What, then, is to be done?

Today, in reaction to the burning of over a hundred wildfires, thirty-six out of control, the province of Alberta has declared a state of emergency. Meanwhile, neighbouring British Columbia is suffering spring floods. And one doesn’t have to look too far afield to see the same and worse elsewhere (or elsewhen).

Understandably, among those persuaded of the reality of the threat of global warming and who either are not among those breathing hot and heavy over their growing fossil fuel wealth or haven’t simply given up (e.g., those persuaded of Near Term Human Extinction) the question of “What is to be done?” weighs heavy.

Among them are The Guardian‘s George Monbiot and scholar-activist Andreas Malm, the latter who has just published a rebuttal to a recent column by the former questioning the aptness of property destruction in the struggle for the system change the fight against global warming calls for—a good, provocative read.

Among those who pose the question asked above is myself, or, at least, the self who wrote the poem “And if I thought…” you can hear, below. (You can also read it at The /tƐmz/ Review here). I don’t offer any answers, but rather give vent to that sense of crisis, writing out of what that demand to act feels like, at least for me, then…

On Poets and Poetry, the Living and Otherwise

A line in a recent poem of mine reads, ‘”…Dante, Hölderlin, Whitman.” “They’re dead,” they said, an absolutely modern.’

The opinion, or, more charitably, judgement, of that “absolutely modern” is one I’ve encountered and that has irked me for nearly a generation (i.e., three decades) now. The well-read reader has likely already arrayed a phalanx of arguments to skewer said opinion, and I would hope the litotic irony that underwrites my line would serve as sufficient refutation, especially as, its being Easter weekend and I’m reading through the Commedia, “I have no will to try proof-bringing.”

That being said, a poem of mine published a while back in Scrivener, touches on, if not quite addresses, the topic. I offer it here, in print and voice.

I remain fairly persuaded this intervention is unlikely to be my final word on the matter…

New poems up at The Typescript

Though accepted last year, The Typescript has at long last published three poems that compose the tentative title track to my latest poetry manuscript, Blank Song (or maybe Amid a Place of Stone). You can read them, here.

Willow Loveday Little on James Dunnigan’s Windchime Concerto

Like, wow.

Very happy to share here a brief but no less impactful review/essay by one of Montreal’s—nay, English Canada’s—most exciting young poets on another no less exciting young poet.

You can snag a copy of Little’s first trade edition, (Vice) Viscera, here. Read her review essay here.

(Did I mention the folks at Yolk are doing great things?)

Five new poems in The /Temz/ Review #21

The /Temz/ Review has kindly published five recent poem of mine, along with poems, stories, and reviews by many others. You can read it all, here.

Help Peter Dale Scott with publishing two new, important books

Freeman Ng has organized a Fundraiser to help cover costs in producing two new books by Peter Dale Scott.

Peter Dale Scott is a poet, political researcher and former Canadian diplomat whose books include The Road to 9/11, The American Deep State, and Seculum, a trilogy of book-length poems — Coming To Jakarta, Listening To The Candle, and Minding The Darkness — that poet and critic John Peck called “one of the essential long poems of the past half century.”

At 93 years of age, Scott is finalizing two new books, to be published through Rowman & Littlefield, that he considers to be the most important he’s yet written. However, he’s facing licensing fees and indexing costs he’s unable to meet on his limited pension. (On top of unexpected medical bills for three recent hospitalizations due to COVID and pneumonia.)

Please help him meet these costs.

The two books are:

  • Ecstatic Pessimist: Czeslaw Milosz, Poet of Catastrophe and Hope, which would be the first recent general analysis of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz intended for English readers, and which Robert Hass, a former U.S. Poet Laureate and Milosz’s principle translator, called “a brilliant and illuminating book on the complex and essential poet.”
  • Enmindment — A History: A Post-Secular Poem in Prose, a book on the role of poetry in cultural evolution.

You can access the GoFundMe site, here.

You can read an appreciation of Scott’s poetry, the first post on this website, here.

Two poems newly online and in print!

With a deep bow of gratitude to special editor Karl E. Jirgens, I’m glad to share two poems in the most recent number of the Hamilton Arts and Letters Magazine. Among the many auspicious names, I would direct interested parties to the unnervingly talented contributions of James Dunnigan and Willow Loveday Little.

This way to Sàghegy…

One of the editors here at Poeta Doctus is synchronicity. And, after all, what poetic sensibility isn’t tuned to the rime of meaningful coincidence?

To wit: a friend recently shared a photo from a small town near where he presently lives in Hungary, Celldömölk. Now, it so happens I visited Celldömölk in 1991 to honour the publication of a friend’s avant garde epic work Fehérlófia (the son of the white horse). In the upper right hand corner of the picture, you can see directions to the nearby vulkán, the extinct volcano Mount Ság (Sághegy).

Among other claims to fame, Sághegy is where the epic’s author, Kemenes Géfin László, hid out after participating in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, before he was able to flee to Austria and eventually to Montreal, Canada, where I was fortunate enough to make his acquaintance. Returning to his home town and the flanks of Sághegy thirty-five years later, Géfin was struck by the lushness of the locale, so much he was moved to remark, “There is a god here!”

To honour the occasion, I sat and furiously composed some forty different iterations (I still have the small, black notebook) of what eventually became the second Budapest Suite. To honour this most recent synchronicity I reproduce Budapest Suites II, below, and share a reading of the poem.

Budapest Suites II

for Laszlo Géfin

 

“There is a god here!”

In wild strawberry entangling thistles,

In maple saplings, a shroud on loam,

In chestnut and cherry blossoms over tree-line,

In goldenrod and grass, every green stalk, bowed with seed.

 

And there is a god who

Quarries slate for imperial highways,

Mines iron-ore out of greed,

Who would have Mount Ság again

Ash and rock.

 

And there is a god

In the seared, scarred, spent, still,

For lichen, poppies and song

Here rise from the bared

And broken rock to the air!

 

A short interview with Griffin-nominee, David Bradford

Griffin Trustee Ian Williams interviews (my) ex-student and poet-friend David Bradford about his Griffin-nominated first book Dream of No One but Myself. The conversation ranges over the book’s matter, some of its compositional gestures, and the title, and includes a short reading at the end.

Here’s looking ahead to the announcement of this year’s winners on Wednesday, 15 June!

Absolutely Modern Compositional Praxis (a title sure to make this post go viral!)

The indefatigable Kent Johnson continues his running battle with any and all complacencies, real or apparent, in (at least) the American anglophone poetry community. As is often the case, he’s been carrying on a running battle with various L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, recently with Bruce Andrews. Interested parties can visit Johnson’s FB page where these threads unwind, but I share here a latest back and forth to pin the point I want to make on:

MORE EXCHANGE ON LANGUAGE WRITING, WITH BRUCE ANDREWS (continuing from yesterday)

Bruce Andrews wrote:

>No grudges about a peer [Eliot Weinberger] who I never found to be “brilliant” & who made what I considered many uninformed “categorical polemics” about a range of experimental (&, yes, intransigent) writing; it was a comment about the thread of responses you’ve mobilized here (& tend, for whatever personal reasons, to mobilize/trigger) into sweeping disavowals of a very large range of poetry that I’ve cared very deeply about — so are we talking about Peter Seaton or Hannah Weiner or Tina Darragh or P. Inman or Diane Ward or Michael Gottlieb or Alan Davies or Steve Benson or Abigail Child or Lynne Dreyer or WHO; this visceral attack/dismissal mode [not duplicated, by my reckoning, in my own published responses to poets I don’t get enthusiastic about] is what I find to be … SAD ~

*

I replied:

Bruce, sorry, but you’ve got it wrong. I’m on record as having a conflicted stance in regard the Language formation.

Sure, I’ve had my strong critiques (that’s part of poetry, right?). And I’ve engaged in satire, as well (that used to be part of poetry, too, no?). But I’ve never turned that into a sweeping dismissal of the tendency. To the contrary: I’ve written more than anyone, so far as I can see, about how you folks quickly capitulated on your original, stated ideals–one of the most rapid “avant-garde” recuperations ever, and one that has had far-reaching consequences in the sociology of U.S. poetry. That’s a good kind of critique, even a comradely one…

All in all, compared to some of the outright character assassination directed against me by a few of the top reps of the Language group and its junior satellites, I’ve been pretty damn reasonable.

The moderately-attentive reader will understand, I wager, that the dispute is, vaguely, critical, invoking as it does “polemics,” “disavowals,” “attack,” and “dismissal”. Johnson has, in recent days, been advocating for a poetry criticism that doesn’t shirk from being “negative”, whether witty or downright mean (interested parties can scroll back on Johnson’s FB page to see numerous examples…). Those of us in (anglophone) Canada who suffered the Reign of Terror of the Axis of Cavil at Books in Canada and the “negative reviewing” it practiced and advocated will likely sigh, roll their eyes, and thank their lucky stars those days are over. A generation later, and it’s hard to discern just what beneficial effect all the bile and venom spit those days might be said to have had on our poetry….

Johnson’s critical polemic isn’t merely aesthetic, however. Many poets associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, especially Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman (among others) adopted an overt, specific, political stance, which Johnson never tires of taking to task (“how you folks quickly capitulated on your original, stated ideals—one of the most rapid “avant-garde” recuperations ever”). One can, however, prise the poetic from the political, here; Johnson’s critique is aimed not so much at the poet-as-poet but the poet-as-citizen, a not unimportant distinction. Not that poetry is not inextricably social (however much the aesthetic arguably is not reducible to the ideological), but Johnson’s dogged persecution of the poets’ hypocrisy diverts attention from strictly poetic concerns, including the question of poetry’s being political.

More urgently for the practicing poet and interested reader (critic or otherwise) is the aesthetic-compositional significance and legacy of the poem or poetry in question. In the case of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (if one can even grasp the “school” as a unified totality, which Andrews calls into question supra), what’s at stake for the poetry is the success and failure (it’s always both) of its intended effect, the articulation of the linguistic medium to achieve that end, and the uncontrollable subsequent reception of the work, aesthetic and otherwise. Of even greater importance is what resources for compositional praxis does the work have for today (a day that is always new).

This question looks both backward and forward. The poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is no longer novel, (however much every reading always differs from the previous), so any estimation of its remaining compositional resources needs contrast the horizon or social matrix of its emergence from that or those in place today, however ephemeral. Moreover, any deployment of its compositional potential that puts it into play today sets the resulting text free into the future; the poem will be received in unpredictable ways. In this sense, “all poetry is experimental” (if that adjective, first used in English by Wordsworth and Whitman, can be said to still be of much use). It should be pointed out, further, the potential of any given compositional technique is never given once and for all; its pertinence and promise is always local.

The ironic (or dialectical…) consequence of this insight is that “the absolutely modern” in terms of what compositional examples might be drawn on is in harmony with Blake’s dictum that “The Authors are in Eternity,” i.e., from the point of view of the pragmatics of composition the poetic inheritance is free of the conditions that determined the moment of its composition and immediate reception. At the same time, however, no practice can anymore claim to be sanctioned by Tradition: every inherited technique, every articulation of the linguistic medium is subject to interrogation: how does it work now? Such an absolutely modern sensibility works with/in a temporality wherein “all ages are contemporaneous” but the moment of composition and the immediately foreseeable moments to follow (insofar as they are foreseeable) is grasped by its relative singularity.

Much, much more, of course, could (and probably should) be said. Moreover, the cognoscenti will detect the position I adopt here doesn’t move much past the notions of poetic development or evolution developed by the Russian Formalists a century back and even draws on Matthew Arnold’s criticism in some respects. Nevertheless, the point I want to make here is a simple one, if all too often forgotten: if you’re going to kick the poetic ball, ya gotta keep your eye on it.

David Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself nominated for a Griffin!

This year’s Canadian nominees for the Griffin Poetry Prize include friend and ex-student David Bradford‘s first book Dream of No One but Myself.

Bradford’s is one of a number I’ve been trying to get around to writing about here at Poeta Doctus. Now, I guess, there’s even more reason. Do yourself a favour, click on the title above, and get yourself a copy, so you can better appreciate that review/notice when it finally gets written and posted, or, better, support a poet whose words call out for close attention.

More from the archives…

In honour of its fiftieth year, The Capilano Review is revisiting past issues and sharing some of their contents. Today, it shared some texts from its Winter 2002 grief / war / poetics issue, but somehow managed to overlook my contribution.

How the editorial team could have committed this oversight is beyond me: to my mind, the poem in question, Seventh Column, excerpted in that issue, is my most accomplished work in terms of its composition, its articulation of its linguistic material.

When the Western powers finally withdrew their forces from Afghanistan recently, I shared the complete poem with some introductory comments. Interested parties can read those comments and the poem, here.

Next reading: Montreal SpeakUp

The organizers of Montreal’s SpeakUp reading series have kindly invited me to read with two others, Tamara Nazywalskj and Derek Godin, Thursday 24 February 2022, 19h00 CST.

SpeakUp has a rewarding format: poets read only one or two short poems, shared with the audience, after which there’s a twenty-minute Q&A.

I’ll be reading a fun, mindbending poem from Grand Gnostic Central that goes by at the speed of thought!

You can get a Zoom link to the event my emailing MTLSpeakUp@gmail.com.

“We must be absolutely modern”: an anecdote for Kent Johnson

Over at his Facebook page, Kent Johnson continues to probe the legacy of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in his inimitable way. His persistent concern with the movement and its wake prompted me to observe, among other things:

I think it needs be said, too, that, for my part, anyway, I don’t know a poet under, let’s say, 35 who would either recognize the terms of the dispute or even grasp the pertinence of the issue. Their concerns are either identity-political or ecopoetical (and that ‘or’ is not exclusive), and those with the conceptual apparatus would likely judge the whole discussion as formalist, all-too-formalist…

All of which brings to mind the following anecdote…

I’m fortunate to count among my friends a number of poets and scholars half my age, among them, one brought into our circle by a peer of mine, now a professor emeritus of German language and literature. One evening, this young friend, another peer of mine, and myself were carousing, as we poet-scholars are wont to do, this time at my peer’s place.

I forget now exactly how the topic came up, but I recall maybe it had something to do with American poet Charles Olson. Our young friend is a frighteningly-gifted and learned young man, a francophone Quebecer who speaks English and German like a native speaker and who, at the time, as part of his graduate work in Irish Studies, was learning Gaelic (he has since, last I heard, taken up learning Dutch, for the fun of it). Though steeped in the European literary Modernism of the first half of the Twentieth Century, Olson was new to him.

What ensued was a speed-seminar in the Poetry Wars of postwar American, anglophone poetry: Donald Allen’s landmark anthology The New American Poetry, the New Criticism oriented poetry then in power, Confessionalism and Projective Verse, etc. The impromptu seminar ended with a lively reading of Olson’s “La Préface”.

Our young friend’s reaction: “Why don’t they teach us all this in school?!”.

New poem online: “Exercise: Prospective Verse”

The EcoTheo Review has been kind enough to publish and share a humble poem of mine online, which can be read, here.

Despite our best efforts, a recording of the poem I made wasn’t posted along with the poem; therefore, I share that recording, here:

“Exercise: Prospective Verse”

Open Book sure likes David Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself

Open Book shares a short interview with David Bradford about his “hotly anticipated debut poetry collection”, Dream of No One but Myself, “a work of stunning creativity and self awareness”.

Personally, I find such promotional copy a little embarrassing, as its hyperbole can’t help but unmask it as promotional copy, emptying it of any of the gravity that would anchor its persuasiveness.

That being said, Bradford’s book is provocative, both thematically (as a “lyric examination of his experience growing up in a racially [and linguistically!] diverse family”) and formally (with respect to the modes of composition deployed to develop and present that matter). Indeed, Bradford’s work would be afforded higher praise by a scrupulous reading of these dimensions, whose study would be a substantial appreciation (free from matters of mere preference—what I like or don’t) of Bradford’s unquestionably accomplished first book.

You can read the interview linked above, or another I conducted with him some time back, here. Of course, the best course of action is to click on the book’s cover, above, check out the sample of poems from the book, and buy a copy!

Grammar, linguistic and literary production, and related matters: a note for Kent Johnson

If there’s one thing that indefatigable gadfly of a poet Kent Johnson and I share it’s a stubborn, irritable tick of concern with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and poetics and their “post avant” wake (so wide now few poets or critics seem aware how much they operate within its horizon…).

Recently, his most recent online persona linked an article he had written for absent, “competence, linguistics, politics & post-avant matters”. Therein, he rightly takes to task Charles Bernstein et al. for their loosey-goosey way of discussing (and thinking about) language, grammar, ideology, and society. I can’t say I’m in full agreement with Johnson on all points, but the drift of his argument is surely in the right direction.

It was with no little delight I read in a recently acquired copy of Slavoj Žižek’s 2012 Less Than Nothing the following passage, which sums up pointedly and neatly the fundamental misunderstanding of language (the identification of linguistic or literary production with that of commodities) that underwrote, at least, the early days of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E:

The basic premise of discursive materialism was to conceive language itself as a mode of production, and to apply to it Marx’s logic of commodity fetishism. So, in the same way that, for Marx, the sphere of exchange also obliterates (renders invisible) its process of production, the linguistic exchange also obliterates the textual process that engenders meaning:  in a spontaneous fetishistic misperception, we experience the meaning of a word or act as something that is a direct property of the designated thing or process; that is, we overlook the complex field of discursive practices which produces this meaning. What one should focus on here is the fundamental ambiguity of this notion of linguistic fetishism:  is the idea that, in the good old modern way, we should distinguish between “objective” properties of things and our projections of meanings onto things, or are we dealing with the more radical linguistic version of transcendental constitution, for which the very idea of “objective reality” of “things existing out there, independently of our mind” is a “fetishistic illusion” which is blind to how our symbolic activity ontologically constitutes the very reality to which it “refers” or which it designates? Neither of these two options is correct—what one should drop is their underlying shared premise, the (crude, abstract-universal) homology between discursive “production” and material production. (7)

I am skeptical Žižek’s characteristically canny observation settles the question (one that extends back to the advent of philology (the science of language) and literature-as-such), but it is surely sharp enough to cut through much of the underbrush!

To praise, that’s the thing

A while back, I ventured a few words on James Dunnigan’s The Stained Glass Sequence. As chance would have it, another set of notes, appreciative of the chapbook’s virtues, has turned up, which can be read, here. The anonymous reviewer (who seems to hail from Ireland) shares my appreciation for the sequence’s reflexive dimension:

Stained glass itself is like a decoration hung on perception, one that refracts the light and shadow of the reality behind, transforming it into a more ornate version. Poet James Dunnigan leverages that quality as the foundational conceit for The Stained Glass Sequence, a chapbook plunged in reflection on another primordial creative force: language. But it’s not for the sake of an academic lesson so much as a means to show how poetry transfigures society into civilization.

High, and well-deserved, praise.

Readers whose interest has been piqued can follow up on The Stained Glass Sequence by getting a hold of Dunnigan’s markedly uncanny and no less accomplished follow-up, Wine and Fire (Cactus Press, 2020), whose launch can be viewed, here.

Now the only question is which acquisitions editor will be canny enough to grab the manuscript of Dunnigan’s first, full-length collection…

Five Minutes at Montreal’s Expozine 2021

Montreal’s Expozine and POP Montreal were kind enough to invite me and other Montreal poets to perform in support of our respective micro- and small presses. You can catch my brief contribution (until the end of October 2021, anyway) around the 35:00 mark, here.

The chapbook I’m reading from is As on a holiday. You can view the Zoom launch here and purchase a copy from the publisher, Cactus Press.

“Poetry is news…” &c.

Two decades back, in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, when the United States and its allies were rattling their sabres mobilizing to invade Afghanistan, many were critical of such an ill-advised adventure, including myself. I cast around for a way to articulate this critical unease, happening, finally, on a column from The Globe and Mail (as described below) that provided the material and impetus to compose a work of verbal art (a “poem” or, in this case, more properly, a “text”) that answered my need.

As I wrote in way of preface at the time:

Saturday 22 September 2001 The Globe and Mail published an essay article by John Barber ‘Wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains’ (F4). Despite its critical stance toward the then impending invasion, the terms of its discourse were so pedestrian my frustrated and bored eye wandered across its six columns. The article read thus, against the grain, oracularly clear, and the experience of that reading what I want to communicate. The sense it made to me leaves its trace in minor editorialisations (where the text has been stepped on). This vision into the essence of our imagination of Afghanistan is as forbidding as the country itself: a land of glacierous and desert mountains and sandstorms and tire-melting heat that swallows whole armies. “Cut the word lines and the future leaks through.” Here, English speaks this vision: in dead or obscure words, new compounds and coinages. Syntactically, at root (or so Norman O. Brown told John Cage) the arrangement of Alexander’s soldiers in a phalanx (the Great, too, stopped in Afghanistan), the language has been demilitarized.

Some stanzas of the resulting poem, Seventh Column, were published in The Capilano Review, in an issue devoted to poetic responses to 9/11. The entire poem was issued in a very limited edition, hand-stitched chapbook, long since sold out. On the occasion of the withdrawal of western forces from Afghanistan, the time seemed ripe to share the poem in its entirety, readable in the PDF, below.

Solace for staycationers

A lot of folks aren’t able to travel as has been their wont these days. One new acquaintance and partner had been planning a short tour of Germany and Italy last summer, a plan put off until at least next summer.

To help them suffer their enforced staycation, I offer this poem from Ladonian Magnitudes, “European Decadence in medias res” to remind them of what they are missing and offer some solace. A recording of the poem follows.

 

 

European Decadence in medias res

 

They’re cutting the gelato in Sirmione

with pure azure lakewater.

In Siena City Hall two old pigeons hunched

on the bitch-wolf’s back trickle lime down

to her teats suckled by the twins.

In the Old City they serve una vera grappa

senese I’ve always passed over at the S.A.Q..

In Otterndorf the Matjes Dutch sushi

raw herring is swimming in salmonella.

In Charles de Gaulle Theseus a clochard

begs our last cents. “If we miss our connection

I’ll strangle somebody!” I said when we finally

found our flight home and remembered I’d said it

arriving. Air France dejeneur croissant et eau de source.

 

For the Love of Dante redux

Every Easter Week I read through Dante’s Commedia.

Last year, to mark the occasion, I recorded a poem “The book I can’t read closed beside me…”. As Easter Week has come around again, and, since making that last recording, I’ve been fortunate enough to invest in a new microphone, I’ve re-recorded a cleaner, crisper, and hopefully more lively version.

You can read that original post and hear the new recording, here.

“Why scribble in lingo 3 peoples reads?” up at “Poetry Pause”

The League of Canadian Poets has kindly included this fourteen-line poem in its “Poetry Pause” series, which you can read, here.

Synchronicity-invoked Dangerous Supplement

By “meaningful coincidence,” the day I downloaded and taught myself the software I needed to make the raw Zoom footage of the launch for my latest chapbook at least a little more presentable, a Canadian poet-critic shared he’d just published an essay on “‘counterfactual’ poetry anthologies, ” a topic essayed by one of the poems from that chapbook‘s Toronto Suite: “Literary Life in the Capital””

“Literary Life in the Capital” from Toronto Suite

“As on a holiday” launch, for your poetry viewing pleasure…

The March 24, 2021 launch of my latest chapbook is now up online: if you missed the event, you can catch it here.

As on a holiday: teaser #3

https://www.cactuspresspoetry.com/

My latest chapbook, As on a holiday, launches Wednesday 24 March.

It’s a challenging book to present orally/aurally, as the poems are all very short. The reader, too, therefore, is faced with the question of exactly how to connect all these short poems. In the tradition of postmodern poetry, such as that of Homer, Dante, and Cervantes, the collection includes a poem that suggests an approach, the first of Farnad Songbook, read here:

from Farnad Songbook

Looking forward to seeing you all at the launch!

As on a holiday: Teaser #2

https://www.cactuspresspoetry.com/

The launch of my new chapbook, As on a holiday, is getting closer. Today, I offer as preview (pre-hear?) two poems from the section “Made in Germany”.

Everything you need to tune in you should find here.

from “Made in Germany”

As on a holiday: Teaser #1

https://www.cactuspresspoetry.com/

I launch my chapbook As on a holiday (Cactus Press) in just over a week. Between now and then I’ll be posting short readings from the book to pique your interest if not whet your appetite.

The first is part of the “London intermezzo” from the section “Made in Germany”.

from “London intermezzo

The FB Event page for the Zooom launch Wednesday 24 March is here.

“Does Anybody Buy Books Today?”

“Developers” are changing the face and character of cities all over the globe, no less in Montreal, Canada.

The city’s Plateau / Mile End neighbourhood has been undergoing gentrification for years, but a recent flashpoint has been the threatened eviction of a longstanding used bookstore, S. W. Welch. The landlord’s jacking the rent caused such an uproar that locals organized a “read-in” in support.

https://www.facebook.com/events/252390853101086/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22mechanism%22%3A%22your_upcoming_events_unit%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22bookmark%22%7D]%7D

The story was widely covered in local media, including a number of telephone interviews with one of the landlords, Danny Lavy, quoted in the poster, above. Lavy’s words struck me as so representative of a certain mindset (like those that inspired Basil Bunting’s “What the Chairman Told Tom”) I quickly cobbled them together into a poem of my own.

You can hear the poem, here:

The Developer Defends the Rent Hike that Would Evict a Longstanding Fixture of the Neighbourhood

(You can read another poem about the changes in Mile End, here.)

New Chapbook: As on a holiday…

I launch my latest chapbook, As on a holiday, with Montreal’s Cactus Press 24 March 2021 20h00 ET. The chapbook collates four short sequences composed during and about trips to Germany (2012), Slovakia (2014), Toronto (2017), and Saskatchewan (2018).

You can access the Zoom link at the Facebook Event page, here.

You can read an earlier version of one of the poems from the Toronto suite, here.

The indefatigable rob mcclennan has published a wi(l)de-ranging interview with the press’ three editors, here.

I’ve invested this year’s Public Lending Rights cheque in a new microphone, so the sound quality of the launch is sure to be top notch! Copies of the limited-edition chapbook are available in print and electronic formats through the publisher, linked above.

Save the date!

A Sideways Glance at Don McKay’s Angular Unconformity

Mark Dickinson’s Canadian Primal:  Poets, Places, and the Music of Meaning, a groundbreaking study of the lives and work of Dennis Lee, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn has been open in my hands since landing there only a few days ago. Having just finished the chapter on Don McKay, I’m reminded I wrote a short notice of McKay’s collected poems angularwhen it appeared in 2014 for a very good website, now defunct. Because it is a sharp, short review, I share it here, now, so it might remain on record. (The curious can read a more sweeping essay on the oeuvre of Robert Bringhurst, here).

 

“Hard to say this awkwardly / enough”:  a review of Don McKay’s Angular Unconformity Collected Poems 1970-2014

 

Angular Unconformity is hardly amenable to a short review, collecting as it does ten volumes of poetry, supplemented by a sheaf of new work, more than 500 pages, a lifetime of poetic production. Moreover, any reader acquainted with contemporary Canadian anglophone poetry can’t be unacquainted with Don McKay, a two-time winner of the Governor General’s award for Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000) and the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip (2006). He is accordingly admired and targeted for these accomplishments and for his influence as an editor and teacher.

Nevertheless, one can characterize the stylistic development of McKay’s poetry with relative ease. The poetics of the first two volumes collected here, Long Sault (1975) and Lependu (1978), are influenced not so much by Purdy or Ted Hughes (as one critic would mysteriously have it) but by the New American Poetry, specifically Olson’s Projective Verse and The Maximus Poems or William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, especially where Long Sault becomes personified in (at least) the book’s fourth section. Lependu torques up the conceit of place and person, in this case London, Ontario and Lependu, in a more focussed, dense, and documentary fashion, but one that is self-aware enough to play fast and loose with its sources for its own artistic ends.

However, with Birding, or desire (1983) McKay finds his groove. In the book’s opening poem “Field Marks” (93) one finds what might be a description of much of McKay’s work from this point on: “…a bird book full of / lavish illustrations with a text of metaphor” (7-8). While in “Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow” (125) in the same volume the poet points to his “shelf / with Keats and Shelley and The Birds of Canada” (21-22). In these lines McKay presciently parodies the reputation this and following volumes will earn him, that of the Nature (i.e. Romantic) poet whose main thematic vehicle is Canada’s birds. Like any parody, however, this one possesses a perverse truth, for a primary objective of McKay’s poetry is one shared with Novalis and Wordsworth, to render the familiar strange, to percieve the things of the world as if for the first time. As McKay writes in the essay “Baler Twine” from Vis à Vis (2001):  “in such defamiliarization…we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy—its rawness, its duende, its alien being” (21). This “circumvention of the mind’s categories” is simultaneously an eschewal of the mind’s drive to dominate via knowing, a refusal of what McKay terms, following Levinas, “the primordial grasp” in favour of a “poetic attention” wherein the poem reaches for “things sensuously through the caress” (23).

The poems caress their objects with two hands:  on the one, a fluctuation of lexicon and tone, while, on the other, a protean metaphorization. The poems mix so-called High and Low culture, “lascivious as Beardsley, sweet as Shirley Temple”, the vernacular and the discourses of geology, philosophy, and (of course) ornithology, English and French, gravity and humour. McKay’s artistic drive to refresh perception by means of poetic redescription shares something with the “rosy-fingered dawn.” But his style differs from epic simile or Metaphysical conceit or even that more recent predilection for what John Crowe Ransom termed “texture” (theme developed by a consistent pattern of trope and scheme). McKay’s metaphors are more impulsive and local, often working strictly within the context of the line more than the stanza or entire poem. A map in The Muskwa Assemblage (2008) is “skewed to the diagonal….as though some formerly symmetrical design had been invaded by irresistable divinity, some Dionysus headed northwest”; the reader of the map “might have been a crime scene investigator”, the geograpy variegated “[a]s though deep form, like a medicine dream, were forcing its way up from the mantle” (480).

Readers, then, must negotiate a constantly changing linguistic landscape bent on “the circumvention of the mind’s categories”. These demands aren’t the product of a high-handed virtuousity but the humility that underwrites McKay’s species of “poetic attention” whose restless articulations stammer to admit it’s all too “[h]ard to say this awkwardly / enough” (“February Willows” 3-4, in Sanding Down this Rocking Chair on a Windy Night (1987), p. 191). McKay’s art works against a certain eloquence, against consistency, knowledge, mastery. The first two books possess more a vector of compositional means than the focussed, polished exploitation of a given set of techniques. The constant shifts in vocabulary, tone, and trope, the bad jokes, all serve to puncture the authority of the poet who must work both with and against his poetic fate, inheritor of the Romantic prophetic or vatic mode that humbles itself to take up a poetry of attention anxious to exploit every linguistic resource not for the sake of Art but perception.

Hölderliniae

The Hölderlin Tower, on the Neckar, Tübingen, Germany

Yesterday, thanks to Cæsura, I got wind of Nathaniel Tarn’s forthcoming collection, The Hölderliniae, a book of poems wherein, “via affairs of love and polity, Tarn speaks through Hölderlin, and Hölderlin speaks through Tarn.”

I received this news with a mix of excited interest and rueful disappointment. On the one hand, like so very many, I hold Hölderlin’s poetry in very high esteem, not least because of its relation to the enduring pertinence of Jena Romanticism, so you can bet a copy of Tarn’s new book will be in my hands warm, if not hot, off the press. On the other, drafts of my own palimpsestic engagements with Hölderlin’s poems, specifically “Heidelberg” and “The Neckar”, now seemed somehow pre-empted.

Of course, Tarn is hardly the only poet to mix things up with Hölderlin this way. In 2018, The Song Cave issued Jonathan Larson’s translation of Friederike Mayröcker’s Scardanelli, and a friend brought to my attention Endre Kukorelly’s H.Ö.L.D.E.R.L.I.N. (1999).

But, then, it occurred to me I had composed poems I could include in this company. Like Mayröcker, my poems allude to Hölderlin by the nom de plume he himself adopted during his (so-called) madness. The first, from Grand Gnostic Central, “Holy Crow Channels Scardanelli” “condenses” some of Hölderlin’s late poetry. The second (graciously published by Dispatches from the Poetry Wars), “Ein Zeichen sind wir…” (We are a sign…) plays off these famous words from a draft of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne” and gives a twist to some of the themes common to Hölderlin’s poetry in general.

Time to get back to work on my own Hölderliniae. “I’m told you’re disappointed I have yet / as Scardanelli would write to sing / of Heidelberg…”

 

 

 

Holy Crow Channels Scardanelli

for Moritz Gaede

 

When from the sky bright bliss itself

Calms and quiets the afternoon through

The pleasant world I’ve made my friend

I am no more, I live no more gladly

Life’s lines various harmonies rich

With peace as who today men brightly halo

Is known, which depth of the spirited succeeds

Of a man say I, if he is good

Daedalus’s spirit and the wood’s is yours

The said, that the earth herself turns from

And perfection is without complaint

When unseen and now past are pictures

So shines nature with her splendour from the earth

 

 

 

 

Ein Zeichen sind wir

 

Like preScardanelli Scardanelli would put it

The Thunderer himself just a heartbeat cut

 

The current crashing my chronocide, and twice

Since noon the same software CTD’d in concurrence.

Amuse-bouche: Sunday 6 December 2020

This week: some thoughts on the untimely timeliness of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Douglas E. Christie, early on in his The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, contrasts John Muir on a sugar pine with Ronald Reagan on the redwood. For Muir, the tree before him is “an inexhaustible study and source of pleasure” noting how “at the age of fifty to one hundred years it begins to acquire individuality, so that no two are alike in their prime or old age. Every tree calls for special admiration.” On the other hand, running to be governor of California, Ronald Reagan (in)famously observed, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.”

However much Reagan’s words express an entire culture, what Christie’s juxtaposition brought to my mind was, first, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ notion of “inscape”, that which individuates each thing as the unique, singular thing it is, what Muir perceived in the mature sugar pine and what Reagan and his ilk are insensitive to. Hopkins’ sensitivity to the singularity of individuals expressed itself in a number of ecopoems avant le lettre. One thinks of his lament for a felled grove, “Binsey Poplars”, or the more profound, radical grappling with the destruction of the natural world, “God’s Grandeur”, a poem I’ve long had by heart. Hopkins’ sensibility in this regard breathes the same spirit as what inspires Christie’s attempt to find common ground between contemplative traditions, primarily those of antique and medieval Christianity, and contemporary ecological thought and concerns.

Of course, Hopkins’ poetry is not only precocious in its concerns, but in its formal innovations. On the one hand, he was motivated by the etymological fascinations with the then-new discipline of philology to dig into the roots of the English language and the prosody and potentials of the soil from which it sprang to develop his own markedly singular style, characterized by its alliteration, “sprung rhythm”, and coinages. His poetic oeuvre is rife with examples, one dazzling as it dense being “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection”. Such sensitivity to language as poetry’s material ground and the invention that it motivates makes Hopkins a precursor of that poetics that finds its most extreme expression in the coinages of Celan, for instance, or the metrical inventions of, surprisingly, William Carlos Williams in his searching out the “variable foot” proper to the American vulgar tongue. Little wonder Jerome Rothenberg includes Hopkins in the opening selections of his assemblage Poems for the Millennium, volume one.

Finally, it strikes me that Hopkins is also ahead of his time in possessing and presenting a sense of what today goes by the more general rubric of “mindfulness” (something Williams, too, expresses as early as 1921 in his poem “Thursday”). The meditative, contemplative mindset is most emphatically attentive, as Hopkins was, to the individual (rather than then type) and the material (as something in-itself rather than merely as for-use, the way his language stands forth rather than retreating into meek transparency). It does, however, also, culture empathy, kindness, and self-compassion of the kind Hopkins ventures to offer himself in one his “dark sonnets” “My own heart let me more have pity on…”.

Hopkins was one of the first poets I was exposed to in school that turned me on to poetry. It’s good to be reminded of how enduring and inexhaustibly rich his work continues to prove to be.

Amuse-bouche: Saturday 7 November 2020

Things have been quiet here for a number of reasons, but the most important one has been that I just haven’t had in me (for a number of reasons…) what I feel is needed to put into a worthwhile piece of writing. Some of that hesitancy is likely attributable to that vice of perfectionism, which keeps so many from doing anything, so, I’ve come to understand that one way to post here more regularly is to loosen up and just jump into the flow of the moment, however turgid or whitewater, and share here, more or less regularly (weekly?), tidbits that have caught my eye, caught in my craw, or otherwise.

Some of my detractors (well, one) have accused my writing (and not just my poetry) of being obscure, academic, or, at times, pedantic. Despite some of their more uncharitable assumptions, I never set out to bedazzle, confuse or belittle. It turns out my approach is shared by that monumental polymath Buckminster Fuller, who articulated his stylistic credo as follows: “I made up my mind as a Rule of Communication that I wouldn’t care if I was not understood — so long as I was not misunderstood.” I would add to Fuller’s unapologetically sincere stylistic credo Marx’s Hegelian pronouncement: “There is no royal road to science (Wissenschaft), and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep path have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”

And speaking of arduous climbs, more taxing than working at poetry is publishing poetry as a small publisher. Sadly, Beth Follet’s Pedlar Press will be shutting down operations in 2021. Pedlar’s aesthetic echoes the sentiments expressed by Fuller and Marx:  “Making no compromise with public taste.” It will come as no small surprise that such an uncompromising stance comes at a price, especially in a society where nothing escapes the dictatorship of the commodity form.

Follet shares a pithy reflection on what happens to small press publishing under the current regime in her Thoughts on Pedlar recently posted at periodicities.

I had the very good fortune to spend an evening in 1996 talking with American poet Adrienne Rich about my vision for Pedlar Press. She said one thing I shall never forget: “Don’t fall in love with the boys’ machinery.“ And what would I say is the boys’ machinery? Media space given over to awards talk and Best Of lists instead of reviews. Five-hundred-word reviews instead of complex critical analyses. The politics behind dumbing down. Technology’s reliance on algorithms which dictate taste, habits, purchases, ads, etc. Dictate lives. Ignorance about how readers of literature read or live in the world, and resultant misdirected and wasteful promotional campaigns.

300px-Vitruvian_Man_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci

I’m unsure I agree with some of the assumptions underwriting what Follett refers to as “the politics of dumbing down,” but a not unrelated phenomenon, no less pernicious than persistent, has imposed itself on my sensorium a number of times this season.

In her Foreword to this years Best Canadian Poetry, Anita Lahey writes about the poems included in this year’s edition as follows:

These were poems: real, handmade (and handheld) forms built to hold, and simultaneously express, universal truths about the human experience.

Lahey is in “good”, as it were, company in valuing  the way poetry, at least, expresses “universal truths about the human experience.” Lavinia Greenlaw, the chair of judges for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize, recently said of the adjudicating process:

We had to be convinced by them as relevant in a profoundly changed world, which meant that we had to be able to connect with them at the level of essential human experience, which is where I believe poetry is really produced, and poetry is really received.

And the cognoscenti will surely remember that Louise Glück, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was cited “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Those who share my education, will remember such evocations of these “universals of human experience” from their high school, if not undergrad, English class, along with the Three Themes of literature, Man against Nature, Man against Man, and Man against Himself (sic, sic, sic, sic, and sic). That such an aesthetic can still hold sway in 2020 among people one would hope continued to live a life of the mind after completing their formal education is demoralizing. Lahey’s observation is especially ironic, given how Marilyn Dumont, this year’s editor, remarks how she proceeded with a keen sense of how “writers of colour, Indigenous writers, women, LGBQT2S, writers with physical challenges, have all been underrepresented in the publishing world”, namely, writers whose difference from that presumably universal norm has led to their being overlooked.

[And it occurred to me upon reflection not long after writing and publishing this post the sharp irony of Lahey’s,  Greenlaw’s and Glück’s all being women, that one class of human being that has had and must continue to fight to have its experience recognized as belonging among those universals poetry and art supposedly address…]

I’ll pass over in silence here the admitted dialectic at work that would both undermine my critique and harmonize Lahey & Co.’s retrograde aesthetic sentiments with Dumont’s more progressive ones, a dialectic, being a lively one, that would also overturn itself again, in turn, merely to note that the thesis that poetry is concerned with “expressing universals of human experience” was, in the anglophone world, at least, most forcefully articulated by Matthew Arnold. He, along with the architects of English as an academic study, weaponized English literature into a means of persuading those disenfranchised at home (Arnold writes Culture and Anarchy in the wake of the Chartism, that working class movement that agitated to expand the vote to include working class men), not to mention those in the colonies, that, despite appearances, the upper and lower classes, and the rulers and ruled, were really, deep down, just the same….

Against the zombie aesthetic sentiments skewered above, I’ll finish off here, today, with a quotation and, of all things, a meme.

Theodor Adorno makes in his “On the Crisis of Literary Criticism” (1952)” a characteristically demanding but no less morally scrupulous (and so much more pithy) claim:  “Criticism has power only to the extent to which every successful or unsuccessful sentence has something to do with the fate of humankind.”

And, finally, words to live by, some wisdomorty of Rick:

3lebc5

Arachnophobic Arachnophilia

A friend recently shared a factoid from Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson book Extraordinary Insects, that the sum of insect “meat” consumed annually by spiders is higher than the total amount of meat and fish consumed by the human population of Earth. I responded alluding to my deep-seated arachnophobia, probed, here, in a poem from Grand Gnostic Central.


Arachnophobia Prima Facie

“God is the spider in the closet”

Though having an insect’s ratio of legs to body segments is not
And though envenomed like bees wasps and hornets is solitary
A nomadic hunter or sedentary in an architecture species specific
Whose strands are two those adhesive catching any lighting
Others pull like the line on a bob
All have fangs that paralyse no mouth but hollow teeth that suck what they injected digested
Wind carries desiccated exoskeletons away

*

I remember playing in the sandbox
The reek of catshit smooth as clay
Feeling a mosquito on my head
Slapping and looking at its ten long legs
Each twitching

My parents say before I talked
They heard me scream in the sandbox
All there was to scare me
A Daddy Longlegs stumbling in flight
To me

*

Once a glisten from roof to front porch railing
Made me pluck a strand finer than nylon it gave like
Dropping a spider big as my thumb at me

That Summer they had webs in every corner of the back fence
And under eaves and in drainpipes
And I crushed them all Summer with the butt end of a sawed-off hockey stick

They red brown their guts yellow slow white
Our neighbour caught one in his back porch light
The jar misty with web the spider thin beside a yellowing drop days later

I identified it to Mr Froh my biology teacher
As a Brown Recluse a black violin on its abdomen
One of three poisonous species in North America

*

Larger females
Eat the males
On mating

*

After they said Athene
Finding Arakhne’s cloth woven
To show her family’s purple adulteries
And incest perfect rent it enraged

*

Hanged Arakhne a spider turning