14th Canadian Challenge - 14th Review - After Desire

Hard to believe I've gotten to 13 reviews this time around with just time for one more before "the polls close" out in B.C.  I really left it all to the last month.  I don't want to do that again. I think in general I would prefer reviewing not quite so many volumes of poetry or at least not all at the same time.  I really need to get moving again on Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant.  And maybe this year is finally the year that I read Atwood's Oryx and Crake.  I was thinking I would do a double review of George Stanley's After Desire and Vancouver: A Poem.  But to do it justice, I need more time and another pass through Vancouver.  I'll tentatively pencil it in for Canada Day proper.

After Desire was published in 2013.  The poems all reflect the period after Stanley's return to Vancouver after leaving to teach up north in Terrace, with the exception of a relatively short section titled "1971," which appear to be poems written in 1971 that Stanley recently uncovered and naturally enough don't mesh with the rest of the book.  Many of the other poems are about moving beyond desire, generally sexual desire, though of course one could also move beyond the desire for wealth or material goods. The loss of sexual desire hits Stanley quite hard, as it was so central to him identity as a gay man.  However, some of the poems, such as "West Broadway" are just about live as an old man (in his 70s) living in the city, taking the 99 bus.

"Memories of Desire" is probably more accurately described as memories of the times desire led successfully to sex.  "I am unable to focus.  I don't want to focus / on desires I can no longer feel. / Desires for powers over /a younger, slender guy, a boy, / a son.  A surge of anticipation / of the first touch..." 

"Loss of Desires" explores what it means to no longer feel desire (or compulsion).  "I don't miss it, I miss missing it. I  miss the / lack of it, the failure, every time, to grasp anything but the / scum of, he edgings of the shiny spot, the passion wound up."

While the next poem, "Desire for the Self," is about taking the bus, somehow it doesn't strike me as quite appropriate (for my anthology), as it sort of feeds into notions of gays as predators...   "Laugh at your freedom from desire. / The boy boarding the bus may even / flash you a smile: Thanks for not wanting me."

The nature of the collection generally left me a bit depressed and downbeat, as do most poems that meditate on aging, frailty in general and on-coming death.  While in these poems Stanley is probably in the 6th Age (of Man) and on the cusp of the 7th Age, Souster had clearly arrived at the 7th Age in Come Rain, Come Shine.  Maybe it is only my delusion that I am still in the 5th Age and haven't started down the slope to the 6th Age - and it is pure superstition that reading about the 6th or 7th Age will hasten their onset...  But that's definitely a bit of a stumbling block preventing me from enjoying Stanley's After Desire.

14th Canadian Challenge - 12th/13th Review - Raymond Souster

I believe I've alluded to the fact that Raymond Souster was incredibly prolific, publishing 50+ books, most of them poetry collections.  Even his Collected Poems runs to 10 volumes, still only covering his work up to 2000!  While I probably should have started with the The Colour of the Times (an early selected volume, which is often paired with Ten Elephants on Yonge Street) I'll have to get to that another time.  I'm actually working from his very late, post-2000 poems, working backwards in a sense.  This will be a double review of Uptown Downtown: New Poems of the GTA and Come Rain, Come Shine: The Last Poems of Raymond Souster. Come Rain, Come Shine truly are Souster's last poems, with some written only two weeks before his death at 91. As this review indicates, in his final years, Souster was blind and had to dictate his poems to an assistant.  In many of the final poems, he clearly is working from his hospital bed.  

Souster's late style doesn't vary much across the collections, though thematically there is a large difference.  In Uptown Downtown, his vision is fading but he can still get around (perhaps taking taxis more than the TTC as he used to) but he still is observing and interacting with the world, even if it is seen through a darkening pane. In contrast, the poems of Come Rain, Come Shine are far more memory pieces about his childhood and early adulthood in Toronto.  When he writes about the present, he usually talks about his confinement and how his world has shrunk.  Souster typically wrote short poems with a few major exceptions, such as book-length poems about the war: Jubilee of Death and What Men Will Die For.  Mostly he put his very straight-forward and unadorned reactions to what he sees in Toronto down without a lot of flourishes.  While he is sometimes compared to Whitman or W.C. Williams, I personally think his closest analogue is Charles Reznikoff, though I find Reznikoff a bit more musical and perhaps a bit more steeped in the Old Testament.

I'll pick out and discuss a few poems of interest, starting with Uptown Downtown.

"Taking Out the Garbage": "My blue box holds empty can, / which once held pineapple, peaches, / humble and filling baked beans, / hot soup, sliced beets, chicken stew."

"Coaxing Up the Dawn": "so first we have a show-off dawn, / then the still loudly yawning sun / starts to grind together into gear / one more day's uninspired routines...".

"Last Day": "Suppose this turned out to be / my last day on earth / ... / I've sat at this desk / where my heart revels in / the golden-yellow light outside, / reflected mostly from a backyard tree, whose leaves must surely know / it could be the last day."

Just like Stymeist, Souster shows the 401 no love.  In "401 Revisited," he calls it "a hell-ride to nowhere and back, / this necklace of yellow smog / hung around the city's / already reluctant, choking throat."

The first group of poems in Come Rain, Come Shine are fairly similar to those in Uptown Downtown with their slightly cynical take on the foibles of city dwellers.  Here's "Revision": "The best laid plans / of mice and men / are usually screwed up / by the wise guy planners."  He includes a few poems celebrating Nuit Blanche, which is an all-night art party in Toronto (initially imported from the more cultured Montreal...).

The poems seem to turn more inwards at about the halfway mark of Come Rain, Come Shine, probably reflecting Souster's shrinking world.  At about the two-third's mark, Souster begins a series called "Simon Says" where the first poems are mostly reflections of his school days, followed by various moments (not typically "key moments" but just random memory flashes) as the poet traces his life until finally arriving at the hospital bed.

Here are a few examples "Simon Says (29)": "the poet now recalls / that in his second year / at Humberside High / ... / he carried home the books / of a girl in his classroom, / and saw as she walked beside him / the wide swaying movement / of her schoolgirl hips."

 "Simon Says (40)": "that time can often end up / with bloodied, torn hands, / but always it ends up / ticking solidly away."

Note that Souster refers to cancer as the "Big C," and indeed it was cancer that killed him.

"Simon Says (112)": "that Big C / is something of a hustler /working round the clock / ... / he may approach your hospital bed / and leaning over / whisper in your ear / it's time now to go, / ... / and soon the two of you / are walking off into the jet-black night."

The two collections are generally pretty similar in tone, though I suppose I would give the nod to his final collection, Come Rain, Come Shine, primarily because they represent his last thoughts on Toronto life and because I thought the Simon Says series was pretty interesting.  I'll return with a review of some earlier collections by Souster in the next Challenge.

14th Canadian Challenge - 11th Review - On the Material

I'm not entirely sure how I stumbled across Stephen Collis's On the Material, though I may have been looking up e-books published by Talonbooks or I found an archived review.  As with The Cold Panes of Surfaces, I liked parts of the collection, especially the last part, which memorializes his sister Gail.  However, I had a strong aversion to the politics and the poetics behind a much more recent book, Once in Blockadia, to the point that I am fairly unlikely to read more of his work going forward.

The first section of On the Material is titled 4 x 4 and it is comprised of 44 poems, each of which have 4 stanzas of 4 lines each (or 16 lines).  There doesn't appear to be any specific rhyme scheme, though many of the individual lines are broken in two (perhaps in imitation of Beowulf). Poem #13 is a clear riff on Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (which ends "You must change your life.").  In homage, Collis writes: "Archaic torso of   Toronto /Shattered pavement on Bloor and /Bathurst   hurt feet sidewalk / Scar of tramcar   track / ... / People clutch pillows in the / Stink of the Greyhound station / ... / you must change your   ideology."

Poem #41 has a tip of the hat to W.C. Williams: "Apropos of appropriation / I take a lyric from your limit / Please excuse the plums from your fridge / They were so old I had to throw them out."

Poem #44 is dedicated to the poet Jordan Scott.  It is not immediately apparent if this poem borrows anything from Scott's work, though "Yawp for bardic hopes" may be a reference to Whitman's "Song of Myself." "Then rain comes to draw the city's lines / Telephones face books that breathe / ... / The street cobble jolt jolt jolt jolt of / Spine after spine of books the forgotten / Art of building stone walls to better   breathe."

As I mentioned, the most moving section is "Gail's Books."  Collis reveals that his sister told him she had cancer, and she passed away six months later.  One month after she died, her house burned down, with her study and library destroyed (presumably while the family was still working through what to do with her possessions).  Collis still possessed some books she had gifted him, as well as some that he had taken over that month prior to the fire, but almost everything else was lost or ruined.  Collis doesn't list all of the books (either saved or lost), but Rilke's Book of Hours was one of her favourites, and Collis adapts from it here.  "Book of lost circles /Fingered in water I / Teach to rout loss / From the word may."  Also "Book of blasted gates / Who isn't comprised of / The office and the home." And "Book of dissolved tears / It's merely resistance / Every wing is closed / Every wing choosing anomie / ... / Cloth of the fallen cities / Stone which we effigy / Our nothing which remains / Small."

The poems which are not directly tied to Rilke are generally about nature, rebirth and of course the fire always circling back to the forefront of Collin's thoughts.  "Even her post-it note smoked / In my hands it still smells of smoke / ... / In the book not the dream smoke / ... / Water damage at one corner crushed and smoked / But you can still read open up prophecy pretend."  

In this short poem Collis invokes the phoenix: "In the fire / A window opened / In the window / Pages turned / As though a wind / A bird passed / Through my hand / ... / I sat by the water / Filled with books / Reading its features / Floating in flame."

It's hard to imagine processing such a terrible loss, and the poems seem rawer here, than in the 4 x 4 section, though of course that may stem from own perceptions and reactions to loss.  While I wouldn't say this section was an easy read, it had its own rewards.

14th Canadian Challenge - 10th Review - The Cold Panes of Surfaces

Rummaging a bit through rob mclennan's blog, I came across a review where he was touting Chris Banks's Midlife Action Figure.  This looked interesting, so I put this and The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory on hold at the library, but they haven't come through yet.  I also stumbled across a very reasonably priced copy of Winter Cranes (not available at the library), so I ordered that, but that isn't here yet either.  I was, however, able to borrow Banks's second collection, The Cold Panes of Surfaces.  Overall, I liked but didn't love this book.  I'm hoping that I see him develop into a stronger poet or simply perhaps one more attuned to my urbanized interests.  

Many but not all of the poems in this book are on pastoral themes.  It's quite difficult for me to fairly or meaningfully evaluate such poems, as it is so far outside my area of interest.  Somewhat amusingly, Banks essentially calls on the spirit of Wordsworth in "My Own Private Tintern Abbey," perhaps in an admission that so many of our direct experiences are mediated by or reflected through others' experiences, so it is no small stretch that a nature poet would essentially fess up that his view of the countryside is refracted through his impressions on how Wordsworth would have seen it if he had gotten to Canada first.  While I find this poem a bit too self-reflexive for my transportation anthology, I do like these lines: "A man can walk a river his entire life, / watching the many days sail around the bend, owning / none of it, yet find it has taken deep purchase within him."  

In truth, I'm more likely to just wait to see what his more recent collections have on offer, but the poem that closes out the collection, "Early Spring," another poem about going for a walk in the countryside, is at least in the running. "The sky above / mills out a few restless clouds, grinding / them into a fine grist. A freezing rain. /All morning glassed in. Now walking / here, you are forced to step carefully / over sedge, brake, mud, roots..."

One of the first poems in the collection is about a magician's assistant who wished at least some of the applause was for her.  Many, many years ago I wrote a handful of poems about carnival life, and one was about a knife thrower and his assistant, so it's interesting to see someone tackle the same general theme from a different angle.  Banks closes the poem out on a fairly somber note with the assistant feeling used up or emptied out, "after each show, and me feeling / more like half a person, vanishing, / ever so slowly, without a trace."

There is a poem titled "Schadenfreude."  I'm not certain it was inspired by the song of the same title in Avenue Q, but it's not impossible either.  While Avenue Q didn't open in Toronto until 2008 (and I saw it in Vancouver in 2014), it opened in New York in 2004.  Anyway, it certainly is very much in the same spirit naturally: "every time a stranger / slips on a patch of ice, / or  when a couple's / love and devotion / suddenly combusts / into divorce ... /  although you chastise / yourself for giving in / to its sweet and sour, / there it is anyways, / that worm of a word, / coiling in on itself, / ... / Schadenfreude."

My favourite poem is "Dark Matter," most likely in part because it is set in Toronto.  Also, the poem has faint echoes (in my mind at least) with the Tragically Hip song "Bobcaygeon," though in the song the constellations are emerging whereas in "Dark Matter" the stars are winking out.  The poem unfolds as if it was a slow-motion disaster flick: "we drove to High Park, passing gridlocked intersections / full of smashed cars, / listening to the sirens go off in the midtown streets, / ... / Dark Matter filling up the car and the city / and the silence between us, / ... / as we wished for whatever was coming / to descend mercifully swift."  Some of the more esoteric branches of cosmology indeed posit an unstable universe that might be unravelled by all the unseen and indeed unobservable dark matter.  Heady thoughts indeed.

14th Canadian Challenge - 9th Review - The Uncertainty Principle

Digging a bit into Michael Dennis and his poetry blog quickly led me to rob mclennan, another poet (and frequent blogger) also based in Ottawa.  He has a number of poetry collections, and I am currently reading and processing The Ottawa City Project.  However, today I am reviewing a shorter collection called The Uncertainty Principle.

The pieces are all extremely short, and are either short prose poems (some as short as a sentence and a hashtag (borrowed from Twitter)) or micro-fiction.  I don't think it really matters either way, but I am considering this as a work of poetry.

Not all of the pieces are humourous or droll; some cover more serious topics or are even melancholy.  However, the ones that grabbed me are the lighter pieces.

There is a running gag about a Twitter-like hashtag #IDon'tHaveFactstoBackThisUp, which is one way, I suppose, to pre-empt the users who insist on #Citations Please.  Naturally, this is applied to a number of urban legends, such as "Radium tastes like butttermilk" or "Winnepeg was founded by cheese moguls."

I'll just pick out a few poems I enjoyed to give you a sense of the collection, as it is essentially a mosaic of many small insights and images.

"If you don't eat your cookie, your fortune can't happen. ... I once had a cookie offer the same fortune three times over ... I knew the universe was trying to tell me something."

"When she was thirty years old, she discovered that all of her problems stemmed from a single flaw: she was wearing a bra three sizes too small."

"She declares, half-serious, that she wants a baby or a dog or a cat or an orchid.  I tell her a dog is out of the question." 

"I've wondered if I would actually want to live forever, and the only concern I have is memory."

These extracts may make it seem a bit more like a comic routine by Steven Wright than it actually is, but this is still broadly representative of The Uncertainty Principle.  There are a few reviews of this book, but I'll just link to this one from Broken Penci , which gets right to the point. 

14th Canadian Challenge - 8th Review - Paradise Lost (Erin Shields)

This weekend was the first in a long time that I tuned in to virtual theatre (and indeed Soulpepper is extending its offerings for one more month, so I don't have to rush quite so much to listen to Six Characters in Search of an Author before it vanishes on me).  George Brown was wrapping up its season, and on Sat. I watched Paradise Lost (adapted by Erin Shields) and on Sunday I saw them do Caryl Churchill's Love and Information.  I'd say of the two, Love and Information translates a lot better to Zoom, but this isn't a review of that show.  I'm not sure if they trimmed Paradise Lost or not.  Shields's adaptation ran 2 hours 45 minutes at Stratford a few years back (when theatre was still allowed), and it was just under two hours here.  Even factoring in a much shorter intermission and less time devoted to character blocking and the battle scenes, this suggests some text had been cut.  What's interesting is that I had seen an even shorter one-hour version of Paradise Lost at the fringe in 2018 that retained far more of Milton's actual language (Shields really only recycles a small handful of lines).  In my view the plot is fairly thin and the underlying message is so problematic (even if spun in a more feminist manner as Shields attempts here) that the only thing really going for it is Milton's glorious language, which is absent in this adaptation.  So in that sense, I don't consider this a particularly successful experiment.

How does Shields adapt the story (as I already mentioned she largely jettisoned the language)?  Satan is portrayed as female, and the angels (mostly doubling as devils/demons) should be a mix of males and females.  (To be honest, I think it might have been more radical to have both God and Satan portrayed as women.)  Adam and Eve have a more balanced relationship, prior to the Fall at least.  Of course, there is only so much that God's judgement can be modified, and Eve is quite explicit about how unfair she considers her punishment (having to be completely obedient to Adam hereafter and then the terrible pains of childbirth).  Shields also seems to dive a bit more into Jesus's plans on redeeming humans, which is a minor theme in Paradise Lost. (Of course the life and times of Jesus is the focus of Paradise Regained.)  One other addition (or at least one I can't recall in the original) is that while the angels can't form a shield around the Garden to prevent Satan from getting in (since there still needs to be the exercise of free will), they put on a show (here done as a shadow puppet show) to warn Adam and Eve about a "Deceiver" who will come into the Garden of Eden and try to lead them astray.  This sort of had aspects of Hamlet's play within a play, but I'd say the payoff was considerably lower.  I guess you could say that they were warned, but maybe a more specific warning would have been more useful, i.e. no matter what you hear about the Tree of Knowledge, it will be a lie.

Where I really balk at religion in general is the insistence upon unquestioning obedience.  I don't think reflexive defiance is any better, but in both cases it is the unthinking part that offends.  Maybe there never would have been a rationale I would have found acceptable on why God didn't want them to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, as it seems to basically be a loyalty test, and moreover one that he knew upfront they would fail.  I definitely am more on the same page as Satan in wondering if there really can be "free will" in a universe run by an all-knowing (omniscient) and all-powerful (omnipotent) being.  The best one can hope for is that the deity is indifferent to things at the human scale, but if he (or she) takes an interest then it seems that everything that happens must just be a piece of God's plan and humans (and angels and devils) are in fact merely puppets.  For my money, I much prefer the Greek or Norse mythologies which feature gods with limits on their powers, as it is simply easier to square human suffering with fractious, squabbling gods rather than the all-powerful one Milton (and Shields) puts up on a pedestal.  (Indeed, reading the Book of Job and taking it seriously was the moment when I lost any vestigial interest I still had in Christianity.)  I could go on for a while in this vein, but it must be obvious that the overall narrative of Paradise Lost does nothing for me and Shields's very minor reworking makes no substantial improvement, certainly nothing that would change my mind on the overall injustice of the Adam and Eve story.

2nd Shot!

While not as big a deal in the States, it still takes some navigating of vaccination websites or waiting in long lines at pop-ups to get that second dose.  There is also a lot of angst given that AZ was pushed up here and now people are hesitant about mixing vaccines, though it seems to be a working strategy.  I was sure I was going to get Moderna yesterday, as the pharmacist told everyone on the phone they didn't have any Pfizer (as there is a lot of vaccine shopping going on, which just wastes everyone's time), but perhaps they meant they didn't have any unbespoke Pfizer, since my second shot was Pfizer.  Honestly, I would have been more than happy to switch to Moderna and give my Pfizer shot to a teenager, but that wasn't an option.  At any rate, I have now had my second shot and should be quite protected from Covid if I do run across a carrier.  Now I might still not want to take the Stratford bus this year, but I think the train to Ottawa might be doable (if they ever decide on when the National Gallery will open and how hard it will be to get tickets to the Rembrandt exhibit).

It wasn't supposed to rain until 8 pm tonight, but in fact it started with a light rain around 3:30 as I was leaving, so I am quite glad that I didn't attempt to bike to work on Friday.  By the time I got back to the Danforth the rain had picked up quite a bit and I got pretty wet.  Fortunately I had a plastic bag with me, so my book (Don Quixote) didn't get all wet.  It was interesting when the pharmacist asked about it (she had never heard of Don Quixote at all, which I thought strange) and whether I would recommend it.  I find the characters totally exasperating (and Sancho's mania about becoming a governor of an insula gets way out of hand in Book II) and the adventures fairly pathetic, so I guess the short answer is not really.  I said it would have worked better at 400 pages, but honestly 200-300 pages would have been better still.  It's somewhat hard to imagine what someone coming at this completely cold would make of it.  Anyway, I have finally hit the 750 page mark!  And I probably will be done with Cervantes by Canada Day.

It was generally a better trip than the first time.  At that time, the link between the TTC and the GO Bus station was out of commission, and the back entrance to the mall was completely closed.  They were letting in a very small number of people for pick-up of essential items but most pick-ups were on the north side of Yorkdale by the parking lot.  There were probably as many manikins as people walking around in the halls.  It really was quite eerie.  Here's the view from my first visit.

They still weren't letting lots of people in, but there were certainly more people inside.  I think some of the food court restaurants were open.  Certainly the stores that had a direct entrance onto the parking lot were in much better shape, as they could let the general public in at reduced capacities.  All in all, there seems to be two to three times as much foot traffic through Gerrard Square as Yorkdale (because of a higher proportion of essential shops), which is just mind blowing when you think about it.  I imagine it will be much, much busier on the 30th when we go to Stage 2 and malls can re-open.  Indoor gyms are still not allowed, along with indoor dining and indoor concerts and movies (maybe that comes in Stage 3 or Stage 3 plus.)  I'm pretty sure museums reopen in Stage 3, which is looking like it will happen in late July, given that the vaccination campaign has really ramped up; more than 75% of adults have at least one dose and 20% are fully vaccinated -- higher in the Atlantic Provinces, Quebec and Ontario and lower in the Prairies and Alberta naturally).

This time around the line-up for vaccines was much shorter, as there were major computer snafus last time.  There was a relatively short delay, but it wasn't too bad, and I did have my book.  The way back was pretty uneventful.  I did grab a few things from the grocery store in case the rain was even heavier on Sat. and in case I wasn't feeling well.  So far, knock wood, my arm is sore but I don't have any other symptoms like nausea or extreme fatigue.  That said, I probably won't head out today, and I'll focus on getting some work work done and maybe some of my remaining 6 poetry reviews up on the blog.

14th Canadian Challenge - 7th Review - The House on Major Street

Like the Bone Weir, Leon Rooke's The House on Major Street also turned up unannounced in my front yard library. I had never heard of Rooke previously, but apparently he's been established in Toronto writing experimental fiction for some time, after moving up from North Carolina.  Many of his stories are still set in the American South, but The House on Major Street is thoroughly Canadian, being set on a small residential street in the Annex and with one of the characters a professor (on leave) from the University of Toronto.  It's a relatively short book (212 pages with some correspondence related to Rooke's using real-life people as characters in the book).  I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had pushed through and read it in a day or two, but I was busy and frankly after the first couple of chapters the manic energy slowed and I just wasn't compelled to press on.  This is a thoroughly postmodern book, and it is fair to say I have moved on and am generally uninterested in literary postmodern games.  One feature of most (all?) postmodern works is because the artifice is front and center, the plot per se doesn't really matter.  The stakes are low (in my view) and I find it particularly hard to be engaged, aside from noticing the construction of the work, but the outcome of the the fates of any of the characters is pretty much besides the point.  I've kind of hit that point in Don Quixote as well, after one too many references to the printed version of the first part of the story actually impacting events in the second part!  All this is to say, I think it is all but impossible to SPOIL the plot of a postmodern novel.  However, I will be revealing the ending, so stop reading now if you find that upsetting.

The through-line plot of The House on Major Street is absurdly simple.  Zan, a girl in the neighbourhood is on her bike, running some errands, when she crashes into her neighbour, Tallis.  It perhaps should be mentioned that both had mini-crushes on the other.  Their heads crack together.  Both go into comas, but Zan recovers sooner, while, at the book's opening, Tallis has been in a coma for over a month.  Many well-wishers come by to support Tallis's parents, Emmitt and Daisy, and indeed this is spun out ad nauseam into the bulk of the novel.  Essentially this is a reverse-Sleeping Beauty tale, so when Zan finally creeps into Tallis's room and tells him to wake up, he does so.  And that's it.  Curtain down.

I liked the energy of the first few chapters, including the flashback to the accident.  It reminded me just a bit of the streetcar accident engineered by the Devil in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.  But as more and more post-modern contrivances were layered on top of each other, my attention flagged.  Maybe I would have been swept along had I read it in a couple of sittings, but honestly I doubt it.  Rooke introduces Sheila, who is one of Daisy's friends and a successful romance novelist.  Two of her characters are lifted off the page and start interacting with "real life" characters, just as in Findley's Headhunter.  In addition, one of Chekhov's characters, Ryabovich, turns up to convene with Tallis in his coma.  There is an entire subplot devoted to the trouble Daisy is in for leaving a rare copy of Finnegan's Wake out in the rain and ruining it.  While presumably this was actually a copy from the Fisher Rare Book Library (or why would the university keep hounding her about it), 3 actual real-world book sellers (Steven Temple, Richard Landon and David Mason) turn up to look for it (when it wouldn't be hers to sell even if it was worth restoring).  This subplot is dropped without being resolved, as are most of the postmodern touches.  

As should be evident by now, as the book went on and on, I liked it less and less, and my overall rating is that this is not a very good book.  It is likely only of interest to those who spent their young adulthood in Toronto's Annex or who really are curious about postmodern fiction.

Ethiopian Longings

While there actually is a good Ethiopian place just north of me on Danforth and Jones, it's going to be a while before I can eat inside or feel comfortable doing so (and their patio leaves a lot to be desired).  So I tried take-out, but it was quite a mess because of the way they packed the food, so I probably won’t go back for a while.  Anyway, I had a hankering for Ethiopian food, so I decided to give the home-cooking option a go and make two recipes (this morning in fact). 

Misir wat -- this one turned out really well.  I added some spinach into the mix.

Green beans and potato recipe. I’m not as sure about this one. The potatoes clearly need to cook at least 10 minutes longer than the recipe called for.  Also, I think the portions are off a bit (not enough tomato relative to potato) and I couldn't get the spice mix right. I don't think I'll make this again.

On the way home from work, I stopped by an Ethiopian restaurant at Queen and Parliament.  They actually wouldn't sell me the injera all by itself!  A bit annoying, but I might try their take-out next month.  They did point me to a grocery store around the corner at Shuter and Parliament where they sold injera and niter kibbeh (though I didn't get any of this this time).

I really liked the misir wat and will make that again, but I need to pair it with something, most likely this yellow split pea recipe, which I'll try soon.  (I wouldn't bother with this one.  Too much turmeric and not enough other spices...)

Passing the Baton

I had a somber email from Tafelmusik this afternoon.  While I was expecting it to be another fund-raising message, it turned out that their former director, Jeanne Lamon, had just passed away from cancer at the age of 71.  Obit here.

While she had stepped down in 2014, she had stayed quite involved with Tafelmusik until 2019 when she moved to Victoria.  I'm not entirely sure how many times I've seen her perform (typically she would perform and direct the ensemble), but probably on the order of 10 or so times.  A significant loss, particularly during a time when Tafelmusik will have to wait a few more months to organize a memorial concert.  However, her legacy will live on for a very long time.

Second Weekend Back

Things are still very slowly opening up.  I managed to bike to work three days last week, though I think only one or two other people are coming in.  I have a lot to catch up on, not least of which is starting to empty out my desk area by Sept. (and I probably will need this entire time!).

The bad news is I certainly gained weight, which is hardly a surprise given how depressing life has been and how few things were available and open.  While I likely would have eventually caught COVID if I went to the gym the whole time, it was still a major blow when they closed.  On the positive side, I can fit into my work clothes, though they are a bit snug.  Between the biking and more discipline around snacking (while not home lying on the couch), I probably will be in ok shape by September and have a two month jump on the rest of my co-workers, who will just be starting to deal with their own weight issues.

My wife and son managed to go to a pop-up clinic and get their second shots already, which is quite exciting.  I decided to pass this weekend, but Wed. I will see what is available, and I likely will try the pop-up route next weekend.  Canada is actually now leading the charts in terms of percentage of adults with one-dose protection.  It's been a long time coming.  I suspect by the fall we'll actually pass the US in terms of 2nd doses as well, since there is so much ingrained vaccine hesitancy in the States.  That said, I am not sure when I will be willing to travel to the States, or at least any of the red states.  I think my wife is likely to head to Chicago as soon as the border opens, which looks like it might be the tail end of August.  I might pass this year.  I haven't really decided.  I'm a lot more interested in getting down to New York and Washington DC.  This may be the first year that the art exhibits at the Art Institute of Chicago and MCA just aren't that compelling (for me).  If the AGO really does manage to pull off the Warhol and Picasso exhibits this summer and late fall, this may be the first year that the art scene (exhibition-wise) is better in Toronto than Chicago.  I'm moderately likely to try to get to Ottawa to see the Rembrandt exhibit at the National Gallery, but there are no details when that is actually going to be open (but probably mid to late August).  I'm still a bit sore that I didn't get to Montreal last summer/fall for the big impressionist exhibit.  I guess hindsight is always 20/20, and cases have never been as low as they were last year, but I wasn't comfortable in staying away from home -- and of course there were no vaccines available last summer.

I stopped by Bau-Xi again today and did get the catalogue from their George Byrne show.  It looks like I bought the very first copy from them!  As far as I can tell, the show actually comes down today, but they might extend it a week.  They were thinking of rehanging some of the Michael Wolf photos in October, since no one really could see them in May, so I'll keep my eyes open for that.

I was able to convince someone to let me into 401 Richmond, but it looks like the galleries are all closed after all.  I guess they are considering themselves as under the "mall" rules, and they don't have an outside door.  Very disappointing.  I'm not sure about the other galleries, but Yumart is sticking to on-line exhibits for the time being, though they were open in March, and I saw the Lee Lamothe exhibit, which I liked.  It reminded me a lot of Aaron Siskind's work, but in colour.  Here are a few of the more abstract pieces from the show.

Lee Lamothe, Yellow Hoarding, 2020

Lee Lamothe, Yellow Black Mass, 2020

I actually just got a call from Shoppers.  (Rare that I answer the phone these days, but so glad I did.)  I can head up to Yorkdale on June 25th and get my second shot!  They really moved the deadlines up a lot, as I believe I was initially booked for my second shot in August.  Anyway, this is incredible news.  Now we just need to find a way to get my daughter her 2nd shot without having to wait hours and hours at a pop-up.

14th Canadian Challenge - 6th Review - The Bone Weir

This poetry collection, The Bone Weir by D.S. Stymeist, turned up in my Little Free Library a month or so back.  While I did enjoy the book, I put in back out to share with another poetry-lover in the neighbourhood.  A weir is a sort of dam, so one can envision a pile of fossils perhaps joining up with the raw material in a beaver dam (to go along with the general theme of the collection).  I would say that the poems fall into three general groups: poems about "ancient times" with a bit of a focus on indigenous people living in the territory that became Canada, a series of poems about driving on the 401 in Toronto and poems about life in contemporary Northern Ontario.  I'll take a quick look at one (or more) in each category.

"Pictographic" is an investigation of an ancient pictograph.  Stymeist doesn't provide enough detail for me to narrow it down ton one location, but this one on Artery Lake seems like a reasonable stand in.  (More information here on Anishinaabe pictographs.)

Stymeist mentions how the pictograph is fading: "Every year it becomes harder / to locate the old red image / amid rock cap moss and lichen. / ... / it has become a rusty smudge."  Stymeist considers the pictograph as part of the animist tradition; this figure is part-man, part-rabbit: "We-sakejak. Great Hare, con-man, / trouble-maker, fool, and our hero."  Europeans interpreted the long ears as devil horns "and barred their Cree guides / from setting up camp onshore."  No question cultural misunderstandings are still rife in Canada.  Incidentally, Free Wah has an entire book on his poetic reactions to pictographs, called simply Pictograms from the Interior of B.C., which is included in its entirety in Scree, The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991.  I don't think I'll have the time to do a decent review of Scree at the moment, but maybe later.

I naturally was quite interested in "The 401 Series," as I don't recall too many poems written specifically about that highway, running right through Toronto (though Raymond Souster surely has written a few...).  It becomes immediately evident that he has nothing good to say about the highway and its maddening traffic.  "Think not that you remain you / when behind the driver's wheel. / I've seen chamber maids, pastry / chefs ... / ... / ... consumed / by mind-rage of beltway and byway."  In another section, he writes: "I can not avoid breathing this opiod fog. / ... the Four-O-One speaks to me / with maggoty tndrils of crosstown transit."  It is hardly a surprise that Stymeist encounters a traffic jam: "Now we're all blocked u, backed up, with nowhere to go, it's the nightmare / of Santa Monica Xpressway all over again...".  But then traffic starts moving again: "And, I can't believe it, we're moving again./ Oh sweet freedom!  Oh sweet delight! /  The open liberation of road gapes / before me as great flying beasts / wing their goony ways into Pearson...".  There is not much to add.  The 401 is often an unpleasant experience, but people still have organized their lives so they are reliant on it to cut across Toronto.  As the mantra goes "You are the traffic;" it's not everybody else's fault that highways, such as the 401, are jammed.  Stymeist seems to get this, not exempting himself from his jaundiced view of the 401, though as one point he does write "I feel not at all one with the road."  

Perhaps not surprisingly, Stymeist does not seem at home in Toronto or indeed the GTA, and the rest of the poems are generally set in more rural locations ("Water Birds on the Rideau", "Tidal Pools", "Winter Bait").  In "Wild Geese" Stymeist hears the call of the geese as a siren's song.  However, the geese "don't know that I can't / join them in the pale blue air" though he clearly longs to.

Even though he takes a largely negative view of the urban environment, I personally was the most interested in Stymeist's somewhat rare poems set in cities with the "The 401 Series" being the most on point.  Clearly his interests evolve more around rural life, though it might be a stretch to tag him as an anti-urbsn poet.

14th Canadian Challenge - 5th Review - Low Centre of Gravity

While George Stanley is moderately obscure for a Canadian poet, Michael Dennis is arguably more obscure.  He was largely an outsider, at least outside of Peterborough and Ottawa poetry circles.  He never landed one of those writer-in-residence gigs.  (Arguably these gigs are not what they used to be, but he seems to have been completely outside academic circles.)  However, he did publish regularly, largely chapbooks with smaller presses (perhaps a male, Canadian version of Lyn Lifshin?).  Many of them are listed here, but sadly most links are dead.  On the other hand, he did become a regular poetry reviewer with his Today's Book of Poetry review site, eventually reviewing an astonishing 800+ books of poetry on his blog, having to shut it down in early 2020 due to ill health.  Mchael Dennis passed away on Dec 31, 2020.  A touching tribute can be found on rob mclennan's blog.  Michael Dennis largely worked in blue-collar professions and didn't support himself through his writing (which incidentally was also the case with George Stanley at least until he started teaching at Coast Mountain College).  I see him as working in the Al Purdy vein, and perhaps a bit inspired by Bukoski as well.*  Michael Dennis has a volume of selected poems from 2002 (This Day Full of Promise) and Bad Engine, a more recent selected volume on Anvil Press from 2017, which also includes a generous helping of new poems.  Bad Engine is still in print, and I expect I'll review it this fall.  Low Centre of Gravity, published in 2020, is Dennis's final stand-alone poetry collection.

In general, the poems are short, first-person observational poems, often with an ironic or humourous  twist at the end.  These are certainly up my alley, and I look forward to checking out Bad Engine in short order.

Low Centre starts off with a bang literally.  "Winter Storm" features a car accident that leads to the car passengers dying with their proverbial lives flashing before their eyes: "their lives sped past / they remembered many of the same things / but not in the same order.".

"Tombstone" seems grounded in a reversion to Dennis's outsider status.  The narrator crashes a poetry reading, shoots the featured poet and takes the stage.  The poem closes: "the audience was lukewarm at best / but I still had some bullets / and they would all love me soon."

While Dennis's wife Kirsty (always referred to as K) appears in many of these poems, it may not be that much of a surprise that she doesn't make an appearance in "There is No Responsibiliy Once You are Dreaming": "had an inappropriate dream last night / about the wife of an old friend / she'd never visited me sleeping before / but she certainly made herself at home."  While "not much really happened" Dennis still "woke up feeling guilty."  But there's a twist at the end: "I think of calling my old friend / on the off chance he won't be home."

There is a somewhat elegiac feel to the collection, though it's not clear how many (if any) of the poems while Dennis was in poor health.  Quite a few poems involve funerals for his (older) family members ("Funeral Chat," "Aunt Alice" and "Another Funeral"), but perhaps even more disconcertingly for his contemporaries ("Went to Another Funeral").  Dennis reflects on previous vacations ("Fourth Arrondissement" and "History"), hiking trips ("The Blue Blue Sky"), and even the wearing out of wedding rings in "My Wedding Rings" where Dennis notes "it's astonishing / how quickly the years fly past."  Most things seem to be in the past for Dennis.  This is abundantly clear in "Quiet Future": "I used to read the newspapers / but there's nothing in them anymore / ... /  I listen to old music / and remember."  In "Sixty-One" Dennis gripes about the weather and says "it feels like I've been 60 / a lot longer / than 60 years."

I'll have to see what jumps out at me in Bad Engine, but my favourite travel poem from Dennis (so far) is "Elephants in Smith Falls" which combines a short report on a cycling trip Dennis made with his wife along with a shout-out to Raymond Souster's Elephants on Yonge Street.  The poem ends on an upbeat note: "a quiet street / us cycling / and the elephants with their handlers / ... / but a good start / an omen / for all those miles we had to ride / before the next small town."

* In this review of Low Centre of Gravity, Dennis admits to being inspired by Bukoski the poet, not Bukowski the person, as well as being a big admirer of Raymond Carver.

14th Canadian Challenge - 4th Review - North of California St.

George Stanley represents a curious case of a poet who came north from San Francisco to Vancouver (part of a mini-exodus at least partly sparked by the Vietnam War), made some connections in the poetry scene at the time (and forged a very close relationship with George Bowering) but then never really broke through, even to this day.  Some have speculated that due to his American roots he was never accepted as a Canadian poet, while others say it was because he went north to quite rural Terrace, BC for 15 years to teach at Coast Mountain College and so disappeared off the literary map.

It appears that he has put out three different volumes of selected poems - Opening Day, A Tall, Serious Girl and, most recently, North of California St., which is the volume I decided to review.  North of California is actually stitched together from 4 books: a relatively small number of poems drawn from Opening Day, the chapbook Temporarily, Gentle Northern Summer and At Andy's.  I'll haven't decided if I will read the rest of the poems in Gentle Northern Summer or At Andy's, though my inclination is not to do so.  Stanley tends to engage in fairly long, drawn out poems that sometimes come across as journal entries, and I prefer much tighter, focused lyric poems.

The poems themselves are arranged partially chronologically and partially geographically.  The first group take the reader from San Francisco to Vancouver (including a few focused on Stanley's fear of flying), and then the second group follow Stanley north to Terrace.  Again, there are a few poems dwelling on how Stanley doesn't like being in planes (and presumably much smaller airplanes than the ones that would have taken him back and forth to California).

In fact, the collection begins with "Icarus," which is also found in Opening Day: "in aerodynamics I was losing my faith. / But the guy in the next seat took time to explain / jet flight, & he blew on a stiff piece of paper / to show how the wing worked, but it fell to the floor, / & I thought, I won't see California again..."  A more recent poem "KAL 007" memorializes the Korean airplane shot down by the Soviets, which is an extreme case stirring up those afraid of flying.  As far as I can tell, Stanley did not write about Iran Air Flight 655 (shot down by the Americans) or Boeing 737-800 (shot down by the Iranians with most of the passengers being Iranians or Irani-Canadians). While these incidents are mercifully quite rare, they do occur.

I wish more of the poems were as short and pithy as "Icarus," but most are longer and in a few cases quite baggy indeed.  That is not to say they are devoid of interest, but I find my interest drops off dramatically with any poem longer than 2 pages, and I have to be very much in sync with a poet to stick with him or her past 3 pages.  (Interestingly, this is not as much of a problem with serial poems where each section is self-contained (and usually just a few stanzas) and strung together like a long pearl necklace.)  But even in cases where I share a sensibility with a poet (Frank O'Hara, for instance), I still prefer tighter, shorter poems.  

Stanley writes a number of these long poems discussing his time in Terrace, with short nods to the airplane trips he needs to take to get there, being driven around Terrace or being on the bus.  (Being on the bus is a much more common theme in his book-length poem, Vancouver: A Poem, and I'll address that in a later review.)  Stanley is definitely an urban poet (who was clearly a bit out of place in Terrace), but interestingly he only wrote a relatively few poems about walking around San Francisco or Vancouver in contrast to the many poems where he is on the bus.  I'm not saying that he specifically avoided these walking around poems because they were so prominent in Frank O'Hara's oeuvre (in the spirit of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence), but it's at least possible.  

He's also a gay poet (and presumably was more at home in San Francisco), though this is far more relevant to the poems in the recent collection, After Desire, which I will review separately) with one significant exception here - "San Francisco's Gone."  "San Francisco's Gone" is largely a family history.  If I am reading this correctly, his great-grandfather, Jack, came to California from Ireland in the 1890s, and the family stuck around.  His father, also George Stanley, was in the Navy.  Stanley believes his father also had homosexual tendencies: "I wished my father had come back to San Francisco / armed with Brazilian magic, & that he had married / not my mother, but her brother, whom he truly loved."  Pretty heavy family history, regardless of whether Stanley knows this for a fact or he is imagining it!  He presses on: "I wish my father had, like Tiresias, changed himself into a woman, / & that he had been impregnated by my uncle, & given birth to me as a girl. / I wish that I had grown up in San Francisco as a girl, / a tall, serious girl..."  No question that Stanley was born 50 years too early given how how gender fluidity is far more understood and acceptable now, at least in North America and Western Europe.  Given that these lines provide the title for one of his collections of selected poems, it seems these issues lie at that heart of his work.

There are a few poems towards the end of the first section that discuss some of the downsides of being an older gay man in the city.  While lurking a bit under the surface, there is the unspoken complaint that gay culture is deeply ageist and that older gay men (who have lost their looks) are largely discarded and unwelcome (perhaps because they serve as reminders of time's cruel passing...).  In "Robson St. '97" Stanley says Robson is "No country for old men / hiding in their T-shirts."  

The 2nd half of the collection is drawn almost entirely from Stanley's years living in Terrace.  Most of the poems are longer, journal type poems and I'm just not in tune with them.  I'd say the most self-indulgent is "At Andy's": "Terrace '97.  I arrive here on the bus, Andy & Martina pick / me up ... / ... / Ok, I guess I really do have to freewrite & quit fucking / around.  So -- dive in -- splash -- in medias res -- don't / like this pen, point too short..."  And later: "I'm sitting down here in Andy's basement at Vicky's old / desk on a hot Sunday in August thinking I should write / about something, or rather, that I should (emphasize / should) write (emphasize write) to justify my existence..."  Either you can relate to this intense navel-gazing or you find it tedious.

I would say that I don't think the arrangement of the collection does Stanley any favours.  The best poems are all in the first half, and it definitely makes me think he lost his edge or his focus in Terrace and he would have been better off staying in Vancouver or even San Francisco for that matter.  I'll circle back and review some of his later collections, when he has indeed returned to life in the big city (Vancouver).  As I mentioned above, I probably will skip Gentle Northern Summer and At Andy's on the basis of what was sampled in North of California St.

Weekend Out of Quarantine

I suppose that is a bit of an exaggeration.  Ontario is still fairly locked down, but starting Friday restaurants could open their patios and non-essential stores (not embedded in malls) could open at 15% capacity.  This also meant that Walmart and Dollarama could let anyone go buy anything in the store.  Even on Friday, all the knickknack aisles were full (and indeed I bought some pushpins that had been off-limits for a couple of months).  Interestingly, Shoppers had never bothered to block off their aisles.

I didn't go in to any other stores on Sat., but I saw some massive line-ups while biking by.  I'm not blaming anyone in particular or throwing shade, but I simply can't imagine lining up for an hour or more to get into a Winners...

Museums are not open yet (though they should be in August if cases keep coming down).  However, private art galleries can reopen.  I swung by Bau-Xi Gallery.  I think last month they were supposed to have some Michael Wolf photos on display, so I was extremely disappointed to have missed that (though I did see a few of his Parisian rooftop photos last summer), but I was quite taken by the George Byrne photo exhibit.  I found a couple of pieces (here and here) about the artist and his technique (which apparently does involve some digital manipulation after all).  Most of the photos on display are from Miami and they have a lot of neon on display (though more clinical and abstracted than what I remember from Miami Vice).  This one reminds me just a bit of the look of a David Hockney painting, but perhaps that is just my imagination.

George Byrne, 8th Street, Miami

In the other building, they had a couple of painting exhibits going on.  I was particularly interested in Adrienne Dagg, and indeed I remember a couple of her paintings from last year.  Her current work seems to be referencing Vuillard or Matisse but then with a touch of surrealism thrown in (usually in the form of a bunch of out of place fish heads, which may itself be a nod to Mary Pratt).  I liked this one the best, though not quite enough to try to acquire it...

Adrienne Dagg, Place Setting

This art will only be up one more weekend until they start getting ready for the July shows.  I had initially thought I would hold off on visiting 401 Richmond (which also has a number of galleries) and save that for next weekend, but then John St. was closed to traffic, and I was funnelled that way after all.  I was extremely annoyed to find that the majority of stores decided to take one more week to prepare and the building was closed (at least the door I tried), so I continued on to Union Station.

My main goal was to get a lot of tax material together, as I have to amend my taxes (as well as apply retroactively for the Canadian child benefit, though that's another story).  Every year it is something new when dealing with the CRA.

I probably would have headed back to work on Sunday as well, but it rained on and off most of the day.

I did not stop by the farmers' market in Withrow Park.  Maybe next week, depending on the weather of course.  The other thing I should do, maybe when biking home this week, is to swing by the Distillery District and check out some of the outdoor artwork.

14th Canadian Challenge - 3rd Review - The Outside World

While I think of Barry Dempster primarily as a poet, he also writes fiction from time to time.  The Outside World is his 2nd novel.  It tells the story of Robbie, a Scarborough boy facing the twin challenges of dealing with adolescence and the fact that his family situation is quite messed up.  It's almost the mirror-image of Leung's That Time I Loved You in the sense there is considerable dysfunction on a sleepy Scarborough middle class street but is all inside the narrator's household.  (I haven't actually gotten around to reading Catherine Hernandez's Scarborough, but my understanding is it is focused on a lower-income neighbourhood with different sorts of pressures and problems.)  Another major difference is this is set in 1966, representing an era of free-range parenting that is quite alien today, but also before the arrival of a steady stream of newcomers to Canada from East and South Asia, whereas this demographic shift is well underway by the start of Leung's novel.

I won't go into great detail about Robbie's situation, but he is largely in charge of keeping track of his developmentally challenged sister, Lissy.  At some point, an older teen starts picking on Robbie and trying to take advantage of Lissy (not completely dissimilar to the deranged bully in That Time I Loved You).  No question neither author really sells Scarborough as a childhood paradise...  

Robbie's father, Ed, nearly works himself into an early grave as the owner of a service station, perhaps in order to avoid facing up to the fact that his daughter will never be normal and his wife refuses to leave the house.  In fact, Robbie's mother has developed an acute case of agoraphobia (in an era when people were just expected to tough it out and not seek medical treatment!).  After Ed has a medical crisis and is taken to the hospital, she can only be forced to visit him once, and the rest of the time it is Robbie who has to make the trips out to check up on his dad.

That said, one of Robbie's aunts does step in and eventually takes over almost all of the paperwork and much of the management at the service station, letting Ed recover.  While there are severe strains in the family, they don't lose everything in a downward spiral, i.e. this isn't a melodramaic tear-jerker.  Robbie does have a few bright spots in his life, even though taking care of his sister and, increasingly, his mother dramatically curtails the time he can spend with his friends.  He develops a crush on a girl in his class and does his best to navigate the shoals of middle adolescence, having been dealt a somewhat lousy hand.

Overall I enjoyed The Outside World, and at some point I'll probably read some other fiction by Dempster, on top of having read most of his poetry.  There is a short review of The Outside World here and a longer one here.

The Canadian Canon

I've been thinking a bit about the Canadian poetry canon lately, given that I have been trying to read quite widely and cover a number of "important" poets I've skipped over before.  Like Canadian literature in general, the early figures leaned heavily on British poets (though writing as if they had been dropped into a kind of unpeopled wilderness) and then much of the 20th Century poetry is more directly inspired by American poets: the Beats, the Black Mountain poets (esp. Robert Creeley), "nature" poets (esp. Gary Snyder), the Objectivists (Charles Olson and Charles Reznikoff), the New York school and William Carlos Williams.

One reasonably good starting point are the lists of poets from Gary Geddes's various anthologies, though I do wonder if 15 Canadian Poets x 2 is more truly canonical than the 4th edition, which I believe includes a full 45 poets, many of whom I have never heard of, even in passing.

• E.J. Pratt 
• F.R. Scott
• Earle Birney
• Ralph Gustafson
• A.M. Klein
• Dorothy Livesay
• Irving Layton
• P.K. Page
• Miriam Waddington
• Margaret Avison
• Al Purdy
• Raymond Souster
• Eli Mandel
• Anne Szumigalski
• Robert Kroetsch
• Phyllis Webb
• D.G. Jones
• Alden Nowlan
• Leonard Cohen
• George Bowering
• Pat Lowther
• John Newlove
• Margaret Atwood
• Patrick Lane
• Gwendolyn MacEwen
• Michael Ondaatje
• Bronwen Wallace
• Robert Bringhurst
• Robyn Sarah

There are a few here that are completely new to me, but generally I've read at least a few poems by these figures.  I would agree with adding a handful from the 4th edition, including bp Nichol, Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Don McCay and Fred Wah.  

Before my recent dive back into Canadian poetry, I would say I was most drawn to Atwood, Bowering, Kroetsch and Ondaatje.  I had read a fair bit of Birney, Purdy and Webb's work, with Purdy being the most interesting to me of the three.

I have a long way to go in exploring these other poets, but I will say that Irving Layton's poetics don't interest me that much, and it's not that surprising that I am not warming up to his work.  I'm also not that interested in explicitly religious/spiritual poetry, which covers an awful lot of Avison's work and Szumigalski's oeuvre from what I've skimmed.

I've read quite a lot of Souster's work over the past month and will review at least some of it.  He strikes me as the Canadian version of Charles Reznikoff, which is generally a good thing but he didn't have an off-switch.  A really good selected volume would do a lot more for his reputation than the 10 volume set of his Collected Poems, which still leaves out a few of his final books!

One fairly interesting discovery to me was Ralph Gustafson.  I'll be reviewing at least one or two of his collections and perhaps a few more in the next challenge, assuming I do sign up again.

Now there are any number of established poets that could be added, such as W.H. New, George Stanley, Barry Dempster, Jan Zwicky, Sue Sinclair, Elise Partridge, George Elliott Clarke, bill bissett, Robin Blaser, David McFadden, Barry McKinnon, Michael Dennis, etc., and many of these are more directly central to my interests than the poets in this so-called canon, but I don't want to expand this list indefinitely.  The only poets that I feel are clearly missing are Dennis Lee and Louis Dudek, and if I add them that rounds it out to 36 poets, which seems like a good number, at least as a starting point.  I could see myself paring down the list, removing poets that seem to have sunk out of the public's eye.  Given my current preoccupations, I probably will see if I can identify a poem about travel from each of the poets on the list, but I can see this might take a while.

Heat Wave

It was so hot on Sat. and still fairly warm today.  I did a fair bit of biking on Sat., but maybe pushed it a bit too far.  I didn't have much of an appetite at lunch either day.  I do wonder if I had a bit of heat stroke.

I was going to watch The African Queen on Sat. but crashed kind of early instead.  We watched it tonight.  I'm generally only getting through one movie each weekend.  At this rate, I'll never get through them all.  It's a great one though, and I haven't seen it in a long time.*  

I have slightly fewer distractions on the reading front and am making more progress on Don Quixote.  I'm into Part II finally and am at the 500 page mark, so just a bit over halfway!  While this is a good translation, it could have been edited down drastically.  Probably only the first ten and last five or so chapters of Part II are really essential.  I'm definitely thinking of bailing, but I'll probably see it through, especially now that I am reading outside on the deck more.  That said, there are major thunderstorms on the horizon, likely to hit Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, which will be super inconvenient for me.  But it might bring the heat down a notch or two, which would be a good thing!

* It occurs to me that Charlie, the skipper of the African Queen, has clearly never dealt with teenagers, or he would have been immune to the silent treatment doled out to him by Rose... 

Tatigrams

I'll just use this post to pull together some general thoughts on Jacques Tati.  I'm pretty close to the end of going through the main Tati features with my son.  I think in a week or so we'll get to Trafic.  I'm planning on watching Parade by myself before then,* so as not to end on a thoroughly depressing note.  I guess it was a good thing that Tati was paid to get some of his music hall routines on film, though actually a fair number had already been preserved and show up the various documentaries in the Tati box set.  (There's more than a little duplication in these documentaries, but some have interesting unseen footage.)

I'm also done with all the various shorts, including a very odd documentary on a football match in Corsica, where true to form you barely see the players but Tati focuses on the audience.  And then the two early, early shorts On demande une brute and Gai dimanche.  While Gai dimanche is technically slightly more accomplished than On demande une brute, I really didn't care for it, as it tries to get the audience to root for two con men who flat out steal from everyone they come across.  Plus the pacing is dreadful.  The odds of me watching any of these shorts again (or even Cours du Soir (Night Classes)) is quite low.  I'm more willing to consider returning to Soigne ton gauche or L’école des facteurs.

What is generally never discussed in these documentaries is Tati's illegitimate daughter.  If this impassioned screed to Robert Ebert is largely true, then Tati was essentially chased out of Paris because his fellow music hall performers felt he was a cad by breaking off with his partner and abandoning his daughter (apparently at the insistence of his older sister!).  What's a little harder to understand is that Pierre Etaix was going to play the magician role in a filmed version of The Illusionist, which ostensibly has this father figure rescuing an orphan, but the two quarreled over the morality of the script (again according to this letter, which seems to be the only source of this story).  Did Etaix simply feel that Tati needed to publicly acknowledge his daughter, rather than hide behind a fictionalize filmed version**?  Not sure, though it is certainly a shame that they couldn't have patched things up, since I'm quite sure Tati's version would have been more compelling than the animated version set in Edinburgh rather than Prague.

Perhaps even more of a shame is that Tati completed a script called Confusion in which M. Hulot would have died in an accident early in the film and the rest would have been about two Americans (played by the Mael brothers of the music group The Sparks!) coming over to France to shake up a rural television station.  Maybe it wouldn't have been quite as incredible as it sounds.  The script does exist though it doesn't appear to have been published or translated into English.  Maybe before I pass on, it will enter the public realm.  Who knows, maybe someone would tackle it with CGI, bringing Tati back to the big screen.  One can dream.  I'm not at all clear on why the extended first cut of Playtime (20-30 minutes longer) hasn't surfaced, but that is perhaps a bit more likely to turn up in my lifetime.†   Fingers crossed.

* I finally got through Parade.  The first half isn't so bad, though the bit with the mule just seems a bit cruel and would have been better left out.  I found everything after the intermission to be pretty dire though.  Maybe 20-30 minutes of solid entertainment in a 90 minute television special, but certainly not a particularly good way to end one's career unfortunately.  It just makes me wish even more he could have gotten Confusion off the ground.

** For that matter, Etaix might have felt that the role was too much of a retread of Yoyo, though it is hard to imagine him falling out with Tati if that was really the case.

† Speaking of things in the vault, Etaix and Jerry Lewis worked together on a black comedy about the Holocaust, The Day the Clown Died, which Lewis deposited at the Library of Congress, and this supposedly will be allowed to be shown to the public starting in 2024.  Maybe the fuss isn't warranted (and I would much rather have the missing Playtime footage or the Confusion script), but I'm sure I would at least watch it once.

14th Canadian Challenge - 2nd Review - Sulphurtongue

Sulphurtongue appears to be the first full poetry collection by Rebecca Salazar, though she has previously published two chapbooks.  Within a few poems, it is evident that Salazar is a queer poet (though not apparently a non-binary poet).  Her poems in the first two sections largely focus on violence towards women, opposing the patriarchy and the somewhat complicated dynamics of rejecting religion (the Catholic faith) when it is still so important to other family members, particularly Salazar's grandmother. These poems seemed as if they had been lifted from a 70s feminist manifesto, though of course the distinct lack of progress in combating male violence over the intervening 50 years is distinctly depressing.  Nonetheless, these two sections didn't resonate much with me.

The third section "dopplebanger" was more interesting when Salazar turned a somewhat acid and jaded Millenial eye to an imagined future where she has a doppleganger (sort of a spiritual twin) who has apparently gone down a more conventional path and has children.  In "Dynasty" she has spawned daughters that chew their fingernails but can still be relied upon to serve drinks.  Really getting into the spirit of the typical television fantasy of the nouveau riche, she writes.  "It's all slander and lies, salamanders and lye, / salmonella and limes, salvaged divorcée lust, you and I."  This may have been the first poem where I really noticed Salazar's wordplay, and I went back through collection again to see what I might have overlooked.

In "Guys" she continues projecting into the future: "You'll find your teenager gets off to vintage Harry potter slash. / You'll remember the saga you blogged at their age, and get sweaty."  Nothing like the hypocrisy of the middle-aged...

I suppose this isn't technically wordplay, but I found some phrases quite compelling.  From "Voyeurs": "Peer through plumes of steam for tea-leaf omens. / They stare back, indignant.  Prophecies need privacy."  And from "Miss": "My lacklustre séance summons just / a jaundiced flicker of your form."

On the whole, the "dopplebanger" section had the strongest or at least most interesting (to me) poems.

That said, the fourth section "sulphur bonds" which is a sort of extended meditation on Sudbury, Ontario (where Salazar grew up) and its rise and fall linked to mining in the area, has no less than three poems that involve riding the bus!  As I've mentioned elsewhere, I am always on the lookout for poems about transportation.

If I am interpreting correctly, "Commute Quartet" is about a mentally unstable, potentially homeless, woman who "hums low to her wolves" as she boards the bus, then "claims / three seats at he front of the bus."

While it is longer (and thus a bit harder to anthologize), I think I prefer "640 West End / Gatchell / Copper Cliff" which engages in people watching on a broader scale and also suggests a bus that is better utilized and more central to the needs of the community: "At one forty-eight, the driver unlocks the one-thirty bus. / You board, an alphabetical procession of iron-on flags: / Brazil and Columbia on backpacks, then Denmark, Italy, / Ukraine, on trucker caps.  A ceremonial FIFA cast-off / défilage, the colours merging in the monochrome / of strained fluorescent lighting as the bus roars." Salazar watches from the window as the bus passes through the town, with most of the scenes reflecting a mining town down on its luck due to the "falling price of nickel."  The focus shifts back inside the bus.  "The turn onto Serpentine shakes loose the smells / that have burrowed in the balding plush bus seats: / white onion fried in peanut oil, an empty paper bag / now oozing grease onto an empty seat, the warmth of bread / perpetually baking at the factory on Lorne."

After a somewhat unpromising start, I found a lot to like in the 3rd and 4th sections of Salazar's Sulphurtongue.

Havana Syndrome

This is intriguing though depressing.  There were reports for several years about strange sonics attacks experienced by staff at the US Embassy in Havana (and indeed some government workers in Washington DC).  Their were several investigations but at the time it was basically dismissed as being all "in their heads" and probably psychosomatic.  As far as I know the official government line hasn't changed, but the Guardian published a story with scientists/engineers who said that the symptoms in fact were entirely consistent with microwave weapons that they had been studying but largely dropped because they were unethical.  

While it is a bit of a stretch to link the imaginary vacuum cleaner technology from Our Man in Havana to the actual (or at least plausible) military use of microwave technology, I'll make it anyway.  I can only imagine what Graham Greene would have made of a chaotic evil* character like Putin who seems to delight in creating havoc around the world for it's own sake, given that Russia is far too weak economically and militarily to directly challenge the West any longer.  

* In the parlance of Dungeons & Dragons.