Poetry is performance; art is artifice. And it’s essentially entertainment. When it works, it’s not because its Romantic soul spelunking was to a record depth, or because its confessionalist moral laundering was the most Tide Fresh. It’s because its maker believes enough in what’s real to wander off and master what’s artificial.(Illustration by Diana McNally)
"Smith eulogizes Lista and Starnino for being “tough-minded” and “stern”; The Walrus “bravely publishes poems” under the aegis of “the truculent Michael Lista”; and Starnino, in his role as a “combative tastemaker”, has helped “purge” Canadian poetry of “a certain kind of weepy folksiness” Smith blames on the baleful influence of Al Purdy. One’s unsure whether Smith is writing about editor-critics, austerity hawk finance ministers, or Jean Charest in his late showdown with Quebec’s students. In any case, such Iron Lady bluster is as tiresome as it is empty."
"How refreshing, then, to read another recent article by poet Matthew Tierney whose purpose, like Smith’s, is to share his excitement about the “fierce mojo” his contemporaries are working. Despite the ironically humble persona he adopts, the catholicity of Tierney’s list of poets who make his “head spin” reveals him to be one of those “poets, it seems, who committed themselves early, read widely, and got down to it”. The sixteen poets he names (including Michael Lista) are mindbogglingly various, writing inventively from and out of (i.e. away from) every school of composition I know of that’s active in North American English-language poetry, let alone Canadian."As it happens, Matthew is a friend whose new book shows a great deal of that "fierce mojo." I guess I'm curious, however, as to how Lista and I—who clearly fall short of the "flexible, charitable, and gregarious" benchmark Sentes sets for his critics—could be the same people who, together, have published, promoted and reviewed many of the poets on Tierney's "mindbogglingly various" list, including Tierney himself! How did two hate-everything cranks manage to outwit themselves so thoroughly?
Oh boy. Here's an excellent example of a critical debate jumping the shark. (Does Zwicky compare a negative review to rape? Yes, she does.)
It occurred to me that it had been a rather long time since I read a review of a book of poetry by a woman in The National Post, and so I called up the column in question and counted. Only 2 of the 14 books of poetry that The National Post has reviewed in the last year and a half were written by women. 2 in 14. I was expecting some discrepancy, from what I had just passively noticed, but nothing like this.
After four years of blogging, Jacob McArthur Mooney closes shop.I understand now that what I was trying to do with Vox Populism was socialize a solitary experience, and that’s why I couldn’t keep it up anymore. I mean “socialize” here as an extrapolation from the word “social” itself, and not “socialism”. I was trying to bundle my loneliness as a practitioner of a quiet, bashful, art form into a kind of popular front. In wanting to band together, I forgot my interest in both poetry and blogging started lonely, and was made to thrive in that loneliness. That it was a loneliness covered in the warm blue glow of internet collaboration only masked its solitary truth.
Layton’s teaching style was dramatic: a booming voice punctuated by insistent hand gestures. He had a restless intelligence and a wrestler’s physique, and he would stride about the classroom as if he were stalking an idea. In a writing class, Layton made you aware of poetry’s physicality — its pulses and cadences — and of the fact that poets write with their bodies. A typical Layton class included scholarly lecture, Talmudic-like question and answer, and bursts of guerrilla theatre. Once, addressing a lecture hall of bewildered undergraduates, Layton ran up and down the aisles, crying “You’re sheep! Wake up! Who chloroformed you?”
He fucking loves it.It’s rare to encounter a poet who can weave economics, wildlife preservation, public policy, personal and civic history, epidemiology and gastronomy together into the tapestry of metaphor using such deceptively simple language.The Quill & Quire review of Gift Horse can now be found online.
Michael Lista raves over Linda Besner's The Id Kid. I'm delighted that he mentions nearly all the themes that drove our decision-making during the editorial process (life as performance, self as artifice, confession as mask-wearing). It's always nice to have a reviewer point out undetected patterns in the carpet. But it's especially satisfying when a reviewer sees exactly what you hoped he would see.
Q: Is there a quintessential short story, and if so, what is it?
A: Probably not (says Hood). Short stories get up to so much, so that a quintessential story by, say, Willa Cather, has no bearing on a quintessential Borges yarn. So Borges kicked this one door down in me, and then Munro booted down another, and Amy Hempel found her way in through an open window, and Flannery O’Connor pretty much burnt my whole house down.
The full interview is here.
