James Pollock has what one of my uncles would have called, with a laughing shake of his head, a "horseshoe up his ass." With the ink barely dry on its pages,
Sailing to Babylon—his debut—nabs a nomination for this year's
Govenor General's Award for Poetry. It then catches the attention of Michael Lista (no mean feat) who, in the
National Post,
praises its "vision of an old world, freighted with history, and still able to astonish itself with the novelty of its recurrence." Next month, James will publish
You Are Here, a fearless, brilliant book of criticism on Canadian poetry that will help drag the whole sorry spectacle into the 21st century. He reads for the
Atwater Poetry Project this Thursday. Don't miss it.
12 comments:
Horseshoes have nothing to do with it. :) Toiling for 20 years in near obscurity and believing deeply in the enterprise: "where else would I live?" (Mortgage) , and then, yes, bursting onto the scene, is more like it, albeit "romantic", ome of those real life stories that might be rejected as contrived if it appeared in fiction (which is of course where Carmine Starnino is goingwith this).
Of course, Colleen. I knew James back when! He deserves every bit of this. And the rest of us are lucky to have him.
I know.
:)
And I've misquoted him. It 's "my friends...say how do you...without my house where would I live " (Mortgage)
Those of us who have been toiling in near obscurity for close to 40 years are starting to get a wee bit exasperated with all the rockets going off every time someone new dismisses Canadian poetry as a "sorry spectacle" which only their generation is canny/elegant/tough/smart/cosmopolitan or whatever enough to reinvigorate.
I look forward to reading Mr Pollock's work. I do not look forward to the invidious comparisons it is is sure to elicit.
I see your point, Susan. And I'm sorry you feel exasperated. But it does seem a little grumpy to recommend a generation stop believing it can do things a better way. Isn't it good to have new ideas, new energy?
I don't believe in generations. I do, however, believe in the availability bias.
Fair enough, Zach. But the problem with the availability bias is that it doesn't seem to take into account that history also gives us examples of bias rooted in reality. Sometimes a group of contemporaries may be seeing things correctly—that what is "available" to them may, in fact, be works of true excellence. Here's Amit Majmudar arguing the point rather persuasively: http://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/10/now-or-never-the-writer-and-the-age/
I think there's a legit case to be made for the average quality of poetry being higher now than it's ever been in Canada. What I don't see is a markedly higher number of unforgettable poems than we've had in the past--even tho there are many more people writing and publishing than ever before. And this, to me, is all that really matters. When I hear it said that this generation is outperforming past generations, all it means to me is that their failures are more enjoyable than the failures of their forebears. Which is something, I suppose, but I think it's hasty to be calling this a golden age.
Let me assure Susan and Zach that You Are Here does not claim we're in a golden age (!) of poetry, or that there is no one in earlier generations who has demonstrated technical sophistication or wide reading. It does remark in passing that, as a whole, the generation of poets who started publishing books around 1990 is more technically sophisticated and cosmopolitan than the previous generation or two, as a whole. But I make an indignant case on behalf of Daryl Hine (1936-2012), who was nothing if not an exemplar of these virtues, and I bet all of us could name others without trouble. My real point is that the best poets of earlier generations have been too often neglected, while too many of their technically inept and ill-read contemporaries have been celebrated ad nauseum. Daryl Hine is my exhibit A for the former, and there are too many of the latter to contemplate. As for the current generation, as I say, it's not a matter of a golden age (sheesh!) but of an emerging sophistication that goes beyond a few isolated figures like Hine. The last essay in the book is an extended argument about what we could do with our sophistication to achieve something great.
I wouldn't have thought for a second that your book was making such a claim, Jim. What I would say is that Hine was no more an isolated figure than the best poets of any era, this one included; the best poets, by definition, stand out from their generation more than they reflect its common denominators. And sure, he hasn't got as much credit up here as he deserves, but he was given a MacArthur fellowship and he edited Poetry for years. He wasn't exactly toiling in unappreciated obscurity, he was just swimming in a bigger pond. His obscurity north of the border has as much to do with the non-porosity of that border as it does with fashion and aesthetics. Consider that poets like PK Page and Margaret Avison acquired considerable reputations. It kind of puts paid to the idea that Hine was ignored because he was technically sophisticated.
And what I would add is that the best poets only stand out rarely... This is why I'm leery of generalizations about cohorts of poets. It all seems quite relevant in the moment, but what's left after all the internecine squabbles and aesthetic manifestoes have evaporated is a small number of, yes, isolated poems.
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