Knuckleball Poetics

Over at Maisonneuve, Danny Jacobs and Daniel Renton trade some banter about new collections by Jason Guriel and Dani Couture. One of the best moments in the exchange belongs to Renton:

I do wonder if Guriel’s well-made box may be a bit of a ruse—his poems might be closer to being Chinese finger traps. That is, toys that snare unsuspecting victims who misunderstand their serious mission: to encourage us to relax our grandiose poetic posture and enjoy the play of language. Take this string of lines from “Knuckleball:" “its bottleneck— / the chewed-over / or coughed-up / or otherwise / indigestible morsel / of food for lines, / wobbly ones, / of thought.” Notice the purposely wound up syntax? The poem so mimics R. A. Dickey at the plate it practically wears a Blue Jay’s jersey.

Sunday Poem

CARP 

Its freedom already won by age, propeller,
or some unseen thing—a cool, white tumour,
small as a grain of rice wedged into meat
or organ. A bloated feathering of scales—
sun-side, bone-dry, and silvering—the carp
looks ready for first and last flight. Tucked
away from bigger water, this fish is an island
of decay bull’s-eyed into a huddle of dike stones.
Bobbing in the wake of yachts cutting across
the bay, it gives the illusion of life. A codex
of pipe taps, footprints after an avalanche,
the false hope wreckage gives. As if something
could still be alive in there. As if, returned to us,
it would still be the same. We task ourselves
with releasing it, but the switch has too much
give, too green for what the job takes. Will not
lift this mass and its clouded eye skyward.
What works: time and a second branch run up
from shore. One stab through the rot, the thing
speared and hauled into open water. That if
we stand together, squint, tilt our heads just right,
we can see how good we are, how we always knew
what was best, what, in the end, could be saved.

From YAW (Mansfield Press, 2014) by Dani Couture

Sunday Poem

SALVAGE 

You can tell a thousand-footer
by her straight back, hammer head
—a skyscraper toppled.
Too long for locks, what she’s best at:
pushing taconite from Duluth to Gary,
the endless circuitry of ports.
Built from the centre of the earth up,
this ship is a piece of ceremonial armour,
a leviathan penny, a horseshoe
pinned to Great Lakes lucky until she’s not.
Christened and kissed off
years before you were born,
she is an older sister, a summer cousin
who only appears in a quarter of your photos
and out of focus. She’s your favourite
because you barely know her.
In smaller water, this ship could be
an island, bridge, or territory.
She is a herd of 20,000 horses
trembling to shake off its load.
In her wake, lesser vessels are sent to scrap,
run aground, and peeled down to air, yet one day
it will cost less to wreck her than to keep her:
a final trip to Port Colborne or Alang.
Breakers will scrabble up her hard-rusted sides,
pull her down by torch and hand.
Her pieces soon held in the gut
of another ship downbound for better things. 

After the Edwin H. Gott

From The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012, by Dani Couture.