Lahey on Lahey

Anita Lahey speaks to Fiddlehead magazine about her new book Spinning Side Kick. She also offers up her top ten Canadian poetry books of the last decade.

Sunday Poem

PICASSO'S RADIO

Picasso's radio played music

that no one else had even heard yet.

Sitting in Paris in 1911

he was already listening to Bob Dylan.

He knew the Rolling Stones by heart.

He would say to Georges Braque, "Georges,

there's this really neat group called the Eagles,"

but Braque was busy playing Bach

on classical clarinet. "Gertrude," Pablo would say,

"you'd love this record called Blonde on Blonde,"

but Stein would give him a stony stare

and turn a deaf ear. So Picasso would go

back to his studio there in Bateau Lavoir

and turn up Beggar's Banquet loud, until Juan Gris

banged on the ceiling. Alas, when he moved

to bourgeois quarters in Montparnasse,

Picasso left his radio behind. He always wanted

to find it again, to tune into Tina Turner,

but some unscrupulous second-hand dealer

has hoarded it away in his basement

where every single night he listens to paintings

the world will never see.

From Dunino (1989) by Stephen Scobie.

Verbatim

"It’s an unwillingness to go along with what can, when you step back from it and take a hard, fresh look at it, be seen as a brutal primaeval agreement (what sort of halfway-sensitive creature could have put, on behalf of all of us, his or her signature to this?) that this is the rhythm the world is going to move to: things will be seen and then will be lost to sight, words will be spoken but at once succumb to silence, beings will be born and die, light will grow and then fade, all these will go, they’re already gone, just now they were here but no more. Why should this be?"

Don Coles explains the obsession with time in his poems.

Sunday Poem

THE SURPLUS MAN

I am the one who has not been killed yet

at war, by earthquake or street accident.

What shall I do

with these years that wave before me

like the sea before the pelican?

After mailing the flower of my words

with letters and sympathy cards,

when my future's been etched

like a swan on a school blackboard

do I explain my dreams

with whispers and touches, like a blind man

or leave them to flow down the sides of my head

like glue down trees at the equator?

Let my windows usher in

a little breath from the forest!

I'm about to suffocate.

My lungs strain to escape my chest

like an orphan's eyes.

My voice dies off like the thunder's,

having no future generation to sing to

nor any old mouth to return to.

Hey, builders:

prop me up with a stone!

I crack like walls mixed by crooked contractors,

collapse like snow hills under the spring sun.

If one could change countries,

like dancers in nightclubs!

From Joy is Not My Profession (1994) by Muhammad al-Maghut, translated by John Asfour.

"Less is More in These Sparkling Stories"

Over at the Globe & Mail, Jim Bartley reviews Daniel Griffin's Stopping for Strangers :

It only takes a page or two to conclude that Daniel Griffin values precision – a precision not of meticulous detail, but of economy, of the extraneous shorn away until a vital core is reached: a core of character, of an exchange of words, of a scene, a story. He gets, as many a new writer does not, that the less an author says, the more the reader can enter, must enter, the process of imagining. Rather than being told what is, you collaborate in its discovery.

To listen to Daniel read the title story of his collection visit his website.

Irving Layton's Last Poem?

"I found this in Box 31 of the Layton collection at Concordia University in Montreal. A clutch of pages stapled together; multiple drafts of a poem Irving Layton began, but never completed, towards the end of his writing. An invocation to the muse who was abandoning him. Twenty-five lines on lined paper, in the cramped handwriting of his old age; both neat, and, paradoxically, difficult to decipher. It was dated, with a question mark, early in 1989. Less than four years, then, after I had filmed him happily scribbling poems amid the ruins in his beloved Greece, for my film Poet: Irving Layton Observed. Now in 2001, I was trolling the archives seeking visual material for a new documentary on the poet's life. What struck me immediately was that the power was still there, even as the poet felt it slipping away: "my scribbles are as pale as a watermark." And the voice. This is no self-pitying plaint. It is the poet standing up to his muse and speaking his mind the way the Biblical prophets he so admired stood up to their God. Jocular, prodding, the poem, even in its uncertain state, gives forth the same wounded majesty as those ruins among which Layton paced, mouthing verse, almost 20 years ago."

—Donald Winkler

_________________________________________________________________

THE POET'S INVOCATION TO HIS MUSE

by Irving Layton

My alter ego, my diabolical other Self

where are you? A whole month goes by,

yet not a single peep from you.

Let me have it straight! Did you grow careless

from too long service? Or was it the tremors of old age

made you spiteful and prankish. You gone

invoking your attendance

my scribbles are as pale as a watermark.

No fire in them, no punch. Return, make my brain

boil again. Make it seethe with the blood

of electrified hitmen and of gallant warriors

dying in an odious cause. How many sheets

must I blacken before you [set?] a premonitory fire

to make my Self [shudder?] with familiar joy.

I'm serious, not even Coleridge's famous ode

on despondency cheers me, nor Shelley's moan,

marvellous and eloquent, while the bay's waters

around him sparkle and dance.

What hope for that mortal so lost to gloom even

another's misery fails to restore his self-esteem

[to rectitude?] with one of life's vital lies or illusions.

My case is desperate. Haul your ass over here

pronto. Abandoned, I'll sit here forever

like a paralytic, like a just-invented Frankenstein

waiting for that first charge to shock him back to life.

(Translated by Donald Winkler, with help from Anna Pottier. Photo by Terry Brynes. Originally published in Books in Canada, March 2003. )

Sunday Poem

LEAVING THE ISLAND

We’ve all gone now, left the place to the sheep

and the gannet, the puffin and the wren.

For decades only a mailboat of whalebone and oak

came and went from here. Then the tourists

arrived to see if we were more than myth in the Outer

Hebrides. We sold them tweed and spotted

bird’s eggs, let them look in on prayer meetings, count

the stones in the walls we built to keep out the weather.

When we prayed it was for a cease

to things: the wind, the war, the plagues.

In the end, the land choked us out, carcasses

of sea birds and layers of peat moss turned to lead

the constant fog, the solitude, the slippery grass

by the cliff’s edge, that impossible winter of 1929.

We left our Bibles open and handfuls of oats on the floor.

Locked our doors behind us. From this vantage point

our home was just a sketch of land that shrank into the sea—

the island’s sharp crags impossible to understand.

This land, so angry and so peaceful now, without

us. The feral sheep bleat into the evening.

Nothing to bother them but old age and the wind

that made us all walk like bent trees.

From Global Poetry Anthology (2012) by Talya Rubin.

What Made Irving Layton so Unforgettable?

Kenneth Sherman captures it:

Layton’s teaching style was dramatic: a booming voice punctuated by insistent hand gestures. He had a restless intelligence and a wrestler’s physique, and he would stride about the classroom as if he were stalking an idea. In a writing class, Layton made you aware of poetry’s physicality — its pulses and cadences — and of the fact that poets write with their bodies. A typical Layton class included scholarly lecture, Talmudic-like question and answer, and bursts of guerrilla theatre. Once, addressing a lecture hall of bewildered undergraduates, Layton ran up and down the aisles, crying “You’re sheep! Wake up! Who chloroformed you?”

Winterset

Mark Callanan's Gift Horse keeps on giving. It's cracked the shortlist for the $10,000 2011 BMO Winterset Award. Winner is announced March 22.

Do It Without Guilt

Poets Are People Too

Jason Guriel catches us up on some recent novels featuring poets as protagonists (he's not a fan of the genre), and makes a plea to any novelist who wants to try it next:

We could probably use more representations of poets who aren’t lovable losers; who have enjoyed some success in areas outside of literature, such as medicine or insurance—poets for whom poetry is not the only obsession, not a means to revolution. We could do with more poets who, like T. S. Eliot, consider poetry a “supreme amusement”; more poets who, in taking poetry less seriously than, say, a visceral realist, just might wind up taking it more seriously. We could do with more poets who will assure us that they, too, dislike poetry. In general, we could stand to read about fewer adolescents, fewer failures, fewer white guys. We could stand to read about more cult figures—not the fetish objects of some avant-garde’s perpetual questing, but craftsmen, poets’ poets, inveterate scribblers in margins, on receipts.

A Casual Guy

In a long, penetrating review of Don Coles' Where We Might Have Been, David Godkin explores the strengths and weakness of Coles's style, which he defines as:

"a poetry that is relaxed, fluid and variable in the way that good prose is fluid and variable, a casualness that is indispensable to good conversation and absolutely central to that peculiarly Oxbridgean sensibility that unfolds from Coles’ longer episodic narratives. Chatty, charming, “offhand” as Margaret Atwood and others ardent fans have put it, Coles poems are not so much pressured from beneath by the urgency of what must be said as preempted by the impulse to charm and subtly provoke his readers."