Alex Boyd has interviewed Steve McCormond about his new book The Good News About Armageddon, as part of the One Question Interview series on his blog. Follow this link: http://boydwords.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/one-question-interview-steve-mcormond/
Perhaps because Heather Cadsby’s name has so long been associated with poetry (as, among other things, an organizer for Toronto’s Axle-Tree Coffee House and director of the famed Toronto Art Bar Poetry Series), it seems surprising that Could be is only her fourth poetry collection. However, it is probably this scarcity of formal collections we have to thank for the delightful mix of quirky and eclectic poems contained in Could be.
From a (slightly) more formal five poem suite on swans (with a nod to Wordsworth) in which those “Huge white swimming birds/” who can “snap off a dog’s leg/” become the ballet, complete with a dancer who “needs 2 arms to flutter through 3 hours (deduct intermissions) to sustain/ / the conversational style of poems lke “Sketch for April,” this collection keeps the reader awake and aware.
Rather than dividing the book into sections, Could be allows quiet moments. For example, “Aubade (At Daybreak)” – one of several more serious poems with this title which are located throughout the book – in which the family, “still in Belfast/ intemperate and raging/,” can be followed by a poem on television channel-surfing, in which the narrator attempts to break the habit by “…systematically limiting the choices” until she’s down to two featuring “Ravel’s Brain and Hockey Night in Canada.”
Could be offers a wild ride but, like Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy referenced in the collection, Could be leaves the reader shouting an exultant “YES!”
Ronnie R. Brown is the author of five books of poetry – her fourth, States of Matter (Black Moss, 2005) was awarded the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award, an honour for which her fifth book, Night Echoes (Black Moss, 2006), was also short-listed. A sixth collection, Rocking on the Edge, is expected out soon.
Barry Dempster is a finalist for the 2010 Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts representing Literature. These awards honour both established and up-and-coming professional artists or organizations whose creative vision and originality have made a major contribution to their field. He was honoured with 5 other finalists at a ceremony on Thursday, June 10th in Toronto.
Ken Gass, founder and artistic director of the Factory Theatre, won the Artist Award at the 2010 Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Mr. Gass has been instrumental in helping nurture and develop some of Canada’s best playwrights and actors. The Guelph Jazz Festival won the Arts Organization Award. This influential music festival has established an international reputation for presenting a vibrant, challenging and culturally diverse program.
Barry Dempster is internationally recognized as one of Canada’s best poets. He is the author of sixteen books. They include a novel, The Ascension of Jesse Rapture, a children’s book, two volumes of short stories and twelve collections of poetry. He has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award twice and has won a Petra Kenney Award, a Confederation Poets’ Prize, a Prairie Fire Poetry Contest and the Canadian Authors’ Association Jack Chalmers Award for Poetry.
Dempster is also acquisitions editor at Brick Books. He lives in Holland Landing, Ontario, where he runs a not-for-profit film series, a writers’ group and two book discussion groups.
He is a gifted and inspiring teacher of creative writing both in Canada and abroad. Dempster has run hundreds of workshops where he has inspired young writers and introduced many established and emerging poets to his community.
He has been hailed as a people’s poet, whose readings make poetry accessible and enjoyable to everyone. He is that rare combination of a people’s poet and a poet’s poet.
Link to Barry Dempster website
For more information about the winner Ken Gass and the other nominees Lydia Adams, Keith Campbell, John Hartman and Ross Manson, go to http://www.culture.gov.on.ca/english/arts/premiers_award_10.htm
It was two years ago today that James Reaney passed away. His nephew, Scott Thibaudeau, read “Ice Cream” at a celebration of James Reaney’s life held in early July at Aeolian Hall in London, Ontario. There was Maple Walnut ice cream for everyone at intermission. Dear Jamie, we remember you always!
“Ice Cream” is a poem from Souwesto Home, James Reaney’s recent collection of new poems, published by Brick Books in 2005.
The local poet is riding his bike uptown
On a fairly hot summer day
Bent on Jumbo’s Ice Cream booth
Before mailing a poem to Chimaera at the Post Office
At Jumbo’s Ice Cream booth there are
Thirty flavours available including—
Licorice, fudge, lemon, orange, apple, grape,
Banana, chocolate, cherry, Maple Walnut (my favourite)
Vanilla, of course, peppermint, strawberry, raspberry—
Weren’t there some vegetable ones? Do I remember—
Onion ice cream?
And this pair of double dip skim milk flavours
Cost only a nickel each!
And the ceiling was of pressed tin!
So, I plunk down a nickel for a Maple Walnut!
And so out the door bent on making the cone
Last till I reach the Post Office door—
The Post Office is French Provincial with 4 clocks.
The poet holds his bicycle up with his left hand.
Walks slowly licking as he proceeds.
Two little girls say scornfully: “He’s acting
Just like a little kid!”
But he thinks— “Isn’t this what life is all about?”
James Reaney, 2005
For lots more information about James Reaney, visit http://www.jamesreaney.com/
Poetic Stories about Goalies – Postcard # 62 – Poet Randall Maggs discusses his book “Night Work” about the troubled soul of legendary hockey goalie Terry Sawchuk plus the nuances of story-telling, conversations with goaltenders, Sawchuk’s Ukrainian heritage and convergence of history and hockey with host Dave Thorvald Olson at the Robson Square covered outdoor rink in Vancouver following a poetry reading promoted by publisher Brick Books.
For the full podcast, go to http://gravellybeach.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/poetic-stories-about-goalies-postcard-62/
Reviewed by Mishka Mourani (Amazon.com – May 29, 2010) – Tony Di Nardo’s collection Alien, Correspondent is a book to savor. The book cover by Ann Nadin evokes the soul of its poetry: Beirut and other cities in the Levant, where many cultures are captured in all their contradictions – beauty and brashness, elegance and seediness, glory and decrepitude, tranquillity and violence, tradition and angst.
This collection of poems is reminiscent of the oriental rugs Di Nardo mentions in one of his poems. It is a mature and intricate book, a book that dotes indulgently on the foibles of ageless cultures and their descendants, but also reprimands their excesses uncompromisingly, capturing form and color but also chaos and darkness.
Throughout the book the poet also explores his identity, rooted as it is in his native Canada, but altered invariably by the experiences he undergoes in other countries, in other literatures and in time.
This is a wise book that not only explores, with clarity and perceptiveness, the minutiae of transitions and destinations, but also the sheer pleasure of writing about them.
Mishka Mourani is the author of Balconies: A Mediterranean Memoir. She is senior vice president of the International College in Beirut, Lebanon.
By Mark Medley May 29, 2010 /National Post – In the late 1980s, fresh out of college, Karen Solie worked as a cub reporter for the Lethbridge Herald. The job mixed the tranquility of small-town life — “a lot of dog shows and bake sales, as they say” — with more stressful assignments, like rushing to the scene of an accident or covering the courts.
“Some of it was truly heartbreaking. … A lot of just terrible situations, and a lot of bad luck,” Solie recalls over coffee at Poor John’s Café, a few blocks from the Parkdale apartment in Toronto that she shares with her husband, the poet David Seymour. “I’ve always been fascinated by luck and by chance — cause and effect, I suppose — and how effects are determined by choice, but also just by luck. Good or bad. And I saw a lot of people in that job for whom it rolled either way.”
Now one of Canada’s acclaimed young poets, it is evident that for Solie, 43, the dice rolled the right way. The author of three collections, she has twice been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize: Her 2001 debut, Short Haul Engine, and 2009’s Pigeon, which on Thursday will compete against Kate Hall’s The Certainty Dream and the late P.K. Page’s Coal and Roses for one of the world’s most lucrative poetry prizes.
Spend some time with Solie and it’s apparent she’s rather stunned by her success. “I got the call in the morning,” she says of her first Griffin nod, “and I stayed in my pajamas all day, just sort of lying on the floor. And actually it wasn’t all that much different from this time, with subtle variations.” Born in Moose Jaw, Solie and two younger siblings grew up on a 2,500-acre farm — “wheat, chickpeas, mustard, that kind of thing” — in southwestern Saskatchewan, not too far from Medicine Hat. “When I go home, I borrow one of my parents’ vehicles and just drive around. Almost no one lives there, in that part of the province. There are abandoned or near-abandoned towns dotting that countryside.”
She aspired to be a veterinarian, but found math and science off-putting (“I don’t have that kind of mind”). Instead, she attended community college in Lethbridge, Alta., and went into journalism. After about three years, she completed her BA in English at the University of Lethbridge, then attended graduate school at the University of Victoria, where she abandoned a thesis on “contemporary novels written by women, the protagonists of which were carnival performers or freaks in some way,” not long after Short Haul Engine was published.
An admitted latecomer to poetry, she had mailed some early poems to Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane after reading a call for submissions in B.C. Bookworld, eventually finding herself among the likes of Michael Redhill and Michael Crummey in the landmark 1995 anthology Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets. “That was my first publication,” she says. “I thought there had to be some luck involved.”
Another fortuitous moment occurred a few years later, when she was working at the Banff Centre. One of her instructors, the future Griffin Prize-winner Don McKay, encouraged her to submit her poems to Brick Books, where he was acquiring editor. “I’ve been really lucky in terms of who I’ve worked with,” she says.
“When I actually got the manuscript itself, and sat down and read it, I knew I was in the presence of something quite new and interesting,” says Barry Dempster, her editor at Brick, of the collection that became Short Haul Engine. “There is a real earthiness, mixed with a braininess, mixed with an awareness that language is filled with volatility and energy.”
The Canadian poetry community embraced the book. “She just sort of appeared fully formed. That’s when you know someone’s not just a good poet but floating above the fray,” recalls the poet and editor Ken Babstock. Poet Kevin Connolly, a friend, says, “You rarely get a first book where you get a sense of someone being there in the room with you. A real, strong, personal voice in the poems. Most poets, good poets, are lucky to get to that after two or three books. But it was there. It was already there.”
Not long after the book was nominated for the Griffin Prize (Christian Bôk’s Eunoia won), Solie headed to Toronto. “I put everything in a U-Haul and drove out here,” she says. “When I moved out here, it was a revelation that people lived downtown.”
Solie’s other big move occurred last year, when she left Brick Books, who also published her 2005 collection Modern and Normal, for House of Anansi. “It was a question of timing,” Solie says.
The old and the new, geography and technology collide in Pigeon, as Solie takes us on a cross-country journey, from factories on the outskirts of Edmonton, their “subsidiaries crawling on to the farmland,” to the Bow River — “older than the mountains folding / in heaves around it” — down “the dullest stretch of highway on Earth” between Medicine Hat and Calgary, to the neon motels along Lakeshore Boulevard in Toronto, with “views of The Beach and Silver Moon, both earmarked / for demolition” — to New Brunswick, where “Daylight fails crucially along the St. John River,” and even across the ocean to Norway, where she explores her family roots.
Though all three collections have received acclaim, Solie remains humble, joking that she usually has just as many questions as the creative writing students she’s taught at various schools over the past several years.
“It would be nice to know what the hell one is doing once in a while,” she says, “but on the other hand isn’t that why people keep doing any kind of art? Because you never quite get there.” Then she answers her own question. “The gesture and the approach is the point: There is no there to get to. I think that’s what people respond to when you connect with a piece of writing: all of what’s contained in that reach towards something ungraspable.”
Babstock, her editor at Anansi, witnessed her struggles: “She has a deep sense of humility about her talent. Like any number of writers, I guess, [she] goes through phases of great doubt about whether or not she can do what she’s attempting to do. So watching her fall apart under notions of inadequacy was almost amusing if it wasn’t heartbreaking.”
Solie’s luck continues with the Griffin Prize nomination; this year, all nominees will receive $10,000 at the readings the night before the prize is announced (“Oooh, I feel sick,” she groans, slamming her head down on the table, when reminded she’ll read for more than 1,000 people on Wednesday). But the money comes at an opportune time: It will allow her to stop working as a teacher and freelance editor and turn to other projects, namely (she knocks on the wall) her novel.
Whatever her medium, expectations will be high. Says her friend, writer Michael Redhill: “Jane Austen talked about working two inches of ivory, and she was a novelist. Whereas Karen, being a poet, is probably only working an inch of ivory, but her tools are incredibly fine. And the thing that’s emerging through a life work, which she is not even in the middle of yet, is going to be something to behold.”
Inscription: May 24, 2010 – Book # 82 – Dear Prime Minister Harper: As everyone on the planet probably knows by now, Yann Martel is busy touring with his new book, and has asked other writers to take over in his absence. Today it is my pleasant duty to present you, and readers of his website, with a classic of Canadian writing, John Steffler’s The Grey Islands.
When I say “classic”, I am placing it among other masterpieces of environmental writing like Thoreau’s Walden, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild; it is a book that engages wilderness in an intense way that alters our way of perceiving it. Unlike those texts, The Grey Islands is, technically, fiction, but it is based on John Steffler’s actual experience alone on the uninhabited Grey Islands off the coast of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. It contains some of the most vivid, and varied, writing anywhere, including prose narrative, lyric poetry (which frequently registers aspects of the place in acute close-up), tall tale, ghost story, dream sequences, essay, maps, census charts, and songs. What emerges is an unforgettable evocation of this remote windswept island and a record of one man’s difficult passage into wilderness. But along with this, there’s an increasing focus on the former residents of the island and the fishermen who still visit it, the narrative opening itself to include their voices in the many-threaded weave.
I’d be hard pressed to say whether I love this book more for its central story (the progress of the protagonist from town planner to pilgrim) or for its wonderful nooks and crannies. There is such economy in the language, and such a sure musical sense in Steffler’s ear, that each of the passages—whether in the voice of a Newfoundland fisherman or the narrator-as-poet—hums with its own energy. When I first read it, back in the eighties, I found it hard to believe he was really pulling it off, making a book so various, with such diverse parts, yet working as an organic whole. It still seems unlikely, as unlikely as confederation, another structure whose mysterious strength—as Canadians discover over and over—lies in its diversity.
I realize that this gift may be redundant—John Steffler having been the Parliamentary Poet Laureate a few years ago. (If you already have a copy, perhaps you wouldn’t mind passing this one along to another parliamentarian.) The Grey Islands should be as inescapable for Canadians as Walden is for those south of the border, an iconic book that sets dramatically before us, in a way that is richly complex, at once meditative and entertaining, the difficult and essential encounter with wilderness.
As a bonus, I’m also including the talking book version, published by Janet Russell of Rattling Books, the intrepid Newfoundland publisher of such distinguished books as Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot and Michael Crummey’s Hard Light—two more books that should be included in any Canadian’s reading repertoire. On the CD, narrated by John Steffler himself, you will also hear Frank Holden speaking the part of Carm Denny, a deceased resident of the island, thought to be mad. It’s a passage not to be missed, and includes the greatest bath scene anywhere. Eat your heart out, Hollywood. My thought is that, what with what I’m sure is a very tight schedule, the CD might squeeze in now, and the book be reserved for a time of greater leisure.
Strong writing enables us to live imaginatively as well as practically; it enlarges the scope of life. When it engages the theme of wilderness, it can also enhance our understanding of ourselves as citizens of the world, as well as of a country. Of course such understanding will embrace not only our hardihood and courage, but our disgraceful blindness to the value of wilderness in and for itself. While that blindness was certainly part of the colonial experience, it remains a lamentable feature of some current attitudes, attitudes often registered in government policy. In the end, reading books like The Grey Islands can help make us better, more thoughtful, inhabitants of the planet.
I hope you will find this a stimulating addition to what must by now be a pretty fascinating, and eclectic, library.
Yours sincerely,
Don McKay
My reaction to Hooked the first time I read it was: “Shit! I wish I’d written that!” And I have continued to feel the same way every time I’ve heard Carolyn read from Hooked and every time I’ve re-read one or more of its dramatic monologues. But I don’t mean that this is the only poetry collection I have ever been blown away by or the only poetic style I have ever lusted after. No. It’s that beyond my admiration for what Carolyn has accomplished in this book, I feel a strong affinity with the material she has chosen and the treatment she has given it.
As some of you know, I taught women’s history and feminist studies at university for many years. So I was pleased with the fact Carolyn had selected seven women as her subjects. Indeed, I have sent copies of Hooked to many women’s historian friends and former students who are neither poets nor great poetry readers, convinced, as I was and am, that this book will interest them. In general, women’s history in those early days had two main objectives: to rescue women from the margins of historical accounts and move them closer to the centre, and to give voice to women, especially women who might not otherwise be heard from. Now, not one of the seven women included in Smart’s selection was completely silenced, though possibly some may have felt other representations distorted their voice. Many of these women’s lives revolved to a great extent around love, as in the cases of Zelda, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, artist Dora Carrington devoted to Lytton Strachey, writer Elizabeth Smart who put herself at the beck and call of poet George Barker, and Jane Bowles, the celebrated avant-garde writer smitten with her Tangierian lover Cherifa. Even the serial murderer Myra Hindley and the Jew-hating, Hitler-adoring Unity Mitford gave themselves over to love, but in each of their cases it was the love of a twisted, megalomaniacal and murderous sociopath.
Carson McCuller’s heart remained “a lonely hunter’ to the end, liquor perhaps her greatest love. Indeed addiction and/or obsession of one kind or another form the real thread binding the seven stories together.
Overtime, women’s historians began to address, and grapple, with the enormous complexity of the task of representing the extreme diversity of women in terms of class, race, ethnicity, country of origin or residence, sexuality, and women’s radically different positions in relation to structures of power and domination. Hooked goes some distance in this direction in terms of class, ethnicity and sexual preference, its seven women constituting by those indicators a heterogeneous sample. Clearly Carolyn rejects the totalizing notion that “woman” can be regarded as an undifferentiated category. Nor, what is more, does she subscribe to the notion that the concept “women” (in the plural) constitutes a unified category. I wonder whether Carolyn knows the British /philosopher Denise Riley who put forward a well-reasoned articulation of this position in her 1988 book “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History? Most definitely not one of Carolyn’s subjects could serve as poster woman for the idealization of womanhood.
As some of you will remember, in the early days of feminism’s revival, sometimes called the second wave of feminism, a major fault line developed in the movement along a divide between, on the one side, those (which included Marxist and socialist as well many liberal feminists) who focused their efforts on overturning the social structures of gender oppression and, on the other side, the so-called maternal feminists (commonly called cultural feminists in the States). These latter believed in the inherent moral superiority of women, holding that women, given their role in reproduction, possess greater compassion and capacity for caring than men, and so would, if given power, end or at least ameliorate many of society’s ills, like war, poverty, and other injustices. (On CBC radio recently, I heard the US/Iranian director of the film Women Without Men, video artist/film maker Shirin Neshat, articulate this view.) I have never been convinced by the maternal, or if you prefer cultural, feminist pedestalization of women, too aware, from my study of history and my own experience, of women’s capability for hatred, cruelty and violence, and not just in defence of their young. Obviously, Carolyn holds a similar view. But what Carolyn possesses in addition is the ability to think and feel herself inside the very psyches of women including one who not only condones but actually cheers on violent, hate-filled politics and another who herself actually commits heinous acts of murder.
The genre of poem in which Carolyn chose to write Hooked is sometimes called the persona poem; at other times the dramatic monologue. Whichever name one uses, it involves envoicing a person other than oneself. In the terminology of rhetoric, prosopopoeia is the name assigned to the practice of giving voice to an absent person (or, in the case of ekphrastic poetry, to an object d’art – a painting, sculpture, tapestry, or photographed image). The practice is similar to, but not identical with, ventriloquism, the art of throwing one’s own voice into another person or puppet or other mute, inanimate object. In the case of ventriloquism, the thrown voice often serves as a vehicle for the expression of the ventriloquist’s own thoughts or feelings (or an alter ego).
I wonder whether Carolyn feels any kinship with Sharon McCartney, a poet with a definite flair for ventriloquism as demonstrated in the suite of poems in Karenin sings the blues (Goose Lane Editions, 2003) in which she throws her voice into the dramatis personae of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and again in The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Nightwood Editions, 2007), this time envoicing not only human figures but also inanimate objects (“Pa’s Rifle,” “Laura’s Needle,” “Ma’s Rocker”) as well as human body parts (“Mr. Clewett’s Feet,” “Mary’s Eyes,” “Mary’s Fingers”). In McCartney’s case, she seems often to be making the recipient of her thrown voice a mouthpiece of her own emotions, grievances, preoccupations. In contrast, Hooked’s dramatic monologues give the impression of having been driven more by Smart’s curiosity about and fascination with the characters she brings to speaking life than by a desire to express herself.
For one thing, Carolyn has researched each of her figures thoroughly and meticulously, as the many sources listed in the Acknowledgements testify. She has, like a scrupulous historical biographer, steeped herself in the life of the women on whom she has focused her attention. And she has occasionally made use, when possible and appropriate, of the exact words that her figures wrote or spoke or have been reported to have spoken.
While some would insist that biography is always to some degree autobiography, and granted that the very selection of the particular women does reflect on the selector, Hooked is not autobiography parading as biography. In preparing this presentation, I discovered that Carolyn is the author of a memoir: At the End of the Day, published by Penumbra Press in 2001. It is an absolutely engrossing and beautifully written memoir that I highly recommend. From it I learned that, when she was a child in England, Carolyn’s father read to her and her sister various news items about Myra Hindley from the London newspapers, such as accounts of the outrage of the British public at the knowledge that the most notorious British female criminal had likely seduced her warden and then walked openly with her in the public parks. (Smart, 2001, 162)
Myra Hindley thus became a sinister presence in Carolyn’s childhood and thereafter never ceased being a woman of fascination. I suspect that there is an interesting story as to how each of the other women also came to cast a spell over Carolyn. In the case of a number of these women, I again feel an affinity with the author of Hooked. I cut my feminist eye teeth reading Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. And as a fan of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, a devourer of the novels of Nancy Mitford in my early post-graduate days, and a student of Germany’s history in the first half of the twentieth century, I was appalled yet fascinated by Unity’s Mitford’s adoration of Adolf Hitler and her brazen support of the Nazi regime. And I share Carolyn’s interest in Elizabeth Smart and curiosity about marginal members of the Bloomsbury group like Dora Carrington. I would, in other words, have loved to write about almost all these women, with the exception, I confess, of Myra Hindley and also of Jane Bowles, whose small though extraordinary literary output I only began reading as a result of learning about her in Hooked. But it’s not principally Carolyn’s stunning selection of women, but the skill with which she verbally embodies them that stirs our imaginations.
I also learned from reading At the End of the Day that Carolyn is a good friend of the current poet laureate of Great Britain, Carol Ann Duffy. Carolyn disclosed to me that she and Duffy were once thrown out of a bar in Wimbledon for being drunk and disorderly. Duffy is another poet who is a consummate ventriloquist, as in The World’s Wife, in which she speaks both through the wives of famous men and through literary and historical female figures famous entirely in their own right. Here is her poem entitled “Mrs Darwin”:
7 April 1852
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him –
Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of
you. (20)
I would also highly recommend from The World’s Wife “Mrs Lazarus.” Carol Ann Duffy is at the same time a brilliant writer of prosopopoeial poetry, that is, of poems in which she intuits the consciousness of another person, usually not to humourous, but to deeply affecting, poignant effect. One that is often anthologized, “The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team,” first appeared in her 1993 volume Mean Time. Might Carol Ann Duffy have been a source of inspiration for Carolyn? I suspect Duffy would be very impressed with Carolyn’s Hooked.
As I have said, it is not only her choice of women subjects, but how she presents them that moves us. What are her writing strategies? When I went last year to the Art Bar to hear Carolyn read, she introduced me to poet and poetry activist Jill Battson and credited Battson with having enabled her, Carolyn, to write Hooked. For a number of years, Jill Battson ran a performance poetry series called the Little Red Schoolhouse Poetry Primer north of Kingston. When she invited Carolyn on one occasion to read there together with several outstanding performance poets, Carolyn, according to her March 2009 interview with Alessandro Porco, felt she’s better come up with “something pretty damn good to stand up on stage next to these powerful figures.” Serendipitously, about the same time, Myra Hindley died and obituaries and news items about her complete with photographs were appearing in the Canadian and British press. Carolyn’s imagination caught fire. She began to wonder, as she reports in her interview, “what issues of class and gender had entered into play in [Myra’s personal history],” and follows that statement with the even more revealing admission: “I wanted to get inside her head and feel around in there.” It was for her appearance at the Little Red Schoolhouse Poetry Primer that Carolyn wrote and read/performed “Written on the Flesh,” the first dramatic monologue in Hooked, that of serial murderer Myra Hindley.
What is it, then, about Carolyn’s poetics that make her monologues so engaging, so performable? In At the End of the Day, I learned that Carolyn’s father also wrote poetry, mostly occasional poems he liked to send as birthday or Christmas gifts to friends or to enter in Guest Books as thanks to hosts for their hospitality. When researching his life, Carolyn often stumbled across poems by her father that she found, she confesses, “embarrassing in their pretension.” She describes them as “very formal and sometimes ironic,” but not very illuminating. One, however, that was dedicated to her and her sister and appeared in a volume privately published in 1969 she quite likes. And the reason she gives is its direct, simple language (138).
There is a directness and simplicity to Carolyn’s own language. I am familiar with only the last three of Carolyn’s five books of poetry. But on the basis of them, I would venture to say that Carolyn prefers a dictional economy that eschews verbal pyrotechnics and semantic hide and seek. And to my ear, the effectiveness, the cogency, the power of her poems to move are rooted to some large extent in the precision of her direct, never unnecessarily heightened or embellished diction. Her poetic kitchen serves up nouveau cuisine rather than Julia Child’s French Cooking. And at the risk of stepping out onto the quicksand of the pre-post-modern, that is at the risk of using unskeptically words like honest and authentic and genuine, I want to say that I hear the ring of true feeling in many of Carolyn’s poems, feel their groundedness in a ruthless self-knowledge, an unflinching, fearless examination of her own life experience. Of course, to bring this off requires enormous craft, for it is, of course, craft that in the end makes her poems work, a craft that does not draw attention to itself.
If you will indulge me, I’d like to present an example from her second-to-last book of poems, The Way To Come Home (Brick Books, 1992). In the late summer and fall of 2008, my only sibling, an older brother, was dying of pancreatic cancer. During the period of my visits to him and my coming face to face with his terminal agony, this book by Carolyn fell into my hands. It contains a suite of poems entitled “The Sound of the Birds” that Carolyn wrote about the agonizing and premature death of her poet friend Bronwen Wallace. Reading these poems brought me, not comfort, for why should we look for comfort in the face of death, but they did provide me with a sense of not being alone, a sense of sharing with another the witnessing of prolonged, harrowing death, of witnessing the ending of the life of a person dear to oneself. In this suite, various birds, their plumage, their song, their flight, serve Carolyn metaphorically as a means to address her friend’s doomed battle with cancer and to testify to Bronwen Wallace’s self-awareness and terror. I’ll read just one poem from the series, the second: “Cardinal and Lunar Eclipse”:
2. Cardinal and Lunar Eclipse
The red bird
and then silence, while I sat
and watched all you endured:
the raw eyes of those afraid to touch you,
doctors who spoke as if you were not there,
months of radiation, pus that filled your mouth,
treatments that failed again and again,
pain that was never controlled, and then
the other things, the thirst and hunger,
your white eyelet nightgown pulled up
exposing your thighs, injections of laetrile,
that look in your eyes,
a terror I have never seen before,
your individual vision of death
I have cancer of the mouth,
you wrote over and over that first day
in your journal, as if by repeating
you might begin to believe it, conquer it
separate it from your future
That cardinal would catch my eye
as I sat on your couch downstairs,
Daniel sleeping in his swing
and the tick of the wall clock
continuous and taunting, broken by
bird calls, the scratch of their beaks
as they darted here and there for food,
red flash of the northern cardinal, its black
eyes and throat, bright moments
in these dark summer days
Later I’d see that red
as a bloom growing in your pale throat,
the arterial blood, hovering
barely beneath the skin that glowed
as I entered your room, breathless
with eagerness and grief
All things became real in one place,
the earth and beyond centred there
Full lunar eclipse:
I stood in the darkness and watched
the shadow creep across
your glowing features,
while all others round about me
watched the marvel in space
I watched you die,
gripping my baby to my chest
I let you go over and over,
still breathing the possibility of miracle
The conciseness in that poem is striking: “…the tick of the wall clock/ continuous and taunting,” “All things became real in one place/ the earth and beyond centred there”. I am still grateful to these poems by Carolyn, the company they gave me throughout the late summer and fall of 2008, the sense I took from them of another person’s understanding.
When asked by Tracy Hamon in a March 2009 interview to name her influences, Carolyn responded at some length. Leonard Cohen and ee cummings were the poets she read as a teenager, branching out in her twenties to Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, Anna Akhmatova, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Carolyn Forché, followed by, among others, Jane Kenyon, Marie Howe, and Elizabeth Bishop, to restrict myself here to the women poets she named and not even all of them. But pride of place, as far as mentors go, goes to Bronwen Wallace who was Carolyn’s close friend for many years until her premature death from cancer at age 44.
There are intimations in The Way To Come Home of Carolyn’s ear for the speech and mentalities of others as, for instance, in “Outside the Teahouse of the Blue Lagoon,” a poem in which she nails the imperious, self-centred, insensitive rant of a racist white South African woman complaining about her Black South African help. “Statistics from the Annual Report of the Race Classification Board, March 1991,” another poem in The Way To Come Home, also anticipates a tactic Carolyn will employ to good effect in Hooked, the presentation of cold, hard data without comment, letting numbers, unadorned facts, speak for themselves. Yet these intimations and anticipations do not really prepare the reader for the enormous leap in mastery of material outside herself Carolyn has taken from her fourth to her fifth poetry collection.
Another possible influence on Carolyn is the poetry of Lynn Crosbie, also a ventriloquizing prosopopoeial writer, who endorses Hooked on its back cover. One can find definite similarities between the two poets. But also definite differences. Crosbie has devoted a considerable amount of her writing to rescuing from obscurity or voicelessness women and girls stamped deviant by society, to celebrating the “bad” women of popular culture. Crosbie seems quite consistently drawn to danger-loving, sex-obsessed, subversive, and notorious women. She presents these women not as victims but as agents, as women who made choices, bad choices from society’s point of view, but nonetheless their own choices, women who deliberately pursued perverse inclinations, reckless thrills, and in so doing, took decisions, acted. She has, controversially, even uncovered agency in the indisputably, sometimes brutally, victimized. Not going that far, Carolyn has gone on record, in her interview with Alessandro Porco, that several of the women she initially considered for inclusion were discarded “because they felt like victims.” The one figure from Hooked closest to the subjects dear to Crosbie is Myra Hindley.
Significantly, Crosbie has also written a poem on Myra Hindley, or rather, on both Hindley and her accomplice Ian Brady, entitled “The Monsters of the Moors.” It appears in Crosbie’s Miss Pamela’s Mercy, published by Coach House Press in 1992. But even here I detect significant differences: differences, for instance, in emotional and linguistic register. The difference, say, between florid and floral. Crosbie goes for the juggler, favours the lurid. Hers is the language of extremity, of drug-induced nightmare (“the rheumatic chimpanzees and molting/ parrots,” “eyes with tombstone pupils,” “a fork-tongued/ and tuneless dirge” (Crosbie, Miss Pamela’s Mercy, 45, 55, 59). Unaware of Lynn’s poem until after she wrote her own Hindley monologue, Carolyn sent it to Crosbie before publication, fearful Lynn might have reservations. Instead, Crosbie graciously wrote back saying she wished she had written it herself. (So I’m not alone in harbouring this sentiment.) If one makes a comparison between Crosbie’s poem and Carolyn’s poetic monologue, the differences in treatment overshadow the sameness of subject. I am of the opinion that there is something more blood-curdling in Carolyn’s version. It is as though Crosbie is looking at Myra more from the outside, even when she lets her speak. While Crosbie seems to be striving for titillating effect, playing up the salacious, Carolyn uses her Myra’s dead-pan recitation of book titles and matter-of-fact listing of the murdered children by name, her taunting references to her good looks and defiant flaunting of her cruelty to produce a more chilling result.
Carolyn has taken an unblinking look at Myra, imagined the workings of her mind, and soberly presented her. She did “get inside her head and feel around in there.” At one point, Carolyn has Carson McCullers ask of herself: “can I turn myself outside in/ and take full impression of a human being?” If she posed that same question to herself, Carolyn could now without doubt answer in the affirmative.
Her preference for dictional sparseness and understatement play an important part in lending veracity to her impersonations. Also her ear for the vivid phrase, the catchy, precise detail. A significant ingredient of her monologues’ power lies in their economy. As someone who has wrestled with the problem, when faced with a mountain of historical data, of how to sift through it and present only what’s crucial, I am in awe of Carolyn’s prowess at distillation. Into Dora Carrington’s La Tendresse, she inserts this paraphrase:
Clive Bell said
there are no divorces in Bloomsbury,
only reshufflings: (70)
Imagine plucking that out of all of Clive Bell’s observations! Imagine choosing “rackety” from all the possible pronouncements by Zelda Fitzgerald and then prefacing it with her own “rickety” to get: “it was a rickety world/ a rackety world of brow-beating the heart” (48). Or choosing the following reminiscence out of so many other possible ones from Unity Mitford’s childhood:
I loved Harrod’s Zoo:
bought a snake, a rat, and a salamander there
Farve fetched a pony home in a taxi,
it was jolly good fun (30)
Or these details in the laconic opening of Carson McCullers’ monologue: “Born in Georgia, I know the manners,/ the shuffling and the Klan” (75). I could go on, giving examples from every single monologue, but you get my drift and could undoubtedly provide many examples from your own reading of Hooked. These monologues rest on a foundation of solid research, but they acquire their punch thanks in some large measure to Carolyn’s genius for selection, her ability to sift through a lot of chaff to find the hard, telling kernel.
When I wrote that “directness and simplicity” characterize Carolyn’s diction, I hope you didn’t think I meant I found her speech merely “ordinary” or her vocabulary in any way limited. No, what I was trying to emphasize is her restraint, her ability to make the extraordinary out of the ordinary, her predilection for the compact phrase. She effects a kind of “defamiliarizing of natural speech” in some ways similar to but at the same time very different from those, like repetition, of Gertrude Stein as discussed by Margaret Christakos in her Introductory Lecture. While not using language that draws undue attention to itself, Carolyn skillfully crafts through word choice, varying line lengths and varying beats to the line different tonalities appropriate to each of the seven different speakers, and also appropriate to different stages in their lives. We go from the blunt, icy cold speech of Myra to the heady flight and crash of Unity’s spoiled child’s discourse, one minute giddily infatuated, the next flauntingly nasty, the later self-inflicted brain damage at once simplifying and gelling the extremes. We hear a wind chime clarity, dare I say “tenderness” in Dora Carrington’s speech, something wild, wistful, and wounded in Zelda Fitzgerald’s, the lush fluctuation of ardour and bitterness in Elizabeth Smart’s, and moments of defiant declamation, as in Jane Bowles’ monologue:
I’m a writers’ writers’ writer,
and what was writing but a misery to me?
the brawling over detail, syllable by spitting syllable
it’s suicide (90)
And this swift and emotionally charged shift from declamation to supplication in Carson McCullers’ “Skinless”:
I am so trepidacious
and fucking loud of need
don’t shut me up now,
my tattered heart’s fast filling up with snow (85)
Closely related to Carolyn’s skill at composing ordinary yet idiosyncratic speech, is her flair for images that speak volumes. For one of Arc Poetry magazine’s “How Poems Work” columns, Alessandro Porco chose Carolyn’s poem “Frangipani” from The Way To Come Home, writing that it “is as close to a perfect poem as I can imagine,” which, though “firmly situated in the imagist tradition,” at the same time distinguishes itself by subverting that tradition. I mention this not to categorize Hooked as imagist poetry, but to highlight Carolyn’s skill with imagery, a skill that, combined with her ability to surprise by unusual but unforced verbal combinations, she has brought to bear with great effectiveness on the drama and dramatic settings of her monologues. Let me cite a few examples, the first from Jane Bowles’ monologue:
phenobarbs like strolling in a smokestack sniffing clouds (99)
The next two from Unity Mitford’s “The Luckiest Girl in the World,” both period-specific and expressive of her exhilaration:
I could do the salute everywhere
that arm clicking up to the sky like a warm machine (32)
I like to wait
and when rewarded by a meeting
my heart rises up like a Zeppelin, (35)
And this evocation of the tumescent jasmine-scented South of Zelda’s birth:
pear trees dropped their intemperate pulp
drowned in the lush of it I could simply explode (44)
And this appropriately vegetal image from Elizabeth Smart’s “Ardent”
implicit ferns unfolding in the shade (104)
And finally these encomia to drink from Carson McCullers’ “Skinless”:
here’s what liquor does:
it shows the hidden things
the undulations of the heart
whole sides of mountains crumbling loose
the yellow beak of day (82)
Give me a little drink
then I’ll wander here and there and watch the sun
rise while the tang of grits and coffee
drifts out between the shade trees
and the infinite gradations of ghost (83)
Carolyn possesses a strong visual imagination. Indeed, I gleaned from her interview with Tracy Hamon, that “it wasn’t just the written research that gave [her] entry to” her subjects, but photographs and filmic images. In Hooked, she does the same for us. As we read we are led to see: Myra Hindley’s “raccoon eyes/ porcelain face” (23), Scott Fitzgerald’s “jonquil hair/ his saffron hands…” (51), Dora Carrington’s “slim and active frame…all wire and nerve,” (63). Elizabeth Smart describes her young self as “radiant, aglow, on fire” in contrast to George Barker’s wife “so thin and shy, so dark against my shining head” (108). The olfactory and the tactile are also drafted to conjure her characters, their milieus: “Fitzgerald’s “saffron hands” “smelled of cigarettes” (51), Carson McCullers’ desire for “the snowy streets of Paris” with their “flakes of ash and the grime of constant prowling,” (78).
Another of Carolyn’s jaw-dropping techniques is an almost cinematic telescoping of time, [like one of those devices invented by Slavko Vorkapich and used to indicate time’s swift passage in 1930’s and 40’s films], as when early on in Jane Bowles’ monologue, she has her character say:
but here’s my story:
my nurse dropped me as a baby and then my father died, (90)
Or when Carson McCullers sums up her youth and early adulthood thus:
rheumatic fever at 15,
a small explosion in the brain at 24,
I could not read nor tell the time
nor even walk:
I had to live it all again, my infancy (82)
The telescoping of time, like some of her startling juxtapositions, could be regarded as variations on her gift for ellipsis, for syntactical anacolutha. What dramatic power resides in omission, in not naming, and also in changing the direction of a sentence’s syntax mid-stream, as in the following from Zelda Fitzgerald’s monologue:
but once, up in the graveyard of the blessed Confederate dead,
I was just fifteen when Scott those boys
don’t tell (45)
Carolyn’s confession to Alessandro Porco, that she “wanted to get inside [Myra Hindley’s] head and feel around in there,” extends to her treatment of all seven women. Carolyn’s unusual juxtapositions, her telescoping of time, her use of ellipses have all in a way been deployed to serve the creation of a kind of dreamy, somewhat rambling and disjointed reminiscence, almost a stream of sub-consciousness, not her own, but that of seven unique women. I do see Hooked as representing a new departure in Carolyn’s poetry writing. Yet Carolyn was able to draw on a poetics honed over decades of writing poetry and teaching creative writing. One propensity evident and fully developed by the publication of Power Sources (1982), Carolyn’s third poetry collection, is her knack for capturing a mind floating free of syntactical restraints, slipping in and out of streams of thought, white water rafting through imagist rapids. Here is “The Room Of Your Life” from Power Sources:
Sometimes at a party
a woman will begin to tell
the story of her life
when she opens her second bottle of wine
and your friends start to make promises,
but when you leave,
and you’re out on the street,
you’re alone,
why are you always alone?
It’s no good to be the only one
standing out on a shining street
when you watch the leaves turn as they do,
just before you begin to see very clearly
because you are alone,
and you walk down to your car
which begins to feel like your skin,
and you listen to the footsteps all around you,
reminding you of other nights like tonight
when it only makes sense
because you’re alone holding a pen
in the loneliness of your room,
at your desk, late at night, breathing.
Hearing that, one is reminded of Virginia Woolf’s insistence in 1929 on A Room of One’s Own as a necessary precondition for women to be able to write. In her interview with Tracy Hamon, Carolyn discloses that she “cannot write with music or the sound of someone moving around in the house,” that she requires for her writing “complete silence and separateness.”
I live in the country, and the only sound I hear most days when I’m writing
is the sound of birds outside and the wind in the trees.
Two major components of the new departure, the shifting of gears that Hooked represents, involve writing poems based on research and writing poems in the voice of other women. “Confessional poetry, “she acknowledges in her interview with Alessandro Porco, “had been my genre of choice for some years,” and “I had grown weary of my own story.” We do usually limit use of the label “confessional” to lyric poems in which the “I” of the poem is assumed to be the “I” of the poet her or himself. But these monologues are also confessional in the sense that they read as the from-beyond-the-grave “confessions” of seven women. And certainly there is much of the lyric in them.
So perhaps the essence of the new departure lies in Carolyn’s having been inspired by performance poetry. We have already looked at some of the elements in Carolyn’s poetry that signal an ear for what can be performed. We also know that Carolyn wrote the first monologue in the collection for presentation in a performance poetry venue. Moreover, as early as March 2009 Carolyn was telling Allesandro Porco that she was already in discussion with the character actress Nicky Guadagni about staging Hooked as a series of dramatic monologues.
In the meantime, that possibility has been realized. Once I learned that a group of theatre women around Nicky Guadagni had developed a show entitled Hooked in House to be mounted inside a person’s home to an audience of twelve to fifteen or so people, I knew I had to witness this before presenting on Hooked for Influency. So, on Sunday, April 11, fourteen women came to my home on a gloriously sunny and fairly warm afternoon to experience the production of Hooked in House not only in my house but also in my garden. Indeed Nicky Guadagni performed four of the monologues outside, three in various sections of the back garden, and the fourth, that of Myra Hindley, in the cluttered and dirty space under the deck [amongst bags of potting soil, over-turned pots, discarded garden furniture, plastic garbage bins, and brown leaves not yet swept up from last fall]. The remaining three monologues were performed indoors in three different rooms, each barely large enough to accommodate the fifteen of us forming the audience. Before, between and after every monologue we were served a delicious something to eat or drink inspired by the monologue’s subject. So, for instance, before Myra Hindley’s, we were given, you guessed it, bloody Myras.
At the end, Nicky Guadagni met with us to discuss the production and her role in it. When asked how she had been able to master all the monologues and to distinguish one speaker from another, Nicky gave credit to the “cadence” of the poet Carolyn’s lines – their lilt, their drumbeat, their varying rhythm. One of the quotations of the day posted by the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild during this past poetry month was from Donald Hall:
The poem happens out-loud, even if you are the fortunate reader who can hear the syllables while he reads silently. The poem is its sounds, and its sounds — mouth pleasures, dance pleasures — are the code which allows the mind to slip back into old and poetic ways of thinking: Ways of fantasy, ways of magic, transformation, metaphor, metamorphoses.
And I am reminded of Margaret’s Introductory lecture in which she gave this definition of Cadence:
Balanced, rhythmic flow, as of poetry or oratory. The measure or beat of movement, as in dancing or marching. A falling inflection of the voice, as at the end of a sentence. The general inflection or modulation of the voice. In music, a progression of chords moving to a harmonic close or point of rest.
In a sense, Nicky Guadagni could have been thinking of all those meanings of cadence, for as an actress, she made use of all those possibilities, not only by giving regionally accented voice to each character, but also by her modulations of that envoicing, by her occasional breaking into song, and also by her incorporation, in the sense of embodiment, of their history and character through her bodily movements, her walk, her dancing, her limping, her gesturing, the tilting or thrusting of her head.
I overheard one person in the audience say to another as we were waiting for Nicky to appear that experiencing her deliver these dramatic monologues brought the women more to life than merely reading them on the page. Immediately I wanted to take issue, but it was neither the time nor the place. Now, I have both of those. And wish to testify, that while I was enthralled by Nicky Gaudagni’s physical and vocal transformation into each of the radically different women, I was just as enthralled by their evocation the very first time I read Hooked’s seven poems on the printed page. From the beginning Carolyn’s words brought the women to life for me – I saw them before my mind’s eye and I heard them in my mind’s ear. This happened as the consequence of the cadence Nicky referenced, but also as the result of Carolyn’s marshalling of all the poetic devices I have sought to identify – the direct, uncluttered speech, the varying tonal qualities associated with each woman’s diction, Carolyn’s ear for precise, unclichéd wording, her eye for the telling gesture, her deft descriptions, her imagistic evocations of time and place, person and personality, her heart-stopping juxtapositions, her uncanny ellipses and omissions, and the narrative momentum she has given each woman’s monologue by her astute line breaks and varying stanza and section lengths, and by endowing each woman’s voice with the percussive musicality of a shifting beat. But I would like to end by returning to my conviction that equally important is a clear-eyed self-knowledge and a resolute, undaunted readiness to plumb the depths of her own life experience and discover there the seeds of all seven women – the cruelty, the compassion, the hate, the despair, the love, the addictiveness – and forge this self-awareness into an ability to capture Myra Hindley’s mocking tone:
god it was a mess, brain porridge, bone bits
and the blood
god it was everywhere
we laughed:
the look on his face! (18)
as well as this impassioned cry from Elizabeth Smart:
why did I not tell her what I knew:
the long bitterness of life
the mean, the ungenerous
the need to forge capacities for pain (113)
and this fatalistic conclusion to Dora Carrington’s monologue:
love is love, and hard enough to find (72).
References
Bowles. Jane. The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, with an Introduction by Truman Capote (Peter Owen, 1984).
Crosbie, Lynn. Miss Pamela’s Mercy (Coach House Press, 1992).
Duffy, Carol Ann. Mean Time (Anvil Press Poetry, 1993)
Duffy, Carol Ann. The World’s Wife (Faber and Faber, 1999).
Heffernan, James A.W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (The University of Chicago Press, 1993).
McCartney, Sharon. Karenin sings the blues (Goose Lane Editions, 2003).
McCartney, Sharon. The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Nightwood Editions, 2007).
Milford, Nancy. Zelda (Harper and Row, 1970).
Mitford, Jessica. The American Way of Death (Simon and Schuster, 1963).
Mosley, Charlotte, ed. The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (HarperCollins, 2007).
Riley, Denise. “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
Smart, Carolyn. At the End of the Day: A Memoir (Penumbra Press, 2001).
Smart, Carolyn. Hooked: Seven Poems (Brick Books, 2009).
Smart, Carolyn. Power Sources (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1982).
Smart, Carolyn. The Way To Come Home (Brick Books, 1992).
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (Hogarth Press, 1929).
Halifax Chronicle-Herald – April 18, 2010 By Stephen Patrick Clare - In the wake of this week’s Atlantic Book Awards, literature lovers across the region have been reminded that some of the country’s – and the world’s – finest authors are today living and working among us.
Names like Linden MacIntyre, Michael Crummey and Shandi Mitchell are now being heralded alongside the likes of world-renowned writers Alistair MacLeod, Ernest Buckler and Thomas H. Raddall.
Perhaps overshadowed by all of the pageantry is National Poetry Month. A slew of strong new works from both our established and emerging poets is evidence that the field is alive and well in Nova Scotia and across the country.
“I am very encouraged by what’s going on in Canadian poetry right now,” said Nova Scotian Johanna Skibsrud, who just released I Do Not Think That I Could Love A Human Being (Gaspereau Press, $19.95). “There is a lot of interest and energy, and an increasing amount of diversity out there, and that’s really good to see.”
Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Halifax’s former poet laureate, agrees. “Poetry is thriving,” she said enroute to Western Canada to promote The Lost Gospels (Brick Books, $19).
Neilsen Glenn who confesses that she “fell into poetry sideways” as a means “to take me places I had never been,” said that the genre has done well to adapt to the changing wants and needs of its audience.
“There are all sorts of new forms and styles; page poets to stage poets; spoken word; slam poetry; poetry performed with other media; poetry online. People are thirsty for poetry in all of its forms.”
Veteran Toronto poet PaulVermeersch, whose latest collection The Reinvention of the Human Hand (McClelland & Stewart, $18.99) is garnering great national attention, explains why poetry continues to play on readers’ hearts and minds.
“People are intrigued and entertained by verbal rhythms and images. It is part of the way our brains work, so it’s inescapable. And that is the mysterious and wondrous thing about poetry; just when you think you know what it is, it changes before your eyes. It’s a wizard. It’s a were-wolf. And it’s everywhere. It could be standing right behind you.”
He adds that “poetry is as important now as it ever was. It is a unique way of engaging with the world. It is a way of seeing, a way of thinking,” and points out that “intellectual diversity is as important to the survival of a civilization as genetic diversity is to the survival of a species or as biodiversity is to the survival of an ecosystem.”
Paul Tyler’s recent debut selection A Short History of Forgetting (Gaspereau Press, $19.95) does well to support claims that the ancient art form is still applicable. “Poetry distills language in an attempt to increase awareness of a particular moment or emotion or event,” he writes via email from his home in Ottawa. “We are creatures of language. Any art form that seeks to heighten our awareness through language will always be relevant to us – even essential.”
With an array of fresh anthologies on bookstore shelves this spring – including Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries (McClelland & Stewart, $18.99), Melanie Siebert’s Deepwater Vee (McClelland & Stewart, $18.99), Eve Joseph’s The Secret Signature of Things (Brick Books, $19), Sharon McCartney’s For and Against (Goose Lane Editions, $17.95) and Newfoundland wordsmith Antony Christie’s latest work Of Love and Drowning (Breakwater Books, $15.95) – it would appear that the country’s publishing industry holds the same belief.
“Certainly there is a lot of poetic energy and skill circulating these days,” muses award-winning Halifax poet Brian Bartlett, who will be flexing his lyrical muscles alongside heavyweight George Elliot Clarke this Tuesday as part of The Halifax Club’s ongoing Literary Lunch series.
“But it’s a little too early to tell how much the renaissance of craft and impressive technique is being matched by originality of vision. The true originals are always few and far between.”
“Still,” he continues, “the work is welcome. Without poetry our world is all the less colourful and flavourful. It might not enjoy the same kind of attention that other fields of literature do, but that doesn’t make it any less important.”
http://stephenclare.blogspot.com/search?q=poetry – this article dated May 18, 2010
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