Sunday Poem

ROAD ENDING 

At the end of the road a hunter’s hut
boarded all summer, the fraying bush
backing against it, a ragged fringe
of beggar’s ticks, rust tassels, thorns,
and boulders pushed to the water’s edge
where the graders turned.
There was no one home. 

And no one in the water. Overhead
the white threads spidered from a jet
drifted across where the evening star
was not yet shining. 

What were the words I could not use,
the thoughts I could not think to say?
The white lake shook in the early dusk. 

Something was lost we were waiting for,
summer, perhaps, or snow.

By M. Travis Lane, from The Essential M. Travis Lane 

(ed. Shane Neilson, The Porcupine's Quill, 2015)

Sunday Poem

ASCHENBACH IN TORONTO

Every Wednesday she came by and
apologized like a schoolgirl
although she was not really late,
smiling and pushing back her long hair—

she had been reading Musil, or
Lessing, or, it could be, Mann, and
there might be some query about
the lecture of the day before, or

she would mention to him that moment
by the sea, on the beach at the Lido,
where the celebrated author is
hallucinating in his deck-chair, 

and by now they would be
undoing each other and
as their bodies came open
there would be only 

a minute or so left
for this, their mouths
pre-empted except for
slight and perfunctory 

syllables—
but still that image beckoned,
and still the little subdued slap
of the Adriatic mingled 

with the air-conditioning
so that even on the office couch, or
held up against some noticed space
when love was 

prompting her, she would see
what he had seen,
a kind of god, a stunning boy
on whom the sun paused 

turning to look back
from the curling shore, but
it meant nothing,
it was youth 

and she was impatient
with anyone who knew
so little. If she
could intercept 

that glance from the deck-chair,
oh, not to be seen by it but
to become it—
and at the thought of this, 

of pouring forth out of
that cache of mind, collecting
beach and sun and
stunning boy 

and returning inside to test these
against the thronged images
(think of it! always there, always
ardent for the light!) 

and teeming, stacked-up rhythms
of that severe, unswerving life,
why, she can hardly wait,
this is why she’s here, 

this is not Venice and
not exactly an aloof genius
either, but it’s the closest
she can get to 

things so boundless
she could spend her whole life
investigating them. As for him,
watching 

her dress and now the brief pause
and turn to look back towards him
from the door, he’s reminded of
something, a motion perhaps, 

some gesture, what is it, he wonders,
watching although she is gone,
he leans forward in his chair
by the sea.

From A Serious Call (Porcupine's Quill, 2015) by Don Coles

Sunday Poem

SLACK ACTION 

It goes through my mind like a train at night,
the train my father rode in the night, his mind
a train of thought far from where he rode. 

When I pull into the seniors' home I like to feel
the car drift in abeyance round the last corner,
another touch to come nearer, the braking slide 

into parking easements and an end. Forty-two
years he leapt among the tracks, nights, to cobble
things together, shuffling boxcars and flat cars, 

dealing their lengths part way into sidings—join
and hinge, muster and release—climbing the ladders
free of his uncouplings. It took some sorting out. 

He listened hard for the word come down
from the Dispatcher. Too heavy now for the staff,
he has to wait for the machine that will hoist him, 

strapped, over to his chair or back to bed again.
A sandbag, his sullen mass slumps into the lift
and rises sloppy and unresisting. He goes with it 

staring in disbelief. I am borne here. For us,
mother and wife are let go, the love-ties
grappled loose in unbroken entanglements, 

our new solitudes gathering and fanning out.
When the sliding door whispers open for me
—in hand his double-double and an apple fritter, 

unlooked-forward-to, like a pill that you take—
I enter with purpose but am halfway off again.
Our family is convergence and divergence both. 

I have a photograph of him in mind, a man
in his prime leaning out from the boxcar's ladder,
signalling ahead the slow recessions, the gaps 

and clearances, the thrown switches and coupler
knuckles ... ten feet and closing, five feet, good.
His grief looks poor on him. Plan was he'd be 

the first to go—with drinks and smokes, half by
his own wishing—and Mum's years would ease
ahead of him by whole decades. But after 

Alzheimer's and a kidney ache, her body still shining
with something fifty about it went off and left him
cajoling his clogged arteries past eighty and beyond. 

We never spoke of this, but I always imagined
those seemingly endless trains he assembled
in the night, a hundred cars and counting, 

how, when the engine pulls up a little
and the cars buckle forward in succession
but have not yet stopped before the hogger guns it, 

it must be that all the fastenings along
let up in turn and spread fresh gaps throughout.
Cars and clusters of cars at once go 

clutching and unclutching down their length.
And I try to picture how, the jolting instress
unravelling, their reciprocal momentums 

would meet and intermingle, the forward push
backing into slows, and the slows pulling off
pulling forward ahead of their kickbacks and jostles, 

and you would hear the whole thing down the line
at once parting and gathering, the entire train
getting on, undecided. But how too, if you really 

listened for it, there would be single cars hidden
in the midst, scudding alone, neither pushed
nor pulled, left gentled into hiatus, coasting free 

an instant in the long line's accordion folds'
uneasy breathing. A hovering out of waiting,
the glide getting on in the inertia, itself still moving. 

He comes to with a jolt. I take in my stride
his pantomimed 'Look who it is!' and we embrace,
our private journeys sallying up behind us 

in opposite directions, gently coupling. Not
a greeting or farewell, but a staying that is
neither between us. He keeps me close, and not 

to come undone, I tell him what I've been
thinking about the train. 'Slack action, it's called,'
he says, and lets his arms fall open around me.

From Slack Action (The Porcupine's Quill, 2013) by Jeffery Donaldson

Oatmeal, Not Manna

In his introduction to The Essential Earle Birney, Jim Johnstone makes the case that Birney is not only "one of the finest Canadian poets of the 20th century," but maybe one of the most restless.

In The Creative Writer (1966), a collection of lectures that Birney prepared for the CBC, the poet asserted: "Living art, like anything else, stays alive only by changing." His poetry reflects this statement—Birney made significant edits to many of his most canonized pieces throughout his career, despite criticism. Birney’s Selected Poems (1966) can be seen as something of a sea change in this regard: nearly every poem in the book was reformatted to remove punctuation, with the notable exception of "David." The grammatical and typographical changes that began in Selected Poems were refined further in The Collected Poems of Earle Birney (1975), and it’s from this point forward in Birney’s bibliography that the poems in this volume have been chosen. The transformation of Birney’s work in the 1960s and 1970s was accompanied by a reevaluation of his poetics. He addressed this in the preface to Ghost in the Wheels: Selected Poems (1977), when he wrote: "I should say at the start that I don’t any longer like the words ‘'poet,' 'poems,' etc. They’ve developed pretentious connotations. I prefer 'maker' and 'makings.' They mean the same but the texture’s plainer, oatmeal, not manna."

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.

Pollock Replies

Immensely gratified as I am by Stewart Cole's thoughtful and sensitive review, I'm puzzled by his critique on these points. On "the work of art per se": the whole thrust of the essay he quotes that phrase from ("The Art of Poetry") is to greatly expand the reach of my own thinking about poetry to include pragmatic, mimetic and performative values. Early in the essay I write that "to ignore all other values besides the aesthetic would be to miss a great deal of what a lot of poetry does." And by the end of the essay I say things like this: "[The] object [of truly great poetry] is ultimately the formation, and transformation, of the human self and community." Granted, I argue that aesthetic value must be central to any good theory of poetry. But my position is much broader than Cole gives me credit for here.

On the matter of our aesthetic sensitivities being affected by our material conditions: of course they are, but I'd argue that we shouldn't merely surrender to our own social conditioning; we should strive to overcome it. That's what it means to be a true cosmopolitan. As I say later in the same essay, "particular aesthetic values change over time: some eras and readers will especially value classical clarity and restraint, others romantic passion or intellectual challenge; but in our time it should be possible to value a wide range of aesthetic qualities, because we have the benefit of a vast literary history. I can value Lorca's fierce rhetorical passion and surreal imagery, and also Cavafy's classical restraint and clarity; nevertheless I can also value Lorca over some minor French surrealist and Cavafy over some dull author of versified history. It is not the poet's particular aesthetic values that should determine the critic's estimation of the poem, but the quality of the art."—James Pollock

Who Do You Think You Are?

James Pollock interviews himself on the nature of literary criticism:

Does the critic have an ethical responsibility?

The critic must be honest. He must say what he thinks. He must ignore the poet’s reputation, her relationship to himself or his friends, the prizes and honours she has won, her status in the literary establishment, not to mention his own career advancement, and anything else that threatens to dissuade him, and tell the truth about the poems. He has a responsibility to his readers, to the poet, to his self-respect, to the field of criticism and the art of poetry, to be an honest judge. Otherwise, he deceives his readers and the poet both, corrupts himself, and damages criticism and poetry within publishing range of his words. It is no trivial transgression. If he hasn’t the courage to be honest he should give up now before anyone else gets hurt.

(Illustration 'Two Heads" by Pierre Piech.)