Fighting Death with Excess

In a recent exchange with Michael Lista about his new collection, The Scarborough, Jason Guriel notices that, for a book with such a grim subject—one "trespassing on sacred ground," as Guriel puts it—the poems are "fizzing with style and formal energy." Lista explains that's not a coincidence.

One of my favourite moments in art, any art, period, of the last little while, was the final scene of this season’s finale of Mad Men, a show that I normally find too long on design and too short on art. Anyway (spoiler alert!), Bert Cooper has died while watching the moon landing and in the final moments of the show, his ghost returns to sing Don “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” replete with dancing girls and a soft shoe in socks. It was so beautifully human and stupid that I cried. It reminded me of a song from one of my favourite albums, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, the concept album about Anne Frank that I thought a lot about when I was writing The Scarborough; as the album builds towards its terrible finale in “Ghost,” Jeff Mangum sings: "I know that she will live forever / All goes on and on and on / And she goes /And now she knows she’ll never be afraid / To watch the morning paper blow / Into a hole where no one can escape." And then over the roaring reverb, a pipe organ and a bagpipe careen into a punk Barnum-and-Bailey Klezmer jig. It’s in moments like these, when death is met with a gaudy surplus of artistry, that you can see the fine membrane that separates art from religion, what Larkin called “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die,” something he could never quite bring himself to sneer at because he realized he’d been knitting one for himself his whole life—his poetry. I’m a fan of any art—any poetry—that tries to do that, too, marshal a decorous consolation against emptiness.

The Scarborough Trailer

Watch the book trailer for Michael Lista's new poetry collection, The Scarborough, out next month.

For background on the book, go here and here. Stay tuned for details about the launch.

Sunday Poem

HEART AS A BARGAINING CHIP: STORY OF A SMALL-TOWN GIRL 

Silly little lifespan only good for growing old. Record the facts,
she says: We swam the Thames. I am the only one to do it—girl
of thirty, flirting with the cabbie, say he looked like Goya, ate
me out beside the entrance of a Marks & Spencer, bobble−headed
Hawaiian eying from the dash. 

I was a teacher for a week—boys of thirteen diddling on while
I talked dirty about colonial history. Had enough? I grew up in a
weathered prom dress circa ’86, spent half a lifetime growing tits.
Sleeves are soaked in heart, sleeps are ever−wrapped in wanting
never to wake up. My sponsor is a monster.

Yoga course in Goa just to be; I had forgotten how to breathe.
These maps for hands, how many lines it takes to make my
psychic aunt insist I’ll live forever. Several thousand sleeps from
being human, chatting with a pint of amber. But I’m blond, I say.
Swear I’ll never suck that pint, that man again.

My gin is sleepy, says it needs to dance for money. I make big
boys buckle in the black light of a haunted hole, this blemished
stretch of Yonge Street. Fact: I am the kindest face to kick The
Canterbury Tales off your table. Don’t want to be your muse but
if I must, just know the record’s never real.

From Knife-Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis (ECW Press, 2013) by Robin Richardson

(Illustration by Caro To)

Underwriting The Present

In 2012, Emily M. Keeler wondered why Paul Bernardo's crimes keep being reprised in the form of essays, books and poetry:

Even though I’m a bit too young (and originally from a city too far away) to have first-hand memories of what it was like to live during the time when Bernardo was serially raping women across the GTA, or the time shortly after when he and his wife, Karla Homolka, tortured and murdered three teenaged girls—Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffy, and Kirsten French—there remains a lingering echo of that terror. The world may be a different place now, and Bernado is behind bars, but lately it seems like this two decades-old story is underwriting some aspect of the present.

Michael Lista, set to publish a poetry collection inspired by Bernardo, has always been quick to clarify his intentions in writing his poems:

I need to make an important distinction here: my new work does not intend “to cover” Bernardo. It’s quite the opposite; It is not about him. It’s more about us, the Canadian imagination, both at the time that Bernardo was committing his crimes, and now, twenty years on, its flaws and allergies. It’s about the twinge of guilt and terror that closes in around that part of our mind when we even mention his name. And I’m looking to see if there isn’t a sympathetic connection that I can represent aesthetically between the solidarity of silence that prevents a mimesis of what happened and the psychopathic personality itself, devoid of empathy (empathy, remember, forces us to feel our neighbour’s pain). It’s a book of poems that isn’t about Paul Bernardo...My interests are in what doesn’t make it into our—especially Canadian—history...Where there is no history, there is no longer an event; and so I suppose my job is to create an alternate event that includes the fact of its exclusion from history.

Libidinous Attention

Adam Thirlwell explores how Pier Paolo Pasolini's work as a filmmaker was driven by his poetry:

Everything he did, he did as a poet. He once argued that “the cinema is substantially and naturally poetic,” and then explained himself with typical bravura: “A cinema sequence and a sequence of a memory or of a dream—and not only that but things in themselves—are profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic, a human face photographed is poetic because physicity is poetic in itself . . . because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself.” An object, like a poem, is just a way for reality to express itself. That was Pasolini’s strange vision, and it allowed him not only his radical politics but also the detail of his thinking, the way the camera in Accattone so often pauses on his characters’ faces, in close-up, as if they’re removed from some Renaissance fresco. He once said that the minimal cinematic unit wasn’t in fact the shot but the objects inside a shot. And in his best poetry, the minimal unit isn’t the line so much as all the details contained in that line—the small utopian freedoms of his libidinous attention.

Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" read as a dramatic monologue

 You can check out the rest of actress Nina Milli's "Beyoncelogues" here.

Sunday Poem

NOTE FOUND IN A COPY OF MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 

Lesley says she’s going to write ya
                so I thought I’d say hello first!
I’m glad you two made up. You’re a great guy
                and Lesley deserves the best. Well gotta go!
I love Jacob! Bye—Robyn. 

Judging by the abrupt disappearance
               of highlighter, I’d guess
he gave up during Act Two. He? She?
               Did Bryan leave it here,
or was it never delivered?

Bryan,
              I did want to do
what we did last night! I just felt sick
              and like it would take all of my energy!
I did not do anything that I did not want to do!

Through the windows of the library
              the leaves shiver to the tune
of Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy.
              It all tastes of the jammy fingers
that last handled these headphones.

Everything we did I wanted to happen!
             You didn’t make me do anything!
If I didn’t want to do something
             or didn’t want you to do something
I would of said something to you about it!

It’s the moment when Helena pursues
            Demetrius into the forest.
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
            Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you. 

Evidence is emerging to suggest
            that Shakespeare’s plays
may have been written by a sexually liberal
            daughter of Jewish musicians.
Bryan, I love you and I don’t want you 

to feel like you raped me! In the film,
            they’re on bicycles,
and Calista Flockhart, perhaps surprisingly,
            holds her own.
I wonder if there’s a cafeteria on this floor.

You DIDN’T so I wish you wouldn’t feel that way!
            Barbara Johnson has an exceptional essay
on the usage of the second person address
            somewhere on these shelves.
I will not stay thy questions; let me go, 

Or if thou follow me, do not believe
           But I shall do thee mischief in the wood.
Finally, here comes the rain.
           Even inside, the smell of hot pavement
gives the Reading Room an erotic humidity. 

Have Akiko Suwanai’s recordings
           of the Fantasy sold better than others’
because of the cover photo of her, lounging
           with her luscious hair raining down?
You are a pretentious patronizing dickwad. 

Well, I have to go now and pay
            attention to Professor Roberts.
I Love You W/All My Heart!
            Her dotage now I do begin to pity.
Love Always, Lesley Anne Busch. 

I could give this to Mike Roberts
            who might call the police
or at least a student counselor.
            Not that it would change much.
Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex. 

How many wives have, on occasion,
            just lay back and let their men
get it over with? Probably all of them.
            How many men had the senses
to notice, and feel anger or guilt? 

Fare thee well, nymph; ere he do leave this grove
           Thou shalt fly him,
and he shall seek thy love.
           And which would have been worse for them,
losing the note, or having someone return it? 

Akiko Suwanai tears through the final runs of the Fantasy,
           her hands damp from the rain
that is peppering the library windows.
           Bottom, with his ass-head,
gropes his way toward the spell-bound queen.

From Complicity (McClelland & Stewart, 2014) by Adam Sol

Copyright (c) 2014 Adam Sol. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.