Dalton and Szymborska

Lynn Davies responds to one of Mary Dalton's poems, reprinted in The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry:

Her poem “The Boat” reminds me of Wistawa Szymborska’s "Funeral” in which Szymborska simply lists the comments of people attending a funeral. I can’t help smiling at the end. How pragmatic but vulnerable we are around death. In “The Boat”, Dalton describes the broken boat that sails down from the heavens and lands in a bed of petunias, and then she lists the people trying to use or make sense of the miraculous boat. In the “ballyhoo” at the end, as the people are arguing among themselves, the boat simply takes off into the blue again, “battered planks clanking.” It’s a noisier, more colourful poem, but I hear a similar vulnerability and pragmatism in response to mystery. Dalton makes me laugh here, as she often does in her poems.

Smarm

Tom Scocca exposes anti-snark hysteria for what it truly is—a "type of bullshit" or "a kind of ethical and moral misdirection"—and in the process coins an excellent term: smarm.

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can't everyone just be nicer?

Daniel Mendelsohn sees evidence of smarm in his classroom:

One of the courses I like to teach is a Great Books course that’s mandatory for first year students, and after I read their first papers it’s always very clear to me that they have no model, no template for what a critical essay is supposed to do—what (or how) you’re supposed to be arguing when you’re writing about a text or a movie or anything. They don’t understand there is a rhetoric of criticism—that there’s a stance you have to have, that you have to position yourself, that you don’t just blather about your impressions or your “opinions” or, worse, your “feelings” about a work. They literally have no idea, at first, what the point of being critical is—no doubt because, in part, they are being raised in a culture where a bland, everything-goes, multi-culti niceness is the paramount virtue. 

The Weight of Words

Donald Winkler won a 2013 Governor General's Award for his translation of Pierre Nepveu's poetry collection The Major Verbs (Les verbes majeur). The following were his remarks at the awards ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on November 29, 2013:

Tonight, in this hall, we are honouring language and its practitioners who, however unlike they may be one from the other, are all intensely aware that this human attribute is a thing of great power and nobility, but also that beyond this precinct there are arenas, not far off, where it is systematically tarnished, degraded, and impoverished. Where words of insight, words of wonder, are recast as words of pretence, words of evasion, words of belligerence, words of contempt. 

It has ever been thus.  

As a translator, my responsibility is to treat every text as an offering, to be transformed, but hallowed, as it is shepherded from one tongue to another. And my accountability is not only to my words and to their readers, but to one whose words, in another language, were set down at great personal cost, perhaps, and whose endeavour and intent must be given their due. This can only heighten one’s sensitivity to the fact that in a world where much hangs in the balance, that balance may be tipped significantly by the weight of words, and how we choose to deploy them.

"We will anxiously monitor
the storms on the sun,
we will welcome its fiery tongues,
we will be nothing but spirit
when the cold centuries come." 

Pierre Nepveu. 

May language be not a smoke screen, but a beacon. 

Thank you very much.

Sunday Poem

SONJA ON THE BEACH 

The wind stirs in the branches of the women
Pure as unthreaded pearls…
—The Thousand Nights and One Night

Sonja is not on this beach as it happens,
but a woman in a black bikini is peeling and splotching—
Please, Woman in Your Black Bikini
put on a shirt and save yourself!        Sonja

is not on this beach today, but a girl,
roughly the age she was,
has turned the colour of
chocolate ice-cream she was, that summer,
a colour still much prized among the young. And look,
there is an adult in deep desiccated brown
to illustrate what fate holds in store for them,

though surely not for Sonja—
because she is not on this beach. Brünnhilde, however,
so athletically hulking, the
dangling drawstring of her shorts
below her strong belly, sun goddess
in cornrows,
is. Planted in the sand.

Sonja is not on this beach but there is
an ostinato rolling with songs, screams, laughter, blue
dragonflying against the drone of waterskiboats,
families spilling out of canoes,
above the pianissimo güiro aspen. And Sonja,

not on this beach, has another emanation in
that woman whose truck is parked next to mine
(pink bikinis must be in style this year)
whom I saw applying lipstick
(which adhered to her cigarette butt),
in her sideview mirror.

Sonja is not on the beach this decade but
a shrieking child on the waterslide, a beachball
barely touching the lake,
a look not entirely suspicious
from a teenager walking through the lozenges of
the waves of the sun in the water
            are. And there’s a gap to represent
Sonja, who is not on this beach to witness
                                                                us, us men,
moving so awkwardly in our near-nakedness—the
incomplete uncoiling of our spines not quite
adapted to our upright posture, stiff rectangle of torso
stumping, the strain of restraining our extraverting
abdomens and the strain of concealing all this—
the lithest of teenagers could scarcely carry it off! Though
Sonja could, Sonja
who is not likely ever to visit this beach
a beach where bottles of tanning lotion continue, innocently, to be
passed, and I am hopeful
of some benevolence for my solitude amongst those,
laid out so larvally in rows,
the deeply connotative sand, and this perhaps illusory
                         sense that there is community on the beach.

From The Civic-Mindedness of Trees (Wolsak & Wynn, 2013) by Ken Howe

Trust Me

Kathleen Rooney wonders if it's time to revise our default notion of poetry as a species of nonfiction.

What if we found out that Wilfred Owen hadn’t actually fought in World War I? Would his condemnation of “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori” be any less moving if we did not know that he was killed at the age of 25 in November 1918, just one week before the Armistice? Or what if we found out that the collection Black Aperture, about the author’s brother’s suicide, a finalist for the National Book Award, was totally made up and that Matt Rasmussen was an only child who not only didn’t have a brother who killed himself, but didn’t have a brother at all? Would it matter if Patricia Lockwood, author of the phenomenal viral poem “Rape Joke,” had not been raped?  In short, if we are angered, confused, or disappointed upon discovering that a poem we took as autobiographical is not, then whose liability is that? If we feel as though we’ve somehow been cheated, is that on us? I’d argue that it probably is. Every text has a narrator or speaker, and we assume at our peril that any given “I” either is the narrator or is even closely associated with some poetic persona the narrator is crafting as an alter ego.

Verbatim

"When I feel most powerful, as a writer, is not in the art of composition. I feel I am at the mercy of the hour, the moment, or the eccentricities of my own circuitry. As an editor of my own work and others’, that is where I feel at my most powerful. I am Edward Scissorhands."
Lucie Brock-Broido explains her "long-term faith in violent concision."

Picture Perfect

Calling it "an incredible feat of vision and voice," Michael Lista is impressed by Alexandra Oliver's debut, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway.

Oliver, who also holds a degree in film studies, writes poems that have dual purchase on the senses; she is equally gifted at picture-perfect scene making and image construction as she is at stitching those scenes together in an unforgettable aural fabric.

And more:

Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway should go a long way toward establishing Oliver as one of the country’s best stanza makers, with a fluidity and ambition aspiring to Dylan Thomas or Yeats.

Sample poem here.