Alcoholic Logic

Michael Lista argues that John Thompson's breakthrough collection Stilt Jack gives us the "sound of a mind in its cups."

Published posthumously, Stilt Jack is a collection of 38 ghazals, a poem for every year of Thompson’s life. He includes a brief primer on the form as an introduction, where he explains the ghazal’s origin in ninth century Persia, and its formal conventions. The ghazal, he writes, “proceeds by couplets which (and here, perhaps, is the great interest in the form for Western writers) have no necessary logical, progressive, narrative, thematic (or whatever) connection.” That’s not quite right though, as the poems in Stilt Jack do have a kind of logic—alcoholic logic. Thompson ends his introduction by writing: “The ghazal has been called ‘drunken and amatory’ and I think it is.” Thompson’s interest in drinking, in other words, wasn’t strictly recreational. In 1962 he published a translation of Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat.” In 1966, he edited and helped translate a book on Paul Claudel and his “l’ivresse poetique,” which Thompson himself rendered as “poetic drunkenness.” And in Stilt Jack, he managed, more than any poet since Baudelaire, to distill the feeling—and the meaning—of being intoxicated.

Hypnotic Qualities

Michael Lista tries to get at the magic of Ricardo Sternberg's poetry:

Magic, by definition, is an exemption to the natural order, and the first thing readers notice and admire about Sternberg’s poems is the overwhelming sense that they shouldn’t work as well as they do. Their constituent parts are too simple; the language is that of everyday speech, sparingly multi-syllabic and rarely sending you to the dictionary. Faulkner once said something like that to Hemingway and intended it as an insult, but as Hemingway knew, it’s hard to cast a spell on someone whose nose is in the OED. And that’s just it: Sternberg’s poems operate the same way that spells do. He describes his own technique as “slowly blowing breath/ into each syllable,” and even here we can see the magic at work: the expertly weighted lines balanced by alternating alliteration, the bookending L sounds, the enjambment machine-tooled to correspond to the length of a breath. But what puts the lines over is that the mechanics of the artistry are hidden in the rafters, leaving only the illusion onstage. The sense is less that the magic has been muscled into place than that Sternberg has divined the secret connections between the words, unlocking their hypnotic qualities. As Quintilian said, “the perfection of art is to conceal art.” The effect is a feeling that the laws have been upended, of discovering that the magician’s coin has vanished from his hands and, abracadabra, appeared behind your ear.

Elise Partridge 1958-2015

I was finishing up a short email to Elise Patridge when I was told of her death Sunday afternoon. The news wasn’t surprising—Elise was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer last February—but I had hoped to see her one final time. As her prognosis worsened, she and her husband, Steve, decided to rent an apartment in midtown Manhattan where, if her stamina from the “chemo tortures” held up, she planned receive friends and family off and on this spring. It was pilgrimage I was determined to make. But three weeks ago she sent around a message saying that circumstances had forced her to abandon that plan (with characteristic generosity, she also offered the New York apartment to whoever might like to make use of it). Clearly, things were escalating quicker than anticipated. Her email weighed heavily on my mind and I decided to send a note asking after her condition. That my email will now forever stay unsent is, frankly, intolerable. My friendship with Elise dates back to 2001, when I read two poems of hers in the summer issue of Fiddlehead and, after getting her address from Ross Leckie, invited her to submit a manuscript to Vehicule press. We published Fielder’s Choice, her spectacular debut, the following year. Ever since, not a month has gone by without a morsel of correspondence from her. She sent pep-talks, rants, reports, advice, updates and detailed responses on my reviews and poems. She inquired constantly about my job, family (and most recently mailed my 12-month-old, Matteo, a christmas package of clothes). The fact, emerging from the stories being told, that she was conducting similar exchanges with dozens of poets all over the country is staggering, and breaks my heart all over again for the tremendous loss of her passing.

I’m not sure I can add much more to the lovely testimonials that have already appeared online, and I’m going to husband whatever ideas I have about her poetry for a longer piece about her upcoming (and now posthumous) book The Exile’s Gallery. But I thought it might be helpful to collect the reactions to her death in one place and maybe provide some of them—Facebook and Twitter being notoriously ephemeral—with a slightly more permanent home.

Very sad about the passing of Elise Partridge who was kind to me during her tenure as Arc Writer in Residence. She was so lovely to many.
— Christine McNair (@christinemcnair) February 2, 2015

Elise Partridge has passed. She was a terrific poet & a sweet woman. I will remember her kindness & her bright eyes. Rest in peace, Elise.
— Eduardo C. Corral (@EduardoCCorral) February 2, 2015

Very saddened by the death of Elise Partridge, a wonderful writer and a generous, caring person: http://t.co/wGrBCWGpak
— Jared Bland (@jaredbland) February 2, 2015

2009 Best Canadian Poet, Elise Partridge, will be greatly missed.... http://t.co/e462RPYeBI
— Best Canadian Poetry (@BestCdnPoetry) February 2, 2015

Sad rower pushed from shore, I'll disappear like circles summoned By an oar's dip. Elise Partridge #todayspoem http://t.co/srV3TjiSls
— Marina Endicott (@marinaendicott) February 2, 2015

RIP Elise Partridge on writing &illness: "I.B. Singer said that anyone who talks about himself too much is a nudnik" http://t.co/CAHCJTn1O1”
— sarahmac (@sarahmac) February 2, 2015

How can this be? This is the most terrible thing. Beautiful poet Elise Partridge warmest of women taken from us I just heard. Unfathomable
— Anakana Schofield (@AnakanaSchofiel) February 2, 2015

When I think of Elise Partridge's work, I think of this poem, which has always devastated me, and now even more: https://t.co/rqxvknuCtG
— Matthew Tierney (@hayflick) February 2, 2015

I am thinking of Elise Partridge, who passed away tonight--of her poetry and all the many kindnesses she showed... http://t.co/yIwlbocz3n
— Chris Hutchinson (@CHUTCHI2) February 2, 2015

Amidst celebrations for the #Patriots win, I'm mourning Elise Partridge, one of the purest souls in Canadian letters. http://t.co/VZ9PeSarVM
— Adam Sol (@adamyael) February 2, 2015

So very saddened to hear the news of Elise Partridge's passing: a great soul. http://t.co/FlZhKL0xUA and http://t.co/sZrEyk8hXe
— Kevin McNeilly (@theRealMcNeilly) February 2, 2015

Very sad to hear about Elise Partridge's passing. She was a fabulous poet.
— Paul Vermeersch (@PaulVermeersch) February 2, 2015

The brilliant Elise Partridge has passed away. Such a horrifying loss--she was one of our great poets, and a generous and kind human being.
— Michael Lista (@michaellista) February 2, 2015

Our community has lost a great poet and friend. Our thoughts are with the friends and family of Elise Partridge. http://t.co/2ocacWH1j4
— The Walrus (@walrusmagazine) February 2, 2015

'So many small things I still want to see.' RIP Elise Partridge, wonderful Canadian poet 1958 - 2015 @EvanPJones @toddswift_dr
— Carcanet Press (@Carcanet) February 3, 2015

Very sad to lose Elise Partridge: wish I'd seen her more. Go read her poems, please. @quillandquire @UBC http://t.co/vN5MUrVgiv
— Stephen Burt (@accommodatingly) February 2, 2015

"The generosity of her spirit is palpable in her poems" -- Elise Partridge (1958-2015): http://t.co/JbWshTAGNs
— Nyla Matuk (@Kabloon) February 2, 2015

I wrote about Elise Partridge a few years ago. I wish I'd written more about her accomplished poems. http://t.co/EjjqLFKIWf @PoetryFound
— Jason Guriel (@JasonGuriel) February 2, 2015

"I'm not TRYING to dazzle – ah just DOES." RIP Elise Partridge http://t.co/Dh8in71Nie
— stevenwbeattie (@stevenwbeattie) February 2, 2015

Ken Babstock

Working with Elise Partridge reminded me what true passion, commitment, integrity, intelligence, and humility look like when combined in one massively talented artist. Reading her poems is being in the presence of a mind fully engaged. She will be missed.

Damian Rogers

Elise Partridge was the most amazing person I've ever had the privilege to know. Working with her on her book was an absolute professional highlight for me... I wish I could tell her how much she mentored me, especially in these last few months, on how to be an uncompromising artist and a beautiful, compassionate, loving person at the same time. Her integrity, her kindness, her bottomless support and enthusiasm and gratitude for the work of others, even when she was suffering... I will hold these lessons close for the rest of my life.

Zach Wells:

She would never have agreed with Larkin that "death is no different whined at than withstood." And she never succumbed to despair, facile or otherwise. Her oeuvre is full of poems about death, but they are playful, virtuosic poems, acts of resistance, testament to the size of her spirit, the defiance of her breath.

Gillian Jerome 

Elise Partridge died last night. What a talented poet she was. What a formidable person. The last time I heard from Elise was about a month ago. She wrote to apologize that she wouldn't make it to hear Helen Guri and I read. Meanwhile, she was dying. All that love.

Matt Rader

Last year, when my friend Elise Partridge knew she was dying, she asked me to keep her memory alive by teaching her poems. Which was an easy request to honour since Elise's poems are exemplars on many subjects. Elise passed away last night. On Tuesday my 3rd year poetry workshop is set to discuss the elegy. I'd planned to bring this poem which tonight seems exactly as Elise would have wanted it--an elegy for someone else as a poem to remember her by: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/248140

Rob Taylor

Looking back, I am humbled to have been included among the lucky few (or many) that Elise connected with, and in awe at the scope of her giving even in a time of great illness. Or, I should say, in awe that the illness changed nothing, that this giving out of hers was not an expendable part of her daily routine but simply was her life. What could she do but live it?

Chris Patton:

My dear dear friend Elise Partridge passed away yesterday evening. She was a marvellous poet and an even more so person. Warm loving acute witty skeptical wry and humane. I am sort of reeling with it (though her death was known to be coming for a while) and don’t have much more to offer than that right now. Here though the first lines of the first poem (“Everglades”) of her first book (Chameleon Hours) —

Nothing fled when we walked up to it,
nor did we flinch

Not a bad note on which to open a life’s work. No fear and no frightening. God I’m going to miss her.

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.

Indie Jeunesse

Michael Lista's pick for best lyrics of 2014? "Blue Boy" by Mac DeMarco:

Every generation gets the asshole musician it deserves. The baby boomers had too many to count, but let’s settle on the elliptical oracle of Bob Dylan that Pennebaker caught on film in 1965, whose mannered transcendentalism and moral pretensions, like his generation’s high-mindedness, would be made ridiculous by the Chevy ads and Christmas albums that were to follow. We, their children, have Mac DeMarco, Edmonton’s crudest emission since an oil pipeline. Drunken hipster nonpareil, this is the dude who once made an AIDS joke at Freddy Mercury’s expense—so ironic, bro! Over at Pitchfork, a cohort of aging, over-refreshed babies lapped it up.

So it came as a surprise when he titled his glorious 2014 record Salad Days after a line from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, headstone for the youthfully headstrong: “My salad days/ When I was green in judgment, cold in blood/ To say as I said then!” As Cleopatra apprehended the end of her youth, DeMarco realizes that the millennials’ skinny jeans—six years out from the financial crisis, and after so many PBRs—no longer fit. Future rock aficionados may look back on this record as the final, magnificent cresting wave of hipster, indie jeunesse. As DeMarco sings, over yacht rock for the yachtless generation: “Sweetheart, grow up.”

Check out the CBC page for other selections by authors, including Sean Michaels and Saleema Nawaz.

As If It’ll Change Everything

Michael Lista traces the power of Stevie Howell's "smoldering" poetry debut to her ambivalence about poetry itself:

There’s a kind of Pascal’s Wager about Howell’s artistic skepticism; poetry may ultimately make nothing happen, but just to hedge your bets you might as well write as if it’ll change everything. And she does. It’s a testament to Howell’s artistry that even though her debut descends into the darkness of abuse, personal tragedy, mental illness and alcoholism, it never feels begloomed, as it’s shot through with the levity and light of her talent. Her ear is impeccable, and she has a gift for mimicry. In “To the free felons who run your facility,” she summons the voice of a paranoid middle-aged man looking for property last seen in 1983. In “Crunches,” she apes some Millennial Liberty Village types, up-speak and all, gearing up for a debauched Halloween: “I’m going to be a Victoria’s Secret angel/ which is neat because my name is Victoria?” And then there are the tiny moments of lyric discovery, like these two jingle-ready lines about everyone’s preferred NSAID: “Take an Advil Liqui-Gel;/ a little Lake Louise in a pill.” Watching her grandfather’s casket being lowered into the earth, she writes: “his reliquary swayed over/ a salivating hole.” It takes an artist of enormous talent to make even insatiable death sound rapturous.

Myth Makers

For Amanda Jernigan, reports of mythopoetry's demise have been exaggerated. She singles out Mark Callanan's mermaid poems as an example of some of the broad new directions the movement is taking:

Insofar as myth is simply the narrative element in literature, the story of mythopoetry is the story of poets’ fascination with story itself, from classical accounts of gods and monsters, to the genesis stories of science and religion, to literary narratives, to pop-culture anecdotes. (Macpherson calls myth, very broadly, ‘any element in literature that has the effect of enlarging a work’s scope beyond the merely descriptive’.)

She also makes a fascinating point about how lyric poetry may, in part, be responsible for the renewed interest in myth:

But lyric poems—contemporary, written-down lyric poems—retain their fascination with narrative. And it is perhaps precisely at the point that poets move away from the longer forms we associate with epic, and toward the shorter, lyric modes, that myths in the sense of canonical stories, stories recognised within a culture by certain basic and recurring elements, become most useful to poets: because this kind of story can be referenced in a phrase, a word.

Jernigan, however, quibbles with a line from Michael Lista’s review of her recent book, and goes on to explain why he doesn’t get contemporary poets incorporating myth in their poetry. This is an odd comment, since Lista does incorporate myth in his poetry. In fact, The Scarborough’s power comes almost entirely from the perspective-altering use of the Orpheus story, for example. More than that, I would argue that Lista’s book might even show us a way past Jernigan’s fear of mythopoets being tagged as “appropriators.” Lista doesn’t practice costumey adapations or new-twist translations or skillful rehashings. Instead, myths become a re-seeing—they enter his metaphorical idiom, his line-making, his sense of self. To borrow from Eliot, Lista becomes the catalyst in the reaction that changes the myths that feed him.

McKaybetes, Ctd

Here's a fascinating Facebook exchange sparked by Michael Lista's review of Don McKay's Angular Unconformity.

Brian Bartlett: Zach, As you no doubt suspect, I'm guessing that 100 years from now—if there is still a human race, & poetry--as many Don McKay poems will still be read & valued as poems by any other living Canadian poet. Speaking for myself, I can say that a few poems of his inhabit my consciousness as only the most memorable poems do. Some of the grousing about his "popularity" caricatures & belittles his readers as if none of them can separate the poet from the person. Also, Lista writes as if in ignorance that the (inevitable) counter-revolution against McKay has been going on now for more than a decade, including in the prose of some of our most articulate critics.

Zach Wells: Brian, I certainly do suspect that you and others hold such views. I also know that predicting future canonicity is a rather haphazard business and ever has been. Jarrell did it for Bishop, and it seems likely that he'll be proven correct, but far more people have said the poems of X, Y or Z will endure only to be proven fools by posterity. Look at any old Untermeyer antho. And just because it happens doesn't mean it's merited. Bliss Carman, who was a truly mediocre poet, still has work in print that is taught in Canadian Literature classes. The competition was a trifle weaker in his day, however. The sheer volume of McKay fans and acolytes will ensure that his work persists until at least they're gone. After that, it's anybody's guess. But what is most popular in any given time and place very rarely overlaps with what is most durable.

Here's the thing about popularity as a topic for critical consideration. Talking about masses and statistics does not actually belittle or caricature any individual reader. I have no doubt that there are individual readers who successfully separate the personality from the poems (or are blissfully ignorant of the personality) and have an unclouded appreciation of McKay's poems. What I'm saying is that the number and distribution of such people is not sufficient to make a McKay the revered figure that he is. Peter Van Toorn has such readers. Bruce Taylor has such readers. Robyn Sarah has such readers. Peter Trower. Travis Lane. But they don't have the pyramid of lesser readers below them that a McKay does. That mass of less-detached readers is what makes the difference between neglect and celebrity. It's the difference between having a 600+ page hardcover Collected selling like hotcakes while you're still alive and having your books go out of print.

The music study and the wine studies cited by Mlodinow are illustrative of very real sociological phenomena. They're phenomena that have benefited McKay enormously. It isn't insulting to his most ardent fans to point this out. And it's naive to think that you're immune to such influences, especially when you know the guy, which is not a factor in wine tasting errors or in preference for one song over another by bands you don't know. It's a major cognitive bias and the principle reason I avoid writing essays about friends' work.

Lista makes brief mention of the "minority reports" by people like myself, Shane Neilson, Carmine Starnino, Don Coles and Richard Greene. He doesn't ignore them, but he doesn't have space in a column to digress at any length on them. So it's inaccurate to say he writes "as if in ignorance." And I, personally, do not feel slighted because he didn't mention my 7,000 word skeptical take on the McKavian oeuvre. Richard clearly isn't miffed that his review of Apparatus wasn't mentioned explicitly. Michael's not trying to steal our thunder; he's adding his voice to a very slowly growing chorus of dissent.

Brian Bartlett: Zach, I've read a bit of literary history, & know very well the risks of "predicting future canonicity." (Yet I indulge in fantasies, such as that a century from now Ashbery's reputation will be greatly diminished.) One reason reading Dr. Johnson's Lives of the English Poets is so fascinating--many of the poets he writes about now largely forgotten & unread (not that he was predicting their future readership). Still, it's a familiar human propensity to look a century ahead--maybe it's wishful thinking on my part to imagine that McKay will have future readers (after the current crop of his enthusiastic readers are "gone," as you put it).

As for being "naive," notice that "belittles his readers as if none of them..." is in 3rd person--at this point I won't be foolish enough to claim I can make a clean separation between person and poet, just as I can't with Don Coles, Bruce Taylor, Robyn Sarah, Travis Lane, Harry Thurston etc., though unlike you I'm sometimes okay writing about poetry by friends—maybe because my approach is generally more exploratory & investigative than evaluative. (Let's not get into an discussion about how all criticism is evaluative, implicitly or otherwise, okay?)

So McKay's book is "selling like hotcakes"? Goose Lane might be interested to know. It amuses me when people talk as if widely praised poets are household names. Are we talking about J. K. Rowling or John Grisham? Are we even talking about Atwood or Munro? While that dizzily poet-idolizing note you shared with us is, yes, embarrassing, a word like "cult" goes beyond hyperbole to stupidity. Even "celebrityhood" is rather funny when it comes to the relatively tiny readership that even much-appreciated poets get.

One thing we agree upon is that wonderful poets (we've both championed Van Toorn and Taylor, for instance) deserve many more readers. I agree that some of McKay's relative "popularity" could be fairly shared by other excellent poets—but he's not responsible for the fact that plenty of people like his work, & it's unfair to use the neglect of those other poets as a stick to beat him over the head with. As for the "very slowly growing body of dissent," it seems to me that among Canadian male poet-critics ("some of our most articulate critics," I referred to them in the previous message) with books or the equivalent of criticism published, attempts to concentrate on McKay's weaknesses & complaints about his readership have become de rigeur. Really nothing new in Lista's approach.

Are You at Risk of McKaybetes?

"In rooting (in both senses) for the often empty calories of [Don] McKay’s words," writes Michael Lista, "our waistlines lengthening and blood sugar spiking, too many of us have succumbed to our national disease: McKaybetes." On the occasion of McKay's collected poems, Angular Unconformity, Lista tries to unpick the mystery behind that debilitating condition:

The question is: why McKay? Why did he, and not the half-dozen or so other top poets of his generation (who I suppose are now post-eminent), become the institution? There are a couple of reasons. By the time Birding, or desire appeared in 1983, McKay, with his ear for vernacular and rural affectations, looked like a natural inheritor of Purdy’s laureateship — itself rather dubious, looking back. His ecological high-mindedness was glossed with just enough aesthetic disaffection to make him seem cool, an attribute, real or imagined, about which Canadian poets are hysterically self-conscious. And the drive of his poems, all torque and no traction, dovetailed nicely with the emerging poetics of trying to get nowhere as quickly as possible (which itself is a cliché: “It’s less about the destination than the journey”).

Of course, there are Canadian poets who, bang for buck, are much better for your intellectual health:

It has to be said: If you put McKay cheek-to-jowl with other top, but less socially influential, practitioners of his generation, his work pales. Let’s meet him on his home turf, nature writing. Here he is on flora: “Flowers begin inhaling through their roots / exhaling darkness.” Again, McKay goes in for the sonorous vagary. Here’s the ex-pat Eric Ormsby on another flora, lichens: “Far-off they’re starlike, spiky as galaxies./ Like us they clutch and grip their chilly homes/ And the wind defines their possibilities.” Not only is he more magisterial by being precise, Ormsby less anthropomorphizes the lichens as he floralizes us, and in doing so sees the natural world in the human X-ray. Here’s the exquisite Robyn Sarah on a desiccated bouquet: “Brittle, dry and brown, / it seemed to speak too plainly of a waste / of friendship, forced to flower, culled in haste.”

Zach Wells dips his toe into the debate:

Michael Lista, in one of his strongest columns to-date for the National Post, has weighed in on Don McKay's doorstopper Collected Poems. He gets it mostly right, I think, but when he says that McKay has "spent a lifetime avoiding seeing the human in the natural world," he has done little more than repeat the press kit. As I argued in my long review essay of McKay's oeuvre-in-progress seven years ago (an updated version of which can be read in my recently published prose collection), this isn't really what happens in McKay poems. Rather, I'd rephrase Lista's statement thus: "Don McKay has spent a lifetime pretending to avoid seeing the human in the natural world." In actual fact, he does it all the time, especially if you compare him with that pre-eminent observer of the non-human world, John Clare--a birdwatching poet who comes up remarkably infrequently in prose by and about McKay. What appears to be a disjunction between McKay's poetics and his poems is actually evidence that McKay's poems tend to be more versified poetics than poems in their own right. Which is another reason, I think, he has been well-received by academic readers: not only do his poems tell you what you should be observing, as Lista points out, they also tell you what you should be thinking while you observe, and they tell you what you should be thinking about the poems themselves. They are therefore very easy to write about and to package in an interpretive argument.

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

Add caption

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

Sunday Poem

JUDGEMENT DAY 

Earth abides. And the sun also rises.
But nothing could prepare me for the shock,
Vanity of vanities, the crisis

Of Arnold beamed down nude between two trucks,
He who had prophesied his endless cycle,
And now was back, and up to his old tricks.

He needs your clothes, your boots, your motorcycle,
But instead gets a cigar to the heart,
Which goes and goes, cold as an icicle.

Dad and I sit in air-conditioned dark,
The popcorn melting like communion,
And the cinema sits in a car park

On a Florida night hot as a kiln.
A molten abstraction becomes a man,
T-1000, who looks like anyone,

Even a Midwestern police officer,
Or your foster mom with a sword for an arm
Who skewers your dad for drinking from the carton. 

The devil’s in everything. Laid as linoleum,
All he has to do is touch her skin
And then he’s her. But something of her charm

Is lost in his cold impersonation.
You catch him by the tingle up your spine—
Her smile inorganic, reptilian,

Too saccharine when she says Woolfie’s fine,
Woolfie’s just fine, dear. John, honey, it’s late.
Please don’t make me worry. Slamming the pay phone,

Schwarzenegger says: Your foster parents are dead.
Your saviour too is cold, born with a gun,
And will deglove his arm to prove a point: 

Not only is evil steel. So is good,
A solid machine forged in fire and quenched,
Austempered to be your personal god,

A real badass, pure Old Testament,
Who’ll kill a man for looking at you weird.
I stare up at my dad, whose temperament 

Could quicksilver, and hold our tenuous world
On his mercurial surface. Even I,
Annealed with his blood, beaded and bobbed 

Across his mirrored pool. Reflecting light
From the screen, T-1000’s changes ring,
Weltering upon Dad’s human face.

The wind changes direction, rivers run
From the sea, and they’ve travelled time for you,
The troubled child who might save everyone 

With his own cold resolve, on Judgment Day,
August 29th 1997,
When the nascent machinery awakes, 

And nukes humanity off to heaven,
Their bodies blown like leaves in the swelter,
Sheltered in a boy’s Ferris-black pupil.

Armageddon roars in a smelter—
Schwarzenegger pours liquid nitrogen
Onto the shape shifter, who falters 

Then freezes. But a fire in the projection
Booth erupts, as from a SkyNet warhead,
And the film flares and melts at ignition—

Judgment Day. The visible scorched to tephra,
Fusing pyroclastic lapilli white,
The disembodied soundtrack playing on.

The night is igneous. It isn’t right.
And in the car, I’m not sure why, I cried.
Dad jokes WE’LL BE BACK, shifts into drive,

And rolls the windows down and then we ride
Down US-41, to the tin sea, where
The sun also sets. And the stars abide.

From The Scarborough (Signal Editions, 2014) by Michael Lista 

A Grave Man

The September Quill & Quire is out of the gate with the first review of Michael Lista's The Scarborough. Micheline Maylor is wowed ("technically brilliant, precisely researched, and formally astute") but is also struck by the poet's "concentrated eye on evil":

Right from the devastating cover image, Michael Lista’s The Scarborough is rife with craft and cultural implication. A VCR-tape masks a grinning skull with a sickly smile evoking Shakespeare's Mercutio: “Ask for me / tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” The visual rhetoric is only the first indication that the poetry collection, which takes place on the 1992 Easter weekend of Kristen French’s disappearance and murder at the hands of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, will layer metaphor, geography, psychology, mythology and pop-culture... Lista’s intentions are not to mollify or explain, but to catalogue and signify an ugly time and place in Canadian crime history with the precision of the obsessed.

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.

The Scarborough Trailer

Watch the book trailer for Michael Lista's new poetry collection, The Scarborough, out next month.

For background on the book, go here and here. Stay tuned for details about the launch.

Underwriting The Present

In 2012, Emily M. Keeler wondered why Paul Bernardo's crimes keep being reprised in the form of essays, books and poetry:

Even though I’m a bit too young (and originally from a city too far away) to have first-hand memories of what it was like to live during the time when Bernardo was serially raping women across the GTA, or the time shortly after when he and his wife, Karla Homolka, tortured and murdered three teenaged girls—Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffy, and Kirsten French—there remains a lingering echo of that terror. The world may be a different place now, and Bernado is behind bars, but lately it seems like this two decades-old story is underwriting some aspect of the present.

Michael Lista, set to publish a poetry collection inspired by Bernardo, has always been quick to clarify his intentions in writing his poems:

I need to make an important distinction here: my new work does not intend “to cover” Bernardo. It’s quite the opposite; It is not about him. It’s more about us, the Canadian imagination, both at the time that Bernardo was committing his crimes, and now, twenty years on, its flaws and allergies. It’s about the twinge of guilt and terror that closes in around that part of our mind when we even mention his name. And I’m looking to see if there isn’t a sympathetic connection that I can represent aesthetically between the solidarity of silence that prevents a mimesis of what happened and the psychopathic personality itself, devoid of empathy (empathy, remember, forces us to feel our neighbour’s pain). It’s a book of poems that isn’t about Paul Bernardo...My interests are in what doesn’t make it into our—especially Canadian—history...Where there is no history, there is no longer an event; and so I suppose my job is to create an alternate event that includes the fact of its exclusion from history.

Cultivating Disaster

Michael Lista praises Joshua Mehigan's new book, Accepting the Disaster, for the way it "tames the chaos with technique":

Mehigan represents a vital alternative to the canard that the only way to faithfully represent the messiness of contemporary life is with messy writing, the pseudo-profundity of the self-indulgently obtuse, a pathologically American idée fixe that’s dominated the last hundred years of poetic thinking and can be traced from T.S. Eliot through Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery and so many MFA theses. “Because forethought and discretion rarely appear in my personal life,” Mehigan writes, “I like to cultivate them in my poems.” It’s precisely because Mehigan is so well acquainted with disaster and disorder that he records them so painstakingly and precisely, according them the memorability they deserve.

Orphic Struggle

In about six weeks, Vehicule Press will publish Michael Lista's second poetry collection, The Scarborough. The book takes place over Easter Weekend in 1992, when rapist and serial killer Paul Bernardo—who lived in the eponymous suburb of Toronto, where Lista himself grew up—committed his final crime. Bernardo's depravity dominates the poems, yet the psychopath himself is nowhere to be found. (Here's a good example of what I mean.) The reason for this is largely due to Patrick LeSage, the judge who presided over the case. When asked to rule on whether or not the videos of the crimes could be shown in open court, LeSage decided that Canadians could hear the tapes, but not see them. Lista has turned that comment into the formal principle of his disturbing and formidable new book. He explains his intentions in an interview from 2012:

The poems are trying to do two things at once, two things that I can’t disentangle. They need to look like psychopathy—classically proportioned, handsome, manipulative, well-spoken, charming, glib, and ultimately devoid of empathy, uncaring of their true subjects. Underneath them runs a psychotic river, the evil Alph, that they’re able to hide with their public faces. But they also need to look like the dignity that LeSage was trying to safeguard in his ruling on the tapes. You can hear the crimes, the perpetrators and the victims, but you can’t see them. The hell of this all is that after some years of thinking in it, dignity and psychopathy look formally identical to me. The form that lets the Devil sneak in is the same that lets the innocent sneak out. The whole thing is an Orphic struggle, leading something unspeakable out by the wrist into the light, without ever turning to look at it.

What Poetry Makes Happen

Amanda Jernigan tries to set the record straight about Auden's famous line "poetry makes nothing happen":

Auden’s nothing is sort of like the “nobody” of the medieval monks who liked to joke about a hero, named Nobody, who existed before creation, who was greater than God. As Odysseus knew, when he introduced himself to the Cyclops as Nemo, Nobody, nothing has always been a good cover for something.

Then, too, it’s a question of emphasis: poetry makes nothing happen; which is not to say that plenty of things don’t happen as a result of poetry. For one thing, poetry turns a lot of people to writing poetry. And, finally: as others have pointed out (see, for instance, Don Share writing here), we tend to quote that Auden line out of context. It is in fact a preamble, capped not with a period but with a colon, which opens out onto the following:

…it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth

Gala Signal Editions Launch in Toronto, April 11, 2014

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

Perfect Phrases

Michael Lista reviews Ricardo Sternberg's latest collection and pronounces him "one of the absolute best poets in this country."

Some Dance doesn’t so much mark a departure from Sternberg’s previous work as continue to plot a trend, an evolution from the folkloric and fantastic to the secular and contemporary. Written in the voice of an “inveterate optimist,” Some Dance finds Sternberg taking account of his world, his life, and bestowing to it the dignity of his style, transforming it like the inveterate optimists of the insect world, “The Bees,” with “the trick (or is it wisdom?) / that allows them to distil / from the thorn of grievance, / the sweetest honey.” He takes us through his encounters with charlatans and stoned surgeons, lost loves, failed marriages, dead friends and relatives, the dictionary, a fridge full of expired food and more, and attends to each with the same verbal precision, panache and pathos, so that the unerring consideration of his aesthetic becomes a kind of ethical invigilation, the redemption of imperfect lives by perfect phrases.