10 Most Popular Sunday Poems from 2015

1. "Armadillo" by Ben Ladouceur 
2. "The Book of Materials" by Jeff Latosik 
3. "Longings Brittle as the Crooked" by Chad Campbell
4. "This Little Piggy" by Katie Fewster-Yan
5. From "Arrondissements" by Daryl Hine
6. "Half" by Michael Prior
7. "Mermaid" by Alessandra Naccarato
8. "By Way of Explanation" by Raoul Fernandes
9. "The Wound" by Zachariah Wells  
10. "Aschenbach in Toronto" by Don Coles

 (Buildings in Winter by Martha Markowsky)

Canadian Oresteia

Robert Moore praises Chad Campbell's debut Laws & Locks:

As family drama—the family as the source of a curse passed from generation to generation—Laws & Locks is a Canadian Oresteia, only without the laughs of the original. There is in the entire volume, so far as I can tell, no lapse into the humourous or even the vaguely ironic (Nabokov’s line from Speak, Memory, “In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much,” could easily have made it to the shortlist for this volume’s epigraph). It is a very dark book. Over the course of its progress through two centuries of Campbells, very little emotional or intellectual light mitigates the gloom of the book’s opening reminder that death is only a breath away or that Canada, for all its apparent promise to an immigrant, “was a thought/ that couldn’t stopper the dark/ rank water of a dark/ rank hold.”

Along with the consistency of shadow, neither the basic subject matter nor the point of view, tone, or essential scheme of techniques of this collection much varies. And this, I think, is one of its strengths, especially for a first book. Campbell isn’t about to be distracted from his solemn agenda by the merely arcane. (This is the advice he tacitly offers in “Lighthouse Beats” to poets whose tastes might run to the postmodern: “Too easy to write of oddities, catalogue curious things—/ mistake a peculiarity of vision for feeling.”) As a result of this discipline, Laws & Locks isn’t what so many debut collections tend to be: a potpourri of voices—of attitudes either struck or borrowed—from a poet who has yet to find his or her own. These poems, rather, read as if they sprang fully formed from the settled and accomplished brow of a mature, mid-career poet.

Signal Editions, Montreal Gala Launch, April 16, 2015

Chad Campbell, reading from Laws & Locks.

Talya Rubin, reading from Leaving the Island.

(From left) Ewa Zebrowski, Marsha Courneya, Carmine Starnino, Chad Campbell, Nancy Marelli

Carmine Starnino, Talya Rubin, Robyn Sarah

Sunday Poem

LONGINGS BRITTLE AS THE CROOKED 

Longings brittle as the crooked
branches of October elms that line the residential
streets where families incubate
behind glass. Be to me as rain, asked the rain.
Be to me as wind, asked the wind.
Be to me as darkness, asked the darkness
& only the darkness answered, siphoning
light from under the garden’s leaves.
Dogs scratched one backyard tree season
after season, until one season the leaves refused.
The burgundy trees are almost mute, it seems,
when before in blushes of colour they would return
now pale images of places something terribly burnt
stole itself away replace them: the shoal beside
the sea that stored heat in frigid evenings,
cave on a cliff that hid two painted horses,
the empty double seats of a streetcar that cut off the track
to ring a kettle lake, deep in winter trees.
Be to me as rain, I ask the rain, wash
away this stiff turf, just the smallest patch, show me
the door in the earth so I could
descend and for a time, just a time, experience
the root’s eyeless dedication, relieve
what worries the wood, emerge a courage of leaves.

From Laws & Locks (Signal Editions, 2015) by Chad Campbell  

(Drawing made out of soil, from a series called "Dirt," by Marsil Andjelov Al-Mahamid)

Interpretive Powers

In an interview with Stewart Coles which appears on Boxcar Poetry Review, Jim Johnstone explains his notion of poetic "difficulty":

I'm not concerned with difficulty as much as I'm concerned with perspective. There's always going to be a gap between what a poem means to its author and what a poem means to an individual reader — to me that adds a layer of perception that makes difficulty a secondary concern. Poetry demands the interpretive powers of its readers, and I'm comfortable leaving that challenge in their hands.

Over at Maisonneuve, Johnstone talks to Chad Campbell about his relationship to revision:

Sometimes it feels like I spend all my time revising. That time feels like work. There’s a stark contrast between writing and revising as far as I’m concerned—writing is creative, joyous, almost ecstatic, whereas revising is necessary if you want to publish your work. There are times when I leave my initial draft in a journal and keep it for myself... I find holding back work refreshing; as long as they remain unseen, my poems belong to me completely. The same principle is necessary in a healthy relationship or friendship. Without mystery, the self can suffer.

The Surreal Solidarity of Metaphor

In a long reply to Chad Campbell's review of Sue Goyette's Ocean, Phil Hall rebuts Campbell's assertion that bad metaphors cause her book to sink like a stone:

Piled up, protean, Goyette's metaphors of ocean and society just make no sense, says Campbell. Clearly.


Which is not the point.


Campbell misses, in his procedure, by his template, the surreal solidarity of metaphor, how it smears logic to expose deeper & wider unity.


This is the alternative tradition of Neruda & Lorca. This is Calvino's Invisible Cities.


Ocean is not coming out of the tradition of Milton's Lycidas & Tennyson's Maud with their track-able system of similes & symbols.


This poem does not come out of the tradition that is being used here to judge it.

The Happiness of Influence

Chad Campbell writes about six books of poetry that helped shape his debut Laws & Locks. (Read his interview here.)

1. Circadian—Joanna Klink: Penguin, 2007

Joanna Klink is stellar. The poems in Circadian limn a borderland between sense and sense impression; a series of maps that trace loss and intimacy equally through the winter landscapes of this beautiful collection. Unabashed and sonorous lyrics, the book is pure tonic.

2. Civil Elegies—Dennis Lee: Anansi, 1972

If the angel of history lost its wings and went for a walk in the wreckage left behind it, you might get something like Lee’s Civil Elegies. Tonally brilliant, this book, to me, is Lee at his most furious and vulnerable. Think the Canadian Heritage commercial version of Prufrock, but better. Even if I hadn’t grown up on Alligator Pie, I’d find this work irresistible.

3. Crow—Ted Hughes: Faber & Faber, 1970

“Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it…turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic”, Hughes once advised. Here, in Crow, I think we see him perform his own best magic—a lucid re-envisioning of the crow into which Hughes pours his preoccupations with myth, sex, and violence in a fallen world. Not to mention the rich, rhythmic textures of the work. It’s like watching a pot of oil boil.

4. Elegy—Larry Levis: University of Pittsburg Press, 1997

Edited posthumously on Levis’ behalf by longtime friend and mentor Philip Levine, Elegy is a masterwork. Like Roethke’s Far Field, here you get the sense of a poet achieving the formal and thematic concerns they hunted for a lifetime—the result is stunning. A touchstone of a book.

5. Land to Light On—Dionne Brand: McClelland & Stewart, 1997

In terms of a poet with something to say, and a way to say it that matches, poem in and poem out, the vehemence of that something, Brand’s Land to Light On is a knockout. At once a scathing account of a continued history of racism in Canada and a refusal to settle for anything less than a fully chosen and lived identity, the book always reminds me that just as it uplifts, poetry can indict.

6. Four Quartets—T.S. Eliot: Faber & Faber, 1943

Take or leave the philosophy, Eliot’s Four Quartets is, to my mind, a tremendous performance. When you see one of those evolution of dance videos, that’s how I feel about this work—Eliot links so many of poetry’s roots in this sequence: lullaby, incantation, prayer, a dizzying combinations of meters. The shifts, formally speaking, are stunning. Not to mention the feel of relinquishment in the work, a coming to terms, as best a person can, with the prospect of death, and the terms and conditions of posterity.

Flash Interview #8—Chad Campbell

A finalist for the 2013 Malahat Long Poem Prize, Chad Campbell’s poetry has appeared in Maisonneuve, The Puritan and Arc, among other magazines. Originally from Toronto, he is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives and teaches in Iowa. Laws & Locks, his first book, is due out from Signal Editions in April.

The following interview was conducted by e-mail.

Carmine Starnino: Tell me a little about your family and why you decided to tell the story about them.

Chad Campbell: We started out, eight generations ago, on Islay, one of the small Isles off the west coast of Scotland. There was a detour in North Carolina, but the family abandoned the farms there and settled—after being sung a pretty song about the opportunity of land north of Toronto—in Eldon, Ontario. I know all that because my grandfather, in his retirement, started the thirty years of research it took to trace our family back into the mists. I stand in his debt. This book wouldn’t exist without the foundation of research that he laid out.

The decision to tell the story, if it came at all, started with my time caring for my mother when she had her first serious manic bout. When things settled, I was left with questions. My life wasn’t free of mental illness, I’d struggled with and, at the time, continued to struggle with addiction. That and the illnesses, obsessions and thirsts that seemed to flourish in my family left me asking what the fuck is happening.

So I started going back. Not looking for some grim root of madness in the family, but instead to try and get a sense of the shape of the mind that seems to have been passed down through the generations. And that’s what I found. Not a singular madness or anything of the sort, but a sort of potential that was more pronounced in some lives, and less in others. Though, at least within the confines of my family, the madness and addiction never appeared out of nowhere, but flourished in the presence of grief, loneliness, and isolation. The first of which is a part of life, the second two became more and more impacted in the family’s experience as they cut ties with farming and more communal living, and took up desks across the country.

But telling the story become important to me. There is so much silence, and fear, around issues of mental health and addiction. The idea that these are weaknesses, to my mind, is a part of what keeps these things unaddressed, tucked away, loathed.

CS: Robert Frost—"No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." What surprised you most when writing the poems in Laws & Locks?

CC: I think it would be just how much we share as a family. Some of this had to do with livelihood. A couple of generations after the farms were up and running in Ontario, people were able to exercise a bit more choice in terms of livelihood. The Campbells started teaching—school, university, church, tailoring—and I had absolutely no clue when I shakily taught my first course at the University of Iowa, that I would be the sixth generation to get up in front of a class.

But more even more than this it was the shape of the mind I was mentioning before—a nervousness about life, a reverence for books, ways of speaking in letters, mannerisms and illnesses of the mind that persisted across the generations. And of course, the sheer, almost baffling oddity of having gone for treatment at the same asylum that one of my family had gone to a hundred and seventy years before me.

In terms of the writing, I think it would be just how much the material demanded that I learn to modulate my voice and perspective from poem to poem. I felt absolutely thwarted at times, struggling with issues of witness and how, exactly, to approach and write towards some of these people. Whether I succeeded is another matter.

CS: Why all the love for the ampersand?

CC: I started using them when I was writing "February Towers," the poems that deal most directly with mania. Not in the first drafts, but once the poems started to settle into the textual blocks they’re written in now, I began to get a better sense of what the form was trying to get at—the sense of something fraught happening in a cramped space; mania in a small house. As the drafts progressed I started looking for ways to turn up the volume on what the form was driving after. Ampersands can quicken lines & oddify things somewhat—that’s the way I see them working in "February Towers": quickenings, traces & tracers in service of the dislocation the poems were born from.

After that sequence I backed away from them and used ampersands only when the poem or poems seemed to do better with them. In the case of the more historical poems that start the book off, I liked the way they call attention to themselves, how they alter the norm a little. For poems that draw as heavily on other people as those do, a bit of otherness, even from ampersands, felt right.

Sea Sick

Chad Pelley is impressed with the metaphor-making in Sue Goyette's new collection of poems:

In Ocean, Sue wades in metaphoric reaction to a life lived by the sea. The ocean is an image-and subtext-rich thing on the margins of her everyday life, and she plays off this, fishing fantastic parallels between the ebb and flow of the Atlantic and life itself. But this is not run-of-the-mill poetry in which the poet uses the ocean to reflect on one’s life, or the world, or our place in it—Goyette plunges much deeper than that, both stylistically and conceptually. She’s making up her own metaphorical ocean mythology in these poems, and it makes for vibrant, innovative poetry.

Chad Campbell doesn't think she pulls it off:

“Everything is connected!”, Goyette’s speaker proclaims, and yes, it is: because a world has been created in which there are no boundaries between anything—not dreams, matter, smells, senses, concepts, or memories—and their connections aren’t revealed because they are presented as fact. Goyette doesn’t have to ground or hone her metaphors, to fashion cohesive conceits, because she has created this world with a structure that implicitly excuses their failings and obscurities.

Sample poem: "The ocean is the original mood ring"