Gender Trouble

In a bid to correct the gender bias in his reading habits, Pasha Malla made sure half of the books he read in 2013 were by women. While he discovered novels he might otherwise have overlooked, the experiment left him with mixed feelings:

I don’t feel particularly better about myself having read 51 books by women. If the point of this project was to transcend numbers—to glean some understanding of a gender other than my own – I’m not sure how George Eliot’s Silas Marner, about a man, was a better selection than, say, Daisy Miller. (A master of human psychology like Henry James surely offers equally perceptive insights into any character, male or female.) In fact, my most revelatory experience of gender came reading Saul Bellow’s Herzog. The book’s particular flavour (“a revenge novel,” a friend of mine calls it) can be summed up here: “Women,” claims the titular character, “eat green salad and drink human blood.” All ironies aside, Herzog’s simplistic and hostile relationships with women felt cautionary: how blithely male resentment can extend beyond an ex-wife to half the people on earth! And isn’t reading most stimulating when we find ourselves not mollified by but in opposition to a writer and his ideas?

Sunday Poem

WHAT WE DID 

We chose a proper genre of night.
We embraced the bittery, the chocolatey.
We scraped a secret song with butter knives. 

We sawed the legs off chairs and gashed our seats.
We ate our memories in silent rage.
We searched for tiny birds in empty trees. 

We praised a pair of pants for seven days.
We set our trauma clocks quietly.
We embraced the lemon rind and marmalade. 

What else did we eat?
We ate all the soapstone sculptures.
We ate the elders with schnapps and black coffee. 

We ate the ivory letter opener.
We wondered at no warnings in the sky.
We double-locked the plastic cake server. 

We held destructed scarves and ties.
We ate a tiny bird we could not see.
We listened to piano wires cry. 

We read day-old bagels, silently.
We repressed bright memories into mirrors.
We daydreamed repeatedly, relentlessly. 

We sat, a row of subtle sudderers.
We held clandestine hissy fits.
We practiced ancient, sanctioned behaviours. 

We sat together in a wet soap dish.
We ate the funeral roll with open mouths.
We stood alone inside the alphabet. 

We tried our best not to cross ourselves out.
We taught our children how to sneeze.
We filled garbage bags with unspoken thoughts.

We stored away a useless ring of keys.
We fell asleep in garbage chutes.
We slept as if a tiny hive of bees. 

We bid our hats adieu, adieu.
We observed one meaningless thing a day.
We ate the people we once knew. 

We analyzed the dust inside the rain.
We ate the rules of proper mourning.
We counted all the garbage that remained. 

We sat alone in broken ice machines.
We waited for a box of wood to come.
We dressed quietly in anything. 

We found an empty garbage chute to plumb.
We fell asleep in abandoned dog bowls.
We tapped the white skin of a scarlet drum. 

We bound ourselves in shadows.
We crumbled cookie shards into our hair.
We burned a hole through what we didn’t know. 

We left our handprints on the walls of hell.
What else did we eat?
We practiced eating weiner schnitzel. 

We ate Atlantic salmon cured in bleach.
We unpacked harmless, morning fireworks.
We ate party sandwiches filled with cheese and grease. 

We ate twelve or thirteen socks.
We sealed our eyes with Saran Wrap.
We shared a suitcase of tattered prayer books. 

We reached for things beyond our grasp.
We grew superstitious.
We tried to make each other laugh. 

We said something kind, something vicious.
We organized a sympathy archive.
We attended to tedious business. 

We stared until we made our mirrors cry.
We raised ourselves for everyone to see.
We said hello, we said goodbye. 

We wore the same shoes aimlessly.
We walked a small parade around the world.
We passed the sunny corner where you used to be.

From What The World Said (Mansfield, 2013) by Jason Camlot

(Painting by Chris Flodberg)

Minor Epic

Declaring Virgil the "most inflated reputation in literary history," Amit Majmudar explores the areas in which he believes the Latin poet's Aeneid fails to measure up to the Greek epics he copied:

So we see that Virgil broke with Homer in two ways, and that it bit him both times. First, he improved on the Odyssey-pattern by having the jilted woman immolate herself; this was thoroughly successful, but it exerted intense power where it didn’t belong and created a break point, dividing the poem structurally. In his second break with Homer, Virgil inverted the Iliad-pattern, with Hector beating Achilles and the Trojans implicitly founding a city, instead of Achilles beating Hector and the Argives implicitly sacking a city. This second break was, manifestly, not an improvement. Virgil himself may have sensed this—after all, he did order his literary executors to destroy the Aeneid, although literary tradition assumes it was from a finicky Flaubertian dissatisfaction with minor points of diction and rhythm, invisible to anyone else. Overall, though, Virgil tried to make his epic out of sequential episodes, instead of episodes embedded in a single dramatic movement. Other Latin epic poets—Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus, among others—fell into the same architectural error. That sprawl and sweep is, contrary to what is commonly thought, antithetical to the classical epic, a secret of Homer’s power that Virgil failed to recognize, and hence failed to learn.

"Those Winter Sundays"

Robert Hayden comments on his 1962 poem, written in memory of his foster father:

It's a sad poem, and one I had to write, almost as an act of expiation. The last stanza—oh, it's full of regret. Many people have told me this poem expresses their own feelings exactly. Some have even wept when they've heard it as poetry readings I've given. It seems to speak to all people, as I certainly want my poems to do. For quite a while after I wrote it, I couldn't get through a public reading of this poem because of its emotional impact on me. It doesn't affect me so much now, unless I'm tired or depressed. It's in a great many anthologies, although nobody paid much attention to it at first.

Marianne Boruch zooms in on the poem's ending:

"Austere" has to have one of the most violently beautiful effects in English, distant and vulnerable at once, public and hidden, held upright by enormous pressure, inside and out. And here, its sound—its iambic lift—the second syllable stressed, adds a brief and expansive counter-rhythm. We hear in that both contraction and expansion. But it's "offices" here that compels, and is brilliant, a word going straight into ancient practice. I remember a young priest in my childhood parish at dawn, reading the matins from his Divine Office, walking the streets as he read, never looking up as we biked by to early Mass. Something vast, nearly incomprehensible looms up in that word. In Hayden's poem, it brings humility—what's been done and done again; one merely partakes of that. But nobility's there too—ditto, done and done, this time into tradition and so heavy, we no longer even know how to weigh it. The power of a single word can be staggering. And finding it, trying to figure out why it works—really why other choices do not—can take a long time and is the writer's most essential, brain-fracturing job.

Robert Pinsky discovered firsthand how popular the poem had become:

Certain poems were written about by many different people who wrote to the Favorite Poem Project. Perhaps the most striking instance was the large number of various, intense letters about this poem by Robert Hayden, the first African-American to hold the post that came to be called Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. The poem does pack remarkable power into its 14 lines. The cogency of phrases like "the chronic angers of that house" seems related to the wide appeal that brought letters from people of so many different ages, professions, regions, ethnicities. Maybe the partial rhyme with "dress" adds to the phrase's power: Certainly the poem demonstrates how like vowel and consonant sounds in an "unrhymed" poem can have tremendous effect. And the cold, ordinary word "offices" at the very end of the poem is like an icicle that touches the heart.

David Biespiel calls the poem a "heart-wrenching domestic masterpiece":

What it discovers is a synchronicity of sound that embodies the poem’s spirit of reconciliation. Listen to the K sounds: blueblack, cracked, ached, weekday, banked, thanked, wake, breaking, call, chronic. That percussive, consonant-cooked vocabulary is like a melodic map into how to read the poem, linking the fire, the season, the father, and his son. Then there’s what the poem defines, unspoken love. It begins with the father toward the son, when he makes the fire. Then, the unspoken love is returned, when the adult son asks, "What did I know, what did I know...?" The tone of that repetition—more statement than question—cuts from indifference to guilt to admiration. It’s a fast moment in the poem that blossoms into the last word, "offices," a metaphor that expresses the endurance required of long-term love, of manual labor, and of the official fatherly role. Yet it all begins with that quiet, understated opening line ("Sundays, too, my father got up early"), which defines Hayden’s initial memory, as well as bringing to mind the other unmentioned six days of the week—and for how many years?—when the father began each day in the cold darkness, to warm up the home for his still-dreaming child.

Sunday Poem

The Turnips
after bpNichol 

The turnips ooze a juice just visible on his chin.
Etiquette-bereft, the cad inturps the conversation I was in.
In the urn’s pit, ash accumulates: mortality’s pith.
A tin spur goads moans from the lover I lie with.
Poking the proxy doll with a rustpin makes for anguish.
Don’t stunrip the ne’er-do-wells. Just let ’em languish.
Pit urns fill with spit-out pits of fruit.
Baffling ritpuns offend the ruling brute.
Punstir the ticklish for a ribald effect.
A nut rips when the razor swipes. Your denim won’t protect.
On the suntrip, bronzed-up tourists tipple plonk.
Untrips are offered. The unship’s waiting at the dock.
Writhe and spin, rut and grunt among the scented sheets.
Runspit in thickets like a rabid boar in heat.
Pitnurs leave me stumped. From a small stump I orate.
Runt, sip that rancid wine. You’ll find it tastes of acetate.
Bail out the punt, sir, or the ferried souls will drown.
Your turn: sip the sugared venom, force it down.
The tip runs off on tipsy legs, leaving the servers broke.
Turps in turpish venues tell the filthiest of jokes.
            Spurtin’ depravity, he mounted the stump—and spoke—

From Water Damage (Mansfield, 2013) by Peter Norman 

The Importance Of Ugliness

Shane Rhodes argues that, in some cases, beauty can be dangerous:

If I have a worry here, it is that the quest for beauty in language, in art, in poetry so often over-rides the importance of ugliness in language, in art, in poetry. It is just as important to search out and study the ugliness (and, sometime, to look at the ugliness of what beautiful language can create) as it is to look for those instances of beauty. This is especially true when looking at issues like colonization, anti-indigenousness, and racism – there isn’t much beauty here, but there is a whole lot of ugliness. So often we are led on by ideas of beauty and deterred or stopped by ideas of ugliness and disgust – but it is important to think of how these terms can be politically motivated and used. Colonization has very real psychological manifestations in any settler society; one of these manifestations is an unwillingness in the settler to look realistically at the injustices of our histories and current actions in the name of settlement. In Canada, who wants to read the treaties? Who wants to read the Indian Act? Who wants to look at such blatant racism? All of these texts are ugly; they are ugly because they rub against the beautiful myths we have created of our just and peaceful society.

Negative Reviewing as Catharsis

Asa Boxer unpacks the ways in which a negative review might prove useful. The most important reason?

[H]ow it corroborates and articulates the feelings of certain readers. For those like myself, the moment of contact with a negative review with which one identifies can be at once a cathartic and inspiring aesthetic experience: it feels like one is no longer alone. This is especially positive for those who feel alienated from current writing trends and suspect that something mysterious and beyond their understanding is afoot, and who probably question their own sanity until they meet a kindred spirit in person or in print.