What Poetry Makes Happen

Amanda Jernigan tries to set the record straight about Auden's famous line "poetry makes nothing happen":

Auden’s nothing is sort of like the “nobody” of the medieval monks who liked to joke about a hero, named Nobody, who existed before creation, who was greater than God. As Odysseus knew, when he introduced himself to the Cyclops as Nemo, Nobody, nothing has always been a good cover for something.

Then, too, it’s a question of emphasis: poetry makes nothing happen; which is not to say that plenty of things don’t happen as a result of poetry. For one thing, poetry turns a lot of people to writing poetry. And, finally: as others have pointed out (see, for instance, Don Share writing here), we tend to quote that Auden line out of context. It is in fact a preamble, capped not with a period but with a colon, which opens out onto the following:

…it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth

Why Does The Walrus Bother Publishing Poems?

Poetry Editor Michael Lista attempts an answer in his preface to a free ebook of the magazine's best poems:

Although The Walrus is known first and foremost for its journalism, it is also, strictly by the numbers, the largest publisher of poetry in Canada. But what’s in it for the reader who looks to the magazine for news of Canada and its place in the world? I’m tempted here to quote William Carlos Williams in a zealous moment: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack // of what is found there.” What is found there is the direct line to another human being, the raw data of personality and sensibility articulated through the sort of aesthetic decisions that led Emerson to write, “Man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.” A key component of our education about the world, and our ability to live peacefully in it, is an intimacy with someone else’s linguistic decision making, our other half. Yet the poems collected here also constitute what Pound would call “news that stays news,” reports filed from the foreign bureaus of individual minds that, unlike pieces of journalism, will never grow old or obsolete, but will stay as true and urgent as the day they were conceived. Nonetheless, it is a gamble, and maybe an impolite one, to appeal to readers’ humanity with the aim of encouraging them to read poetry. To shore up the odds, during my tenure as poetry editor I have followed a rule (which grew out of Pound’s injunction that poetry be at least as well written as prose) that the poems we run in The Walrus be at least as interesting as everything else in the magazine. They should be at least as good as Richard Poplak writing about sports, or Ron Graham writing about Michael Ignatieff; as nuanced and complicated and concise as Rachel Giese writing about bullying; as beautiful as Brian Morgan’s art direction.

How Foreign Is Foreign?

Stevie Howell pushes back on Stewart Cole's characterization of her Walrus prize short-listed poem “Rip Torn” as being an example of "cosmopolitanism in flashing lights":

The upshot is, as foreign as Ireland and England may seem, they are not internet-scoured metaphor-props, but core to who I am—closer to who I am than so much souvenir shop Canadiana. And if that’s not in my work, part of me would be lacking.

(Illustration by Danielle Bazinet.)

"The Buried Hatchet"

New poem by Jason Guriel.

"Return to Metcalfe Street"

A new poem by Nyla Matuk.

(Photo by iKEN2010.)

"What Was That Poem?"

Perhaps the most moving poem in David McGimpsey's new book Li'l Bastard (2011).

(Painting: "The Shadows of Beauty Lengthen" by Mary Harman)

Signal Poet Gets TV Show!

Just kidding -- but it's a start.

No Respect

Delighted to see Brian Busby's biography on John Glassco get some well-deserved praise from Stephen Henighan in The Walrus. But it's bizarre: you would never learn from this review -- as you certainly do from Busby's superlative book -- that Glassco is one of Canada's indispensable poets. There's a funny irony to arguing that "the best of Glassco’s work...remained hidden from the public eye" in a piece that reduces one of the very things "hidden from the public eye" -- namely Glassco's poetic achievements -- to a dozen words tacked on at the end. Worse, Henighan even gets that wrong. Glassco won the GG in 1971.