Sunday Poem

THE MYTH OF ORPHEUS 

And I came to in a room with a draft
that issued from beneath a swinging door,
my head plugged up like a sink stuffed
with months of shed hair,
shaving stubble, other things
that thought to disappear. 

And the covers were bunched
at my waist like a marble effigy
of Christ newly sprung from the cross,
unveiling an inch of midriff,
my navel, which in the hospital light
looked like a wound from a hollow-point. 

And the old man in a nearby bed
kept dying. The monitor would shriek
its air-raid warning and he would die
and come back. That was his trick.
He did it and did it. The slap-slap
of the nurses’ soles was deliberate

applause. Then he left for good.
My wife said that when I was dead,
or during my death, she paced the garden
with my jacket on, cupping votive flames
to cigarettes. She killed each
match with a flick of her wrist, 

then laid the burnt corpses to rest
in a packet scored with scratches
from matchstick heads that sought
to light the way, and did, and died.
Tendrils of smoke grew into the sky
as vines climbing from tomblike shade.

She stood, then, and helped me to my feet,
led me down the corridor
to find a cup of tea—past an orderly
who wheeled an assemblage
of bed, old woman, and IV—
not looking back to see if I was there.

From Earth and Heaven: An Anthology of Myth Poetry (eds. Amanda Jernigan and Evan Jones, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2015) by Mark Callanan.  

Myth Makers

For Amanda Jernigan, reports of mythopoetry's demise have been exaggerated. She singles out Mark Callanan's mermaid poems as an example of some of the broad new directions the movement is taking:

Insofar as myth is simply the narrative element in literature, the story of mythopoetry is the story of poets’ fascination with story itself, from classical accounts of gods and monsters, to the genesis stories of science and religion, to literary narratives, to pop-culture anecdotes. (Macpherson calls myth, very broadly, ‘any element in literature that has the effect of enlarging a work’s scope beyond the merely descriptive’.)

She also makes a fascinating point about how lyric poetry may, in part, be responsible for the renewed interest in myth:

But lyric poems—contemporary, written-down lyric poems—retain their fascination with narrative. And it is perhaps precisely at the point that poets move away from the longer forms we associate with epic, and toward the shorter, lyric modes, that myths in the sense of canonical stories, stories recognised within a culture by certain basic and recurring elements, become most useful to poets: because this kind of story can be referenced in a phrase, a word.

Jernigan, however, quibbles with a line from Michael Lista’s review of her recent book, and goes on to explain why he doesn’t get contemporary poets incorporating myth in their poetry. This is an odd comment, since Lista does incorporate myth in his poetry. In fact, The Scarborough’s power comes almost entirely from the perspective-altering use of the Orpheus story, for example. More than that, I would argue that Lista’s book might even show us a way past Jernigan’s fear of mythopoets being tagged as “appropriators.” Lista doesn’t practice costumey adapations or new-twist translations or skillful rehashings. Instead, myths become a re-seeing—they enter his metaphorical idiom, his line-making, his sense of self. To borrow from Eliot, Lista becomes the catalyst in the reaction that changes the myths that feed him.

Mom Poems

Amanda Jernigan shares her thoughts about motherhood as an inspiration:

I have a two-year-old, and another child on the way. Given the proliferation of mombooks on the market, you might think motherhood an exhausted subject—for books, if not for poetry. But if you think about the poems that have come down to us in English, the great body of them are written by men (in the fifth ed. of The Norton Anthology of Poetry—the table of contents of which represents decades of scholarly excavation, to retrieve the works of female poets—still only a fifth of the poems are by women). This is not to say there have not been great poems of motherhood, written by both men and women. But I feel that there are many unexplored possibilities here, still, both thematic and formal. (It is tempting to say, ‘The great poem of motherhood has yet to be written.’ But that’s really just a pep-talk to myself. And, lately I’ve been wondering if in fact the great poem of motherhood has been written, and it’s Janet Lewis’s ‘A Lullaby’.) I was reading recently Dan Chiasson’s review of new work by the American poet Rachel Zucker, in The New Yorker. He talks about her work as that rare thing, a poetry of motherhood that gives the effect of having been actually ‘written … under the conditions it describes.’ I’m still not often able to write under the conditions of early motherhood, all-consuming as it is: there just isn’t the time to work up an idea, often, even when the idea is there. Which often, it isn’t: so much of early motherhood is averbal. One tends to think in ways that are other than linguistic. But, then, great poems are made as much out of silence as they are out of speech, and I tell myself that the way to new poems is to immerse myself more deeply in this seeming interruption, rather than to bridle at it.

(Photograph by John Haney.) 

What Poetry Makes Happen

Amanda Jernigan tries to set the record straight about Auden's famous line "poetry makes nothing happen":

Auden’s nothing is sort of like the “nobody” of the medieval monks who liked to joke about a hero, named Nobody, who existed before creation, who was greater than God. As Odysseus knew, when he introduced himself to the Cyclops as Nemo, Nobody, nothing has always been a good cover for something.

Then, too, it’s a question of emphasis: poetry makes nothing happen; which is not to say that plenty of things don’t happen as a result of poetry. For one thing, poetry turns a lot of people to writing poetry. And, finally: as others have pointed out (see, for instance, Don Share writing here), we tend to quote that Auden line out of context. It is in fact a preamble, capped not with a period but with a colon, which opens out onto the following:

…it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth

Ancient and Effective

Amanda Jernigan mounts a defense of rhyme:

Somebody-or-other called rhyme "that ancient goddess of happy coincidence," and I like that very much — but rhyme is also closely associated with another ancient goddess: Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. In this age of digitization, it is easy to forget that the real business of living is not to school computers but to school brains — "to school an intelligence and make it a soul," as Keats put it. So what is needed are not technologies that make things memorable to computers but technologies that make them memorable to human beings. Rhyme is one such technology. Metre is another. Ancient and effective, both.

Sunday Poem

CLEARCUT 

It pleases us to think the sun
redeems the logging roads with cane,
with high cicadan orisons,
with fern and black-eyed Susan. 

Picking our way amid the slash
we say blackberry rosaries,
we finger their knotted beadwork, one
for the bucket one for me,
as in he loves me not he loves me. 

Watching where we eat our prayers
the trees themselves might pity us.
When autumn comes they lose their leaves
by accident, deciduous.

From All the Daylight Hours (Cormorant, 2013) by Amanda Jernigan.

(Painting by Paul Saari)

Dark Horse

I've put together a small selection of Canadian poets for the Autumn/Winter 2012 number of the excellent Scottish-American literary magazine The Dark Horse. I first heard of The Dark Horse in 1999 when, during a fellowship at the Hawthornden Castle, I paid Stewart Conn an afternoon visit at his home in Edinburgh. Just as I was about to leave, Stewart pressed a copy of the journal into my hands, and encouraged me to send them poems. I never did, but I finally meet the editor, Gerry Cambridge, at the West Chester Poetry Conference in 2010. I was there with Robyn Sarah, Bruce Taylor and Molly Peacock for a panel on Canadian poetry.  At one point during the conference, Gerry began distributing recent issues of the magazine, which, in the intervening years, had clearly taken a quantum leap in terms of design and direction. We struck up a series of conversations which continued into an email correspondance (I soon became a subscriber). I know Gerry would love to see more submissions—and subscribers!—from this side of the pond. A long review of Todd Swift and Evan Jones' anthology Modern Canadian Poets appeared in issue 26.

Sunday Poem

AUBADE

The time, if time it was, would ripen
in its own sweet time. One thought of dawn.
One felt that things were shaping up,
somehow, that it was getting on.

Day broke. Upon the waters broke
in waves on waves unbreaking and
night fell, unveiling in its wake
one perfect whitened rib of land.

I slept, and while I slept I dreamed,
a breaking wave, a flowering tree,
and all of one accord I seemed.
I woke, and you divided me.

From Groundwork (2012) by Amanda Jernigan

Verbatim

"These are what the poet Peter Sanger might call ‘civilizational’ stories: they gather in to themselves about as much as a story can hold about the experience of being human. Which is, of course, an exclusive and exclusionary experience -- so no one story can tell it all. Still, we construct these arcs, these myths. Their capacity is the capacity of human life: finite, but, to us, all there is."
Amanda Jernigan on her attraction to stories like the Iliad.

My Top Ten of 2011

I didn't read everything, but here, in no special order, is what I liked from the dozens of Canadian titles that crossed my path this year. Not included—but highly recommended— are the books I published (The Id Kid by Linda Besner, Skullduggery by Asa Boxer, Gift Horse by Mark Callanan and Spinning Side Kick by Anita Lahey) and the books I edited (Carapace by Laura Lush).

Earworm by Nick Thran (Nightwood)
As promised by its excellent title, Thran’s second book offers arrestingly memorable poems. His phrase-making is idiosyncratic, often unpredictable, enticing us with a left-handed mind adept at fresh, newly angled speculations about contemporary life.




Lil’ Bastard by David McGimpsey (Coach House)
A great deal of the myth that McGimpsey’s poems live in a hostile environment can be traced to an early review collected in my critical book, A Lover’s Quarrel. I’m happy to serve as the villain in this morality play, if only because it helps make my moments of praise more noteworthy. McGimpsey’s new book of “chubby sonnets” underscores the fact that when his high risk, high-caloric poetry works—as it did in Sitcom, and does again here—the results are marvellous, provocative and original.

A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno by Matt Rader (Anansi)
One of the most formally exciting books of the year. Sometimes, alas, the craft is most of what we get (like his editor, Ken Babstock, Rader is a poet who is good at being good). But when craft yields to feeling, Rader can train tremendous, nearly Lowellian rhetorical power onto his subjects.



Methodist Hatchet by Ken Babstock (Anansi)
Complaints that his poems traffic in “nothing” have provoked a response from this immensely gifted poet. If you share those complaints, this book won’t do much to correct that impression—his subjects still sometimes disappear inside wordplay at once fast, flittering and opulent. But there’s an emotional streak in Babstock’s new poems I don’t recall seeing before: the vision is broader, bolder, more generous. The best pieces feel lived in, peopled, emotion-rich, packed with narratives-within-narratives.

A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth by Stephanie Bolster (Brick)
This book, which represents a further key-change for Bolster, beguiled me with its exquisite, pinpoint play with syntax. I didn’t like everything. More than a third of the poems were too brittle, too cut-short and barely did the job. Yet her minimalist accounts of animals and (and in) zoos have a sly way of disclosing in extremis psychological states.



A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People by Gabe Forman (Coach House)
I was utterly defeated by parts of this book. But in my bafflement, there was always something—a funny bit, a crisp image, an apt metaphor—I could pocket. Forman’s absurdist, anti-prose-sense "personality profiles" are events in themselves, and I found myself gladly tacking to all the linguistic shifts in his shaggy-dog-storytelling.



Open Air Bindery by David Hickey (Biblioasis)
Hickey’s second book is a model of transparency, lightness and simplicity. What I admire most, even envy, is his tonal clarity: a spectrum of experiences come alive in crystalline speech that shuns inflation.





Hypotheticals by Leigh Kotsilidis (Coach House)
A promising debut. Unquenchably attracted to the sound of scientific sense, Kotsilidis is wickedly good at using line-breaks and stanza shapes—often short, tense couplets—to locate unexpected pressure-points in her well-timed sentences. The collection is studded with terrific turns of phrase.



No End in Strangeness by Bruce Taylor (Cormorant)
This collection, which brings together highlights from Taylor’s previous two titles with magnificent new work, is the best book—in any genre—I read this year. In Taylor’s hands, domestic details become the crucible for elegant, textured, virtuosic observations on fate (“Kafka with kids” is how someone once described Taylor to me). He is a master at combining heart-breaking self-portraiture with ironic self-counselling (like a witty therapist giving himself a talking cure while staring in the mirror) and has a superb ear for description: his visual close-work is full of sonic surprises. I don’t think there’s a stronger English poet in Canada.

All This Could Be Yours by Joshua Trotter (Biblioasis)
Only his first book, but Trotter has already forged an unmistakable style: dream-like without being esoteric, ludic and lucid, deadpan and insinuating. Under formal pressure, ordinary experiences become delivery-systems for very odd, and oddly moving, ideas. And as verbal objects, the poems are ravishing.



Honourable mentions: Groundwork by Amanda Jernigan, Folk by Jacob McArthur Mooney, Guesswork by Jeffery Donaldson, Lines of Flight by Catherine Chandler,

A Reminder

Gift Horse

It took seven years, a bit of arm-twisting and a near-death experience for Mark Callanan to finish his second book of poems, but I'm happy to announce the wait is finally over. Gift Horse is being launched at The Ship Pub (265 Duckworth Street) in St. John's, NL on October 11 at 8.00 pm. Joining him is Amanda Jernigan, who will be reading from her (also long-anticipated) debut Groundworks with George Murray hosting the event. Sounds like an amazing evening. Breaks my heart that I have to miss it. Mark's new poems are such grim, sharp-cut little things. It's certainly one of the strongest collections I've published in my time at Signal.

Chicks With Swords

Chief among the highlights of the July/August issue of Poetry (which includes a lovely poem by Amanda Jernigan and a ferocious essay by Joshua Mehigan) is A.E. Stalling's translation of Plutarch's anecdotes on Spartan women.

A woman who had sent her five sons to war waited anxiously outside the city and asked a man approaching which way the battle was going. When he replied that her sons had all perished, she retorted, “You sorry slave, that’s not what I asked.” When he said Sparta was winning, she said, “In that case, I gladly accept the death of my sons.”

•

Another gave her son a shield as he set out for war, saying, “Your father always saved this for you. Keep it safe, not yourself.”

•

Another, when her son complained his sword was too short, said, “Step forward: add a foot to it.”

(Painting by Edgar Degas, "Young Spartans Exercising.")

My Hair

In an ongoing feature called "The Devil's Engine" (No. 1, No. 2) Tara Murphy has been putting a series of sensible, process-related questions to Biblioasis poets. The latest query, however, is a little whimsical, though Amanda Jernigan bats it out of the park.

Question:

If you had to pick a body part, and make that body part the storehouse for all of your poetic instincts, which part would you choose and why?"

Amanda says:

My hair. As a reminder that my poetic instincts are easily lost; that their loss, if painful to my sense of self is not (or not immediately) fatal; and that, given time, I may grow them back again.

The rest here. It's a pretty cool answer.