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.
No comments:
Post a Comment