Sunday Poem

AFTER THE STORM 

Walking past the farmer’s fields, you are struck
by the watermelon smell of mown grass
not noticed before. One thing is always
like another thing, not to supplement
but to vary, to give us reason to
demand no less. The clouds have polished up
the sky like pewter plate, the air so still
you might be thunder-deaf, and in the lull
you hear the trees raining from their leaves.
The light is buttery with promises
and the far meadow peppered with grackles,
and all is well being what it is and
isn’t, as if impossible to tell
the dogrose from the raspberry flower.
A runnel of bells trickling from the broke-
down barn is like a distant carillon.
Then all is quiet once again until
a quarrel of crows and squirrels over
granaries of pine cones breaks the silence,
which is not like breaking bread but breaking
bone. For even when one thing is not like
another, it is like another thing
that grates against the need to celebrate.
Walking past the farmer’s fields, you remark,
despite the red slash of a sudden fox
and the cry of an unseen creature in
dark wood, which is not like milk in the pail
but blood in the ear, something tells you still,
amid the difference and because of it,
you must love the world better than you do.

By David Solway, from Installations (Signal Editions, 2015)

Gala Poetry Launch, October 17, 2015, Drawn & Quarterly

Joshua Trotter reading from Mission Creep (Coach House)

David Solway reading from Installations (Signal Editions)

Derek Webster reading from Mockingbird (Signal Editions)

(From left) Talya Rubin, Derek Webster and Pat Webster

Saleema Nawaz Webster and Jennifer Varkonyi

(From bottom left:) Jennifer Varkonyi, Carmine Starnino, Simon Dardick, Derek Webster and Saleema Nawaz Webster 

Lazy Bastardism Reviewed II

Brian Palmu is full of praise for the book, but takes issue with a few things, chiefly my thesis for why Montreal poetry is so distinctive. I think he underestimates the breadth of the code-switching that occurs in the city, but his point is well-taken:

"Speaking of disagreements, the biggest one I have anywhere in Lazy Bastardism comes out of this (mostly quoted) paragraph in the [Michael] Harris’ essay:“But this also reflects the culturally synoptic condition of most Montreal poets, who are constantly forced, on a daily level, to shift between different registers and syntaxes and thus are more open to cross-influences than they might have been had they lived in Toronto or Vancouver or Calgary. ... The city itself, in other words, lures our poems out of the verbal ghetto of what Solway has called ‘Standard Canadian Average’ “. Now this is an argument that is both ignorant and needlessly defensive. I’ve lived a half-century in Vancouver. It is now slightly over 50% Asian, and many of those immigrants have retained their first languages. But it’s not a new development, and it doesn’t pertain to one dialect or ethnicity. Growing up as a wee ankle-biting critic-in-formation, my friends were Fijians, Italians, Slavs, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, and Sikhs (as well as a few pasty-faced Brits and Scandinavians). I’m sure I picked up some hidden nuances in all the different cadences, syntactical emphases, cuss-vocabulary expansion, and emotional variance. And I’m sure many in Toronto could say the same since it’s a multicultural pot of stew. So Montreal’s situation in this regard is hardly unique."

The Unquiet Canadian

Kevin McNeilly seems conflicted about David Solway's criticism (he accuses him of "picking imaginary fights where he could be discovering imaginative vitalities"). But when it comes to his assessment Solway's antipathy toward cultural nationalism, he's bang on:

His essay “The Flight from Canada” offers a cogent and persuasive alternative to what he calls the “Canadian content syndrome,” a canonizing of Canada’s national literature based not on qualitative discriminations but on the mere fact of its being Canadian. Still, Solway doesn’t actually refuse a national cultural thematics so much as re-think it, carefully and provocatively. It isn’t, for him, a question of poetically formulating, or adhering to, an identity but of inhabiting its negation: “it is precisely the comfortless absence of a secure identity, the rootlessness, the sense of radical alienation which is our greatest gift and blessing.” He wants, he asserts, identity “solidly founded in difference.” He becomes ours, in a sense, by refusing us. But claiming a solidness for that foundation also distinguishes his work from more openly alternative poetics; difference, for him, means “that each poet can work up the materials of place and language into that signature alloy we call individual style”; flight is predicated on a thoroughly conservative cosmopolitanism, a flight made radical, in other words, only by its rootedness in the solid ground of a distinctive poetic diction. This conceptual mix may be, at its base, self-contradictory, but surely Solway has managed at least to point up a viable means of confronting poetically, formally, the question of a late nationalism, of the differential ethos of the Canadian.

"The Rock"

A new poem by David Solway.

Sunday Poem

NIGHT SAILING

They say only fools sail at night
around the barrier reefs:
sloops and double-enders come to grief
on the jagged corals
as the Trades make for unpredictable currents
and the sudden heaves and plummets
of the seabed
bring the waves to cauldron-froth,
and all compounded by dark.
It’s like sailing in another language.
Even during the day
the marker buoys break free
and drift out of alignment,
requiring close attention to the marine charts.
But at night it’s almost always a naufrage.
The problem is
you cannot avoid sailing at night
when the call comes in
and you have somewhere to go.

From Reaching for Clear (2006) by David Solway.

What Kind Of Answer Is That, O Lord?

David Solway reads a new poem for the Montreal Gazette summer poetry series.

Visual Poetry

Last week, the Montreal Gazette launched a video series featuring readings by local poets.

In all, eighteen Montreal poets are scheduled to appear. They include Robyn Sarah, Peter Richardson, David Solway, Katia Grubisic and Norm Sibum.

The Gazette plans to post two videos a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, throughout the summer.

Go here to see David McGimpsey read his poem "Montreal."

Windfall

I'm very happy to report that The Conseil des arts et des lettres has awarded David Solway a Bourse de carriere valued at $60,000. These bourses are awarded only once every two years and only two go out to writers.

This is the second time David been acknowledged in this public way by the Francophone community, the other occasion being the Grand Prix du Livre in 2004. He was the first Anglophone writer in the history of the prize to win it.

David's most recent Signal Editions collection is Reaching for Clear which was awarded the 2007 QWF A.M. Klein Prize for poetry