Little Life Raft

Vincent Colistro reflects on the relationship between poetry and comedy:

I think you’re right there’s a link between poets and comedians. Both inspect and wrestle with the status quo, and both do so to share the experience of discovery. But I think comedy has unseated poetry over the past 100 years in popular culture because its core purpose is more straightforward—laughter. The other stuff, the “Thinky Pain” as Marc Maron puts it, gets to tag along like a rider provision in a congress bill. Comedy has this way of leading different interpretations to the same general response—again, laughter. Poetry doesn’t have a core purpose as easily definable as comedy (look at all the ink spilled everywhere), so maybe people are unsure what they’re supposed to glean from it, or how they’re to react. I love poetry for that. I love that a single line can elicit all sorts of interpretations. The reason I guess that I use humour sometimes is to toss a little life raft into the storm and say, let’s all convene to have the same response to something, if just for a moment. It’s a cheap way to scooch your audience closer.

Sunday Poem

TAMAGOTCHI 

Electric phoenix, temperamental pet:
Cradled by pockets, it would die unseen
While crosses and gravestones darkened the screen.
If you practiced, your love could be reset.

Shell of appetite, of family, of rest.
Its sheen wore off beneath your anxious touch:
Proof of a lie you later proved auspice,
When you wished for nights you might still reset.  

Mom said it’s not your fault, you did your best:
The same condolence with which she’d lament
The hamsters starved, the goldfish overfed.
You learned on your own what can’t be reset.

By Michael Prior, from Model Disciple (Signal Editions, 2016)

Sunday Poem

REGATHERING 

I searched everywhere in the back-
scapes of my life—through the backlogged paperwork,
the back of the topmost cupboard, the backs of old books—
to find my heart. I think I lost it 

this time last year. I’d given up on it all. Allowed
mortality to piggyback onto everything, blowing the roof off what
I’d built. Why try, I thought? And here

the computer exacted an ounce of my heart,
and there a drink in the afternoon took some of it; the lion’s
share was carved up by sleep and meted 

to the various wishes my body made
when I wasn’t around. My heart was scattered. It would be
near impossible to gather it all back. Michelle watched
as I travelled the apartment like a streetcar at night—as vacant
and vulgarly lit.

She hugged me to bed, cupped her life,
her workaday problems around mine and held them aloft. She sung
such elegant music. I searched the back-scapes, 

thinking the shards of my heart would have dumbly
fallen somewhere. I tried to find it, actually, because
there have been a few deaths around me recently
and I could really use my heart. I did find it, too. Quite 

by accident. I’d given up on getting it back, when I crawled
into bed and Michelle flung a half-asleep arm
around me. And there it was, gathered. I have to give
the little bastard credit, my heart, it knows how to get home.

By Vincent Colistro, from Late Victorians (Signal Editions, 2016) 

Good Measure

Michael Prior shares some thoughts on his upcoming poetry debut, Model Disciple:

When people ask me what Model Disciple is about, I always get a little uneasy. I wanted to make Model Disciple a collection of individual poems first and foremost, but a thematic framework for the book arose organically: as with most writers, I kept returning to the same subject matter. At the core of the collection are my maternal grandparents’ experiences as Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Like thousands of other Canadians of Japanese descent, they were forced into internment camps after Pearl Harbour, while their families’ properties and possessions were auctioned off to pay for their own internment.

Accordingly, the book often deals with issues of intergenerational memory, cultural inheritance, and my own experience of growing up half (“halves?” “halfed?”) and still not really knowing what that means. The collection has a lot to do with my troubled relationship to the writers I love and the implications of stealing from the traditionally privileged canon to express my own confused position. But of course, there are also VHS tapes, guinea pigs, Tamagotchis, Boromir, and Pat Morita thrown in for good measure.

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)

Canadian Oresteia

Robert Moore praises Chad Campbell's debut Laws & Locks:

As family drama—the family as the source of a curse passed from generation to generation—Laws & Locks is a Canadian Oresteia, only without the laughs of the original. There is in the entire volume, so far as I can tell, no lapse into the humourous or even the vaguely ironic (Nabokov’s line from Speak, Memory, “In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much,” could easily have made it to the shortlist for this volume’s epigraph). It is a very dark book. Over the course of its progress through two centuries of Campbells, very little emotional or intellectual light mitigates the gloom of the book’s opening reminder that death is only a breath away or that Canada, for all its apparent promise to an immigrant, “was a thought/ that couldn’t stopper the dark/ rank water of a dark/ rank hold.”

Along with the consistency of shadow, neither the basic subject matter nor the point of view, tone, or essential scheme of techniques of this collection much varies. And this, I think, is one of its strengths, especially for a first book. Campbell isn’t about to be distracted from his solemn agenda by the merely arcane. (This is the advice he tacitly offers in “Lighthouse Beats” to poets whose tastes might run to the postmodern: “Too easy to write of oddities, catalogue curious things—/ mistake a peculiarity of vision for feeling.”) As a result of this discipline, Laws & Locks isn’t what so many debut collections tend to be: a potpourri of voices—of attitudes either struck or borrowed—from a poet who has yet to find his or her own. These poems, rather, read as if they sprang fully formed from the settled and accomplished brow of a mature, mid-career poet.

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 

Sunday Poem

MOCKINGBIRD 

I don’t need you to tell me why I’m here
or solve the mystery of how I slipped so far
and came to, lost in a snickering wood,
your trill my sole directive.

No bewigged guardian of the law
will ever compliment my patience, or sense
of beauty, or your eloquence.
Like you I’m playing with a kingless deck,
bound to songs that others made,
and with my life I sing out the pale result,
my reputation like the heavy coat
of a Victorian postman.
Kindness makes me angry. It’s rough justice.

Now we’ve reached the final, spoofing call
when you parrot the morning bell—
melody dug in, song-fuse set,
then that spine-deep tingle
that bursts in your abrupt last line,
enlightening darkness, slowing time.

By Derek Webster, from Mockingbird (Signal Editions, 2015)

Flash Interview #9—Derek Webster

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Derek Webster grew up in Beijing, Toronto and London. He received an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Carl Phillips, Erin Belieu and Yusef Komunyakaa. His poetry and prose have appeared in Boston Review, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review. The founding editor of Maisonneuve magazine, he lives in Montreal. His first book, Mockingbird, is being launched this Saturday at Drawn & Quarterly bookstore.

Carmine Starnino: The presiding spirits of your book include Americans like Frost and Stevens, as well British poets like Auden and Larkin, and, of course, that transatlantic enigma Eliot. What draws you to their work?

Derek Webster: Frost’s Virgilian dialogue “Home Burial” was important for me as I put together my long poem “Intervention.” The knife-twisting and sardonic rhymes of Auden and Larkin and the traumatized psyche of Eliot’s The Wasteland helped me make sense of many other things as I went along. All these writers use iambic pentameter as their starting point. I found that using it as a default meter helped me in the early stages of creation. It’s the cabernet sauvignon of meters—a robust, full line that, the more you absorb it, the more it pulls unexpected things from you as you strive to complete a line. Thinking about meter also helps distract from some of the more charged aspects of writing—too much emotion can overwhelm. Of course, rely on it too much, put too much weight on it, you can end up with lines that feel like guide rails. Much Victorian poetry feels that way to me.

CS: It's interesting how your poems often measure things in relation to the past—you’re always looking back at the bigger, bygone, picture.

DW: Well, the past is where ideals go to die, so it’s a rich, complex place for poetry. I like art that captures an unsentimental feeling of history, a connection with people who once stepped spritely where we tromp today. We exist on a very limited scale—modern science tells us we’re barely here at all, that there are other scales unimaginably larger and unobservably smaller than ours. These things make me look for what’s most human in us as a kind of answer, and for me that means love, history and family. I’m not sure if these qualities come across in my own writing, but I think of them when I write, and take pleasure and solace in playing out different results in different poems. There’s a brilliant contemporary poet, James Pollock, who has written a long poem called “Quarry Park” that captures exactly this sense of things.

CS: Has your experience as a magazine editor helped you as a poet?

DW: It’s helped me to discern what’s valuable and alive in my own poems and to leave out things that aren’t. About half of the poems in Mockingbird have been around in some form or another for twenty years. Before I edited Maisonneuve magazine, I was rarely sure of what I had written or why and I had no idea how to make them better. I ran my poems through a gauntlet of drafts and forms that ended up fracturing my confidence because the results weren’t an improvement (the poems got worse, usually). That and some other events pretty much stopped me in my tracks for eight years or more. But when a need compelled me to return to poetry, desperate and a little terrified, I slowly realized something had changed; I knew what to do with my own words now, both the rough scribblings of raw experience and the labouriously reworked “finished” pieces of earlier years. Things started to fall into place then.

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.

Flash Interview #11—Talya Rubin

Poet, playwright and theatre creator/performer, Talya Rubin’s poetry received the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. In 2011 she was short-listed for the Winston Collins/Descant prize for Best Canadian poem and was a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She lives in Montreal with her husband and son. Leaving the Island—launched at Drawn & Quarterly on Thursday, April 16—is her first book of poems.

Carmine Starnino: The opening section of your debut describes the Scottish island of St. Kilda as a pretty grim and deprivation-ridden place. If those poems were made into a film, which director would get it right?

Talya Rubin: Lars von Trier would no doubt do a stellar job of making the landscape particularly miserable, but the human aspect would most likely get lost in the abject misery. He tends to be so heavy handed in his bleakness these days, although I am a big fan of his earlier films. Breaking The Waves could almost be a modern day St Kilda story. It's interesting that you think film and drama right away, as the poems do seem to contain a lot more than geography. The ghosts of that place spoke to me in so many layers. I think someone made an opera about St Kilda—heightened human drama and intensity that lends itself to opera, no doubt. Andrea Arnold is my favourite UK filmmaker alive right now. She is very contemporary and deals with working class urban issues, so not an obvious fit, but she did do a re-make of Wuthering Heights, so I think she would be my first choice. She knows how to hone in on a detail and tell a human story like no one else making films right now.

CS: You won Harbourfront's Battle of the Bards in March. A number of people in the audience later told me about how powerfully you read. Are the theatrical and aural aspects of your poetry important when you write?

TR: Hugely important. I'm a theatre maker and a performer as well as a writer, and when I write for theatre I literally speak the text up on my feet. I then transcribe what I've written onto paper. I believe I write poetry in a similar way, only it is by its very nature a more formal process. Most of the poems arrive with some kind of whispering in the ear though, a niggling feeling that there is language there, a rhythm of some kind, an urgency or insistence on an arrangement of words into particular meaning. I often hear things before I write them and when they arrive like that I know a poem is there. Sometimes I carry a poem around in my head for a while before committing it to the page, so voice is very strong for me, and where these words come from is certainly an inner kind of listening. And then, because I am naturally a person who likes to read words on a page out loud I have an innate desire to bring those words to life as a performer. As though the blood and heart beat behind the poem needs to get out. When I read poems by other authors, I often have to read them out loud to really know them, to hear them. The voice in our heads is one thing, but what a liberating, enlivening thing it is to read poetry out loud. I see it as a performative and a visceral experience, not in any forced way, but almost by necessity. I think it is part of what poetry is—this very aural thing at both its source and the way it gets conveyed, like you are writing/speaking from your own inner ear to your reader's/listener's. But I still think poems written with this inner ear need to have rigour on the page. There is an expectation (rightfully so) that poetry in print is going to work visually and read in a more literary, fixed way, and this aural aspect is never going to replace an awareness of line and form. It is about how that listening is translated into something more formal that is going to work on the page.

CS: The last section of the book is comprised of prose poems describing a stay on a Greek island. Why the prose poem? What can it do that a traditional poem can't?

TR: I think the prose poem is a perfect example of this aural tradition. It compresses language so that lines are bumping up against one another, so that breath is almost compressed as well. The prose poem also has an inherently lyric aspect, it sinks us into language so deep we are drowning. And for me, the job of the prose poem is then to make sure the reader can swim, can get to the surface for air—but only just. That the rush of language doesn't entirely overwhelm and the choices that are made are still exacting and ripe with precise meaning. I tried to break those prose poems into more traditional line breaks at one point as an experiment, and it was completely off, it was like trying to force something into the wrong space. Not because the lines wouldn't hold on their own, but because the form is entirely different. I like Charles Simic's take that a prose poem is: "a burst of language following a collision with a large piece of furniture." There is action in a prose poem and an absurd leap. And I think this particular suite of poems was asking for that. It is a series of poems about a really heightened experience, it contains the personal and the mythic, it holds a vast span of time; ancient history and the here and now. So the form seemed right for the content. There is something impossible about a prose poem. The image of those glass bottles with boats in them comes to mind. I always think, "how did those things get in there?" And a prose poem to me is like that, it is like an impossibly large thing fitting into a small thing. And the impossibility of it—the wonder of it—is the form itself.

Sunday Poem

LONGINGS BRITTLE AS THE CROOKED 

Longings brittle as the crooked
branches of October elms that line the residential
streets where families incubate
behind glass. Be to me as rain, asked the rain.
Be to me as wind, asked the wind.
Be to me as darkness, asked the darkness
& only the darkness answered, siphoning
light from under the garden’s leaves.
Dogs scratched one backyard tree season
after season, until one season the leaves refused.
The burgundy trees are almost mute, it seems,
when before in blushes of colour they would return
now pale images of places something terribly burnt
stole itself away replace them: the shoal beside
the sea that stored heat in frigid evenings,
cave on a cliff that hid two painted horses,
the empty double seats of a streetcar that cut off the track
to ring a kettle lake, deep in winter trees.
Be to me as rain, I ask the rain, wash
away this stiff turf, just the smallest patch, show me
the door in the earth so I could
descend and for a time, just a time, experience
the root’s eyeless dedication, relieve
what worries the wood, emerge a courage of leaves.

From Laws & Locks (Signal Editions, 2015) by Chad Campbell  

(Drawing made out of soil, from a series called "Dirt," by Marsil Andjelov Al-Mahamid)

Sunday Poem

AFTER THE SOLAN GEESE

To think you slender necked majestic birds, mythical white,
were worn as shoes. Split open at the seam and tender female feet

urged in to keep the damp and mud at bay; slippers of a sort.
The only plunge you made a final one into the thud of earth

not the dive of arrows into the sea your sharp beaks
once made, a weapon for the abundant fish.

The sky so thick with gannet you resemble white ash
not birds that rise above the rock and fog.

Coupling pairs with yellow-crested heads dusted with pigment,
a solid crown, your skulls resistant to impact from impossible heights.

The only way to catch is from above. The fish are all your bounty here,
herring swallowed by the beak-full, under water.

Sea-bound boats bob and flail in winds too fierce
for any fisherman’s hook or line.

So they net you instead. From horsehair ropes bound with
the lining of sheep gut to keep from splitting off.

Men suspend themselves and poach you from your sea stack nests
dangle from cliff faces, their only implement a long stick

with a noose at the end to scoop you by the neck and snap it there
above the depths.

The goose-neck footwear only lasts four days, if that, then
tossed aside to sink into the ground, skin and carcass as mulch for crops.

From Leaving the Island (Signal Edition, 2015) by Talya Rubin.

The Happiness of Influence

Chad Campbell writes about six books of poetry that helped shape his debut Laws & Locks. (Read his interview here.)

1. Circadian—Joanna Klink: Penguin, 2007

Joanna Klink is stellar. The poems in Circadian limn a borderland between sense and sense impression; a series of maps that trace loss and intimacy equally through the winter landscapes of this beautiful collection. Unabashed and sonorous lyrics, the book is pure tonic.

2. Civil Elegies—Dennis Lee: Anansi, 1972

If the angel of history lost its wings and went for a walk in the wreckage left behind it, you might get something like Lee’s Civil Elegies. Tonally brilliant, this book, to me, is Lee at his most furious and vulnerable. Think the Canadian Heritage commercial version of Prufrock, but better. Even if I hadn’t grown up on Alligator Pie, I’d find this work irresistible.

3. Crow—Ted Hughes: Faber & Faber, 1970

“Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it…turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic”, Hughes once advised. Here, in Crow, I think we see him perform his own best magic—a lucid re-envisioning of the crow into which Hughes pours his preoccupations with myth, sex, and violence in a fallen world. Not to mention the rich, rhythmic textures of the work. It’s like watching a pot of oil boil.

4. Elegy—Larry Levis: University of Pittsburg Press, 1997

Edited posthumously on Levis’ behalf by longtime friend and mentor Philip Levine, Elegy is a masterwork. Like Roethke’s Far Field, here you get the sense of a poet achieving the formal and thematic concerns they hunted for a lifetime—the result is stunning. A touchstone of a book.

5. Land to Light On—Dionne Brand: McClelland & Stewart, 1997

In terms of a poet with something to say, and a way to say it that matches, poem in and poem out, the vehemence of that something, Brand’s Land to Light On is a knockout. At once a scathing account of a continued history of racism in Canada and a refusal to settle for anything less than a fully chosen and lived identity, the book always reminds me that just as it uplifts, poetry can indict.

6. Four Quartets—T.S. Eliot: Faber & Faber, 1943

Take or leave the philosophy, Eliot’s Four Quartets is, to my mind, a tremendous performance. When you see one of those evolution of dance videos, that’s how I feel about this work—Eliot links so many of poetry’s roots in this sequence: lullaby, incantation, prayer, a dizzying combinations of meters. The shifts, formally speaking, are stunning. Not to mention the feel of relinquishment in the work, a coming to terms, as best a person can, with the prospect of death, and the terms and conditions of posterity.

Flash Interview #8—Chad Campbell

A finalist for the 2013 Malahat Long Poem Prize, Chad Campbell’s poetry has appeared in Maisonneuve, The Puritan and Arc, among other magazines. Originally from Toronto, he is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives and teaches in Iowa. Laws & Locks, his first book, is due out from Signal Editions in April.

The following interview was conducted by e-mail.

Carmine Starnino: Tell me a little about your family and why you decided to tell the story about them.

Chad Campbell: We started out, eight generations ago, on Islay, one of the small Isles off the west coast of Scotland. There was a detour in North Carolina, but the family abandoned the farms there and settled—after being sung a pretty song about the opportunity of land north of Toronto—in Eldon, Ontario. I know all that because my grandfather, in his retirement, started the thirty years of research it took to trace our family back into the mists. I stand in his debt. This book wouldn’t exist without the foundation of research that he laid out.

The decision to tell the story, if it came at all, started with my time caring for my mother when she had her first serious manic bout. When things settled, I was left with questions. My life wasn’t free of mental illness, I’d struggled with and, at the time, continued to struggle with addiction. That and the illnesses, obsessions and thirsts that seemed to flourish in my family left me asking what the fuck is happening.

So I started going back. Not looking for some grim root of madness in the family, but instead to try and get a sense of the shape of the mind that seems to have been passed down through the generations. And that’s what I found. Not a singular madness or anything of the sort, but a sort of potential that was more pronounced in some lives, and less in others. Though, at least within the confines of my family, the madness and addiction never appeared out of nowhere, but flourished in the presence of grief, loneliness, and isolation. The first of which is a part of life, the second two became more and more impacted in the family’s experience as they cut ties with farming and more communal living, and took up desks across the country.

But telling the story become important to me. There is so much silence, and fear, around issues of mental health and addiction. The idea that these are weaknesses, to my mind, is a part of what keeps these things unaddressed, tucked away, loathed.

CS: Robert Frost—"No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." What surprised you most when writing the poems in Laws & Locks?

CC: I think it would be just how much we share as a family. Some of this had to do with livelihood. A couple of generations after the farms were up and running in Ontario, people were able to exercise a bit more choice in terms of livelihood. The Campbells started teaching—school, university, church, tailoring—and I had absolutely no clue when I shakily taught my first course at the University of Iowa, that I would be the sixth generation to get up in front of a class.

But more even more than this it was the shape of the mind I was mentioning before—a nervousness about life, a reverence for books, ways of speaking in letters, mannerisms and illnesses of the mind that persisted across the generations. And of course, the sheer, almost baffling oddity of having gone for treatment at the same asylum that one of my family had gone to a hundred and seventy years before me.

In terms of the writing, I think it would be just how much the material demanded that I learn to modulate my voice and perspective from poem to poem. I felt absolutely thwarted at times, struggling with issues of witness and how, exactly, to approach and write towards some of these people. Whether I succeeded is another matter.

CS: Why all the love for the ampersand?

CC: I started using them when I was writing "February Towers," the poems that deal most directly with mania. Not in the first drafts, but once the poems started to settle into the textual blocks they’re written in now, I began to get a better sense of what the form was trying to get at—the sense of something fraught happening in a cramped space; mania in a small house. As the drafts progressed I started looking for ways to turn up the volume on what the form was driving after. Ampersands can quicken lines & oddify things somewhat—that’s the way I see them working in "February Towers": quickenings, traces & tracers in service of the dislocation the poems were born from.

After that sequence I backed away from them and used ampersands only when the poem or poems seemed to do better with them. In the case of the more historical poems that start the book off, I liked the way they call attention to themselves, how they alter the norm a little. For poems that draw as heavily on other people as those do, a bit of otherness, even from ampersands, felt right.

The Grand Seduction

In his interview with me, Michael Harris explains some of his methods when editing the Signal series:

A first line literally has to have one hooked immediately. Without a first line that either leads in immediately to a second line hook or a third line hook, there isn’t any poem, you don’t get down to the fourth line usually. It has to be something that doesn’t throw one off. It has to actually bring one in. Reading a poem is a little bit like falling in love. Ten years on, if it was a correct falling-in-love you’re still with them and if it was an incorrect falling-in-love, you’re not with them anymore.

C: Does that thinking affect arrangement in a book? For example, the first poem you place in your manuscript?

M: A friend of mine, the Quebecois poet Michel Garneau, once told me, “Lead with your best piece.” And that makes a kind of sense. He is, amongst other things, an actor and a playwright. And theatrically, what’s interesting is to have something very strong at the beginning. But I don’t think the first poem in a book has to be the best poem. It has to be a poem that is absolutely solid, that doesn’t push one away, that says, “Here I am. I’m a decently written piece. I have subject matter that’s of interest. I have a couple of oddities. A couple of interesting tropes that tell you I’m an interesting poet beyond what one might normally read.” And by the end of the first page, you have to have read something of import. Then the second page and the 3rd page and the 4th page, you can fool around a bit. By the time the 5th or 6th page, then you have to have a plateau poem, a decent poem, a very good poem. Something that’s so good that, had you put it first, you might have lost the reader; it’s a little bit like getting introduced to somebody you don’t know and coming on too strong. That’s how Shakespeare managed the plays. Very seldom is the huge speech in Act 1. The magic develops slowly. By the time you get to Act 3 or 4 there’s strength, power and explosiveness.

C: You don’t want to come on too strong?

M: You want to be absolutely present and inevitable, but you can’t whack somebody over the head and say this is genius. At least, that’s how I would organize the seduction.

The Art of Memory Loss

On his popular Poetry Forum blog, Robert Pinsky praises Elise Partridge's cancer poems:

I like the directness, clarity and understatement of these poems. Partridge scrupulously avoids playing for sympathy; but beyond that, in “Chemo Side Effects: Memory” she convinces me that her attention to memory loss is absorbing, rich in detail: a little like the fascination a birder or a nature poet communicates in rich textures of behavior.

Vaulting Iambs

Richard Kelly Kemick reviews Richard Greene's Dante's House in the Spring issue of The Fiddlehead (review isn't available online), giving special praise to the title poem:

"Dante's House," the titular piece, is an ambitious long poem written entirely in terza rima and centering around Siena's horse race, Il Palio. Because of the abundance of rhyme and metre within the poem, it is both highly original and oddly familiar. Greene commits himself unflinchingly to the form throughout the entire poem and "Dante's House" has a fierce musicality allowing it to be tremendously re-readable. Greene's ear for metre and adherence to the chain rhyme pattern entangles the reader in the plot of the poem. The form begs to be read aloud, accentuating the vaulting iambs and phonetic chimes. It is the equivalent of that chorus that so subtly creeps into your ear, goading you to chant percussive beats and miming the drum hit, followed by whatever else makes that second sound.

Sunday Poem

THE APPROACHING CURVE 

You said we could be happy
anywhere. But here?
Scylla’s cavern haunts our map.
You said we could be happy
unlipped, unvoiced; left to clap
along or disappear.
You said we could be happy
anywhere but here.

From Dog Ear (Signal Editions, 2014) by Jim Johnstone

(Painting "Glaucus and Scylla" by  J.M.W. Turner, 1841)

Gala Signal Editions Launch in Montreal, April 4, 2014

Carmine Starnino

Jim Johnstone

Ed Carson

Jason Guriel

Catherine Chandler

Richard Greene