The Nativity of BookThug

It seems I played a part:

“The milieu that BookThug comes out of is the late ’90s and early 2000s, and there’s this famous argument that was going on at the time after Christian Bok won the Griffin.Carmine Starnino had his famous response review to Eunoia, ‘Vowel Movements.’ There was this very curious thing that was going on where people were choosing whether something was good or not based on style.

"So you had the experimental poets over here saying these people were wrong because they were doing what they were doing and then there were the New Formalists … There was The New Canon which Starnino edited and there was Shift and Switch which was edited by Beaulieu and Christie and Rawlings,” Jay Millar told me. “There was this mad grab of defining that was going on, but it had to do with camps. What I was interested in was that poetry is a very vast spectrum between these things, and I don’t think that just because something has a stylistic experimental thing or a stylistic New Formalist thing, that it is better than the other things. There’s good examples of both and there’s a really interesting place in the middle. That’s the most fascinating. The good examples of things on the extremes are also fascinating, for different reasons. That’s kind of the aesthetic that I was interested in curating at BookThug. The discussion between things is much more interesting to me than what everything is, which is why I set up the press the way that I have.”

Street View

Michael Schmidt became briefly infamous in Canada in 1998 for two words that appeared in his 900-page book on the history of English-language poetry Lives of the Poets. In that study—which included mention of only a couple of Canadian poets—the Manchester-based poet and critic dismissed Canadian poetry as a "short street." An interview with Schmidt appears in CNQ 87 which revisits that controversy and covers other aspects of Schmidt's thoughts on Canadian literature. The interview, conducted by Evan Jones, isn't available online, but here are some highlights.

On the dearth of Canadian poets from his 1998 study:

I’m afraid that when you are doing an international historical survey a lot of local darlings get neglected because in that context they are invisible. Lives of the Poets started from a hypothesis of continuities, between poems and between poets, between seemingly discrete literatures. There are major poets who work well beyond borders, and there are those who don’t. Ashbery versus Ammons, for example, or Larkin versus Betjeman. This doesn’t mean that a local or national poetry is necessarily enervated or lacking in shape and even distinction; but the absence of substantial figures to appeal to a visiting reader (I was not the first to stand at Seven Dials and reach such a conclusion) with a very large wave of poetry carrying me forward from the fourteenth century, is what I was experiencing. Much as I admired Margaret Atwood as a wry presence and novelist, her poetry did not seem very good to me. Anne Carson was not at that time where she is today. Mark Strand and Elizabeth Bishop had shaken the dust of Canada off their feet. Earle Birney seemed a colossal joke, a product of Arts Council policy. I have long admired Klein, as you know. So I was a traveller from an antique land and I was looking for mountains or monuments or at least enormous feet of stone

On Earle Birney:

I think I heard him at a Poetry International back in the 1960s or early 1970s. He was the Canadian poet everyone had heard of, the one Canada promoted as the Voice of the Nation. It is possible that I enjoyed his reading. Someone, a publisher or the Canada Council, sent me a very heavy and substantial two volume edition of his poems, hardback and boxed like a Folio Society classic. There was his ‘David’, carried away by its sounds. The problem is that they are, many of them, especially the thick alliterations and assonances, overdone. The effect is achieved and then overwritten again and again. In this case Poe’s prescription is right about the extent of poems, and the treachery of narrative when the impulse is, as I take it to be here, essentially lyrical-elegiac. There were also many poems about his travels for representing Canada. Poetry as diplomacy, poetry as outreach, poetry not as journalism—it did not have that kind of precision—but as enthusiasm, with descriptions of things or of how things affected the travelling bard. My sense was that the whole thing was too easy: the writing, the editing, the publishing, the binding, the privileging. The man was a living monument, but not like A.D. Hope a poet of formal and thematic substance, or like James K. Baxter a volatile genius. It didn’t seem serious.

On hybridity:

Hybridity nowadays is deliberate, a matter of choice and design, treating the genetic chain like rosary beads. Formal choices seem often to be preceded by political calculations.

On anthologies:

You mention anthologies, a subject dear to my heart. Anthologies of poetry needn’t be indiscriminate. They may be bigger because the anthologist rebels against the Golden Treasury approach and feels that if a poet is worth including s/he is worth reading in extenso. For my part, I subscribe as a reader and as an editor to Thom Gunn’s ‘spectrum’ argument which he proposed eloquently in an essay in PN Review, demonstrating a continuity in American poetry from the work of Edgar Bowers at one extreme to that of Michael Palmer at the other, with gradations between. It is this sense not of oppositions, cliques, encampments or interest groups, but of contiguous and interdependent strata. It’s the sort of approach that leads to [Carmine] Starnino’s kind of anthology (which I do find a little too optimistic in its harvest of fifty poets from two decades, but still compelling in its intelligence), but not to [Roddy] Lumsden’s. There are borders, of course, but they are permeable. Note that Starnino’s title proposes a canon, which implies the creation of a diverse, common and authoritative poetry; Lumsden’s proposes a triumphal parade of discreet identities, marching obediently forward. A generational victory parade.

How he would revise Live of the Poets today;

If I was to be revising LotP, of course, I would be under various constraints, not least that of space, and I am not sure how long the comparative street would be, or how Canadian with a Capital C it could be given that so many Canadian poets are Canadian more because of the deliberate erasure of another nationality, or by nurture not nature… I wonder how many Canadian poets insist on Canadianness, and how many are marshalled into that category by those who want to consolidate the notion of a distinctive and definable Canadian poetry? 

On prizes:

On the whole, prize culture, like performance culture, seems to me a distorting thing. Many poets can’t perform and most poets don’t win prizes. The creation of a culture of plausibility becomes restrictive. The fruits are obedience, writers writing for toffee apples, as in fiction the presence of the big screen and its rewards actually impacted on the pacing and texturing of novels. Odd how many novelists, for two long generations, made some of their money from script writing, and the lucky ones from film deals. Performance and prize culture are aspects of the commodification of poetry and the dumbing down, the decorum of relevance and accessibility.

Sunday Poem

SOCIAL STUDIES

“This is your history,” said the teacher of it.
And it was. So, now, is she,
passing around her portrait of a Cree
Indian in a top hat. Any child could see
how meticulously bad that drawing was:
a face like a heraldic shield,
with stuck-on eyes and cheeks of pencil fuzz;
a mouth of line, and, dangling beneath,
a canted Celtic alphabet of teeth.
In hands like dinner forks it seemed to hold
a strip of parchment, sumptuously scrolled;
and this, Miss Ward revealed to us, revealed,
in Bible Gothic, signed with an x and sealed,
how Indians had given up the deeds
to our dominion, in return for beads.

Beside the blackboard, maps were tacked
which showed the world cut up like orange rind,
sliced and sectioned, air-brushed, dotted lined
and crammed with calculations to distract
each young, impressionable mind
from the corrupt, the riotously inexact
contours of unornamented fact.
For there on the grid, like a spilled drink:
the land of Canada, vast and milkshake pink,
pocked with lakes spattered with islands that had lakes,
a pattern of mistakes within mistakes,
profusely annotated with the names of towns,
Manigotagan, Flin Flon, Churchill Downs,
stuck like mayflies in a web of red
roads and rails, unravelling like thread
among the moraines and glacier melts,
dust bowls, tree lines, lichen belts,
along the flumes and gravel beds
where European traders packed their pelts
across our atlas, laying traps
to capture beavers when there were no maps.

Our history, I’ll be honest, is at most
a theory which the facts do not confute.
Some people came from somewhere to a coast
as ragged as the salt line on a boot,
and pitched their cabins in the wilderness,
and did the things that somehow led to this.

The country I live in is a patch of thorns
below a culvert in a sunken plot
where burly geese with necks like flugelhorns
intimidate the pigeons and are shot
by a district sales manager named Russ.
And that’s it. Our lives, our landscape, us.
But near the train yard, where I catch my bus,
a late October frost has clenched the ground,
the football field is hard as frozen meat,
enormous gulls are swaggering around
with snowflakes on their orange rubber feet.
They cruise through stubble with their beaks ajar
shrieking that what they are they are they are.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry by Bruce Taylor.

Sunday Poem

READING MY SON TO SLEEP

Last night, for the first time, I went down the well

my father went down with me.

It plunged deeper than the back of the little skull

whose edge lay page-thin on the while pillow

and darker than the earth's dusk seeping in

to blot the secret passwords I spoke.

"Hello," I tested with each downladdering breath,

the letters pattering like rain in the murk

and echoing off the cavernous stone. A blink,

a butterfly's tentative settle, and the slight

way back had briefly closed.

Another blink, and I was left

with the aftersound of uttered entrance,

my eyes guttering, my arms loose as rope.

With an inward cry I could not help

I watched darkness flood the praying-book.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Tim Bowling.

Sunday Poem

WIND

Forty paces from the house I live in,

across the street, beside the stone wall

of mottled grey boulders cobbled into place,

the men appear once more, the ones who come

without a word or sign to stand beside

the tall, medieval, wooden catapult

wheeled on stone wheels down the street in the dark

from across the bare outlands, stopping there

opposite my house, beside the stone wall,

and together load awkward, unwieldy

sandbags that are the size of dead bodies

onto the catapult and launch them one

after another against the house front,

and sometimes one of them will come straight up

to the house and bang on the window panes

with his bare fist and then go back to his place,

and when I have just about had enough,

they will suddenly stop, break up, and go,

and just leave the sandbags and the catapult

where they lie, if you can believe it.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Jeffery Donaldson

Sunday Poem

CHANGE ISLANDS

So named because I’ve heard

people here changed

islands by season, wintered

on the South and on the hinge

of spring swung to this North

Island, exposed to the slap

of the sea, then back. No one on the path.
Past small graveyards I sleep
by sea urchin skeletons, give

no thought to the phalanx
of cloud coming on. No grief,
except my pail lacks

the partridgeberries I seek.
In Chaffey’s Cove, lobster traps
of broken slats and twine slack

with age, perhaps ripped
by tide, invite my hand inside:
bedroom, kitchen, parlour

where they took bait, and died.
Except the small one who, lured
by herring, tangled in the rooms,

jerked toward a slitted heaven
and found a hatch, a moon
to slip through into a haven

of sea, flux in the gulch, in
and out, applause of water
over stones and surge, again,

again, no house, no mortar,
feast of red-berries, heave
of tide, like Plath’s stunned flies

I believe in heaven, here.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Barbara Nickel.

Sunday Poem

CARDIO ROOM, YOUNG WOMEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION

You won’t know me. Any resemblance
to the woman I was is purely
agricultural. That fluff. A pink annual
given to low-born intemperate acts
unbecoming a modern person. No more.
I’m tough. Nothing
could eat me. No profligate billy
with a hacking cough, or that old goat
and his yen for plagues, floods and burning
fun places to the ground. Not you,
either. There was a time
I rolled like dough, plumped up
to be thumped down with artless yeasty
chemistry. Dumpling. Honeybun.
I sickened some. But evolved
in a flash, like the living flak
of a nuclear mistake. In space-age fabrics
I’ve moved more iron than a red
blood cell, climbing and climbing
the new world’s dumbest tower. I’m on
to this. Alongside the rest
I sweat it out with the smug one-party
affability of a sport utility vehicle.
Deceptively little cargo space.
Even covered in mud I look great.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Karen Solie.

Sunday Poem

SEX NEXT DOOR

It's rare, slow as a creaking of oars,
and she is so frail and short of breath
on the street, the stairs -- tiny, Lilliputian,
one wonders how they do it.
So, wakened by the shiftings of their bed nudging
our shared wall as a boat rubs its pilings,
I want it to continue, before here awful
hollow coughing fit begins. And when
they have to stop (always), until it passes, let
us praise the resumed rhythm, no more than a twitch
really, of our common floorboards. And how
he's waited for her before pushing off
in their rusted vessel, bailing when they have to,
but moving out anyway, across the black water.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Julie Bruck.

Photo of the day

Walid Bitar (right) and Jack Illingworth at the Toronto launch of The New Canon poetry anthology, held at the Rivoli on December 10th, 2005 . Check out the recently uploaded photographs (including the Montreal and Ottawa events). Slideshow here.