Domestic Poetry Exploded

Aptly describing it as a "collision of danger and decorum," Lorraine York is dazzled by Nyla Matuk's debut:

In Matuk’s Sumptuary Laws, the domestic is deeply infused with the bizarre. A dizzying array of metaphorical pyrotechnics adorns Matuk’s description of the banal. “Sunday Afternoon Croquet,” for instance, a poem about playing that most placid of domestic lawn games, becomes saturated with repressed chaos; the poet imagines herself bending over the ball, “elfin green bitchy lady” feeling “like a mad Roman emperor with a history of failures / at miniature golf”—a fabulously bathetic collision of the bizarre and the tame. For Matuk, this is life as we know it: the everyday suddenly disclosing its grand theatre. Her collisions of language and metaphor are so daring, the jumps between image and image so precipitous, that she provides, at the end of the volume, a gloss on some of the references. This is more than a paratextual glossary, though; the entries themselves refuse to follow the convention of explanatory material acting as a taming explanation. The most witty of these is the note explaining that her description of “Petit-four disciplinarians” refers to six- or seven-year-old bossy little girls: “Sometimes these girls are dressed in the colours of buttercream icing on petit-fours, but they are sometimes just little fucks.” Matuk’s poetic lexicon may be ornate, but it refuses the cloyingly sweet; here is sweet “feminine” domestic poetry exploded.

Sunday Poem

1959 

Launched on abracadabra, searching steamed rock
ruled by the lizards. Where we arrived it stunk
from extinction and exhale. One of our crew
whispered, We have landed on Venus. The navigator 

believed him and died from the burn in his lungs.
Our map predicted mountain ranges, chartreuse
lakes. Instead, hot quarries swallowed sunrise,
we kept time by quake strength and sulfur hallucination. 

Our instruments lost pace with the paramecia. The rust
was proof of oxygen. Still, we grieved for future
suffocations. Our vessel started as a notebook sketch
from a dream seized by stiff drinks. Escape muscles

calcified, reentry theories perished and the bones emerged
as decorative fossils. The dead machines, benign constellations
tainted each drop of our blood water. Amnesia became
magic. We dared believe we deserved the home we had.

From Everyone is CO2 (Wolsak & Wynne) by David James Brock 

The Long Game

To love poetry, argues Michael Hofmann, means reading less of it:  

I think poetry is always one or two poets away from extinction anyway. If it’s any comfort, it’s not a living tradition—it doesn’t depend on being passed from hand to hand. It could easily go underground for a couple of decades, or a couple of centuries, and then return. People disappear, or never really existed at all, and then come back—Propertius, Hölderlin, Dickinson, Büchner, Smart. Poetry is much more about remaking or realigning the past than it is about charting the contemporary scene. It’s a long game. Also, it’s not about extent, never about extent, not about numbers or range or choice. It’s not a supermarket. You can’t roam around, and read x on one day, and a the second, and b the third, not if you have taste and take it with you everywhere. It’s a condition of poetry that you can’t read everyone. What is it Lowell’s Harriet says— “You can’t love everyone—your heart won’t let you.” It’s about depth, and what you find in it. The question isn’t, Who would I like to read now for the first time? It’s, I have these six poets. I must have read them all a hundred times. They’re just about all I read—it’s years since I read anyone else. Which of them do I feel like reading for the hundred-and-first? Whose books do you wait for? That’s the question. Precious few.

On the Future of Poetry

From David Wheatley's Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave, 2014)

Indie Jeunesse

Michael Lista's pick for best lyrics of 2014? "Blue Boy" by Mac DeMarco:

Every generation gets the asshole musician it deserves. The baby boomers had too many to count, but let’s settle on the elliptical oracle of Bob Dylan that Pennebaker caught on film in 1965, whose mannered transcendentalism and moral pretensions, like his generation’s high-mindedness, would be made ridiculous by the Chevy ads and Christmas albums that were to follow. We, their children, have Mac DeMarco, Edmonton’s crudest emission since an oil pipeline. Drunken hipster nonpareil, this is the dude who once made an AIDS joke at Freddy Mercury’s expense—so ironic, bro! Over at Pitchfork, a cohort of aging, over-refreshed babies lapped it up.

So it came as a surprise when he titled his glorious 2014 record Salad Days after a line from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, headstone for the youthfully headstrong: “My salad days/ When I was green in judgment, cold in blood/ To say as I said then!” As Cleopatra apprehended the end of her youth, DeMarco realizes that the millennials’ skinny jeans—six years out from the financial crisis, and after so many PBRs—no longer fit. Future rock aficionados may look back on this record as the final, magnificent cresting wave of hipster, indie jeunesse. As DeMarco sings, over yacht rock for the yachtless generation: “Sweetheart, grow up.”

Check out the CBC page for other selections by authors, including Sean Michaels and Saleema Nawaz.

Jean Béliveau 1931-2014

By Crystal Béliveau

I knew Jean Béliveau long before I knew him. My brother and I recently pulled out an old black and white photo dating back to 1959 (I think it was 1959: cousins, correct me if I’m wrong). In it, Mom and Dad are sitting on a couch, with Dennis on Mom’s knee. Next to them, in all his athletic, Hollywood-handsome glory, is Jean Béliveau. They are all smiling of course, not in a stiff, photo-taking way but as though they were caught in the middle of a conversation. And Jean is looking every inch what he was: a hockey god.

It's amazing to me that, a few short years after winning his first Stanley Cup, Jean was sitting on a sofa on a farm in Saskatchewan paying a visit to his prairie relatives, many of whom he didn’t even know. I’m sure all of my aunts and uncles have their own version of that photo. It is the stuff of family legend.

I spent my high school years wearing number 4 in Jean’s honour, and running from my bedroom every time Dad shouted, “Jean’s on TV!” (He only did that with two subjects: Jean Béliveau and nature shows. “Chrissy, come see the fox!” and “Chrissy, come see Jean!” were the rallying calls of my youth.)

When I moved to Montreal in the mid-nineties, I sent a letter to Jean via the Molson Centre announcing that I was a second cousin from Saskatchewan, that my father was George and that my mother Marianne was coming to visit. Would he be so kind as to meet us for coffee?

Weeks later, as I was running out the door to sling popcorn at the Cinéma du Parc, the phone rang. It was Jean saying of course he remembered my parents, and extending an invitation to come for dinner. I was stunned. I kept the event a secret from my Mom and didn’t tell her where we were going when we headed out (in part because I didn’t want her to realize that the metro ride to Longueuil would involve us hurtling under the Saint Lawrence River in a tube: she hated the metro enough as it was).

I brought a bottle of dep wine (I didn’t know better then) and we spent the evening in their back yard gazebo listening to Jean and Elise tell stories of how they met and his early days in hockey. After dessert, Jean made a phone call. As planned, my brother Dennis answered and handed the phone to Dad. Jean said, “Hello George, how are you? Do you know who this is? It’s Jean Béliveau.” (Dad didn’t believe him at first, which was also kind of wonderful in its own way.) Jean went on to tell him who his dinner guests were, and back in Wolseley the next day, Dad became the star of coffee row.

That was the first of many gracious offers Jean extended over the years. When my brother Duane came to visit, Jean and Elise came to my humble Saint-Henri apartment for dinner and gave us their seats for the next game. (My brother pretty much started vibrating at that moment: my scalper tickets up in the nosebleed section couldn’t hold a candle to those). When my sister Colleen came with her husband and kids, Jean took the time to meet us for lunch at the Molson Centre. My nephew Nathan posted a photo from that day: he is wearing a Leafs jersey (yes, my sister married a Leafs fan) and Jean, smiling, has his hands planted firmly on his shoulders. Over the years, he sent autographed pictures to both Colleen and Colette to help raise money for their sons’ minor hockey teams. When my uncle Roger died last year, my cousin Mark asked for Jean’s number and was deeply comforted by the conversation he had with him.

Jean was that kind of man. He had a talent that made him legendary, and a humility that made him ours. Until his health started failing, he personally responded to every letter and phone call he ever got. I know, because he responded to mine, and I have been humbled by that ever since. Rest in peace, Jean. You made us all so proud.

Restaged Debate

Five years after the event, Richard Harrison's report on my "cage match" with Christian Bök is finally online.

As is almost always true of such staged debates, much was said. And much was left unspoken. Then we all went to the lobby for refreshments. It might have ended there. But between what was discussed and what was left unsaid that night, in the nature of the audience drawn to two poets whom many regard as antagonists, and from all that led up to the event—including Starnino’s Writer-in-Residency at Mount Royal and the publication of the second edition of Bök’s Eunoia—emerged a wide-ranging, deep and fascinating discussion about the nature of poetry and of the mind that writes it. What follows are the conclusions I’ve come to so far as a participant in a symposium spread out across the offices, hallways, bars, classrooms and various virtual spaces in the community created by the Cage Match itself.

It's a long essay, but well worth your time.