Showing posts with label Lemon Hound. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lemon Hound. Show all posts

Saturday, 8 August 2015

Fascinating Permutations


Marilyn Hacker doesn't think the sonnet form needs an algorithm to make it interesting:
I admit to a lack of interest in computer-generated poetry. The sonnet form is adaptable to near-infinite variations made by human beings, most of which include some kind of implicit dialogue with previous practitioners of the form. It intrigues me into how many disparate languages the form has travelled. Mahmoud Darwish included in one of his later book a series of sonnets in Arabic, which may (I could be wrong) be the first passage of the sonnet into that language, but which is entirely indicative of Darwish’s own continual dialogue with other poets and poetries, Lorca being one of his interlocutors. One of my favorite contemporary sonnet-writers in English is George Szirtes, now British, born Hungarian, who also translates widely from the Hungarian — and the sonnet is vital in contemporary Hungarian poetry, including the “heroic crown” of 15 sonnets in which the last sonnet is made up of the first lines of the 14 others. A lovely English example of that feat of legerdemain is British-Iranian Mimi Khalvati’s “Love in an English August”. But so, in another register, and in the United States, is Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till, which brings the sonnet back to (as it happens) one of the horror/martyr stories of American racism also commemorated by Gwendolyn Brooks. Karen Volkman’s linguistically surreal sonnets in her new book Nomina are a fascinating permutation of the form.

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Saturday, 9 May 2015

I Contain Multitudes


Shane Book—whose second book, Congotronic, is nominated for this year's Griffin poetry prize—muses on his allegiance to the maple leaf:
I think there was something about growing up in a family of travelers, a family that lived in different countries and was itself made up of multiple nationalities, races, ethnicities, and so on—that seemed to me to be very Canadian. Perhaps this is because I have always associated Canada and Canadians with a certain inquisitive internationalism, an outward-looking curiosity about the world. Also, I have always felt like and been, an outsider. To absolutely generalize—I think there’s a certain quality of the “onlooker” or “spectator” that is part of being a Canadian. This quality of “watching” probably goes along with being from any smaller, peripheral nation: we’re looking to the centres, at what the empires are doing. Then again I have always felt like a citizen of several nations, so maybe that cancels out everything I just said. Apparently, like anyone, I contain multitudes, contradictions and some platitudes, as well.
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Tuesday, 17 March 2015

Chairing of the Bard








































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Saturday, 21 February 2015

Mentored by Example


Damian Rogers' friendship with the late poet Elise Partridge taught her some valuable lessons:
Sometimes I feel burnt out by how marginalized the poetry world seems and how fractious it can be. It’s easy to feel trapped between the poles of online sniping among those within the community and the apparent indifference of those outside it. But watching Elise work on what she knew would be her last book was an absolute inspiration. She didn’t compromise on a comma. And she maintained that integrity while expressing only kindness and warmth and appreciation for everyone involved throughout every stage of the publishing process. I said this somewhere else, but she mentored me by example. I didn’t realize how much she taught me until it was too late to thank her.
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Saturday, 20 December 2014

The Artful Voyeur


Bert Almon praises the concept behind Michael Lista's new collection:
Dante, one of the poets Lista alludes to frequently in The Scarborough, tried to represent the Devil at the end of Inferno; the description is powerful but falls short somehow, just as attempts to take us into Hitler’s mind are always problematic. Instead of depicting Bernardo, Lista focuses on a single weekend in 1992, Easter weekend—the days marking death and resurrection—when fifteen-year-old Kristen French was abducted. The point of view stays close to Lista himself, who, age nine at the time, experienced the anxiety that pervaded Scarborough, an atmosphere of terror he evokes very well. Events in suburban life resonate strangely with the tragedy performed offstage, and allusions to pop culture (like the R.E.M. song, “Superman,” played by Bernardo during the rape and murder) and folk culture (fairy tales are full of grisly murders) are functional rather than decorative. Lista gives his poems two pillars to hold up the diverse structure: the story of Dante and Beatrice and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Yet in The Scarborough, we know that Eurydice is not brought back from the dead, and Beatrice is not enthroned in heaven but rather buried in the woods. Lista’s ability to make every detail significant shows mastery. The allusions to voyeurism are especially chilling when the murderer is also a stalker—and the poet knows that the artist is a kind of voyeur as well.
Lista's struggle with his own voyeurism seems to excite Jonathan Ball most about The Scarborough, a book he calls "a significant achievement":
When Lista turns his gaze away from French, only to turn towards this turning away, the poems draw their blood. They are part of a sadistic project. The project’s sadism lays bare the reader’s sadistic interest, and the media’s exploitation. Lista plays a dangerous game by picking this subject, but he knows the game, and knows its danger. When the poems stop being about what they are supposed to be about, and instead become about Lista’s hatred of himself for being powerless to help French, and for wanting to write poems about her, the book bleeds.
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Tuesday, 16 December 2014

Weights and Balances


Kerry-Lee Powell discusses how the extraordinary story behind her poetry debut, Inheritance, shaped her formal decisions:
The collection centres around a shipwreck endured by my father in the second world war, his subsequent struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide. I wanted the collection to function as both an elegy and a love letter to the world that made and destroyed him. The subject matter imposed a number of constraints and meant that I was working with a subdued palette. Much of the rhetorical flamboyance that I admire in my fellow Canadian poets would have felt out of place. As the book approached publication, I became anxious about the emotional intensity of many of the poems. But it struck me that the forms needed the emotional intensity, would have been just so much dead wood without that heft.

 I am a sound-oriented writer, and tend towards rhyme and slant rhyme and hard Anglo-Saxon stresses even in my fiction. I felt that working with older forms suited the outward theme of the collection. But there were other qualities, the doomed logic of the sonnet, the obsessive-compulsive repetitions of the villanelle that seemed ideally suited to the subject of mental trauma.

 I don’t necessarily see myself as a formalist. Part of the pleasure of poetry for me, whether it’s free verse or conceptual or formal, is to find the patterns and constraints in any given piece. Are they conceptual, tonal, emotional? Where are the weights and balances? I find it hard to appreciate poetry that is shapeless or has too many false notes.
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Tuesday, 18 November 2014

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 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)
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Saturday, 17 May 2014

The Orbit of Mentors and Precursors

In an excerpt from his collection of essays, Career Limiting Moves, Zach Wells is skeptical of "coming of age yearbooks" like Breathing Fire:
The reason these anthologies are consistently disappointing is that poetry, fickle bugger that it is, manifests not in generational collectives and period styles, but in scattered individuals of eccentric talent. Generations are epitomized by shared characteristics, poetry by exceptionality, oddness, iconoclasm. And the generations presented in these books, having been carefully chosen by their elders and mentors, tend towards the reproduction of both the virtues and the flaws of preceding generations.

 But if one sets out to be different without an apprenticeship to past masters, one is apt to come off more freak than unique. “Woe to him,” as Lao Tze said, “who willfully innovates while ignorant of the constant.” Following in the shadow of poetry’s greats can of course be discomfiting. Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence deals with the psychological upheaval poets—even great ones—undergo trying to escape the orbit of their mentors and precursors. Small wonder some poets prefer to pretend that they have little to learn from the distant poetic past: it makes their jobs a hell of a lot easier.

 Most of the contemporary poets I admire have developed a dialectical knack for folding lessons learned from their ancestors into the batter of contemporary settings and idioms. When baked, these experimental mixtures can create surprising and spontaneously fresh conceits, structures and turns of phrase. When there is no new thing under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9), the key to originality is in the choice of antecedents as they combine with the particularity of the individual poet’s experience (including his or her heritage and present cultural milieu), thought and speech patterns. To borrow Auden’s distinction, these poets aren’t concerned so much with “originality” as they are with “authenticity.” They know that if they’re going to write the poems that are theirs to write, they must pick and choose those techniques others have used that best suit their own predilections and limits. Such poets don’t so much find a voice as they forge a style. Respectful deference is rejected in favour of a bold blend of promiscuous intertextual fraternizing and thievery.
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Wednesday, 26 February 2014

The Garbage of Inattention


Lisa Robertson describes the process by which certain literary careers go extinct:
My reading into previous eras, reading into community and situated writing activities in different periods and places, suggests to me that at any place, at any given time—in early 19th century London, for example—there are many fabulous women writers. Do we read them now? No, mostly not. Can we even name them? No, not beyond Wollstonecraft and Shelley. But there have always been women writers. And they have been publishing and active and popular and read, bought, discussed, and have been vital parts of their societies and cultures. The problem, I think, that continues, what has been the problem and is the problem now, is that the institutional formations that are responsible for the continuity of literature as a canon have continued to resist placing writing by women in the macro narrative and economy of literature.

 And so, continuously there has been this ongoing process of rediscovery. Like, wow, there was feminism in the 19th century, can you imagine? Every single generation we go through this ridiculous re-discovery. In the 80s we thought we were inventing feminism. In the 70s we thought we were inventing feminism. Every single generation is put in the situation where we feel like we have to invent this thing. Why? Because there is no continuity. No narrative has been formed. But women writers have always been present, brilliant, and even plentiful. Not rare.

 And so, in this sense, I think it's the same situation now as it was for, say, this Paris expatriate women's modernist writing community. You could put your finger down in any city and find this vital, articulate, educated exchange of literary activity among women. Then the first thing that happens is that books go out of print. As soon as a book's out of print, it's dead. It can't be taught or exchanged. It can become a sort of absent cult object: did you hear that X did this. I mean, one major difficulty in the reception of the Paris women modernists is that all of those books were out of print for a long time. You couldn't even get your hands on their work. Often, the work does not leave its original micro-context. It becomes a kind of mythology. It has to be belatedly rediscovered. It can’t slowly develop a readership over time. The same could be said of women in Montreal writing from the 70s through til now. If publishers don't take care of the work and keep it in print, and if a seriously sustained discourse and scholarship does not construct itself around it, the very same thing will happen. It will fizzle, and, in a couple of generations, people will say didn't you hear there were once these interesting writers. The fact of this community of work will become a kind of retro culty thing. Whereas, everybody knows that the Montreal women’s writing experiment is the great and strongest thing that's happening now intellectually. The same garbage happens every generation, so far as I can see. The garbage of inattention.
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Sunday, 22 December 2013

The Importance Of Ugliness


Shane Rhodes argues that, in some cases, beauty can be dangerous:
If I have a worry here, it is that the quest for beauty in language, in art, in poetry so often over-rides the importance of ugliness in language, in art, in poetry. It is just as important to search out and study the ugliness (and, sometime, to look at the ugliness of what beautiful language can create) as it is to look for those instances of beauty. This is especially true when looking at issues like colonization, anti-indigenousness, and racism – there isn’t much beauty here, but there is a whole lot of ugliness. So often we are led on by ideas of beauty and deterred or stopped by ideas of ugliness and disgust – but it is important to think of how these terms can be politically motivated and used. Colonization has very real psychological manifestations in any settler society; one of these manifestations is an unwillingness in the settler to look realistically at the injustices of our histories and current actions in the name of settlement. In Canada, who wants to read the treaties? Who wants to read the Indian Act? Who wants to look at such blatant racism? All of these texts are ugly; they are ugly because they rub against the beautiful myths we have created of our just and peaceful society.
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Thursday, 25 April 2013

Can Twitter Make You A Better Poet?


Robin Richardson thinks so.
I was always meticulous about individual lines, but having to make them stand on their own made me think about their function on a whole new level. Every time I post a tweet I ask to myself “is this musically cohesive?” “Does it resonate content-wise without its context?” and most importantly, “Does it give the reader something more than what’s contained in its 140 characters?” This last consideration is what’s really improved how I approach writing. I don’t want these tweets to be clever little quips, or single thoughts that make a person sigh or chuckle. I want them to open infinitely off the edges of the page, or screen, so that each new tweet is the key to its own, much larger universe. Alice Munro is brilliant at this: in a single gesture or off-handed comment her characters inflate before the reader’s eyes, becoming fully realized within those few strokes. Poetry, if anything, should do the same in even fewer strokes.
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Monday, 25 March 2013

How Do You Create Beauty in Poetry?


For James Langer, beauty is a principle one abides by best when quarreling against it:  
Beneath all of the divisions within poetry—all the schools and mantras and ideals of form—poetry’s first principle, the thing at its compositional core, is variation. That supersedes all else, in my opinion. Whether we’re avant-garde or new in the old-fashioned way, to paraphrase Frost, I believe we can agree on that core. Verse means turning, and that refers, I think, to more than just considering your line breaks. It’s a contingent idea of beauty, variation. To play with and against what has been deemed beautiful through the tradition. To create something that is recognizable and different simultaneously. And then to offer that thing up to the court of opinion and argument. The whole tradition, with its giants, as we understand it and agree and disagree with it, has been one big argument about what’s beautiful, trying to set and reset and adjust the terms, trying to come to agreements.
(Illustration by Javier Pacheco.)  
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Sunday, 23 December 2012

Ideal Forms


Sonnet L'Abbé addresses the topic of beauty:
"Beauty was politicized for me long before I had the sense that through the art of writing, I might address that politicization. I spent my young years in prairie provinces, and after ten grew up in Kitchener, Ontario. Until I hit high school was the only non-white child in every one of my classes. We were all about seven years old, in Calgary, when my classmates began informing me that I was ugly. The message intensified when we moved to Manitoba. A change was occurring in us: we were beginning to see the world the way those around us saw it. Boy and girl were suddenly categories to be rigidly policed; so were pretty and ugly. 'Beautiful,' like pretty, went with a certain kind of girl, and in the late ’70s, early ’80s, that girl, for my school 'friends,' was white."
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Thursday, 22 November 2012

What's The Smallest Unit Of Poetry?


Elisa Gabbert believes she's found it:
"The poneme is the smallest unit able to trigger delight, surprise, recognition, or whatever intellectual frisson is the reason that we go to a poem. It could be as small as a symbol or a sequence of letters – Aram Saroyan’s triple-humped 'm' or the 'ghgh' in “'ighght'—or a cluster of words, or it could extend over multiple lines. But whatever its size, it’s the extractable thing that draws us in and brings us back to the poem."
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