Montreal and Chagall

I mentioned once or twice that there is a massive Chagall exhibit running at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.  It runs through June 11, so there is still a fair bit of time to view it, though the last weekend or two are likely to be very crowded.  It was overwhelming in pretty much every way, both in the amount of material on display and the fact that it was a very popular exhibit.  We turned up at about 11 am, and unfortunately had to pass through two guided tours that were clogging up the galleries.  I'm still glad I went, but it probably would have been better to experience on my own, since I would have fought the crowds to try to see some paintings a second or third time.

The exhibition has Chagall's focus on music and works he created for ballet's (costumes and backdrops).  Here are some of the costumes for a production of Mozart's The Enchanted Flute.

Given how many of Chagall's paintings include a fiddler or an angelic harp, there was a lot of material to choose from, and it doesn't feel like too much was sacrificed to make this exhibit come together.  The catalogue is pretty exhausting, and going through the exhibit in person is even more so, particularly with the crowds.  I was somewhat surprised that most of the paintings could be photographed, though a few were off-limits.  I didn't take too many photos, but here are a few.

Marc Chagall, The Yellow Room, 1911

Chagall, Dusk aka Couple Between Darkness and Light, 1938-43

Marc Chagall, The Wedding, 1944

It wasn't particularly surprising that some of the paintings in the catalogue were not on display, but what was a bit more surprising is that apparently some of the paintings in Montreal weren't actually in the catalogue.  I'm fairly sure that The Yellow Room isn't in the catalogue.  I'm somewhat less sure about Birth (from the Art Institute of Chicago -- not pictured here) and Dusk, but I don't think they are included.

I was glad that there was a room of Chagall's stained glass pieces, though they didn't photograph particularly well.  As I said, it was a pretty overwhelming amount of Chagall and really too much to take in in a single visit, but I won't be able to go back unfortunately.

On our last visit to Montreal, we spent far more time on the Quebec artist installations housed in the building across the street.  This time around we just went to a couple of floors and focused mostly on the Beaver Hall artists.  I liked these two paintings quite a bit.

 

Philip Surrey, Night, 1938

Adrien Hébert, Corner Peel and Sainte-Catherine, 1948

After this, we took a quick look at the gift shop.  I was somewhat surprised to learn that the museum owned some modern art by European artists, as I don't think I managed to see that on the previous trip either.  So I left my wife and daughter on a bench, and my son and I went in for a lightning strike visit.  I would have liked to spend more time obviously, but I did see the Picasso and Matisse and other modern paintings.

My favorites were these three.

Henri Matisse - Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window, 1922

Lyonel Feininger, Yellow Street II, 1918

Philip Guston, Rain Cloud, 1973

As this post is long enough, I will discuss the rest of what we got up to in Montreal in a follow-up post.

Hidden theatrical gems

I thought I would mention a couple of shows that are still a bit (or a lot) under the radar.

Tarragon is doing Ntozake Shange's for colored girls.  It is a powerful production, though as many have noted it isn't a traditional drama but different monologues about Black women's experience.  It has gotten a fair number of reviews, but there still doesn't seem to be a lot of buzz around it.  This is a slightly updated version with a poem about HIV/AIDs (and partners being on the DL -- down low) and then an abusive partner gone crazy largely due to his service during the Iraq Wars.  So it has somewhat blurred the original timeframe of the 70s, but some things seem to be timeless.  Anyway, I think it is worth seeing, though I will admit I went and scored rush tickets...  (Details here.)

Much more underground is The Best Dad in the World and other Sad Characters, which is an interesting piece with 3 actors who do short character sketches set in Toronto (I think).  Each one is performed as a stand-alone piece, though the characters all kind of interact in one way or another.  So there is a young cancer patient, whose step-father showed up at the hospice ward and played God.  On one of his visits, he attached a therapeutic clown.  The clown then shows up later, very anxious to meet his drug connection.  We find out that his girlfriend left him after he quit or was fired from his hospital gig.  We also see the man who is now dating his ex, and who was suckered into buying a Botticelli painting at an art cafe!  So it is a fairly intricate kind of sketch comedy, based on character studies.  It might have been interesting to have the characters interact, particularly for the final sketch or two.  In addition to the art cafe sketch, where the menu contained some outrageous puns on artists' names, the sketch about the trans-woman who came from the town of Whimsy was truly peculiar and funny.  This show is at Red Sandcastle through the end of the week.  (Tickets here.)

Grab bag (with curtains)

Now that it is nice out again, I've been exploring the neighbourhood a bit.  I went back to the bookstore at Pape and Dingwall and picked up the hardback edition of The Watch That Ends the Night.  (I'll be visiting Montreal soon, and I wanted to make sure I had a copy to read on the train.)

I think this is the first time I cut across Dingwall (to then cut through the projects to get to Jones).  I saw one of the Little Free Library boxes.  These are so cute, even though I probably won't ever use it.  I think the other one I saw was in the Annex, but there are several around Toronto.

Anyway, I was off to check out this pizza place that supposedly does deep-dish Chicago style pizza.  It's called Double D's.  It's actually quite close to Gerrard Square, which is fairly convenient for us.

It's pretty good.  Nowhere near as good as Giordano's or even Pizzeria Uno's, but probably the best equivalent we'll find in Toronto, and it is close as I said.

I've been fairly good about the biking, and I'll bike at least three times and perhaps four times this week.  Drivers are only slowly getting used to cyclists being out.  I haven't had that many close calls myself, though I've been cut off a bunch of times or blocked from the bike lane by a car (or the 144 bus!) where it isn't really supposed to be.

On the way home I saw the aftermath of a major accident at Queen and Sherbourne, where somehow a car and a van collided in the intersection and then the van smashed into a telephone pole.  So glad I wasn't in the area when that happened (maybe 15-20 minutes before).  Indeed, I had worked late today, so it isn't inconceivable that I could have been right in the middle of it had I left on time.  While the damage to the van looked quite bad, I don't believe there were any serious injuries or at least there wasn't an ambulance anywhere in the vicinity.  (Oops, my bad.  Looking at the photo again, there is an ambulance, but no one was put on a stretcher or anything like that.)

On a completely different note, it's been quite interesting checking out the weather report for the Toronto Islands.  The rain has really socked it to the Islands, and the lake level is also higher than it has been for years.  Consequently, large parts of the island are flooded and tourists aren't going to be allowed on the Islands until the end of June at the earliest!  I think my office had a picnic excursion planned, so now it will have to be July, but everyone will be wanting to get out there then, so perhaps a rethink is in order.  (I had kind of wanted to take my family, but maybe this should be something we try to do next summer.  On the flip side, it might be a lot easier to canoe the Humber River compared to last year when the river was so low...)

Finally, I thought I would talk about a few things that are paying off.  I tried to plant grass seed, and I think some of it is coming up, though one corner of the yard is so beaten down it probably needs a soil transplant!

Also, we planted flowers (from seeds) in the flower boxes, and I think these are coming up as well, though it looks like we should have tried to spread them out a bit more.  I should know soon if these flowers are going to bloom this year or not. 

And I have finally made significant progress on the curtain project.  The sewing machine is still squeaking a bit, but I am able to run off roughly one curtain per night now.  (There are far fewer problems with the bobbin with this material, thank goodness!)  I really ought to pin the next one, but I am fairly tired.  I wish they looked a bit more professional, but this isn't too bad for 100% home-made curtains (we'll probably tie them back anyway), and the final set ought to come out just a bit better.

I have roughly one more week to finish the second set and finish straightening the study and the basement.  At that point, I will have to decide just how serious I am about making a stuffed fish for a friend's child and then starting in on a quilting project.  I kind of promised I would do it, so I think I will at least attempt the quilt (the top at least) and see how it goes (though I am open to paying for a long-arm quilter to put the whole thing together).  Maybe it will be relaxing once I really get the hang of it.  Or at least that's what I can tell myself now...

Most quoted authors

I wonder if there has ever been a comprehensive study of which authors get cited or quoted in other authors work.  This does exist for academic works (most of the articles I contributed to have been cited fewer than 20 times, but four have been cited 80+ times and then two of those have hit the 100+ mark).  I'm not aware of anything nearly as systematic for fictional works, not least because you don't list one's references at the back of a novel (and only in the copyright page if you quote extensively from other works).  I suspect if Google really wanted to find this out, they probably could do a study, given that they have scanned most books that are still in print, but I don't think they consider it worth their time, at least not now, since it is hard to image a revenue stream that would emerge.

Now when I mean quoted or cited, I mean it in a fairly general sense, so it might mean an epigraph or sentence being quoted in another work, but it might just be a riff, like saying someone is stingy like Scrooge or even a situation is Kafkaesque.

From my recent scan of literature, I would say that a fair number of British authors, particularly from the Victorian era through 1950 or so, tend to cite Roman authors, like Horace, Virgil, Ovid or Juvenal.  I'd say that has died down a bit lately, however.  American writers always were a bit more likely to reference the Greeks (particularly Homer) but that also seems to have declined a bit and Greek and Roman literature (and even Chaucer and Dante) is not really part of the curriculum any longer.

I suspect Shakespeare remains in the top position, even among American writers.

Lewis Carroll is probably not that far behind, since so many authors want to explore dreamlike states, and Alice is a convenient shorthand reference.

I'm not sure what the list looks like after that, but I'll offer up some thoughts.

I suspect Kafka is the single most influential and/or cited "foreign" author among writers working in English.  I could certainly be wrong, of course.

I suspect that Dostoevsky far outpaces Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov as far as Russian influence in English literature.  In terms of specific Dostoevsky works, it is probably Crime and Punishment in the lead, then the Brothers Karamazov with The Double and Notes from Underground fairly far behind.  I don't think Demons is particularly influential anymore, which is a shame, as it is a bit of neglected masterpiece.

Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita seems to be gaining in influence, which is well deserved.

It's kind of interesting that when Hemingway is invoked, it is sort of for the whole of his oeuvre as well as his macho image, whereas when Fitzgerald is referenced it is virtually always in regards to The Great Gatsby.

While Dickens has certainly generated quite a lot of interest in a wide range of his characters, the ones from A Christmas Carol do sort of eclipse all the rest.  The same could be said for Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

At least people do read their other works, for Mary Shelley and Charlotte and Emily Bronte, they are all defined by just one novel each, which is a bit unfortunate no matter how great those novels are.  (I suppose it is still better to be a one-hit wonder than to not have that level of success in the first place...)  Orwell is more of a two-hit wonder with 1984 and Animal Farm being quite influential, but with his other novels and essays being generally neglected.

I would say Faulkner may be at a low point now, as I certainly haven't seen too many other novels reference his characters (though perhaps I do remember coming across a reference to epic stubbornness that was actually a reference to As I Lie Dying).  (Other long and fairly complicated novels such as Moby Dick* and Ulysses have somewhat fallen out of fashion these days.)

I really don't think I could hazard a guess at which poets are still cited, though I do see T.S. Eliot (especially The Waste Land) pop up from time to time, as well as Walt Whitman.

Anyway, this is what I have come across in my relatively recent reading.  I am happy to make corrections based on submitted comments.

* Melville's character Bartleby the Scrivener does have legs, however.

The Stupid Baby Play

I am sorry to report back that last night was another example of a really solid cast in what I consider an unworthy script: Albee's The Play About the Baby.  Now most critics consider this a black comedy or more precisely a black, absurdist comedy, minor but still intriguing.  I basically feel this is a case where they can't bring themselves to say that the Emperor has no clothes.  I think Albee has written a pretentious, post-modern wank-fest that is only a pale shadow of his other plays, particularly Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.  There isn't a single moment where the perfectly reasonable questions of "Who are you?", "What are you doing here?"* and "What have you done with the baby?" are answered directly.  I suppose the last one is answered indirectly.  (SPOILERS coming.)  But there is no motivation established, and instead the older man keeps going off on a variety of tangents whenever asked a direct question.  Some of these aside are amusing (or at least amused the majority of the audience, though I found them too self-indulgent and theatrical), but they are certainly evasive.  I suppose this is the same sort of thing that he and Pinter have done for years, but I just didn't think that the dialogue is interesting enough to carry the evening (again, at least not for me -- many people in the audience enjoyed it).

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Since the role of the older couple is never explained, my mind tries to impose meaning on the vacuum.  The most likely explanation is that these are mental projections of the young couple as much older and wiser people, which only partially explains why the older man says that the young man touched him in the groin (as he would obviously have done if the two are the same person), but then this no longer makes sense when the older man says that he was in the hospital giving birth (rather than the young woman).  It just fails to cohere in any way that makes sense, and when things don't cohere, I have absolutely no interest in them.  Again, trying to impose some sense on this, I generally came around to the idea that the woman either had a miscarriage or lost the baby very early due to SIDS, and then this play is them coming around to accepting trauma in the Now (rather than Later when they are older and more used to pain, as the young man tries to bargain at several points).  And yet, if this is so, why is the older man so gratuitously cruel to his younger self?

The whole thing was treated like a joke by the older man, who also breaks the fourth wall quite frequently.  At one point he says he has six children: two Black, two white, one green and one is not described.  Then he says he had the Black children when he was Black.  Then he catches himself and says that he had one Black child, two white ones and a light green one (which he gave birth to incidentally).  What is one supposed to do with such ramblings, aside from turn the older man into a trickster character like Coyote or even Loki, who is a more malevolent trickster?  It just means that nothing we see is real and can be inverted or reversed at any moment.  I have no interest in plays that refuse to have ground rules, and it is very rare indeed that I like absurdist plays.

There are definitely interesting moments along the way, and I'll touch on just a few, although for me the destination wasn't worth it. In one of his monologues designed to distract attention from what is going on (and now that I think about it, it is quite pointless that the older couple spend a lot of time talking to the audience without the younger couple around and yet they do...), the older man talks about going into the Royal Academy Museum in London and experiencing a sculpture exhibit for the blind by closing his eyes tight and having a guide show him to the pieces.

The older woman talks a bit about trying to interview creative types and not getting very far, particularly when a writer says he would rather die than let her watch him write (or as she puts it, translate his ideas into words).  She gets really quite indignant about this rejection, but of course why should she have any right to impose upon the artist, particularly when she seems to want something from him in exchange for nothing?  (I assume this was Albee's dig at a bunch of reporters who must have always been pestering him about his craft.)  Just coincidentally, I read a follow up piece on this comic/performance artist who is trying to goad Jason Segel into responding to his videos where he eats Segel's photo every day.  He sounds like a total knob when he complains that he is being ignored and assumes that he has a right to make his name off of Segel.  I mean he has a bit of fame already, but the more he complains, the more he comes across as an entitled jerk.  (This is one of the rare cases where I wish The Star had comments turned on, since I thought they would be illuminating, though there are comments here at an earlier point in this guy's quest for fame.)  I guess Albee helpfully(?) points out that entitled jerks were around 20+ years ago, even if there do seem to be more of them today in the era of social media.

I'm sure I started the evening in the wrong frame of mind, wanting to be proved wrong that this play was not worth my time, but, despite fine acting, I still felt it was a waste of my time.  I can't judge whether others would feel the same.  Most people in the audience did seem to be digging the play, more engaged in the discursions than I was.


* While it is sort of hinted at, I don't think the younger couple ever asks "How did you get in?," but I may have just overlooked that.  The fact that the older couple can apparently just sort of walk through walls just adds to the unreality of the play and the fact it has no ground rules.

Sidewalk Sale

I am not particularly organized when it comes to putting on big events, but fortunately there are others in the neighbourhood that are.  They usually put on a sidewalk/yard sale every year, and I just tag along and try to get rid of some stuff.

Over the past few months, we thinned out the kids' toys and put them in a box in the basement.  I had tried to thin out the books as well, but there was no movement on that front.  I wasn't quite ready to part with some of the childrens' DVDs, though they haven't watched them in years, so I'll plan to put more of them out next year.  I did consider putting out a bunch of jazz and classical CDs, but right now CD generally do not sell.  LPs, even lousy ones, do better in the yard sale context.  I'll try to take them back to the one local shop that still pays for used jazz and classical CDs.

The main thing that I managed to sell was a bunch of Lego sets.  I tried to put them together and decided that 95% of the core pieces were there, plus all the instruction books, so it was ok to sell them as individual sets.  The more interesting sets were the Harry Potter Knight Bus and an Alien Invasion set.  The kids never were really that into Lego, at least in part because 1) my son felt bad about mixing up the pieces from different sets, so that limited his creativity and 2) my wife made a fuss if they strayed from the play area and eventually no one wanted to bother.  It was so different from my experience growing up.

I sold the whole bunch to one woman and threw in a free pair of bunny ears.  I did warn her that there were a few missing pieces, but that the core pieces were all there.  I even turned up all the dinosaur teeth for another set.

It looked like rain, but actually the rain held off all afternoon, and it is just starting now (unfortunately I need to head back out).  Some folks down the street managed to put out tables and tables of stuff.  I was actually quite good and only picked up a single book from a neighbour (apparently he and his wife had been at an event and John Irving signed one of his new novels and they were willing to part with it -- of even more interest is that John Irving has moved to Toronto -- I had no idea).  Thus, I got rid of more than I brought home, which is really the primary goal of these sales.

Fairly shortly after I sold off the Lego sets, I just put out a free sign for the rest and then walked away.  Most things were gone when I strolled back.  (Others held out longer, but eventually started giving away a lot of stuff.)

My son and I then left for TCAF at the Toronto Reference Library (where I did manage to spend on comics what little cash the sidewalk sale had brought in, mostly on the Toronto Comics Anthology).  TCAF is on tomorrow for those interested.  I know I won't be able to go back this year.  All in all, a pretty good day.

10th Canadian Challenge - 29th Review - Queen Rat

Lynn Crosbie's Queen Rat is actually the third poetry book in a row with a connection to House of Anansi Press.  Queen Rat originally came out in 1998 and was reprinted as part of Anansi's A List series in 2014.  At the time it was a bit of a hybrid, with about 2/3rds of the poems from Crosbie's first three collections, but then three new groups of poems.

The first new material is a series dedicated to Fredo Pentangeli from The Godfather 2.  I have to admit, these poems didn't do much for me, as I never got around to watching The Godfather or The Godfather 2.  I realize that is an unforgivable omission, but I just haven't found the time.  The two movies have permeated the culture to the point that it feels like I have seen them, however.

The second grouping, Presley, focuses on a news story about a child who was so disturbed by the death of her dog that she put it in the freezer.  This is fairly creepy, and not that far off from Faulkner's Emily, though the child apparently nothing to do with the dog's death.  To sort of add to the overall effect, there are photos of a child, a dog and a refrigerator, almost as if this was a true-life story and not a bunch of poems.  To be honest, I thought this series was too manipulative.  Plus, I don't like dogs, not even a little bit, so these poems didn't do anything for me.

I did like Alphabet City, however, as Crosbie sort of memorializes a bunch of bars, taverns and booze cans that she spent time in after her arrival in Toronto circa 1982 (after growing up in Montreal).  While most of the poems are based on her memories of the mid to late 80s, a few reach into the mid 1990s.  It's fairly unlikely that our paths would have crossed, since the pubs I went to were all near UT and I hung with a fairly sedate crowd.  As one reads about Lynn's various adventures, she started to come across like a Canadian version of Jim Carroll.  Many of the misadventures are her own, but she was surrounded by other drug users and documented their struggles as well.  From "Western Hospital": "Some things I remember I would like to forget: / blood soaks the inside of his thighs 3 A.M., the way the street / always looks at this hour on this ride; / the arc of Bathurst opening into emergency; / inert ambulance, waiting to sleep; / then he is staggering through the corridor while I confiscate / syringe, tie, and spoon...".

I would say in general, in her early career she did buy into the notion that outsider artists like Jim Carroll and William Burroughs and Rimbaud (who practically started this all) make better art, and therefore one ought to live on the wild side and perhaps even do drugs to enhance one's artistic powers.  She seems to have come through this, though she is still fascinated by dark and/or tragic characters as seen in her book Paul's Case (a very controversial novel about Paul Bernardo) and Where Did You Sleep Last Night, which envisions the reincarnation of Kurt Cobain into a teenager (but still no happy ending).  

Her experience in Toronto, as related in Alphabet City, is not all bad, and she describes being part of the literary scene and going to and giving poetry readings.  She falls in love from time to time, though typically with other drug users.  She records a trip to Niagara Falls.  For me one of the technically most interesting poems is "Union Station," which seems inspired partly by Robert Lowell, but then somewhat by Anne Sexton.*  "Green and white boxcar heading west past / moulting ferris wheel pasture rows of houses each alike... / ... / the conductor calls; / paterson Johnson tynkaluk adlai hazen cuddy dent trudi nixon lauzon / ... / stops I miss, static, sleep, / train I ride half-dead / objects falling back, smaller, in perfect miniature: the line / of little cats' teeth, bridging sharp incisors, that comb the body, / drawing out tangles in long tined tracks."

Several of the poems drawn from Miss Pamela's Mercy and VillainElle are about murderers or murder victims ("The Black Dahlia" and "Poems for Jack the Ripper").  There are also poems more focused on S & M and power relations more generally.  For instance, "Strange Fits of Passion" ends as follows: "He was quiet also, and I whipped him, / I ground my heels in his chest / until he begged for mercy."

I'm not entirely sure where "Carrie Leigh's Hugh Hefner Haiku" fits in here, as Carrie Leigh is still alive and never accused Hugh of any physical abuse.  (There is a slight connection between Leigh and Crosbie in that Leigh is Canadian and she and Crosbie are the same age.)  I do think it is an interesting exercise in writing a long poem, formed by a number of Haiku (and I had completed writing Double Sabbatical with its Haiku before I read this poem).  I would say that in one critical way they fail the test of classical Haiku in that the poems are supposed to be self-contained and these clearly are not.  They are still amusing, however.  The poem opens: "Hef brings me flowers / tiger lilies, ochre veined / downcast, sleek black cups // small shadows, are the puckers in his pyjamas / where his skin caves in // tired profligate, I / sigh and pour the oil along / your circular sheets".

Of the three books that Crosbie drew upon for Queen Rat, Pearl was the last published (1996) and seems the most assured.  Most of the poems appear to be titled after movies ("Have Gun, Will Travel," "Superfly," "The Snake Pit," etc.).  At some point, I will go ahead and track down Pearl to see what I thought of the poems not collected in Queen Rat.  There are several spots on the internet that claim that Pearl is all about Crosbie's relationship with Tony Burgess, but there are also some sites that claim she and Burgess are (still) married, which does not seem to be the case.  It's probably not terribly relevant to know the truth behind these poems, other than they are about a male partner struggling with drug addiction.

"The Snake Pit" is indeed dedicated "To Tony": "He is often tired this fall, his eyes -- purple shadows, / narcotic flowers. Glassine bags, black envelopes, ill-concealed secrets / I discover, sunflower dust, faint streaks of powder. / ... / At night, he combs the winter streets for / heroin, and sinks deeper / into the glacial corners of his sheets."

The poems named after Blaxploitation flicks seem to be an imagined rendering of this relationship as it would be in a B-movie.  From "Have Gun, Will Travel": "How pleased he will be when I surprise him with the cool barrel, / when it arouses his neck, his temple. / Its sight lowers to the silver zipper, its cold teeth clenched, / closed to me / ... / I want to excite him this way."  Speaking from experience, it is best to leave the gun fantasies on the screen and not bring them into one's life as a marital aid...

Ambrosia seems to be a cautionary tale of trying to hold onto love too long, particularly when one partner wants to be out of the relationship.  "He became restless: the guy wanted to leave and I didn't want him to leave. / A heart-shaped box, the candies are moss green; I have held on to this / too long. Anger hot / enough to incinerate each scalloped chocolate...".  (Note the shout-out to Kurt Cobain.)  It isn't clear if Crosbie is talking about her fraying relationship (with Tony) or a previous one, but in any case, it isn't healthy: "I crush his throat with a metal paddle (stolen / from the factory, sweetness is only mine to steal), / wrap his confectionary body into plastic bags, and then retrieve it. / To kiss the rigid wrists and neck that belong to me...".  Again, the poem has strong connections to A Rose for Emily, which also featured in Presley, a slightly later work.  It's possible that Crosbie goes a bit too far and overplays her hand when she adds "As a child, I would preserve insects in formaldehyde," since the concept has been well established.  I can certainly understand how someone reading this poem would be a bit hesitant to let the poet into his (or her) life, but it is pretty effective.

I'll close with a short meditation on "After Illness."  This poem is a bit more cryptic than some of the other ones.  It isn't entirely clear whether the illness is a literal sickness (like a very bad winter cold), drug addiction or being addicted to love, i.e. staying in this unhealthy relationship.  It might be some combination of all three, though the poem doesn't suggest she is actually out of the relationship with Tony.  "February returns -- a ribbon of pink, a paper wand sealed in ice. Blue / star, a girl in violet tulle and diamante glitter brocades her little bodice. / ... / I have been desperately tired, / and he irons this sickness from me in smooth circles."  Almost all the imagery in this poem relates to winter: chilly, blue, pearl, diamond, etc.  It may be a more effective poem precisely because I am not entirely sure what is going on at the end and what will happen when she emerges completely from her illness, so there is an air of mystery about it.

I liked quite a few of the poems in Queen Rat, particularly those in Pearl and the Alphabet City series, though I do feel Crosbie got swept up into the cliched role of outsider poet throughout the 90s.  It is basically impossible to imagine separating the poems in Queen Rat from this pose (and the actual drug use and the sketchy situations she got herself into during this period).  For some readers, this literary slumming is quite exciting and perhaps a few will be glad that Crosbie did the "hard time" and brought back these poems along the way, while others will be less sympathetic (not that I imagine Crosbie would care either way).



* One of the most interesting facts about Lynn Crosbie is that she completed a PhD on Anne Sexton in 1996, so I might have theoretically crossed paths with her in the U of T English department, but the students taking courses and those that were ABD didn't typically interact.