Noblesse Oblige

The Spring 2015 issue of CNQ includes a deeply considered, hard-hitting 12,000-word essay by Alex Good (not yet online) on Canlit's ruling gerontocracy. He argues, among other things, that Canada's worship of its literary establishment—the hard-won creation of millions of dollars in grants and a colluding academic industry—is crushing the ability of interesting new careers to properly take root. The essay begins with a description of Alice Munro's decision to pull out of the 2009 Giller prize—an act, Good goes on to explain, that should have given us serious pause.

As Canada’s literary award season started to gear up in the fall of 2009, a polite bombshell was dropped on the media oddsmakers. Alice Munro, widely recognized as not just one of Canada’s top authors but as one of the greatest writers working in the English language (she had already won the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, and in 2013 would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), withdrew her new collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, from consideration for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize. She had already taken home the Giller twice, and the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction three times, and, it seemed, had had enough of awards.

Such a withdrawal was not without precedent. Both Munro and Margaret Atwood had previously removed their books from Giller consideration, but that was because they were also serving on the jury that year (only a slight conflict of interest, given the history of prize). The reason Munro gave for pulling out of the contest in 2009, however, was noteworthy. “Her reason is that she has won twice and would like to leave the field to younger writers,” her publisher explained.

Munro’s decision was applauded in the media for its generosity, and understandably so. But her statement also dramatically laid bare the thinness of the field she was leaving open. Meryl Streep found herself nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role in the film Julie and Julia in 2009, despite having already received 15 Academy Award nominations, more than any other actor in history (she would win for the third time in 2012). Should she have withdrawn her name from consideration in order to leave the Oscars open to younger talent? That would not have gone down quite so well. And yet in the run-up to the prize that had established itself (at no small expense) as Canada’s most prestigious literary award, Munro’s act of noblesse oblige was simply accepted for what it was: a recognition of the foregone conclusion that with her in the race, no younger Canadian writer (and, at 78 years old, the field of “younger writers” was rather large), would have had much of a chance. The winner’s name would, in turn, forever have an asterisk beside it, like a baseball record from the steroid era.  

Sunday Poem

SEX LIVES OF LEOPARD SLUGS 

Drawn by a scent,
a body without bone—
move with the ease of silk. 

Upward, slugs seek
an overhang. 

Hermaphrodite contortionists
spin on a rope of mucous.
Entwined, dangling aerialists in courtship. 

The intrusive mind, endless swing
as if overtaken by a current.
Optical tentacles, skirt and mouth,
fringe against foot, press
in a knot that spins. 

The penis is in the slug’s head:
they both evert a phallus and tangle.
It can take hours
to unwind the appendages.
They drop like a seed
to its place on the earth.

From Proof (DC Books, 2014) by Larissa Andrusyshyn

Total Hedonist

Steven Beattie gets serious about the seriousness that enfeebles a great deal of Canadian literature:

The books we tend to elevate in this country are ones with subject matter that is intended to educate rather than entertain, and the dominant tone is almost painfully sombre. Which has never made sense to me. Canadians are great at being funny: why is it we seem so reluctant to embrace humour in our literature? Why do we assume that just because a book happens to be funny, it must therefore lack serious intent?

I shy away from literature that is more self-consciously good for you than simply good. That is, if the primary intent in a novel is to teach the reader some kind of moral lesson or to convey a message about, say, tolerance or acceptance, I tend to tune out. That is the job of an essayist, a teacher, a polemicist, or a priest, not a novelist. The novelist should be primarily concerned with story and technique, not the importance of the theme or the potential for improvement in readers. (If this happens as well, so much the better, but it should never be the foundational reason for telling a story.)

There also seems to be an idea afoot—still—that books should be edifying, but not necessarily enjoyable. Where did that idea come from? I am a total hedonist in this regard: when I read, I want to derive pleasure from the experience, not be preached to or lectured at. Why bother reading—fiction, at least—if it isn’t enjoyable? We spend so much time lamenting the fact that young people don’t read anymore, then we try to force-feed them the most self-consciously upright, moralistic stuff on the assumption that it’s good for them. No wonder they run screaming in the opposite direction.

Verbatim

"Give me Tony Hoagland or Brenda Shaughnessy or David Berman. Give me a story. Don’t draw a picture of a bullet using only vowels and then tell me it’s a poem. That experimental shit is for grad students and grants. I want poems to make me laugh then break my heart, borrowing a phrase from Donald Bartheleme."

Mike Spry on what he looks for in poetry. 

Hear It Sing

Kevin McNeilly reports on Stephen Burt's recent lecture at UBC called “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Place.”

He concentrated on the work of two key poets, for him: C. D. Wright and Mary Dalton. Quoting from Wright’s “Ozark Odes”—“Maybe you have to be from here to hear it sing”—Burt developed the homonymy of here and hear to suggest that Wright’s poems generate the textures and particularities of place apophastically, allowing the reader access through lyric attention, through the melopoeic richness of her geographically precise diction, to a phenomenologically rich encounter with that particularity. You hear the place, you sense it, palpably, in Wright’s words, despite and even because of her skeptical refusal to claim communicative success. The withdrawing “melt” of her language, in other words, is also recombinant and evocative, a plenitude. Burt gestured at Elise Partridge’s poem “Dislocations” (from Chameleon Hours, 2010 version) which also presents a “hybrid” form of lyric apophasis, refusing to lay claim to any naïve or grandiose transcendence while also, at a moment of surprising intensity, discovering how poetic intelligence still fuses to its descriptive objects, as “you feel your strengths intermingling.” One of the pleasures of Elise Partridge’s poetry, Burt said, is that its “attention to place does not preclude migration from one place to another,” and that some of her best work inheres in those transitions and intermediations. He concluded his talk with an investigation of some of the poetry of Mary Dalton. He was especially taken with how human geography and dialect words, in her poems, “imply the physical geography that the words produce.” He focused on the seductive estrangements of encountering the moments when she seemed to open her Newfoundland word-hoard. “Maybe you don’t have to be from there,” he concluded, “to hear it sing.”

School of Outsiderism

While finishing up edits on an absurdly overdue book of essays by Michael Harris, I came across, in an interview he gave Sonja Skarstedt in 1990, a pretty decent definition of the Signal Editions aesthetic.

I have always been attracted to the writing of so-called “outsiders.” Which is not to say “experimentalists” or whatever, although those are partly included—but people whose voices tend to be somewhat solitary or unique. I have great difficulty with “schools”—the school-oriented poets…that is to say “language” or “sound” or “concrete” poets or whatever kind of group of poets. Because I find that the truely interesting sensibilities come from people who have a unique vision of things and so they’re—I mean, my feeling is that there isn’t any particular “voice” that Signal has—there are a range of poetries written by people who have something unique to say. Or a unique way of saying it. And that is what has always interested me about editing: finding those particular voices of people who have worked something out—one thing, or one way of looking at things.

(Photo by Terence Byrnes)

Sunday Poem

GHOSTS: A RUINED VILLANELLE 

As if I have to watch you
A thousand times a day
Moving away from me, moving away from me, moving away 

Construction workers in bright vests, grey
Boots, hard hats in orange, white, blue
And every one of them is who 

You were—a young man—new
Dreams in his speech, all his movements, play
Moving away from me, moving away from me, moving away 

Putting in the hard hours, taking home his small pay,
Slow to admit he's still uncertain what to do
And every one of them is who 

You felt and didn't feel yourself to be: crude,
Beautiful, beyond whatever they could say
Yes, every one (every last one) of them is you
Moving away from me, moving away from me, moving away

From Designated Mourner (ECW Press, 2014) by Catherine Owen

("X-Men at Union" by Stephen Andrews)