview a fan who, well, has “a streak of snobbery in her anti-snobbery.” Nor should you be entirely shaken by his account of how sociology explains your taste; after burning up 10 pages on it, he confesses he only half-believes the stuff. The dead-ends and reversals wouldn’t be so annoying if one didn’t suspect he already had the destination in mind. In short, Wilson’s book could never have ended with the critic doubling down on his snobbery; the needs of his project demanded otherwise. A mere page after declaring, “Maybe if hating Celine Dion is wrong, I don’t want to be right,” he’s already wondering if he won’t find something “human” in Dion’s work after all. While a messily self-reflexive writer like David Foster Wallace truly wrestles with himself—with predilections, prejudices—Wilson bets on his fuzzy side, and throws the fight.

Language Absolutely Unliterary

In reviewing a collection of Robert Frost's savvy, cultivated letters, Michael Lista reminds us not to mistake the cliché of Frost as "a sensible, tender, humorous" poet for the hard-worn achievement of his poetry:

In this first volume of letters, we get to see how that plain-spoken sausage, for which Frost became so famous and misunderstood, gets made. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it turns out it’s an affected literary voice, nothing like Frost’s erudite, wide-referencing letters, which revel in multi-level puns and literary riddles as much as anything in Joyce. “In North of Boston you are to see me performing in a language absolutely unliterary,” Frost writes in December 1913. “What I would like is to get so I would never use a word or combination of words that I hadn’t heard used in running speech.” But since we find no evidence in the letters that Frost’s neighbours had the happy habit of speaking in masterful paragraphs of blank verse, or lived their lives, as Frost said of the poems in North of Boston, “in a form suggested by the eclogues of Virgil,” we should take him at his word that these unselfconscious colloquialisms are actually artificial, rehearsed performances.

Are Canadian Poets Publishing Too Much?

Michael Lista thinks so:

The interconnected system of publishers, granting bodies, magazines, reading series, etc. that, with the purest of intentions administers and disseminates what we call our literary culture, which by the numbers is as robust as it’s ever been, actively encourages, for its own survival, a writer’s worst attributes: vanity, assuredness, sophistry, mutual flattery, imprecision, inefficiency and an unselfconscious fluency that is the surest sign of a minor writer. The qualities that contribute to producing great work—skepticism, deliberation, patience—are not in the system’s interest. But this is Canada. Here individual achievement doesn’t matter as much as our ambient collective hum. We’re a country of collectivists, so it’s of a piece. To America’s Thomas Edison, whose light bulb couldn’t be more Promethean and singular, we politely answer with Alexander Graham Bell, whose invention is useless if you don’t have a friend.

Epoch of Likes and Follows

In his fourth—and final—column for The National Post, Jason Guriel recommends four collections of criticism that influenced The Pigheaded Soul. First up, The Portable Dorothy Parker:

A member of the Algonquin Round Table, around which New York’s wits famously assembled, Parker knew what we, in the Epoch of Likes and Follows, would like to forget: most of the art that wants our time is only going to waste it. Ruthless, maybe, but her devotion was to readers, not writers. “I tried, for my first duty is toward you…” she reports of one of her efforts to reckon with a book. “Unhappily, it was like counting those sheep over that fence; before I had listed the first hundred I was safely asleep.” Parker wakes you up.

Pileup of Talking Points

In his third excerpt from The Pigheaded Soul, Jason Guriel recalls some of his formative influences: 

My senior-year writing teacher—a gaunt, sharp woman—could muster no patience for the Beat poet who finds his utterances too inevitable to revise. This wasn’t “conservatism,” that label a conservative mind will pin on those it decides aren’t liberal enough; this was concern for language. Anyway, what’s more conservative than a rigorously regulated subculture of rebels – you could opt in any number of avant-gardists, pre- and post-Beat – for whom innovation amounts to the same old pileup of talking points?

Poetry As Escapism

In his second excerpt from The Pigheaded Soul, Jason Guriel wants us to stop "overburdening poems" with "the noble purpose of making some supposedly thoughtless reader think." He defends his favourite poets as being

far too intelligent to try to teach us anything, to condescend. Yes, their poems make us more alert, but the authors make no great claim to cracking open some mindless reader’s middlebrow and terraforming her consciousness. As with the best kind of “experimental” poets, the adjective is implicit. Entertainment, escapism—these are feats enough.

Low Hum of Hedging

In his first excerpt from The Pigheaded Soul, Jason Guriel shares his discomfort with the online world:

My brief stint as a paid blogger was fun for a time, and I’ve preserved some of the posts in my book. But it also permitted the young critic too much of the wrong kind of freedom: freedom to go on at length; freedom to qualify; freedom to moisten an otherwise wick-crisp phrase for fear it might inflame the comment stream; freedom to take the real-time responses of those kind enough to read one’s writing—and, by extension, to take one’s writing—too seriously. I gathered I was expected to set a tone: to stay on top of the comment stream by pouring into it enough courtesy to ensure the poisonous comments were merely parts per million. (Thank you, reader; may I have another?) But in the utopian interest of dialogue and community, I often made like the failing teacher who has to put up with a certain amount of petulance if he’s to keep the class moving along. What the former editor of Poetry magazine, Christian Wiman, says about teaching—“The chief difficulty is the sound of your own voice, the assuredness that inevitably creeps in, the sheer volume of talk that, after a few weeks, you feel flabbing around you like a body gone bad‚" is what I want to say about our endless, editorless, online adventure. Except that it’s not even “assuredness” that’s the real problem in the poetry world (flame wars, sparked by the self-assured, can be trusted to flame out); it’s the low hum of hedging, a commitment to consensus, that high-speed Internet encourages.

Should the Griffin Prize Get Rid Of The Canadian Category?

Richard Sanger says no:

Forcing us poor little ankle-skaters to dress-up and play with the bruisers in the big leagues may sound good but makes no sense. That’s because every poet I know, Canadian or otherwise, is already playing in the big leagues. To suggest anything else is to misunderstand the creative impulse. We already measure our work against the very best, irrespective of where those poems come from and when they were written, and we try to write poems of our own that stand up. On the eclectic, unsegregated bookshelves of our imagination, it’s always been survival of the fittest: Only the best poems have a place on these shelves, and the rest, no matter how worthy, fall by the wayside.

What Did Dante Invent?

Michael Lista tallies it up:

He invented conceptualism; the idea of his book, and how it’s executed, is so brilliant that it predates by some 700 years Kenneth Goldsmith’s formulation that the best books are so good you don’t need to read them. The Divine Comedy is unlike any other poem in that its architecture alone is enough to make it famous; three books, or canticles, in the three realms of the afterlife, each containing 33 poems, each poem of which is composed of interlocking three-line stanzas, all pointing to the perfection of the triune god’s design. He prefigures the defining feature of post-modernism, the comingling of the high and low. For centuries scandalized commentators didn’t know what to do with Dante, who could marry the classical and the contemporary, who would dare debase the epic form by writing it in a vulgar vernacular, and pay equal attention to the afterlives of both the Virgin Mary and his political enemies. He revels in gossip, the come-back imagined too late, High Fidelity curatorial taste-making, and the essential, divine judgment of The Voice and The Bachelorette.