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.

Sunday Poem

A GOSPEL

That picture’s somewhere still: First Communion, 13 girls
in lace and satin 'Like a Virgin' frocks,
legs crossed man-style under frills, floral hairpieces
             hanging flaccid over ears. Marrying God. 

An over-lit confessional, gilded chairs, Father Antony’s
embroidered bib, pew-fulls of frog-eyed
parents who’d endured years waiting for our
             exorcisms. This was just before my faith fell.

I stumbled toward Hari Krishnas at the Eaton Centre
causeway and paid $20 for a tome
they would have given away; tried to find in mock-leather
            what they found there, but it hid—

or snapped up free papers about 'the 18,000 realms,'
and visited living room churches north on Bathurst
with congregations of passive mutes; or let the Bahai
            indoctrinate me on Bloor, one afternoon, 

where they fed me channah in a muralized Olive Garden
basement. I left with a cassette
and a mental image of a saviour cresting a hill
            with a hankering for garlic bread. 

My high school and university were poverty and violence. A quadriplegic
classmate lived in a Winnebago. Her mother’s ex
cowered in a laundry hamper with a gun and shot her dead
            one Sunday after Mass. That’s all I know.

From ^^^^^^ [Sharps] (Icehouse, 2014) by Stevie Howell

The Scarborough, Toronto Launch

Carmine Starnino, Michael Lista

Michael Lista

Carmine Starnino

Michael Lista

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

Carmine Starnino and Nyla Matuk

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

How Foreign Is Foreign?

Stevie Howell pushes back on Stewart Cole's characterization of her Walrus prize short-listed poem “Rip Torn” as being an example of "cosmopolitanism in flashing lights":

The upshot is, as foreign as Ireland and England may seem, they are not internet-scoured metaphor-props, but core to who I am—closer to who I am than so much souvenir shop Canadiana. And if that’s not in my work, part of me would be lacking.

(Illustration by Danielle Bazinet.)

Sunday Poem

POPULUS TREMULA 

Broad leaves swing loose, near-unhinged. Noosed
to limbs, swaying gravely without season.
Verging on abscission, oxidizing
copper-tinged, thread-thin necks crane, glint, shift
between whisper and hiss.
Like the shimmer of a sequin-scaled dress, its ombre glitter
is too proud of itself for how common it is. 

Thrusts on edges of thickets down shafts so deep
that stubby-fingered fire can't wring its roots. Sprouts into ashes,
tall as Gloria in excelsis deo, sheds furry grey flowers like post-
apocalyptic summer snow.
Shred into excelsior to bed fragile goods in crates, rescues
oak-casked red wine from centrifuging en route. 

Mortised and tenoned into a rough cross.
Populus tremula, the crux.
It quivers like shot arrows' bow
and shushes its' own secrets for show.

From Ringsend (2012) by Stevie Howell.