Strange True Places

Reviewing the book for Arc's summer issue, Heather Spears celebrates Jason Guriel's new collection Satisfying Clicking Sound:

For Jason Guriel, chance verbal encounters are a primary source of his inspiration. Here’s an instance where the cliché, tickles his fancy, revives itself: it describes so exactly how this poet works—or rather, plays. He takes a phrase that does just that and runs with it, and the results are wonderful, startling, and unexpected (I am avoiding the book reviewer’s favourite word here, though it would for once be appropriate). In some poems he appends the longer quote after the phrase which delighted him, and the spinning of the poem proceeds.

Guriel would not have left this cliché alone either. Like Robert Lowell (I look, and turn up by chance “as if my hand were at its throat”), Guriel brings outworn phrases to the shining surface of the language, fools around with them, upturns them so a new meaning, a new insight appears. Is this a device and does it have a name? It has a punch that a new image can hardly compete with. A satisfying clicking sound. The first poem’s title “The Buried Hatchet” sounds mundane but comes alive with the first line: “begins to biodegrade,” and ends with another brilliant turnaround—I would add this and more examples, but they should be read where they belong. Otherwise I would be like the reviewer of a comedian who retells all the best jokes and takes the credit.

Guriel’s poems are short, with short lines. His diction in impeccable. He writes tight verse and quatrains as effortlessly as, to name a contemporary, Vikram Seth. Or many an old master—let’s say R. L. Stevenson.

Guriel reinvents the body. In “Claustrophobia” the sense of boundaries is eerily warped:

You step into the plaster
cast of yourself,
the doors close behind,
and everything’s snug;
your penis finds
its sheathe, your lips
their depression

I am always interested in body perception because I teach drawing, and observe firsthand how people’s idea of the named and partitioned body interferes with their ability to draw it.

So I am specially intrigued when I come across the word “sleeve” in two poems, and see how Guriel, again with broken and reassembled clichés, moves our attention away from the hands, into and past the extension of the wrists, the nameless source of gesture. “The trick to writing / well isn’t up / the sleeve. It is / the sleeve that fluffs up / the flourish.” (“John Hancock’s John Hancock”) and (“Hands Playing Haunting Chords”) that “cannot help the soul / that’s up the sleeves, / and cannot help / but fall as fists—off / and on and off / the beat."

I am floored: how does he know stuff like this? What he does is more than playfulness. Reading him is to have your eyes cleared of junk, to be led into strange true places you never noticed before. I am sure that writing is for Jason Guriel “a special kind of happiness.” He was recommended by John Barton and I am grateful. I am delighted to make his acquaintance.

Hating the Haters

When Jason Guriel tweeted his unhappiness with the poetry reviews on Slate, Jonathan Farmer, the site's poetry reviewer, took notice. The result? A utterly fascinating—and pointedly diplomatic—exchange on the nature of reviewing:

Guriel:

None of your reviews, in and of themselves, are particularly egregious. As one-offs, they are clear and articulate, with stylish turns of phrase. But in the context of Slate – a magazine I go to for lively, feisty prose – your reviews strike me as, to quote the Tweet, "conspicuously safe," especially in the aggregate. You like a lot, but hate very little. When you write, "It's hard to resist, but it's also a stretch, this sense that if we can keep other people from loving what they love, we can get back to – or on to – something worthy of us, at last," I'm put on red alert and in mind of recent the debate about smarm, snark’s antimatter. Who's keeping anyone from loving what they want to love? Critics who steer me away from the bad (by acknowledging it) and towards the good are, in fact, teaching me how to love. In other words: don't hate the haters.

Farmer:

I'm not sure I can think of any examples of a review that feels legitimately skeptical to me, though I'd be very curious to read one. To expand on a point I made in an earlier email: I think there are all kinds of ways in which a poem can create value for someone, and very few of them do me or anyone else any harm. There are plenty of people who love a style of poetry that seems, to me, excruciatingly unambitious and aurally inert. And yet there are these large (at least by poetry standards) communities of people who are deeply invested in this kind of poetry. Are they deluded, ignorant, inferior? Maybe. Or more likely their needs are just different from mine. Either way, I think any attempt to say, publicly, that this has no value would have to reckon with the fact that so many people value it.

The Larger Light Show

Jason Guriel gives Clive James props for focusing on the "counterintuitive" aspects of poetic technique:

At bottom, James is loyal to poems, not poets. He’s concerned with the question of why some stretches of verse stick with the reader and why others don’t. It’s clear he has spent years white-boarding problems that contemporary poets no longer give much countenance. For example, most of us dabblers would delight to be able to manage a brilliant line or two of poetry per poem. But James is preoccupied with not just how to generate brilliance—feat enough—but how to muffle it slightly so that it serves a larger light show. As he says of Frost: “His easy-seeming, usually iambic, conversational forward flow is a deception, a way of not just bringing show-stopping moments to your attention but of moving them past your attention, so that you will form the correct impression that he has wealth to spare and does not want the show stopped for such a secondary consideration as brilliance.” Brilliance as a “secondary consideration” is, well, brilliant—a counterintuitive point at a time when the practitioners who tend to trend, like Frederick Seidel and Patricia Lockwood, specialize in show-stopping lines. Elsewhere, James reminds us that poets once taught readers how to pronounce a word simply by its placement in a pattern of stresses. He can talk couplets, alliteration, nuts, bolts. It’s not that Poetry Notebook is perversely arcane; it’s rather as if a ballet textbook had readmitted to its pages, after years of doing without, the pirouette.

Writer, Interrupted

The final title in Patrick Leigh Fermor's famous trilogy of travel books was published posthumously in 2014. Jason Guriel ponders the reasons for Leigh Fermor's inability to finish the manuscript.

The Broken Road, however, is far from the fully realized book Leigh Fermor’s fans were hoping for. It covers the last leg of his journey, from Bulgaria to Constantinople, but as editors Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper explain, the new book was composed before its predecessors, in the early 1960s, when a magazine invited 5,000 words from Leigh Fermor on “The Pleasures of Walking.” Leigh Fermor, then in his forties, finally began to set down the European journey of his youth, and came to focus on the final stretch. But in the mid-1960s, he abandoned the manuscript. When he resolved to return to the subject of his European travels in the 1970s, he started over, repositioning his narrator in London, the day of departure. The rest we know: Leigh Fermor’s renewed effort produced the two best works of travel writing of the twentieth century.

But for the next two decades, he was unable to make headway on a book that would bring the trilogy to an end. The editors describe a “long ice age”: the “loyal and long-suffering” publisher was lost in 1993, the wife, ten years later. Leigh Fermor consulted a psychiatrist, but his energy had been flagging for some time. “The whole subject was beginning to feel stale, barren, written out, and he feared he no longer had the strength to bring it back to life,” is how Cooper puts it, darkly, in her recent biography of Leigh Fermor.

Not to Imply Anything

By Jason Guriel

Yesterday, my poem "Reviewing a Unicorn" appeared on the Lemon Hound website. Not too long after, Natalie Zina Walschots—for brevity’s sake, I’ll go with her nom de guerre, "Natalie Zed"—Tweeted about it:

Not to imply anything, but Guriel's poem http://t.co/sUehClhp2x talks about criticism rather a lot like I did: http://t.co/i2eOXqp4Ry
— Star Lord (@NatalieZed) November 17, 2014

Not to imply that Zed is accusing me of plagiarism, but she does seem to want to draw a comparison between my poem (which uses surgery on a unicorn as a metaphor for criticism) and some of her prose (which also uses a surgical metaphor, though no unicorn). It looks like Zed’s paragraph was posted to the CWILA site on June 12, 2013.

Not to imply that Zed deserves exhibits A through Z—but for the record: I submitted "Reviewing a Unicorn" by email to Paul Muldoon at The New Yorker and Michael Lista at The Walrus, in December 2012, well before Zed's post. (Alas, the poem was rejected by both magazines; I have the email threads.) I also made mention of a poem about sawing the horn off a unicorn in an interview for the Fall 2012 issue of The New Quarterly, which appeared online in January 2013—again, well before Zed’s post.

Not to imply that Zed’s prose is banal, but more troubling than a Tweet that doesn't quite have the nerve to commit to its accusation is the suggestion that I would steal from a short paragraph that:

• makes the mistake of “make it’s point,” 
• clubs the reader with the noun “writing” five times, 
• is content to employ the phrase “razor’s edge,” and 
• is content to employ the phrase “keen, clever, diamond-edged writing.” (Doesn’t “diamond-edged” do the same work as “keen”? Isn’t “diamond-edged” a cliché?) 

Moreover, a cumbersome sentence like this—“She gives every piece of writing that she explores the dignity of thorough and intelligent examination, pays it the compliment of picking it apart, confidence [sic?] that regardless of blood loss it will survive the procedure”—somehow leaves Natalie Zed’s reader feeling less than confident about Zed’s command of grammar and just what exactly the author means by "it."

(Illustration by Sarah Goodreau)

Molly Peacock: A Critical Introduction by Jason Guriel, Toronto Launch

Molly Peacock, Jason Guriel

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The Scarborough, Toronto Launch

Carmine Starnino, Michael Lista

Michael Lista

Carmine Starnino

Michael Lista

Matthew Tierney and (with his back to us) Peter Norman

Carmine Starnino and Nyla Matuk

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Carmine Starnino, Michael Lista, Jeff Latosik, Jason Guriel and Stevie Howell

The Predator Franchise

Jason Guriel calls Michael Robbins' sophomore effort, The Second Sex—his second book in as many years—a "rush job."

If the American poet William Carlos Williams was right, and poems are machines, then Robbins’ best are like those drones Amazon proposes will one day deliver our literature and toilet paper: sleek content delivery systems that ruthlessly zero in on, and engage, our attention. But the poet should take note of his predecessor, Seidel, who waited sixteen years to follow up a scandalous debut. The more effective move after making a statement like Alien vs. Predator—and the more provocative prank—might’ve been to appropriate the one strategy a successful poet can afford, but which Robbins doesn’t seem to have much considered: a little bit of silence.

Fighting Death with Excess

In a recent exchange with Michael Lista about his new collection, The Scarborough, Jason Guriel notices that, for a book with such a grim subject—one "trespassing on sacred ground," as Guriel puts it—the poems are "fizzing with style and formal energy." Lista explains that's not a coincidence.

One of my favourite moments in art, any art, period, of the last little while, was the final scene of this season’s finale of Mad Men, a show that I normally find too long on design and too short on art. Anyway (spoiler alert!), Bert Cooper has died while watching the moon landing and in the final moments of the show, his ghost returns to sing Don “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” replete with dancing girls and a soft shoe in socks. It was so beautifully human and stupid that I cried. It reminded me of a song from one of my favourite albums, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, the concept album about Anne Frank that I thought a lot about when I was writing The Scarborough; as the album builds towards its terrible finale in “Ghost,” Jeff Mangum sings: "I know that she will live forever / All goes on and on and on / And she goes /And now she knows she’ll never be afraid / To watch the morning paper blow / Into a hole where no one can escape." And then over the roaring reverb, a pipe organ and a bagpipe careen into a punk Barnum-and-Bailey Klezmer jig. It’s in moments like these, when death is met with a gaudy surplus of artistry, that you can see the fine membrane that separates art from religion, what Larkin called “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die,” something he could never quite bring himself to sneer at because he realized he’d been knitting one for himself his whole life—his poetry. I’m a fan of any art—any poetry—that tries to do that, too, marshal a decorous consolation against emptiness.

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.

Unstuffy and Unafraid

In his review of The Pigheaded Soul, Brian Palmu seems incensed by Jason Guriel's dismissal of Charles Bernstein's work

This is all too easy, this macro-dumping on avant-garde poetry. I’ve expressed my disgust with a lot of it, in reviews of specific books, and in proactive poetics. But that’s the point. Books should be reviewed for what’s between the pages, not as soldiers in a long line of casualties in an ongoing war. It’d be nice if Bernstein’s poems, delightfully various and rich with sound, feeling, and sense, could’ve gotten a deliberate airing in the expanded word count. But Guriel has formed an opinion on avant-garde poetry, and has framed his argument with misconstrued examples from several poems. God knows, if that’s the route one takes, it’s easy pickings: pretentious nonsense like “Virtual Reality” won’t win Bernstein many new converts. But Guriel’s also failed to note, never mind comment on, other worthy poems, and lines of poems in All the Whiskey in Heaven.

Still, Palmu finds a great deal to admire:

Guriel’s most important attribute, however, is his writing: concise, with creative turns of phrase, surprising and apt lexical choices, skeptical, allusive, unstuffy and unafraid to stick his neck out with evaluations (Heaney’s The Human Chain doesn’t make the grade), and wide-ranging, Guriel is foremost a curious reader who’s arrogant enough to believe his opinions matter (reviewers, in general, need more of that arrogance). That I disagree with him on many of his assessments isn’t all that big a deal. At least I know where the man stands. Can a reader of criticism ask for anything more important?

Ringers

Jason Guriel argues that poets need to start believing in the existence of real readers with real needs:

Poetry lacks a critical mass of readers who aren’t themselves also poets. In other words, most of the people who consume poetry are the ones producing the stuff. They can take for granted the needs of their audience because the audience is full of ringers—other poets!—who will applaud on principle or, at the very least, stay mum if the stuff’s no good. We depend on food critics to block the door to bad restaurants. We depend on movie critics to save us the money we might’ve otherwise wasted at the multiplex. But most of us aren’t restaurant owners or movie makers. So no one much wrings their hands over the way we talk about restaurants or movies. In the insular poetry world, we’re all over-invested. We tend to boo the few critics who, by delivering a tough review to one of us, put a pin to the collective delusion. You asked about literary community; that’s one use for it—policing how we talk. I try, then, to write for a reader who has no investment in poetry, who approaches books the way I approach movies or records: as a paying customer who wants to be entertained but who’s also demanding. If such a reader is a fantasy, it’s still one worth believing in.

Throwing The Fight

Reviewing what he calls poptimism's "major text," Jason Guriel thinks Let’s Talk About Love—in which Carl Wilson undergoes a taste experiment and develops a grudging respect for Celine Dion's music—is too "overdetermined" to be trusted.

Even more predictable is a tendency to suddenly reverse course on an argument. Wilson is always doubling back, as if anticipating your objection; he’s always armed with yet another study, another counterargument. You shouldn’t enjoy that shot at Oprah Winfrey for long; several pages later, Wilson will call attention to his snobbiness, implicating your own. Nor should you entertain the thought that there’s something snobby in his anti-snobbery; Wilson will soon enough interview a fan who, well, has “a streak of snobbery in her anti-snobbery.” Nor should you be entirely shaken by his account of how sociology explains your taste; after burning up 10 pages on it, he confesses he only half-believes the stuff. The dead-ends and reversals wouldn’t be so annoying if one didn’t suspect he already had the destination in mind. In short, Wilson’s book could never have ended with the critic doubling down on his snobbery; the needs of his project demanded otherwise. A mere page after declaring, “Maybe if hating Celine Dion is wrong, I don’t want to be right,” he’s already wondering if he won’t find something “human” in Dion’s work after all. While a messily self-reflexive writer like David Foster Wallace truly wrestles with himself—with predilections, prejudices—Wilson bets on his fuzzy side, and throws the fight.

Showmanship

In a fascinating round-table discussion with Molly Peacock, Robert McGill, and E Martin Nolan, Jason Guriel complains that Canadian poets don't pay enough attention to readers:

I get that we live in an age of very diverse audiences, but I don’t entirely think that’s true. It’s easier to simply say, “We’re never going to get that reader again, anyway, so it’s fine if my poem isn’t calibrated to get someone’s attention.” There’s a way in which Canadian poets are not always orienting themselves toward a reader. I remember reviewing an anthology that Shane Neilson edited called Approaches to Poetry: The Pre-Poem Moment. The anthology featured a number of poets, and printed a poem by each and an essay about how they came to write that poem. I was struck by the poets who were like, “I don’t have any designs on the reader. I don’t have any calculations and I’m not trying to impress anybody.” I remember thinking that a little bit more calculation, a little bit more showmanship, wouldn’t necessarily have been a horrible thing.

Gala Signal Editions Launch in Toronto, April 11, 2014

(Left to right) Vincent Colistro, Michael Lista, Jim Johnstone and Jason Guriel.

Gala Signal Editions Launch in Montreal, April 4, 2014

Carmine Starnino

Jim Johnstone

Ed Carson

Jason Guriel

Catherine Chandler

Richard Greene

Tweet Of The Day

Still, I think TPHS is the most impressively alive and engaged volume of Canadian poetry criticism I've encountered in many seasons.
— Lemon Hound (@lemonhound) April 9, 2014

Praise for Jason Guriel's The Pigheaded Soul: Essays on Poetry and Culture.

Sunday Poem

UNRAVELLED CASSETTE TAPE 

You can tell the time
period by its tumbleweed—
whatever is light
enough for the breeze to take
up for a time
but far too clingy to tug
free of any takers—
the haggling hand
of a branch, say,
which will go
to great lengths
to get some
unravelled cassette tape
and model it
like tinsel a little
while longer
while oddities last.

From Satisfying Clicking Sound (Signal Editions, 2014) by Jason Guriel

When We Talk About Poetry

Tracy Kyncl attended the “What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry” panel in Toronto. She wonders if the assembled critics were too quick to dismiss social media:

Social media is too limiting, insofar as responses tend to be short, inflamed, and emotional. Journals, essays, and columns offer the room to expand analysis thoughtfully with clear evidence. But we return to the root of the problem again: who is being published in journals, newspapers, and in books, and why? If social media isn’t good enough, how else are marginalized readers and critics supposed to get a word in if established media outlets pay no attention to these ignored voices?

Ryan Pratt describes an interesting moment that occured at the Hamilton event:

Diversity of opinion is crucial to the growth of a literary community and, in a question that addressed W.H. Auden’s view that anyone who writes criticism should make clear his or her idea of Eden, different perspectives emerged – albeit in a politely Canadian way. Guriel populated his Eden with role models and metaphors studied during his adolescence. Lahey deemed hers as a space to engage with writing free from outside judgment. And Wells saw himself outside the garden with his back to Eden, seeking knowledge. Beyond the preferences with which each author treated their sacred place, it’s noteworthy that Guriel and Lahey embraced Eden while Wells saw it as “antithetical.” However innocent that icebreaker of a question was, it exposed an ideological fracture in the panel that subsequent topics would investigate.

Friendly Talk

Norm Sibum sizes up the recent poet-critic panel discussion in Montreal (audio below)

I was told to smile and do friendly talk. Accordingly, I am smiling and doing friendly talk. Not that what follows is in any way important, literature not much more now than a spectator sport, as is any stand-off between barroom arm wrestlers. But even so, an evening vouchsafed to poetry by way of a panel of critics (who also write the stuff—poetry, that is); an evening consecrated to—what?—the explication of, the interpretation of, the bashing of, the treating with poems in some way or other; an evening devoted to the separating of stalwarts from dullards, was had at the Word Bookstore. It was had under the aegis of ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry’. Alright then. The panel, moderated by one of this fair nation’s leading literary lights, when all the dust had settled, seemed to have acquitted itself well. The Moesian thought so, and because he can be a surly bastard, I was inclined to take his ‘take’ on the matter. But then the man might have been preoccupied by the antics of Putin and American neo-libs gadding about in their stretch pants and limos, not to mention our very own Clown Prince and our very own Dragon Lady and the cartwheels they were effecting. In light of such events, how earth-shaking was this panel?