It's been quite a while since I posted any of the poems from my self-published chapbook (from 1992!). However, in getting ready to review Nancy Lee's Dead Girls, I wanted to refer back to this poem, but thought that it would be too awkward to stick this poem in the middle of a review. The link will become fairly apparent.
This was probably written in early 1992. I was still making the adjustment from growing up in the suburbs of Michigan and going to university in a college town (Ann Arbor) to living (and teaching high school!), in Newark, NJ. In a way, it was a pretty huge culture shock, as my "knowledge" of urban America mostly informed by the movies. While I was living and teaching in a part of Newark that was still largely white, mostly second generation Portuguese actually with a sprinkling of Italians, Poles and Brazilians, I did spend considerable time in downtown Newark (and the Library/Museum complex not far from the Rutgers-Newark campus). Once I crossed under the train tracks until I hit Rutgers, I would usually be the only white person on the street. It was an eye-opening experience to be sure. This incident, only slightly embellished, occurred as I was taking the bus back one night from a poetry reading not far from Rutgers. While this poem is certainly somewhat inspired by Audre Lorde's "To My Daughter the Junkie on a Train," the narrator here has mixed motives, to say the least.
Stop
In all likelihood,
this is it.
yes,
the bus is coming;
it is the bus you want.
a quick step up
you avoid the driver's impatient look.
you sit
and watch the other passengers file on.
a woman gets on
a junkie
a beautiful junkie
at least you think she is a junkie:
her hands shake as she searches for her pockets
her shirt sticks to her skin
her face is tight
her eyes stare past the bus windows
she is certainly not here on this bus
you look closely at her
you get up to pay her fare
you know that this will cost you everything.
it is too late.
you exhale as she is put off the bus.
the bus starts up,
putting a stop to this particular, peculiar fantasy.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Old Poem -- An Elevator That Only Goes Up
I realized that I have really not kept up with archiving some of my older poems. That's probably for the best. I have a soft spot for many of them, but only a few of them were "validated" by getting published in literary journals. Ultimately I chose a very different path.
Before I get to this poem, I should mention that I was inspired to blog about it by the similar treatment by another author. I mentioned elsewhere that I was recently reading Clarice Lispector in the new translations published by New Directions. I remember ages ago reading some of the short stories in Soulstorm and thinking they were pretty good. So I bought a copy of her Complete Stories, but have been relying on the library for everything else. I'm glad that I did, since I strongly disliked Água Viva and A Breath of Life to the point I was wondering why I had ever liked her in the first place. Fortunately, I browsed through a few of her more conventional stories and thought she was still a decent writer, so it is just these two novels that are thoroughly experimental and not rewarding in my eyes.
Essentially the only section that really jumped out at me as something that I enjoyed was this section, practically a prose poem 2/3rd of the way through A Breath of Life.
“Elevator”
My elevator suddenly refused to elevate or lower me. It was simply moving between floors, opening the door automatically and presenting me with the slap in the face of a wall. For days: sulky, angry, vindictive. Pointless because no one wished it ill. We were only using its energy. But it got irritated and decided to be rude. It needed a lot of oil and a lot of back-and-forth to finally make up with us and lower and elevate us.
What I can’t tolerate is fuss. The object is mute, it’s without any fuss.
There was a gaze of the atmosphere of the room upon me. I felt that gaze like a mysterious comfort.
As for how the rotation of the stars produces the inertia of my ashtray — explain it if you can.
That's half a page out of two short novels! At any rate, the only reason this struck a chord with me was that I had written a few poems about "Useless objects" with this one the one that had the most legs so to speak.
An Elevator That Only Goes Up
Certainly it must be avoided in emergencies
as it would only rise,
taking people further from the ground.
Each day they move it up a floor
from the twenty-fourth to the twenty-fifth,
from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-sixth --
hoping that some motion might set it right --
it might go down.
They can squeeze sixty people into the elevator car.
On cue, they jump.
The springs squeal, but the elevator will not go down.
If only they could cut the cables, they think,
they could carry it down the back stairs,
put it back in its place.
Each day the elevator sits open on another floor.
No one knows what happens
when it runs out of room.
I certainly wasn't inspired by Lispector, since A Breath of Life was first published in English translation in 2012. This poem is at least 20 years old. It cribs a bit from Sexton's "Riding the Elevator into the Sky," though perhaps adds just a bit more existential dread.
Now that I think about it, I probably wrote it before I had a lot of experience with balky elevators in apartment buildings. Probably the worst was when we lived on the top floor of a residential tower in Hyde Park, Chicago. The apartment was great, except when the elevators went out! Fortunately, that was fairly rare. I may be misremembering, but I don't recall living about the 4th floor after that, so that an elevator going out of service was certainly an inconvenience, but not a climb where you had to hire sherpas.
Before I get to this poem, I should mention that I was inspired to blog about it by the similar treatment by another author. I mentioned elsewhere that I was recently reading Clarice Lispector in the new translations published by New Directions. I remember ages ago reading some of the short stories in Soulstorm and thinking they were pretty good. So I bought a copy of her Complete Stories, but have been relying on the library for everything else. I'm glad that I did, since I strongly disliked Água Viva and A Breath of Life to the point I was wondering why I had ever liked her in the first place. Fortunately, I browsed through a few of her more conventional stories and thought she was still a decent writer, so it is just these two novels that are thoroughly experimental and not rewarding in my eyes.
Essentially the only section that really jumped out at me as something that I enjoyed was this section, practically a prose poem 2/3rd of the way through A Breath of Life.
“Elevator”
My elevator suddenly refused to elevate or lower me. It was simply moving between floors, opening the door automatically and presenting me with the slap in the face of a wall. For days: sulky, angry, vindictive. Pointless because no one wished it ill. We were only using its energy. But it got irritated and decided to be rude. It needed a lot of oil and a lot of back-and-forth to finally make up with us and lower and elevate us.
What I can’t tolerate is fuss. The object is mute, it’s without any fuss.
There was a gaze of the atmosphere of the room upon me. I felt that gaze like a mysterious comfort.
As for how the rotation of the stars produces the inertia of my ashtray — explain it if you can.
That's half a page out of two short novels! At any rate, the only reason this struck a chord with me was that I had written a few poems about "Useless objects" with this one the one that had the most legs so to speak.
An Elevator That Only Goes Up
Certainly it must be avoided in emergencies
as it would only rise,
taking people further from the ground.
Each day they move it up a floor
from the twenty-fourth to the twenty-fifth,
from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-sixth --
hoping that some motion might set it right --
it might go down.
They can squeeze sixty people into the elevator car.
On cue, they jump.
The springs squeal, but the elevator will not go down.
If only they could cut the cables, they think,
they could carry it down the back stairs,
put it back in its place.
Each day the elevator sits open on another floor.
No one knows what happens
when it runs out of room.
I certainly wasn't inspired by Lispector, since A Breath of Life was first published in English translation in 2012. This poem is at least 20 years old. It cribs a bit from Sexton's "Riding the Elevator into the Sky," though perhaps adds just a bit more existential dread.
Now that I think about it, I probably wrote it before I had a lot of experience with balky elevators in apartment buildings. Probably the worst was when we lived on the top floor of a residential tower in Hyde Park, Chicago. The apartment was great, except when the elevators went out! Fortunately, that was fairly rare. I may be misremembering, but I don't recall living about the 4th floor after that, so that an elevator going out of service was certainly an inconvenience, but not a climb where you had to hire sherpas.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
8th Canadian Challenge - 20th review - Brief History of the Short-Lived
This is an incredibly tardy review of Chris Hutchinson's A Brief History of the Short-Lived, which is his third collection of poetry. I actually had to go back to my own review of Other People's Lives to recall just what I had already said about Hutchinson and his poetry. I also saw that he has a newish book out called Jonas in Frames, which straddles the line between epic poem and novel, and I may get to that some day. However, I may no longer classify Hutchinson as a Canadian author for the purposes of the challenge.
Overall, I find myself reaching for the dictionary a bit more often in these poems than in the previous two collections. I generally find that I am less attached to these poems than those in his earlier collections. I either hang onto poems that still tell an interesting story (a relatively rare phenomenon in this collection) or the language is particularly arresting to me. As a rough guess, I think that means 10-12 poems kind of jump out at me from A Brief History, whereas that number was over 30 from Other People's Lives. (It is probably fair to say that the review itself sampled only a small number of poems (just as this one will), so it is not immediately apparent that I favour one over the other by such a large margin.)
A Brief History opens with the rain. One might even imagine that Hutchinson is back in Vancouver, where he lived for roughly a decade and where he set many of the poems in Unfamiliar Weather. From "The Gift": "The spring malingers. He is sick of it -- / This loose fabric of rain, all warp and no weft. / America, once predatory, has presumably fled. / ... / ... His own name / Blurring, drips onto the windowsill where it / Puddles, and puzzles him...".
"Crosstown Still Life" is a curious poem that rides the line between sense and nonsense. On the one hand, you have the image of a "thrift-store Poet Laureate" who rides "the M train to Brooklyn" while declaiming poetry or at least posing questions that are informed by a poetic sensibility. One such statement is "could is be that within all / Postures of stillness lurks a clandestine What's next?" On a side note, I don't imagine that Hutchinson is recalling Garrison Keillor's fantasy of preaching from Walden on the subway (from "Local Man Moves to the City"), but it may not be too much of a stretch to think that he is referring to Charles Simic's "Dime-Store Alchemy," which contains a number of prose poems inspired by Joseph Cornell. Incidentally, Simic was the U.S. Poet Laureate. Most of the time his poems feature much shorter lines, but those in "Dime-Store Alchemy" are longer and do tend to pile one image on top of another, much like the middle section of "Crosstown Still Life." For instance, this block of text is so dense, yet it has an alluring internal propulsion: "the morning becoming / Night by way of an afternoon everything's busy skyrocketing / Through: moorhens, Japanese paper, protractors, alphabets / Genome decoder rings and the missed phone calls from our dearly / Departed self-confidence. Never mind if our beliefs revolve / Around Calvary, the Smithsonian or National Geographic...". Just don't ask me to try to unpack it.
There is a similar feel to "Captain Nemo Resurfaces," though this one is a bit easier to place into context. The entire text can be taken as the slightly-unhinged rantings of Captain Nemo*, whereas the source of the lists in "Crosstown Still Life" is unclear; only a relatively small portion of the poem is placed directly in the mouth of that thrift-store poet.
To return to Nemo, the poem opens with him waking up: "Is it dawn already inside the world's / Subconscious, or is it still the postmodern / Age of aquatic mosaics where governments / Blur the edges of words?" The good mood doesn't endure: "... And though I awoke / Buoyant and smiling like the pufferfish in some / Marine biologist's float parade, you'll see / I am glancing now above the crannied murk / At the media squinched unhappily / Into those trilobite faces we all know / From the pages of American Scientist. Ha!" From here, Nemo's mood continues to darken, and soon we find ourselves faced with the outcast (dreamed up by Verne) who has turned his back on the land-dwellers: "I've come / To spit poisonous pearls into your earth / Which rejects me and all of my people."
Compared to these two quite dense poems, "Equinox" is centered around a much simpler metaphor of a city tree transformed into a kind of green streetlamp: "One tree grows in the gated city / Like a leafy bulb screwed into the ground / Drawing the earth's current. No one notices. / Its green luminescence lives only in the minds / Of its inhabitant birds, sparrows and jays whose / Throats convert the tree's energy into a thrum / Of hallelujahs."
Hutchinson draws on the legend of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in "Poet in Middle America." Of course, Lorca famously visited New York, but the idea of him driving deep into the U.S. "into the creature-stew of the valley's smog" is somewhat ludicrous (and yet amusing due to its incongruity). I will say that the attention to the geometry of the Interstate system is impressive, and if I ever do publish my anthology on poems about transportation, this is a strong candidate for inclusion. The poem ends with Lorca still in flight: "Today the expressway is a flume of fire-/Reflecting steel. You say the twentieth century / Has been replaced and miles of earth skinned / Like ripened fruit. But let's recall the artist, alone / Yet not along, speeding towards his unborn / Admirers: those of us in this desert who know his heart / Was filled with butterflies and bullets."
It's a bit more difficult to place "East-West," but if I had to, I would argue that it records the wanderings of a location scout (for the movies) around the Mediterranean. It is not entirely clear if it is the scout or the poet who is aware that it is the near poverty of many of the places he visits that makes it possible to gain access to these sites by throwing hard currency around. A secondary theme is how many of the places mentioned in the poem had their glory days far in the ancient past. This seems particularly apt for Greece, which is currently undergoing severe economic contractions and is the first "advanced economy" to default on its payments to the IMF. But back to the poem: "Once the site of temporal displacement / Delphi has been retrofitted with a waterworks / And crowded with public officials ready to drag you / Through an umbra of gin and clove cigarettes. / These markets are unsafe...".
I'll end the review with one of the last poems in the collection "Flying Dream, Terminal City," which is essentially a poem about dreaming of flying. Sometimes the dreamer is falling, a bit out of control, but normally the dream-flight is controlled, and this isn't a nightmare per se. It is somewhat interesting that the poem is actually written in first-person plural, so "we" are flying or falling, along with the poet. The poem opens on a night-time vista: "Lawns and boulevards have been painted / With the glow of crushed stars. / Every green tendril and blade frosted over / Curls tightly and shines." Even though "we" are above the trouble and turmoil on the ground, this is not a placid dream: "Buses grunt and sigh and mimic / Our distress, knowing we are gone before / We arrive, knowing on waking we must try / To rephrase what yesterday we failed to express." Nonetheless, at times we are able to soar over barriers, only to confront other aspects of modern life that disappoint or otherwise diminish us: "We are falling through silence / And open like snowflakes unfolding / Insensible scripts. Anything is possible / Notwithstanding these barricades / And cavalcades of mounted police. / We escape to the rooftops where the sky / Is eclipsed by a billboard which would have us / Mortgage our lives to a humanoid duck. / There are rules to flying, even in dreams." This strikes me as somewhat similar in spirit to a Terry Gilliam film where there are moments of freedom, but generally it is transformed into something more sinister by the end. That's not to say this poem ends on a note anywhere near as melancholy as Brazil or The Zero Theorem (where the protagonists retreat completely from "reality").
I hope this review gives a hint of the rich language employed by Hutchinson and some of the ideas that he is grappling with throughout the collection, though, as I already noted, I tend to find the emphasis on language (often overwhelming meaning) to be too much sometimes. For my taste, Other People's Lives got the balance right, and A Brief History often goes a bit too far. Still, I would recommend giving it a go if one is attracted to cerebral poetry sprinkled throughout with unusual word choices.
* While I doubt Hutchinson had this in mind, I am reminded of several of Robert Browning's long poems that were essentially monologues, such as "Caliban upon Setebos" or "Fra Lippo Lippi."
Overall, I find myself reaching for the dictionary a bit more often in these poems than in the previous two collections. I generally find that I am less attached to these poems than those in his earlier collections. I either hang onto poems that still tell an interesting story (a relatively rare phenomenon in this collection) or the language is particularly arresting to me. As a rough guess, I think that means 10-12 poems kind of jump out at me from A Brief History, whereas that number was over 30 from Other People's Lives. (It is probably fair to say that the review itself sampled only a small number of poems (just as this one will), so it is not immediately apparent that I favour one over the other by such a large margin.)
A Brief History opens with the rain. One might even imagine that Hutchinson is back in Vancouver, where he lived for roughly a decade and where he set many of the poems in Unfamiliar Weather. From "The Gift": "The spring malingers. He is sick of it -- / This loose fabric of rain, all warp and no weft. / America, once predatory, has presumably fled. / ... / ... His own name / Blurring, drips onto the windowsill where it / Puddles, and puzzles him...".
"Crosstown Still Life" is a curious poem that rides the line between sense and nonsense. On the one hand, you have the image of a "thrift-store Poet Laureate" who rides "the M train to Brooklyn" while declaiming poetry or at least posing questions that are informed by a poetic sensibility. One such statement is "could is be that within all / Postures of stillness lurks a clandestine What's next?" On a side note, I don't imagine that Hutchinson is recalling Garrison Keillor's fantasy of preaching from Walden on the subway (from "Local Man Moves to the City"), but it may not be too much of a stretch to think that he is referring to Charles Simic's "Dime-Store Alchemy," which contains a number of prose poems inspired by Joseph Cornell. Incidentally, Simic was the U.S. Poet Laureate. Most of the time his poems feature much shorter lines, but those in "Dime-Store Alchemy" are longer and do tend to pile one image on top of another, much like the middle section of "Crosstown Still Life." For instance, this block of text is so dense, yet it has an alluring internal propulsion: "the morning becoming / Night by way of an afternoon everything's busy skyrocketing / Through: moorhens, Japanese paper, protractors, alphabets / Genome decoder rings and the missed phone calls from our dearly / Departed self-confidence. Never mind if our beliefs revolve / Around Calvary, the Smithsonian or National Geographic...". Just don't ask me to try to unpack it.
There is a similar feel to "Captain Nemo Resurfaces," though this one is a bit easier to place into context. The entire text can be taken as the slightly-unhinged rantings of Captain Nemo*, whereas the source of the lists in "Crosstown Still Life" is unclear; only a relatively small portion of the poem is placed directly in the mouth of that thrift-store poet.
To return to Nemo, the poem opens with him waking up: "Is it dawn already inside the world's / Subconscious, or is it still the postmodern / Age of aquatic mosaics where governments / Blur the edges of words?" The good mood doesn't endure: "... And though I awoke / Buoyant and smiling like the pufferfish in some / Marine biologist's float parade, you'll see / I am glancing now above the crannied murk / At the media squinched unhappily / Into those trilobite faces we all know / From the pages of American Scientist. Ha!" From here, Nemo's mood continues to darken, and soon we find ourselves faced with the outcast (dreamed up by Verne) who has turned his back on the land-dwellers: "I've come / To spit poisonous pearls into your earth / Which rejects me and all of my people."
Compared to these two quite dense poems, "Equinox" is centered around a much simpler metaphor of a city tree transformed into a kind of green streetlamp: "One tree grows in the gated city / Like a leafy bulb screwed into the ground / Drawing the earth's current. No one notices. / Its green luminescence lives only in the minds / Of its inhabitant birds, sparrows and jays whose / Throats convert the tree's energy into a thrum / Of hallelujahs."
Hutchinson draws on the legend of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in "Poet in Middle America." Of course, Lorca famously visited New York, but the idea of him driving deep into the U.S. "into the creature-stew of the valley's smog" is somewhat ludicrous (and yet amusing due to its incongruity). I will say that the attention to the geometry of the Interstate system is impressive, and if I ever do publish my anthology on poems about transportation, this is a strong candidate for inclusion. The poem ends with Lorca still in flight: "Today the expressway is a flume of fire-/Reflecting steel. You say the twentieth century / Has been replaced and miles of earth skinned / Like ripened fruit. But let's recall the artist, alone / Yet not along, speeding towards his unborn / Admirers: those of us in this desert who know his heart / Was filled with butterflies and bullets."
It's a bit more difficult to place "East-West," but if I had to, I would argue that it records the wanderings of a location scout (for the movies) around the Mediterranean. It is not entirely clear if it is the scout or the poet who is aware that it is the near poverty of many of the places he visits that makes it possible to gain access to these sites by throwing hard currency around. A secondary theme is how many of the places mentioned in the poem had their glory days far in the ancient past. This seems particularly apt for Greece, which is currently undergoing severe economic contractions and is the first "advanced economy" to default on its payments to the IMF. But back to the poem: "Once the site of temporal displacement / Delphi has been retrofitted with a waterworks / And crowded with public officials ready to drag you / Through an umbra of gin and clove cigarettes. / These markets are unsafe...".
I'll end the review with one of the last poems in the collection "Flying Dream, Terminal City," which is essentially a poem about dreaming of flying. Sometimes the dreamer is falling, a bit out of control, but normally the dream-flight is controlled, and this isn't a nightmare per se. It is somewhat interesting that the poem is actually written in first-person plural, so "we" are flying or falling, along with the poet. The poem opens on a night-time vista: "Lawns and boulevards have been painted / With the glow of crushed stars. / Every green tendril and blade frosted over / Curls tightly and shines." Even though "we" are above the trouble and turmoil on the ground, this is not a placid dream: "Buses grunt and sigh and mimic / Our distress, knowing we are gone before / We arrive, knowing on waking we must try / To rephrase what yesterday we failed to express." Nonetheless, at times we are able to soar over barriers, only to confront other aspects of modern life that disappoint or otherwise diminish us: "We are falling through silence / And open like snowflakes unfolding / Insensible scripts. Anything is possible / Notwithstanding these barricades / And cavalcades of mounted police. / We escape to the rooftops where the sky / Is eclipsed by a billboard which would have us / Mortgage our lives to a humanoid duck. / There are rules to flying, even in dreams." This strikes me as somewhat similar in spirit to a Terry Gilliam film where there are moments of freedom, but generally it is transformed into something more sinister by the end. That's not to say this poem ends on a note anywhere near as melancholy as Brazil or The Zero Theorem (where the protagonists retreat completely from "reality").
I hope this review gives a hint of the rich language employed by Hutchinson and some of the ideas that he is grappling with throughout the collection, though, as I already noted, I tend to find the emphasis on language (often overwhelming meaning) to be too much sometimes. For my taste, Other People's Lives got the balance right, and A Brief History often goes a bit too far. Still, I would recommend giving it a go if one is attracted to cerebral poetry sprinkled throughout with unusual word choices.
* While I doubt Hutchinson had this in mind, I am reminded of several of Robert Browning's long poems that were essentially monologues, such as "Caliban upon Setebos" or "Fra Lippo Lippi."
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
8th Canadian Challenge - 19th review - Blue Sonoma
As mentioned in this post, Jane Munro's Blue Sonoma has won the Griffin Poetry prize. In some ways it now becomes more daunting in reviewing something that has such a stamp of critical appreciation on it. However, that hasn't really stopped me before. While it's only my opinion, I find Blue Sonoma to be two or even three smaller collections, and it is only the section ("Old Man Vacanas") devoted to her husband and his decline due to Alzheimer's that led to Blue Sonoma taking the prize. Nothing wrong with that, and the other sections have amusing poems as well, but it is worth noting there are only 11 of these vacanas, so it is only a relatively small portion of the book, and the rest of the collection is in a very different key.
I'll start with the other sections, many of which are clearly inspired by yoga and other "Eastern practices." I'm not sure whether I would call these representative samples or simply the ones that worked best for me...
In the poem "A small doll nested in hollow dolls," Munro writes "water knows to be water / a spruce grows into a spruce / in a crevice / buckling down, living on less".
The following poem "My mind is my grandchild" features the poet and her grandson on the beach, practicing stillness: "We sit on the beach, / my arms and legs about him. ... We watch light on the waves -- / its quick crowd, / passengers changing trains. / We listen." The poet recognizes that she still struggles with feelings of anxiety, but still she is hopeful that she can gain inner peace. While she doesn't presume that her grandson will follow in her path, she still hopes "he will absorb this beach. / I hope it will stay with him."
Towards the end of the collection, the poems seek to embrace the cosmos. This is particularly true of the poem "In the slow spin of stars, a dancer turns": "In the slow spin of stars, a tree grows. / Its branches curl up and are wrapped / by two vines. It's a pillar of greenery. // In the slow spin of stars, crystals form. / All the elemental glyphs. / Alphabets."
Whether it is a fair comparison or not, this strikes me as being in tune with Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. People who are open to that movie will probably be open to this section of Blue Sonoma, while others may find both the poems and the movie somewhat pretentious and too imbued with mysticism. I will say that, for me, a little mysticism goes a long way... Nonetheless, I do appreciate the fact that the humor in some of the poems partly compensates for this borrowing from (and/or leaning on) Indian cultural practices.*
One example of Munro's humor is in the poem "A poet is walking the platform," which appears to be recounting a dream of sorts. The poet, in the underground station, is "holding / a sign that says 'Germans lessons.' / She's wearing a blue dress. / Later, she's carrying a sign that says / 'Kissing lessons.' // Upstairs, the streets are flooded / and gas leaks bubble through the city's tailings. / Pavement is breaking up / the way sea ice melts..." (Well, like many dreams it combines the humorous with the terrible.)
I will turn now to "Old Man Vacanas," which really is the heart of the book. On the Griffin Poetry website, they have some discussion of the origin of a vacana as a kind of prayer-poem from South India. No question that Munro was hoping that her husband's condition would not worsen, as well as memorializing him in some sense while he was still alive (trying to capture his real essence and not merely the platitudes that one hears after a person dies). While in this case, the portraits are being drawn by another, I see parallels to the sad decline of William Utermohler, which he captured himself.
Most of the poems in this series are spare, almost stark. There are rare flashes of humor, mostly of the black sort, presumably employed as a kind of defense-mechanism.
From the second vacana: "[The old man] asks what day it is. / Hail falls. / ... / His calendar melts, / its pages slipping into soil. / ... / None of this matters to him / any more than greying hair."
From the fourth vacana: "The old man / losing his mind / registers / the weather systems / of intelligence. // Climate change, for all / its extinctions, / won't alter the planet's orbit." (This might be read as a kind of displacement, moving from intense personal pain to an Olympian perspective on how entire species will be wiped away before too long, so what's one more individual death?)
In the sixth vacana, Munro offers a plea for help, asking others to visit, so that she has some company (particularly company that can remember the thread of a conversation). She is in desperate straights, feeling as if she is boxed in by "Four windowless walls" and near despair: "Roar up the drive. Spit gravel. Blow your horn. // I am gnawing through myself." This strikes me as the most painful of the entire bunch.
By the next poem, Munro seems to have reached a kind of acceptance and is simply riding out the string.
By the eighth vacana, Munro almost seems to be experiencing a split-mind phenomenon, appreciating the small things in the present that she finds endearing about her husband, but obviously acutely aware of how much has been lost. At least this is how I interpret this poem. The subsequent poems all seem to ride this line. "My old man / oh, my old man, oh my / old man." While it doesn't actually rhyme (though there do seem to be some internal rhymes), the last stanza of the eighth vacana reminds me of a nursery rhyme:
He sleeps on his back,
straight as a broom.
He sleeps on his side,
curled like a cat.
He sleeps with the heater going
and a T-shirt on.
My old man likes
to catch some zzzzzzzs.
In the tenth vacana, Munro suggests that her husband's regression is actually taking him closer to his prehistoric ancestors, or at least a pre-verbal era: "The old man / feeding the fire / keeps up primitive." Or at least this is our view of our genetic ancestors -- that human evolution was somehow tied to the mastery of tools and perhaps even moreso the harnessing of fire. This article goes into some detail about how there is relatively solid evidence that humans have been using fire to cook food for 800,000 years, and there is more speculative evidence that this goes back as early as 1.5 million years. Intriguingly, in effect this earlier date for the intentional use of fire would push it much further back than the era when Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans diverged, so there might well have been a different reason for that particular split.
This linkage to pre-history is made more direct in the final vacana: "DNA from fossil bones / tells us we're siblings to Neanderthals -- // and the small arrangements / we make? Language, travel, art? Props // in a little, local, theatre of light." If taken too literally (rather than simply being the reaction of a person in deep anguish), this is in fact anti-humanist. Munro is saying that the greatest human achievements from the Renaissance onwards are all just window dressing and probably nothing more than diversions to keep us from thinking too deeply about the fact that someday we will die. I certainly can't go that far, particularly when thinking of the many advances that science has made over the past 400 or so years, though I understand where she is coming from, having gone through the loss of my mother. (Fortunately for the entire family, it was not such a drawn out process.) However, I do think it is an odd and particularly bleak note on which to end the series.
After some further reflection, it seems that Munro is probably drawing on Macbeth's tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech, where an individual's life is dismissed as "signifying nothing." It is difficult to completely refute that viewpoint, particularly when it is expressed by someone in deep mourning, and yet society as we know it would not function if people were not able to put aside their grief, to say nothing of ignoring the abyss that lays before each and every one of us. I am surprised that she ended on this one, which strikes me as a poem empty of hope and empty even of celebration of the spirit of her husband. I would have probably swapped vacana 10 and 11 -- or added another poem that had slightly more closure than this particularly raw poem. I suppose I do tend to follow convention when it comes to these kind of deep losses. Now it is worth noting that the collection as a whole does end there. Quite a few of the yoga-inspired poems (discussed above) follow.
I don't really have anything else profound to say about the collection. I thought the Old Man Vacanas section was strong though extremely raw in places. I wasn't as moved by most of the other poems, but I enjoyed a few of them a fair bit. I'll keep my eyes out to see if she publishes another collection and what she writes about this time, particularly as she has relocated to the mainland after 20+ years on Vancouver Island.
* Cultural appropriation is always a touchy subject. I'm definitely less doctrinaire about this than I used to be. In my twenties I was always against Western artists borrowing from other cultures (including Paul Simon's Graceland), as it always seemed a one-way street. I now think the dynamics are far more complicated than that, and that putting too many barriers in the way of inspiration is a terrible idea. Nonetheless, there can certainly be situations that rub me the wrong way, such as the other day at the Toronto Jazz Fest at the concert by Ikebe Shakedown, which is a Brooklyn-based Afrobeat band composed entirely of white hipster types. While I am sure they are quite respectful and sincere in their love of this music, they played a note-for-note cover of Ebo Taylor's Heaven, and I didn't hear them credit him, though I may have just missed that.
I'll start with the other sections, many of which are clearly inspired by yoga and other "Eastern practices." I'm not sure whether I would call these representative samples or simply the ones that worked best for me...
In the poem "A small doll nested in hollow dolls," Munro writes "water knows to be water / a spruce grows into a spruce / in a crevice / buckling down, living on less".
The following poem "My mind is my grandchild" features the poet and her grandson on the beach, practicing stillness: "We sit on the beach, / my arms and legs about him. ... We watch light on the waves -- / its quick crowd, / passengers changing trains. / We listen." The poet recognizes that she still struggles with feelings of anxiety, but still she is hopeful that she can gain inner peace. While she doesn't presume that her grandson will follow in her path, she still hopes "he will absorb this beach. / I hope it will stay with him."
Towards the end of the collection, the poems seek to embrace the cosmos. This is particularly true of the poem "In the slow spin of stars, a dancer turns": "In the slow spin of stars, a tree grows. / Its branches curl up and are wrapped / by two vines. It's a pillar of greenery. // In the slow spin of stars, crystals form. / All the elemental glyphs. / Alphabets."
Whether it is a fair comparison or not, this strikes me as being in tune with Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. People who are open to that movie will probably be open to this section of Blue Sonoma, while others may find both the poems and the movie somewhat pretentious and too imbued with mysticism. I will say that, for me, a little mysticism goes a long way... Nonetheless, I do appreciate the fact that the humor in some of the poems partly compensates for this borrowing from (and/or leaning on) Indian cultural practices.*
One example of Munro's humor is in the poem "A poet is walking the platform," which appears to be recounting a dream of sorts. The poet, in the underground station, is "holding / a sign that says 'Germans lessons.' / She's wearing a blue dress. / Later, she's carrying a sign that says / 'Kissing lessons.' // Upstairs, the streets are flooded / and gas leaks bubble through the city's tailings. / Pavement is breaking up / the way sea ice melts..." (Well, like many dreams it combines the humorous with the terrible.)
I will turn now to "Old Man Vacanas," which really is the heart of the book. On the Griffin Poetry website, they have some discussion of the origin of a vacana as a kind of prayer-poem from South India. No question that Munro was hoping that her husband's condition would not worsen, as well as memorializing him in some sense while he was still alive (trying to capture his real essence and not merely the platitudes that one hears after a person dies). While in this case, the portraits are being drawn by another, I see parallels to the sad decline of William Utermohler, which he captured himself.
 |
| William Utermohlen, Blue Skies, 1995 |
Most of the poems in this series are spare, almost stark. There are rare flashes of humor, mostly of the black sort, presumably employed as a kind of defense-mechanism.
From the second vacana: "[The old man] asks what day it is. / Hail falls. / ... / His calendar melts, / its pages slipping into soil. / ... / None of this matters to him / any more than greying hair."
From the fourth vacana: "The old man / losing his mind / registers / the weather systems / of intelligence. // Climate change, for all / its extinctions, / won't alter the planet's orbit." (This might be read as a kind of displacement, moving from intense personal pain to an Olympian perspective on how entire species will be wiped away before too long, so what's one more individual death?)
In the sixth vacana, Munro offers a plea for help, asking others to visit, so that she has some company (particularly company that can remember the thread of a conversation). She is in desperate straights, feeling as if she is boxed in by "Four windowless walls" and near despair: "Roar up the drive. Spit gravel. Blow your horn. // I am gnawing through myself." This strikes me as the most painful of the entire bunch.
By the next poem, Munro seems to have reached a kind of acceptance and is simply riding out the string.
By the eighth vacana, Munro almost seems to be experiencing a split-mind phenomenon, appreciating the small things in the present that she finds endearing about her husband, but obviously acutely aware of how much has been lost. At least this is how I interpret this poem. The subsequent poems all seem to ride this line. "My old man / oh, my old man, oh my / old man." While it doesn't actually rhyme (though there do seem to be some internal rhymes), the last stanza of the eighth vacana reminds me of a nursery rhyme:
He sleeps on his back,
straight as a broom.
He sleeps on his side,
curled like a cat.
He sleeps with the heater going
and a T-shirt on.
My old man likes
to catch some zzzzzzzs.
In the tenth vacana, Munro suggests that her husband's regression is actually taking him closer to his prehistoric ancestors, or at least a pre-verbal era: "The old man / feeding the fire / keeps up primitive." Or at least this is our view of our genetic ancestors -- that human evolution was somehow tied to the mastery of tools and perhaps even moreso the harnessing of fire. This article goes into some detail about how there is relatively solid evidence that humans have been using fire to cook food for 800,000 years, and there is more speculative evidence that this goes back as early as 1.5 million years. Intriguingly, in effect this earlier date for the intentional use of fire would push it much further back than the era when Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans diverged, so there might well have been a different reason for that particular split.
This linkage to pre-history is made more direct in the final vacana: "DNA from fossil bones / tells us we're siblings to Neanderthals -- // and the small arrangements / we make? Language, travel, art? Props // in a little, local, theatre of light." If taken too literally (rather than simply being the reaction of a person in deep anguish), this is in fact anti-humanist. Munro is saying that the greatest human achievements from the Renaissance onwards are all just window dressing and probably nothing more than diversions to keep us from thinking too deeply about the fact that someday we will die. I certainly can't go that far, particularly when thinking of the many advances that science has made over the past 400 or so years, though I understand where she is coming from, having gone through the loss of my mother. (Fortunately for the entire family, it was not such a drawn out process.) However, I do think it is an odd and particularly bleak note on which to end the series.
After some further reflection, it seems that Munro is probably drawing on Macbeth's tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech, where an individual's life is dismissed as "signifying nothing." It is difficult to completely refute that viewpoint, particularly when it is expressed by someone in deep mourning, and yet society as we know it would not function if people were not able to put aside their grief, to say nothing of ignoring the abyss that lays before each and every one of us. I am surprised that she ended on this one, which strikes me as a poem empty of hope and empty even of celebration of the spirit of her husband. I would have probably swapped vacana 10 and 11 -- or added another poem that had slightly more closure than this particularly raw poem. I suppose I do tend to follow convention when it comes to these kind of deep losses. Now it is worth noting that the collection as a whole does end there. Quite a few of the yoga-inspired poems (discussed above) follow.
I don't really have anything else profound to say about the collection. I thought the Old Man Vacanas section was strong though extremely raw in places. I wasn't as moved by most of the other poems, but I enjoyed a few of them a fair bit. I'll keep my eyes out to see if she publishes another collection and what she writes about this time, particularly as she has relocated to the mainland after 20+ years on Vancouver Island.
* Cultural appropriation is always a touchy subject. I'm definitely less doctrinaire about this than I used to be. In my twenties I was always against Western artists borrowing from other cultures (including Paul Simon's Graceland), as it always seemed a one-way street. I now think the dynamics are far more complicated than that, and that putting too many barriers in the way of inspiration is a terrible idea. Nonetheless, there can certainly be situations that rub me the wrong way, such as the other day at the Toronto Jazz Fest at the concert by Ikebe Shakedown, which is a Brooklyn-based Afrobeat band composed entirely of white hipster types. While I am sure they are quite respectful and sincere in their love of this music, they played a note-for-note cover of Ebo Taylor's Heaven, and I didn't hear them credit him, though I may have just missed that.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Griffin Poetry prize winner - Jane Munro
I learned just the other day that Jane Munro had won the Griffin Prize for Poetry for her collection Blue Sonoma. This is one of the better paying awards around, so it is quite something to win. News stories here and here. Part of me is a little annoyed that I didn't get around to reviewing Blue Sonoma yet -- I have a partially completed review started back in February. I managed to get around to reviewing her other collections (here and here), and I have always planned to complete this review in June. But I have been busy and so got scooped in a sense.
I do find it a very curious collection, with roughly half or even two-thirds of the book comprised of poems inspired by meditation or yoga and the rest a elegy of sorts to her husband who had just died of Alzheimer's Disease. While there is no way of knowing, I will speculate that the prize was probably awarded on the basis of this section ("The Old Man Vacanas") and not the yoga poems, which certainly didn't do all that much for me.
I'll move my personal response to the rise of the yoga-poets of B.C. to this post, and I'll have a more formal review ready in the next week or so (famous last words...). Anyway, this poem (mine not Munro's) is meant to be good-natured (as least I hope it is viewed that way):
So imagine your mom --
no let's say it is your friend's mother --
who you hear about in a casual way,
and probably see every three or four years
at weddings or graduations,
has taken up yoga.
That's nice you think,
wondering if this is just another sign from the cosmos
you should be spending more time at the Y.
(If only it wasn't so
embarrassing having to change
in front of everybody
in the locker room.)
Then you hear she goes everywhere
with her yoga mat.
Well, that isn't so strange
anymore.
Almost every third girl has a yoga mat
poking out of a backpack
or clenched under her arm.
And again you wonder when you can get to the Y.
The next time your friend brings up his mom,
it turns out she is flying out to India
to learn about yoga and mediation
for a month.
That's hardcore, you mutter,
half in sympathy, half in envy.
And later that day, you call up the Y
and cancel your membership.
I do find it a very curious collection, with roughly half or even two-thirds of the book comprised of poems inspired by meditation or yoga and the rest a elegy of sorts to her husband who had just died of Alzheimer's Disease. While there is no way of knowing, I will speculate that the prize was probably awarded on the basis of this section ("The Old Man Vacanas") and not the yoga poems, which certainly didn't do all that much for me.
I'll move my personal response to the rise of the yoga-poets of B.C. to this post, and I'll have a more formal review ready in the next week or so (famous last words...). Anyway, this poem (mine not Munro's) is meant to be good-natured (as least I hope it is viewed that way):
So imagine your mom --
no let's say it is your friend's mother --
who you hear about in a casual way,
and probably see every three or four years
at weddings or graduations,
has taken up yoga.
That's nice you think,
wondering if this is just another sign from the cosmos
you should be spending more time at the Y.
(If only it wasn't so
embarrassing having to change
in front of everybody
in the locker room.)
Then you hear she goes everywhere
with her yoga mat.
Well, that isn't so strange
anymore.
Almost every third girl has a yoga mat
poking out of a backpack
or clenched under her arm.
And again you wonder when you can get to the Y.
The next time your friend brings up his mom,
it turns out she is flying out to India
to learn about yoga and mediation
for a month.
That's hardcore, you mutter,
half in sympathy, half in envy.
And later that day, you call up the Y
and cancel your membership.
Monday, March 30, 2015
8th Canadian Challenge - 17th Review - Atwood's The Door
The Door is a fairly long collection of poems by Margaret Atwood, which follows on from Morning in the Burned House about 12 years later. I would say overall Morning is the more compelling collection, but an Atwood fan will eventually want to read The Door.
The Door falls in five overall sections, though some sections don't work as well for me, particularly an entire section about Poets in a general sense that ultimately felt forced, that is to say Atwood wanted to write an entire series about the poetic process, but had to really strain at them. I'll only write about the poems that interested me and not try to cover the entire collection.
One amusing poem is "Resurrecting the Dolls' House":
Resurrecting the dolls' house
lying dormant for fifteen years,
left behind by its owner,
we unswaddle the wrapped furniture,
wake up the family:
mother and father; a boy and girl
in sailor suits; a frilly baby;
grandmother and grandfather,
their white hair dusty --
all as it should be,
except for an extra, diminutive father
with suave spats and a moustache:
maybe a wicked uncle
who will creep around at night
and molest the children.
No -- let's make him good!
Perhaps a butler, or cook...
The effort in putting the fantasy on slightly more acceptable terms shows up in some internal strain, and the meals that this creepy cook fixes seem hardly edible. It isn't clear why the narrator is so anxious, but she clearly is.
Stand back: now it's a home.
It glows from within.
The welcome mat says Welcome.
Still, it makes us anxious --
anxieties of the nest.
How can we keep it safe?
There's so much to defend.
...
There might be nightmares.
Lucky if it's just the toast
that catches fire.
I can certainly understand why the dollhouse would go back under wraps if it triggers all these anxieties. Still, it is an effective poem, one of the better ones in the collection.
It is followed immediately by a poem ("Blackie in Antarctica") about the death of a family cat, and then a more introspective poem ("Mourning for Cats") that steps back and analyzes why the death of a pet hits so hard.
We get too sentimental
over dead animals.
We turn maudlin.
But only those with fur,
only those who look like us,
at least a little.
...
No one laments a spider.
Nor a crab.
...
Baby seals make the grade,
and dogs, and sometimes owls.
Cats almost always.
Do we think they are like dead children?
Do we think they are a part of us,
the animal soul
...
fuzzy and trusting,
and vital and on the prowl...
Even though Atwood comes across very analytic in this poem, it seems more of a defense mechanism, since she already revealed that she is a big softie in "Blackie in Antarctica" as well as "February" from Morning in the Burned House.
This collection continues with "January," which is another poem about pets in wintertime, the prime difference being that she is thinking about a deceased cat:
The front steps are slick and treacherous;
at night the house crackles.
You came in and out at will,
but this time of year you'd stay indoors,
plump in your undertaker's fur,
dreaming of sunlight,
dreaming of murdered sparrows,
black cat who's no longer there.
If only you could find your way
...
back through the locked door of air.
As a cat lover myself, I certainly enjoy or at least relate to these cat poems in both collections.
I already alluded to the fact that Atwood has quite a few poems about poets in this collection, most of which seem a bit strained. I did think "The Poets Hang On" is one of the more successful ones.
The poets hang on.
It's hard to get rid of them,
though lord knows it's been tied.
We pass them on the road
...
What is it they claim to know?
Spit it out, we hiss at them.
Say it plain!
...
Go away, we say--
and take your boring sadness.
You're not wanted here.
"Questioning the Dead" has a somewhat similar feel with the dead giving only gnomic answers that are not satisfying to the questioners: "Their voices are dry as lentils / falling into a glass jar. / Why can't they speak up clearly / instead of mumbling about keys and numbers, / and stairs..."
Atwood keeps returning to this theme of hidden knowledge that cannot be passed on accurately, and perhaps inevitably she turns to the Oracle of Greek legends. She actually has an entire suite called "Another Visit to the Oracle": "They used to ask me all kinds of questions / ... / Now it's only the one thing: / Is there no hope? / They ask that over and over. / Though the sky is as blue as ever / the flowers as flowery..."
I find "Dutiful" resonates with me, even if I never had quite as many expectations placed upon me, since I was born a boy. Still, in a great many organizations, it turns out that just possessing basic competence means that you end up stuck with all kinds of tasks that you didn't want to take on. Unfortunately, it is a bit riskier to employ strategic incompetence in a work setting. I do recall one summer I wanted to do just a bit of volunteer work, and it was I was going to end up running the whole shebang, so I just pulled out before I had more responsibilities piled on.
Anyway, here are a few lines from "Dutiful": How did I get so dutiful? Was I always that way? / ... / sweeping up dirt I didn't make ... / I didn't perform these duties willingly. / I wanted to be on the river, or dancing ... / That's me too, years later, a purple-eyed wreck, / because whatever had to be finished wasn't, and I stayed late, / grumpy as a snake, on too much coffee ... / But I've resigned ... / I've decided to wear sunglasses, and a necklace / adorned with the gold word NO...
Wise words, though I probably need a few more years before I can completely check out of all the things I don't want to do...
The final poem is "The Door," which is clearly a meditation on death, which is fitting given how many of the poems in this last section are about old age and the settling of accounts.
The door swings open,
you look in.
It's dark in there,
most likely spiders:
nothing you want.
You feel scared.
The door swings closed.
...
The door swings open,
you look in:
why does this keep happening now?
...
The snow falls,
you clear the walk while breathing heavily;
it's not as easy as once.
Your children telephone sometimes.
The roof needs fixing.
You keep yourself busy.
The spring arrives.
...
The dog has died.
The happened before.
You got another;
not this time though.
...
The door swings open:
...
It's dark in there.
You confide yourself to the darkness.
You step in.
The door swings closed.
It's somewhat interesting that even a poet as reasonably as clear-eyed as Atwood falls back on cliches and a bit avoidance when trying to face up to death. It's just not something that is easy to face, and I suppose there are only so many ways to talk about "the void" or non-existence.
I enjoyed a few poems quite a bit, i.e. the ones I discussed, but a larger proportion of the poems in The Door didn't quite work for me, compared to her earlier collections. But it's certainly worth flipping through this autumnal collection to see what Atwood is up to now, as I am only able to give a basic overview of the collection (a perennial problem with reviewing poetry).
The Door falls in five overall sections, though some sections don't work as well for me, particularly an entire section about Poets in a general sense that ultimately felt forced, that is to say Atwood wanted to write an entire series about the poetic process, but had to really strain at them. I'll only write about the poems that interested me and not try to cover the entire collection.
One amusing poem is "Resurrecting the Dolls' House":
Resurrecting the dolls' house
lying dormant for fifteen years,
left behind by its owner,
we unswaddle the wrapped furniture,
wake up the family:
mother and father; a boy and girl
in sailor suits; a frilly baby;
grandmother and grandfather,
their white hair dusty --
all as it should be,
except for an extra, diminutive father
with suave spats and a moustache:
maybe a wicked uncle
who will creep around at night
and molest the children.
No -- let's make him good!
Perhaps a butler, or cook...
The effort in putting the fantasy on slightly more acceptable terms shows up in some internal strain, and the meals that this creepy cook fixes seem hardly edible. It isn't clear why the narrator is so anxious, but she clearly is.
Stand back: now it's a home.
It glows from within.
The welcome mat says Welcome.
Still, it makes us anxious --
anxieties of the nest.
How can we keep it safe?
There's so much to defend.
...
There might be nightmares.
Lucky if it's just the toast
that catches fire.
I can certainly understand why the dollhouse would go back under wraps if it triggers all these anxieties. Still, it is an effective poem, one of the better ones in the collection.
It is followed immediately by a poem ("Blackie in Antarctica") about the death of a family cat, and then a more introspective poem ("Mourning for Cats") that steps back and analyzes why the death of a pet hits so hard.
We get too sentimental
over dead animals.
We turn maudlin.
But only those with fur,
only those who look like us,
at least a little.
...
No one laments a spider.
Nor a crab.
...
Baby seals make the grade,
and dogs, and sometimes owls.
Cats almost always.
Do we think they are like dead children?
Do we think they are a part of us,
the animal soul
...
fuzzy and trusting,
and vital and on the prowl...
Even though Atwood comes across very analytic in this poem, it seems more of a defense mechanism, since she already revealed that she is a big softie in "Blackie in Antarctica" as well as "February" from Morning in the Burned House.
This collection continues with "January," which is another poem about pets in wintertime, the prime difference being that she is thinking about a deceased cat:
The front steps are slick and treacherous;
at night the house crackles.
You came in and out at will,
but this time of year you'd stay indoors,
plump in your undertaker's fur,
dreaming of sunlight,
dreaming of murdered sparrows,
black cat who's no longer there.
If only you could find your way
...
back through the locked door of air.
As a cat lover myself, I certainly enjoy or at least relate to these cat poems in both collections.
I already alluded to the fact that Atwood has quite a few poems about poets in this collection, most of which seem a bit strained. I did think "The Poets Hang On" is one of the more successful ones.
The poets hang on.
It's hard to get rid of them,
though lord knows it's been tied.
We pass them on the road
...
What is it they claim to know?
Spit it out, we hiss at them.
Say it plain!
...
Go away, we say--
and take your boring sadness.
You're not wanted here.
"Questioning the Dead" has a somewhat similar feel with the dead giving only gnomic answers that are not satisfying to the questioners: "Their voices are dry as lentils / falling into a glass jar. / Why can't they speak up clearly / instead of mumbling about keys and numbers, / and stairs..."
Atwood keeps returning to this theme of hidden knowledge that cannot be passed on accurately, and perhaps inevitably she turns to the Oracle of Greek legends. She actually has an entire suite called "Another Visit to the Oracle": "They used to ask me all kinds of questions / ... / Now it's only the one thing: / Is there no hope? / They ask that over and over. / Though the sky is as blue as ever / the flowers as flowery..."
I find "Dutiful" resonates with me, even if I never had quite as many expectations placed upon me, since I was born a boy. Still, in a great many organizations, it turns out that just possessing basic competence means that you end up stuck with all kinds of tasks that you didn't want to take on. Unfortunately, it is a bit riskier to employ strategic incompetence in a work setting. I do recall one summer I wanted to do just a bit of volunteer work, and it was I was going to end up running the whole shebang, so I just pulled out before I had more responsibilities piled on.
Anyway, here are a few lines from "Dutiful": How did I get so dutiful? Was I always that way? / ... / sweeping up dirt I didn't make ... / I didn't perform these duties willingly. / I wanted to be on the river, or dancing ... / That's me too, years later, a purple-eyed wreck, / because whatever had to be finished wasn't, and I stayed late, / grumpy as a snake, on too much coffee ... / But I've resigned ... / I've decided to wear sunglasses, and a necklace / adorned with the gold word NO...
Wise words, though I probably need a few more years before I can completely check out of all the things I don't want to do...
The final poem is "The Door," which is clearly a meditation on death, which is fitting given how many of the poems in this last section are about old age and the settling of accounts.
The door swings open,
you look in.
It's dark in there,
most likely spiders:
nothing you want.
You feel scared.
The door swings closed.
...
The door swings open,
you look in:
why does this keep happening now?
...
The snow falls,
you clear the walk while breathing heavily;
it's not as easy as once.
Your children telephone sometimes.
The roof needs fixing.
You keep yourself busy.
The spring arrives.
...
The dog has died.
The happened before.
You got another;
not this time though.
...
The door swings open:
...
It's dark in there.
You confide yourself to the darkness.
You step in.
The door swings closed.
It's somewhat interesting that even a poet as reasonably as clear-eyed as Atwood falls back on cliches and a bit avoidance when trying to face up to death. It's just not something that is easy to face, and I suppose there are only so many ways to talk about "the void" or non-existence.
I enjoyed a few poems quite a bit, i.e. the ones I discussed, but a larger proportion of the poems in The Door didn't quite work for me, compared to her earlier collections. But it's certainly worth flipping through this autumnal collection to see what Atwood is up to now, as I am only able to give a basic overview of the collection (a perennial problem with reviewing poetry).
Sunday, March 29, 2015
8th Canadian challenge - 16th Review - Active Pass
Somewhat later than I intended, I am finally ready to review Jane Munro's Active Pass, which was published 4 years after her collection Point No Point, which I reviewed here.
The cover references a Mary Pratt painting: Fish Head in Steel Sink, which is basically exactly what it says on the tin. The second section of the collection riffs on a number of Mary Pratt paintings, and it is a somewhat propitious coincidence that I saw a fair number of these paintings in person at a Pratt retrospective at the McMichael Collection last year.
But the collection begins with an extended suite of poems called Active Pass, which refers to a stretch of water between the B.C. Lower Mainland and Swartz Bay. I assume I crossed this pass 3 times on my very occasional ferry trips out to Victoria.
I have to say this is a very complicated suite, which does repay repeat readings. At first glance, most of the poems just seem to be descriptions of nature that are found on the way to the two ferry terminals (and this is a bit of a callback to the opening section of Point No Point) and particularly the natural world from 20 or more years ago which was relatively less disturbed by humans. But then the poems get entwined with reminiscences of Munro's father (who also dominated the last poem of Point No Point).
From Poem 5 in the sequence: "'Well, dear -- / goodbye for now.' My father's last words to me. // The man interred not only in my DNA / but in my turn of phrase, my taste."
Reproduction in a somewhat abstract sense or perhaps the issue of reproduction of culture across generations is another recurring theme. From Poem 4: "What I want now / is not what a woman wants from a man. // I want what an egg wants from its DNA. / I want this with all the greed of a grub."
And then the focus shifts to essentially a geological time scale, taking in the dinosaurs -- and fish who took their evolutionary form millions of years before humans, and yet we, the upstarts, are reshaping their environment. While Munro doesn't directly touch on this, there are interesting examples of how humans have triggered evolutionary changes in a number of species, with part of the tragedy of our outsized environmental footprint that we are forcing changes on species much faster than most of them can adapt.
Then the poems shift back to the intensely personal to memories of both her parents passing away and how Munro wishes she could have held her father's hand while he was dying.
The poems speak to a life that is so layered that almost anything -- even seeing a white-haired woman on the ferry -- can trigger up thoughts about and longings for the past. Apparently for Munro it is the periodic sailing on the ferry that really puts her in mind of her youth (on the mainland, I believe) and her adult life on the island, where she is involved in a number of quotidian tasks like gardening, but it is difficult at times for her to stay grounded in the present. "Going home" should be going to her adult home, but the mind wanders and she is just as frequently going back to her childhood home (in memory).
The sequence closes with Poem 21: "Going home -- up the gravel drive beyond street lights, / municipal water, or garbage collection. // Mother read Baha'i texts while smoking on the toilet. / Toyota station wagon's my confessional. // After little islands, the big one, I can smell the Pacific. / Feel my cheek on your chest."
As I said, it is a fairly open-ended poem but one that tries to tie together a number of strands of things that one might be thinking about on a fairly long ferry crossing.
The next section are poems all inspired by Mary Pratt.
Probably the most powerful (and certainly the most graphic of the paintings themselves) is The Service Station, which was on view at the McMichael.
Munro's take: "You've seen it before .../ ... But this is a new world corpse: / moose, headless, ribs and forelegs strung up on a crossbar, / hung from a hook ... / ... [in] this service station, hoisting her body as provision -- / carving her up for roasts and stews."
I probably should be glad that this is a fairly straight-forward take on the poem, and it isn't all about how eating meat, particularly from a female animal, is the equivalent of glorified sexual violence. I do think it is fair to say that the painting is a bit more ambiguous than the poem... And if I recall correctly, Pratt was very relieved when she left the rural area they were working in and moved to the slightly more cosmopolitan St. Catherines not far from St. John's, Newfoundland.
Munro tries to capture the quality of light or luminescence that is a fairly notable feature of many of Pratt's paintings. But it is hard to write poems about paintings, and I usually just write poems inspired by paintings, using them just as a launching pad.
Here is Munro on Pratt's Green Grapes and Wedding Presents with Half a Cantaloupe: "The ivory patter's bruised / by echoes of the silver bowl in sunset light. / The painting's galactic--a spiral in composition. / Round and round their course the two / pursue each other..."
If I recall correctly there was a third section that didn't do that much for me, so I move on to the final section of the collection which is comprised of poems about everyday life and which are also somewhat philosophical.
"Give thanks" is basically Jane jogging around town, near the homes of her children, who have moved away but seem to be doing fairly well, with the run jogging her memory back to the children growing up (not that this is covered extensively in this poem). "Finally, I could to our home -- / today, you're sitting at the kitchen table, / looking up, expecting me -- / not that I've a lot to say: / a road report, weather news -- / I see a new tarp on the greenhouse roof." This poem is quite poignant, particularly given the main thrust of Blue Sonoma, her next collection, where this domestic tranquility is shattered. But all the more reason to give thanks in the moment.
The next poem, "For see how the jasmine releases and lets fall its withered flowers," more directly takes on the issue of the poet moving into old age. I'm not sure if this line is taken from Shakespeare or Donne, but it certainly resonates like poetry from a much earlier age. Here Munro considers the literal and metaphoric baggage that people carry around: "The clutter and clatter / of what I drag / along behind me -- a dilapidated cart / rocking on its wooden wheels / over roots / and rubble on a track / ... / ... no wonder / it takes such energy / to get going." Her solution is to become more like the trees that cast off each season's dying blossoms. "Can I not / emerge from the past's brown days, leave them / dropped here, to decay / ... / ... and walk / quietly and freely on my way?" Sadly, I am not sure such renewal is available to non-perennials...
The final poem I am considering (and probably the final one in the book, though I'd have to check) has a title that is more than a little demanding "Live in love. Do your work. Make an end of your sorrows." The poem opens with an image of the power and majesty of nature: "and now the rains / have come / sword fern frond bent down / collecting water along its seam..." And it ends "puddle on gravel / pocked with falling drops, filled / with something out of nowhere / sinking slowly in // for now the rains / have come"
Of course, most of us do not have the luxury of living anywhere near unspoiled nature, but part of this is a choice. I've always considered city life to be more appealing (along with Frank O'Hara!) but it does leave me fewer opportunities to experience unmediated nature and experience its renewing power. And it is also possible that I would not have this near ecstatic experience. The opening and closing of the poem (and the shout out to wild horses) reminds me of the the film Solaris (Tarkovsky's original) where I was quite bored by the opening and closing sequences. Some of us simply are not attuned to nature to the same degree, and certainly do not find as much philosophical comfort (or derive religious imperatives!) while communing with nature. So while we can respect and find some interest in reading about Munro's experiences, they are essentially alien to us. That's really where I come from when I read the second half of Active Pass (and most of Blue Sonoma for that matter, though that is a story for another day).
The cover references a Mary Pratt painting: Fish Head in Steel Sink, which is basically exactly what it says on the tin. The second section of the collection riffs on a number of Mary Pratt paintings, and it is a somewhat propitious coincidence that I saw a fair number of these paintings in person at a Pratt retrospective at the McMichael Collection last year.
 |
| Mary Pratt, Fish Head in Steel Sink, 1983 |
But the collection begins with an extended suite of poems called Active Pass, which refers to a stretch of water between the B.C. Lower Mainland and Swartz Bay. I assume I crossed this pass 3 times on my very occasional ferry trips out to Victoria.
I have to say this is a very complicated suite, which does repay repeat readings. At first glance, most of the poems just seem to be descriptions of nature that are found on the way to the two ferry terminals (and this is a bit of a callback to the opening section of Point No Point) and particularly the natural world from 20 or more years ago which was relatively less disturbed by humans. But then the poems get entwined with reminiscences of Munro's father (who also dominated the last poem of Point No Point).
From Poem 5 in the sequence: "'Well, dear -- / goodbye for now.' My father's last words to me. // The man interred not only in my DNA / but in my turn of phrase, my taste."
Reproduction in a somewhat abstract sense or perhaps the issue of reproduction of culture across generations is another recurring theme. From Poem 4: "What I want now / is not what a woman wants from a man. // I want what an egg wants from its DNA. / I want this with all the greed of a grub."
And then the focus shifts to essentially a geological time scale, taking in the dinosaurs -- and fish who took their evolutionary form millions of years before humans, and yet we, the upstarts, are reshaping their environment. While Munro doesn't directly touch on this, there are interesting examples of how humans have triggered evolutionary changes in a number of species, with part of the tragedy of our outsized environmental footprint that we are forcing changes on species much faster than most of them can adapt.
Then the poems shift back to the intensely personal to memories of both her parents passing away and how Munro wishes she could have held her father's hand while he was dying.
The poems speak to a life that is so layered that almost anything -- even seeing a white-haired woman on the ferry -- can trigger up thoughts about and longings for the past. Apparently for Munro it is the periodic sailing on the ferry that really puts her in mind of her youth (on the mainland, I believe) and her adult life on the island, where she is involved in a number of quotidian tasks like gardening, but it is difficult at times for her to stay grounded in the present. "Going home" should be going to her adult home, but the mind wanders and she is just as frequently going back to her childhood home (in memory).
The sequence closes with Poem 21: "Going home -- up the gravel drive beyond street lights, / municipal water, or garbage collection. // Mother read Baha'i texts while smoking on the toilet. / Toyota station wagon's my confessional. // After little islands, the big one, I can smell the Pacific. / Feel my cheek on your chest."
As I said, it is a fairly open-ended poem but one that tries to tie together a number of strands of things that one might be thinking about on a fairly long ferry crossing.
The next section are poems all inspired by Mary Pratt.
Probably the most powerful (and certainly the most graphic of the paintings themselves) is The Service Station, which was on view at the McMichael.
 |
| Mary Pratt, The Service Station, 1978 |
Munro's take: "You've seen it before .../ ... But this is a new world corpse: / moose, headless, ribs and forelegs strung up on a crossbar, / hung from a hook ... / ... [in] this service station, hoisting her body as provision -- / carving her up for roasts and stews."
I probably should be glad that this is a fairly straight-forward take on the poem, and it isn't all about how eating meat, particularly from a female animal, is the equivalent of glorified sexual violence. I do think it is fair to say that the painting is a bit more ambiguous than the poem... And if I recall correctly, Pratt was very relieved when she left the rural area they were working in and moved to the slightly more cosmopolitan St. Catherines not far from St. John's, Newfoundland.
Munro tries to capture the quality of light or luminescence that is a fairly notable feature of many of Pratt's paintings. But it is hard to write poems about paintings, and I usually just write poems inspired by paintings, using them just as a launching pad.
Here is Munro on Pratt's Green Grapes and Wedding Presents with Half a Cantaloupe: "The ivory patter's bruised / by echoes of the silver bowl in sunset light. / The painting's galactic--a spiral in composition. / Round and round their course the two / pursue each other..."
If I recall correctly there was a third section that didn't do that much for me, so I move on to the final section of the collection which is comprised of poems about everyday life and which are also somewhat philosophical.
"Give thanks" is basically Jane jogging around town, near the homes of her children, who have moved away but seem to be doing fairly well, with the run jogging her memory back to the children growing up (not that this is covered extensively in this poem). "Finally, I could to our home -- / today, you're sitting at the kitchen table, / looking up, expecting me -- / not that I've a lot to say: / a road report, weather news -- / I see a new tarp on the greenhouse roof." This poem is quite poignant, particularly given the main thrust of Blue Sonoma, her next collection, where this domestic tranquility is shattered. But all the more reason to give thanks in the moment.
The next poem, "For see how the jasmine releases and lets fall its withered flowers," more directly takes on the issue of the poet moving into old age. I'm not sure if this line is taken from Shakespeare or Donne, but it certainly resonates like poetry from a much earlier age. Here Munro considers the literal and metaphoric baggage that people carry around: "The clutter and clatter / of what I drag / along behind me -- a dilapidated cart / rocking on its wooden wheels / over roots / and rubble on a track / ... / ... no wonder / it takes such energy / to get going." Her solution is to become more like the trees that cast off each season's dying blossoms. "Can I not / emerge from the past's brown days, leave them / dropped here, to decay / ... / ... and walk / quietly and freely on my way?" Sadly, I am not sure such renewal is available to non-perennials...
The final poem I am considering (and probably the final one in the book, though I'd have to check) has a title that is more than a little demanding "Live in love. Do your work. Make an end of your sorrows." The poem opens with an image of the power and majesty of nature: "and now the rains / have come / sword fern frond bent down / collecting water along its seam..." And it ends "puddle on gravel / pocked with falling drops, filled / with something out of nowhere / sinking slowly in // for now the rains / have come"
Of course, most of us do not have the luxury of living anywhere near unspoiled nature, but part of this is a choice. I've always considered city life to be more appealing (along with Frank O'Hara!) but it does leave me fewer opportunities to experience unmediated nature and experience its renewing power. And it is also possible that I would not have this near ecstatic experience. The opening and closing of the poem (and the shout out to wild horses) reminds me of the the film Solaris (Tarkovsky's original) where I was quite bored by the opening and closing sequences. Some of us simply are not attuned to nature to the same degree, and certainly do not find as much philosophical comfort (or derive religious imperatives!) while communing with nature. So while we can respect and find some interest in reading about Munro's experiences, they are essentially alien to us. That's really where I come from when I read the second half of Active Pass (and most of Blue Sonoma for that matter, though that is a story for another day).
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Late Levine
So I have gotten caught up as much as is possible with Philip Levine's late work.
The basic chronology of his collections can be found in this earlier post, but the short version is that New Selected Poems covers everything from On the Edge (1963) through A Walk with Tom Jefferson (1988). He later supplemented this with Unselected Poems, though he drew the line at Sweet Will (from 1985). The vast majority of Sweet Will was incorporated into those two collections, whereas Tom Jefferson was not considered,* primarily because it was still in print. Indeed, all the remaining books with Knopf, from What Work Is (1991) onwards, have never been re-anthologized, at least not in North America.**
While I suspect it won't happen, I think it would be a good thing if an editor at Knopf put together a supplemental collection that rounded up a few of Levine's missing poems (like "The Last Shift") and anything that appeared in print after 2009, but primarily going through What Work Is (1991) through News of the World (2009) and gathering up the best of them.
I'll just add in my two cents† as to my preferences:
What Work Is (1991)
"Coming Home From the Post Office"
"Facts"
"Coming of Age in Michigan"
"On the River"
The Simple Truth (1994)
"Ode for Mrs. William Settle"
"The Trade"
"In the Dark"
"Dreaming in Swedish"
"Getting There"
"The Escape"
"The Simple Truth"
"The Spanish Lesson"
"My Mother with Purse the Summer They Murdered the Spanish Poet"
"My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years Before the Nazis Could Break His Heart" (some thoughts on this poem here)
The Mercy (1999)
"Flowering Midnight"
"Reinventing America"
"The Cafe"
"Night Words"
"Philosophy Lesson"
"The Evening Turned Its Back Upon Her Voice"
"These Words"
"The Return"
"The Mercy"
Breath (2004)
"The Great Truth"
"The West Wind"
"The Two"
"The Lesson"
"The Esquire"
"My Given Name"
"The Genius"
News of the World (2009) (a partial review of this collection here)
"Dearborn Suite"
"Arrival and Departure"
"Library Days"
"Closed"
"News of the World"
"The Music of Time"
I haven't had much of a chance to track down any poems published after 2009, as I was quite short on time on my last visit to Robarts, but I'll make sure to spend some time on this on my next visit and will post an update on that, probably in a new post, however.
* New Selected Poems is missing (in my view) just a few from A Walk with Tom Jefferson. I can understand why it wouldn't be worth the flak to add "Dog Poem," which is actually an anti-dog poem. But I think "Winter Words" should have been added, and probably "I Sing the Body Electric" and "Picture Postcard from the Other World."
** Stranger to Nothing (Bloodaxe, 2006) is for the UK market and while it does cover all the Levine's books through Breath, and indeed is somewhat heavier on the later collections, it is a bit slimmer than is ideal. It is not surprising that only about half of the poems I picked ended up in Stranger to Nothing, and it does include some that don't do as much for me.
† I want to be entirely clear I have no stake in this, and I am happy to delete this post if it truly impedes an editor from Knopf from actually undertaking such an endeavor.
The basic chronology of his collections can be found in this earlier post, but the short version is that New Selected Poems covers everything from On the Edge (1963) through A Walk with Tom Jefferson (1988). He later supplemented this with Unselected Poems, though he drew the line at Sweet Will (from 1985). The vast majority of Sweet Will was incorporated into those two collections, whereas Tom Jefferson was not considered,* primarily because it was still in print. Indeed, all the remaining books with Knopf, from What Work Is (1991) onwards, have never been re-anthologized, at least not in North America.**
While I suspect it won't happen, I think it would be a good thing if an editor at Knopf put together a supplemental collection that rounded up a few of Levine's missing poems (like "The Last Shift") and anything that appeared in print after 2009, but primarily going through What Work Is (1991) through News of the World (2009) and gathering up the best of them.
I'll just add in my two cents† as to my preferences:
What Work Is (1991)
"Coming Home From the Post Office"
"Facts"
"Coming of Age in Michigan"
"On the River"
The Simple Truth (1994)
"Ode for Mrs. William Settle"
"The Trade"
"In the Dark"
"Dreaming in Swedish"
"Getting There"
"The Escape"
"The Simple Truth"
"The Spanish Lesson"
"My Mother with Purse the Summer They Murdered the Spanish Poet"
"My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years Before the Nazis Could Break His Heart" (some thoughts on this poem here)
The Mercy (1999)
"Flowering Midnight"
"Reinventing America"
"The Cafe"
"Night Words"
"Philosophy Lesson"
"The Evening Turned Its Back Upon Her Voice"
"These Words"
"The Return"
"The Mercy"
Breath (2004)
"The Great Truth"
"The West Wind"
"The Two"
"The Lesson"
"The Esquire"
"My Given Name"
"The Genius"
News of the World (2009) (a partial review of this collection here)
"Dearborn Suite"
"Arrival and Departure"
"Library Days"
"Closed"
"News of the World"
"The Music of Time"
I haven't had much of a chance to track down any poems published after 2009, as I was quite short on time on my last visit to Robarts, but I'll make sure to spend some time on this on my next visit and will post an update on that, probably in a new post, however.
* New Selected Poems is missing (in my view) just a few from A Walk with Tom Jefferson. I can understand why it wouldn't be worth the flak to add "Dog Poem," which is actually an anti-dog poem. But I think "Winter Words" should have been added, and probably "I Sing the Body Electric" and "Picture Postcard from the Other World."
** Stranger to Nothing (Bloodaxe, 2006) is for the UK market and while it does cover all the Levine's books through Breath, and indeed is somewhat heavier on the later collections, it is a bit slimmer than is ideal. It is not surprising that only about half of the poems I picked ended up in Stranger to Nothing, and it does include some that don't do as much for me.
† I want to be entirely clear I have no stake in this, and I am happy to delete this post if it truly impedes an editor from Knopf from actually undertaking such an endeavor.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
8th Canadian Challenge - 13th Review - Morning in the Burned House
Somewhat curiously, I've been reading quite a few collections by senior poets, that is to say poetry collections by poets who have reached retirement age. I've just started working through quite a few of Philip Levine's later volumes, and I've also read (though not yet reviewed) Jane Munro's last two collections. I decided that it might be best to officially close out the challenge with Margaret Atwood, but I am reviewing her poetry and not one of her novels.
As it happens, Morning in the Burned House is not even her latest collection, which is The Door (from 2007). I'll be reviewing The Door next month. As I was working my way through Morning in the Burned House, I had a sense that I had read at least a few of these before. Indeed, it turns out that the entire collection is published as the last section of Eating Fire (which also contains two volumes of selected poems, so it is an incredible bargain, or at least my copy was -- though I kind of prefer the newer edition's cover, even if it is a bit too literal).
I wouldn't say I prefer Atwood's poetry to her novels, as she has many pleasures that only become apparent when she is writing layered fiction. However, she can be quite good when forced to be concise. Or at least reasonably concise. Many of these poems are two or three pages in length, so they are not short, pithy poems.
The collection is broken into 5 sections. The first is made up of primarily autobiographical poems (where the authorial voice does seem to square with what we know of Margaret Atwood). The second section is mostly comprised of poems about women from history, particularly those that got a raw deal. I wonder if The Penelopiad (first a novella from 2005 and then turned into an effective play) stemmed from the work she did researching and writing these poems. The third is a bit of a mix, a bit more personal but still some political poems, particularly "Half-Hanged Mary," a long sequence of poems about a "witch" from Massachusetts. She almost seems to be channeling Adrienne Rich in this particular section. The fourth section is primarily about her (quite) elderly father and is vaguely reminiscent of Sharon Olds or indeed Jane Munro writing about their fathers, but with far less conflicted feelings. (Atwood seemed to have a much happier childhood than either of them.) The final section is, like the third, hard to categorize, though the poems seem to be drawn from dreams and/or have a mythic quality to them. I would say my favourite sections were the 1st and 4th, though there are good poems, or at least interesting stanzas and lines, throughout the collection.
I'll just touch on a few that worked for me.
While she comes across just a bit heavy-handed in "In the Secular Night" (she is well-known as a humanist and fierce agnostic*), the last lines work:
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
Perhaps it is fitting that my favourite poem was "February," which features her cat:
... In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
...
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here. ...
This has indeed been a particularly brutal February (one of the coldest on record though not all that much snow), and I am also thinking dark and dire thoughts. As it happens, I am starting to think about pets now that we will own our own place soon, and the kids are just about old enough to help take care of them. We'll see how that works out.
Of the poems in the second section, I think I am most attuned to "Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing," where the somewhat incongruous nature of a Greek legend brought into the modern world reminds me more than a little of Steven Sherrill's The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break.
The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
...
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous...
From the third section, "Half-Hanged Mary" is apparently about a women accused of witchcraft who was hung from a tree but survived. It is a bit too long, but I thought the very final stanza was well crafted and a bit eerie:
The words boil out of me,
coil after coil of sinuous possibility.
The cosmos unravels from my mouth,
all fullness, all vacancy.
The final poem from this section "A Pink Hotel in California" features Atwood remembering her father chopping wood while they were staying in the woods in 1943 (this seems to be basically the parts of her past that fed into Cat's Eye). Now (in 1994) she is in a pink hotel in California (perhaps on a book tour?) and her past comes flooding back to her.
This nicely sets up the fourth section where the poems discuss caring for an aging father, who is at times a bit cranky and unpredictable and even a bit Lear-like ("King Lear in Respite Care"). Perhaps not surprisingly, Atwood's poems evince a powerful desire to rewind time and to restore her father to his glory days, even if that means she has to return to childhood.
She is honest enough to admit she was bored a great deal in her youth ("Bored") and that "I could hardly wait to get / the hell out of there to / anywhere else." But knowing what she knows now, she would gladly go back to that time when her father was still a youngish, vigorous man and appreciate it for what it was. I guess this is a fairly standard trope coming from poets past their own middle age, but it is still a useful reminder.
It's hard to pick any particular poem out from the last section as they all have a bit of the spectre of doom hanging over them, as so many dreams do. Even when the dreams start out reasonably upbeat, there is always the chance that things will quickly take a turn for the worse.
I did like this section in the middle of "Shapechangers in Winter":
Every cell
in our bodies has renewed itself
so many times since then, there's
not much left, my love,
of the originals. We're footprints
becoming limestone, or think of it
as coal becoming diamond. Less
flexible, but more condensed...
I think this is a solid collection with "February" being a stand-out poem. Given that there are a few days left in February (and early March looks to be just as cold), it is worth reading this and trying to take some solace in the fact that others are suffering just as much. As it happens, the entire poem is on-line here for your reading pleasure.
* I find myself in basic agreement with Atwood here. She is too polite (most of the time) to come right out and say it, but she considers the idea of a personal God that pays attention to the human race (or specific tribes or favoured individuals) as arrant nonsense. At the same time, to claim with absolute certainty that there is no possible way that an impersonal force or prime mover might have kick-started the universe is dogmatic and close-minded in its own right.
As it happens, Morning in the Burned House is not even her latest collection, which is The Door (from 2007). I'll be reviewing The Door next month. As I was working my way through Morning in the Burned House, I had a sense that I had read at least a few of these before. Indeed, it turns out that the entire collection is published as the last section of Eating Fire (which also contains two volumes of selected poems, so it is an incredible bargain, or at least my copy was -- though I kind of prefer the newer edition's cover, even if it is a bit too literal).
I wouldn't say I prefer Atwood's poetry to her novels, as she has many pleasures that only become apparent when she is writing layered fiction. However, she can be quite good when forced to be concise. Or at least reasonably concise. Many of these poems are two or three pages in length, so they are not short, pithy poems.
The collection is broken into 5 sections. The first is made up of primarily autobiographical poems (where the authorial voice does seem to square with what we know of Margaret Atwood). The second section is mostly comprised of poems about women from history, particularly those that got a raw deal. I wonder if The Penelopiad (first a novella from 2005 and then turned into an effective play) stemmed from the work she did researching and writing these poems. The third is a bit of a mix, a bit more personal but still some political poems, particularly "Half-Hanged Mary," a long sequence of poems about a "witch" from Massachusetts. She almost seems to be channeling Adrienne Rich in this particular section. The fourth section is primarily about her (quite) elderly father and is vaguely reminiscent of Sharon Olds or indeed Jane Munro writing about their fathers, but with far less conflicted feelings. (Atwood seemed to have a much happier childhood than either of them.) The final section is, like the third, hard to categorize, though the poems seem to be drawn from dreams and/or have a mythic quality to them. I would say my favourite sections were the 1st and 4th, though there are good poems, or at least interesting stanzas and lines, throughout the collection.
I'll just touch on a few that worked for me.
While she comes across just a bit heavy-handed in "In the Secular Night" (she is well-known as a humanist and fierce agnostic*), the last lines work:
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
Perhaps it is fitting that my favourite poem was "February," which features her cat:
... In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
...
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here. ...
This has indeed been a particularly brutal February (one of the coldest on record though not all that much snow), and I am also thinking dark and dire thoughts. As it happens, I am starting to think about pets now that we will own our own place soon, and the kids are just about old enough to help take care of them. We'll see how that works out.
Of the poems in the second section, I think I am most attuned to "Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing," where the somewhat incongruous nature of a Greek legend brought into the modern world reminds me more than a little of Steven Sherrill's The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break.
The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
...
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous...
From the third section, "Half-Hanged Mary" is apparently about a women accused of witchcraft who was hung from a tree but survived. It is a bit too long, but I thought the very final stanza was well crafted and a bit eerie:
The words boil out of me,
coil after coil of sinuous possibility.
The cosmos unravels from my mouth,
all fullness, all vacancy.
The final poem from this section "A Pink Hotel in California" features Atwood remembering her father chopping wood while they were staying in the woods in 1943 (this seems to be basically the parts of her past that fed into Cat's Eye). Now (in 1994) she is in a pink hotel in California (perhaps on a book tour?) and her past comes flooding back to her.
This nicely sets up the fourth section where the poems discuss caring for an aging father, who is at times a bit cranky and unpredictable and even a bit Lear-like ("King Lear in Respite Care"). Perhaps not surprisingly, Atwood's poems evince a powerful desire to rewind time and to restore her father to his glory days, even if that means she has to return to childhood.
She is honest enough to admit she was bored a great deal in her youth ("Bored") and that "I could hardly wait to get / the hell out of there to / anywhere else." But knowing what she knows now, she would gladly go back to that time when her father was still a youngish, vigorous man and appreciate it for what it was. I guess this is a fairly standard trope coming from poets past their own middle age, but it is still a useful reminder.
It's hard to pick any particular poem out from the last section as they all have a bit of the spectre of doom hanging over them, as so many dreams do. Even when the dreams start out reasonably upbeat, there is always the chance that things will quickly take a turn for the worse.
I did like this section in the middle of "Shapechangers in Winter":
Every cell
in our bodies has renewed itself
so many times since then, there's
not much left, my love,
of the originals. We're footprints
becoming limestone, or think of it
as coal becoming diamond. Less
flexible, but more condensed...
I think this is a solid collection with "February" being a stand-out poem. Given that there are a few days left in February (and early March looks to be just as cold), it is worth reading this and trying to take some solace in the fact that others are suffering just as much. As it happens, the entire poem is on-line here for your reading pleasure.
* I find myself in basic agreement with Atwood here. She is too polite (most of the time) to come right out and say it, but she considers the idea of a personal God that pays attention to the human race (or specific tribes or favoured individuals) as arrant nonsense. At the same time, to claim with absolute certainty that there is no possible way that an impersonal force or prime mover might have kick-started the universe is dogmatic and close-minded in its own right.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Philip Levine, RIP
While not quite as flashy as other poets, Philip Levine carved out quite a career for himself in a fairly unassuming way. He considered himself a Detroiter, despite having left the city years ago. He also portrayed himself as a working-class poet and generally a political progressive, though much of his life was spent as visiting professor of poetry at various top tier universities. (He was actually Poet Laureate from 2011-2012.) This isn't meant to tear him down, but simply point out the contradictions inherent in artists who keep playing up their working-class roots, as they inevitably stray from them.
Here is a nice obituary from the Detroit Free Press (Levine died on Valentine's Day 2015 at age 87). I can't guarantee the video will always play, but at the moment it is set on Levine reading his poem "The Last Shift," which apparently has never been collected in book form (it is in Michigan Quarterly Review from 1986). There is also a nice piece in remembrance from The Paris Review and the probably uncollected "She's Not Gone" published in The Paris Review in 1980.
Here is a list of his published collections (not counting Selected volumes):
On the Edge (1963)
Not This Pig (1968)
Pili's Wall (1971) (more of a very short chapbook)
Red Dust (1971)
They Feed They Lion (1972)
1933 (1974)
The Names of the Lost (1976)
Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979)
7 Years From Somewhere (1979)
One for the Rose (1981)
Sweet Will (1985)
A Walk With Tom Jefferson (1988)
What Work Is (1991)
The Simple Truth (1994)
Unselected Poems (1997)
The Mercy (1999)
Breath (2004)
News of the World (2009)
There is a fairly long gap from News of the World to the present, and we know Levine was still writing (as he has a couple of poems in the Winter 2014-15 edition of Ploughshares, which I will have to try to track down soon). I suspect his editor could pull together one final posthumous volume, which would probably be worth peeking into.
As it happens, I have New Selected Poems, which came out in 1991, and covered -- reasonably well -- basically all of his individual volumes through A Walk With Tom Jefferson. There were no poems from What Work Is, which personally I thought (at the time) was trying a bit too hard. I suspect I would be more open to the poems in it now (and I did like a few from that collection).
I kind of let the other collections pass me by, though in 2011 I picked up News of the World from Powells (the one in Chicago), presumably around the same time that I was trying to sell off quite a few of my books. After I heard of Levine's passing, I decided to order Unselected Poems, and get the rest out of the library. I am still somewhat surprised that there is almost no Levine at all in the Toronto Public Library, but virtually all of his poetry collections are in the UT library.
I came pretty close to going on Saturday (adding even more stress to a day in which I always seemed to be running late), and I went today (Monday). I really thought some enterprising English grad. student would have beat me to the punch, but no, they were all on the shelves, and I checked out everything from Sweet Will to Breath. So this week I will have a chance to really dive into his work.
I know there was a poem or two I was strongly considering for my transportation poetry anthology, and I'll try to dig that out shortly, and I am sure I'll find another one or two that really catch my eye as I work my way through his later collections.
So I have found my list of transportation-related poems by Levine. In the bus category, I selected "Coming Home from the Post Office" from What Work Is. In the car category, I choose "Coming Home, Detroit 1968," which is in They Feed They Lion. If you scroll about halfway down, the poem is reprinted here. Finally, in the airplane/air travel section, I was hoping to anthologize "Salt." This was published in Poetry Magazine, all the way back in 1979. It turns out that it turns up in Unselected Poems and it may well have been published in One for the Rose. In any case, it can be read here. I think of these three "moving" poems, "Salt" is probably my favorite.
At the moment, I don't really have anything profound to say about his work, other than I enjoyed reading it when I remembered to make the time. He had a long, productive and seemingly happy life. RIP.
Here is a nice obituary from the Detroit Free Press (Levine died on Valentine's Day 2015 at age 87). I can't guarantee the video will always play, but at the moment it is set on Levine reading his poem "The Last Shift," which apparently has never been collected in book form (it is in Michigan Quarterly Review from 1986). There is also a nice piece in remembrance from The Paris Review and the probably uncollected "She's Not Gone" published in The Paris Review in 1980.
Here is a list of his published collections (not counting Selected volumes):
On the Edge (1963)
Not This Pig (1968)
Pili's Wall (1971) (more of a very short chapbook)
Red Dust (1971)
They Feed They Lion (1972)
1933 (1974)
The Names of the Lost (1976)
Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979)
7 Years From Somewhere (1979)
One for the Rose (1981)
Sweet Will (1985)
A Walk With Tom Jefferson (1988)
What Work Is (1991)
The Simple Truth (1994)
Unselected Poems (1997)
The Mercy (1999)
Breath (2004)
News of the World (2009)
There is a fairly long gap from News of the World to the present, and we know Levine was still writing (as he has a couple of poems in the Winter 2014-15 edition of Ploughshares, which I will have to try to track down soon). I suspect his editor could pull together one final posthumous volume, which would probably be worth peeking into.
As it happens, I have New Selected Poems, which came out in 1991, and covered -- reasonably well -- basically all of his individual volumes through A Walk With Tom Jefferson. There were no poems from What Work Is, which personally I thought (at the time) was trying a bit too hard. I suspect I would be more open to the poems in it now (and I did like a few from that collection).
I kind of let the other collections pass me by, though in 2011 I picked up News of the World from Powells (the one in Chicago), presumably around the same time that I was trying to sell off quite a few of my books. After I heard of Levine's passing, I decided to order Unselected Poems, and get the rest out of the library. I am still somewhat surprised that there is almost no Levine at all in the Toronto Public Library, but virtually all of his poetry collections are in the UT library.
I came pretty close to going on Saturday (adding even more stress to a day in which I always seemed to be running late), and I went today (Monday). I really thought some enterprising English grad. student would have beat me to the punch, but no, they were all on the shelves, and I checked out everything from Sweet Will to Breath. So this week I will have a chance to really dive into his work.
I know there was a poem or two I was strongly considering for my transportation poetry anthology, and I'll try to dig that out shortly, and I am sure I'll find another one or two that really catch my eye as I work my way through his later collections.
So I have found my list of transportation-related poems by Levine. In the bus category, I selected "Coming Home from the Post Office" from What Work Is. In the car category, I choose "Coming Home, Detroit 1968," which is in They Feed They Lion. If you scroll about halfway down, the poem is reprinted here. Finally, in the airplane/air travel section, I was hoping to anthologize "Salt." This was published in Poetry Magazine, all the way back in 1979. It turns out that it turns up in Unselected Poems and it may well have been published in One for the Rose. In any case, it can be read here. I think of these three "moving" poems, "Salt" is probably my favorite.
At the moment, I don't really have anything profound to say about his work, other than I enjoyed reading it when I remembered to make the time. He had a long, productive and seemingly happy life. RIP.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
8th Canadian Challenge - 12th Review - Point No Point
Jane Munro's poetry collection Point No Point ends up throwing the reader for quite a loop. I'll get to that when I get to discussing the final poem in the collection "Moving to a Colder Climate."
Up to this point, the first batch of poems are generally uplifting vignettes of Munro's remembrances of growing up. Her father teaches her about life on a camping trip, making sure that she has survival skills. He is definitely a man's man, but that is what makes sense, living in largely rural areas in B.C.
However, with knowledge of what is to come, there are certainly a few warning signs in the first batch of poems in the collection, particularly when Munro sort of casually mentions that her father owned and lost a boatyard. But most achingly in the early going in "Missing Person" when she talks about her brother who has essentially become a loner and then vanished off the grid: "Traced to Edmonton and thin air." This is always the worst case scenario for parents -- that their child will somehow fail to thrive, get into drugs and vanish. Here, Munro must take on the worry and perhaps even a bit of the guilt (though she doesn't discuss that) as both her parents are dead by this point. It's a moving but sad poem.
As an aside, the semi-renowned Chicago photographer Art Shay lost his son at a somewhat younger age (than Munro's brother) while he was out more or less hitchhiking his way around the world, trying to find himself, and sadly eventually running into trouble. It sounds as though this son, Harmon, was simply unlucky and wasn't driven/dragged down by the internal demons that haunt Munro's brother. I'm not sure that makes the pain any less, however. I always break up when I see this image of Harmon in the snow at age 6 or so. I guess I didn't mean to sidetrack this review,* but it is such a beautiful and heart-breaking image.
The poems after this sort of return to a more chronological order, going to Munro's young adulthood when apparently she moved to San Francisco. The poem "Midsummer, After Watching Bullitt" is a catalog of what life was like back in simpler days: "everyone / was thin then, before pasta became popular, living on grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs and celery sticks stuffed with Velveeta..." She recalls other aspects of being poor, like cockroaches in the kitchen and having to sleep on a hide-a-bed in tiny apartments.
Certainly some of her dissatisfaction stems from how the world turned out. The hippies eventually became middle class and voted for Reagan (or Mulroney). "we didn't guess the Selma March would fade, or that McDonald's would spawn millions / the sixties seemed so full -- we didn't imagine always being in a rush, or how our lives would grow more labyrinthine..." But it seems clear she would pretty much drop anything to go back to those days before being burdened with the full weight of adult responsibilities. I know I would. Anyway, this is one of the poems from the collection that really speaks to me.
I also like "Intercourse," though this seems to be tied to economic ties and nothing more intimate. It's actually a poem about a freight train and freight transport more generally, which then leads her into a reverie of her own train travel, including a train ride through Quebec. "Transports / tying a country together. / The slow strip of a whistle uncovers / longing ... / ... The way I longed to / speak French after a trip to Percé. Riding a little train / across the Gaspé..."
The next section of the collection seems to delve into her middle aged life. In the title poem "Point No Point," she discusses the whole move from the city (presumably Vancouver) to Vancouver Island. "We left the city, moving to this coast and its colder climate when I turned fifty and wanted to change my life. What was I expecting?"
What she finds is a more immediate connection with nature as she walks down her driveway into the trails that lead to Point No Point. "Out on the point, cormorants and gulls queue in the gale and stare across the strait at the Olympics. A trawler gurgles by. I think of the smell of coffee and diesel as I step carefully on wet rock, the swell and dip of the deck." This poem is growing on me. It and a few others in this collection put me in mind of the Vermont poet David Budbill. If I ever manage to publish the transportation poetry anthology, I think I would try to include this in the nature walks section, even though it is a bit of a stretch.
I also like "Morning with Cats" where Munro describes how the morning is so magical, mostly because of a very thick fog that has settled around her house, that she decides not to split wood or light the furnace but to put on Mahler's Fourth and watch the cats. "Fog coats the windows with seed pearls. Music loves / the kitchen's plain details. I watch one cat drink rapidly. / We eat a little. What a lush romance to have a life." There is something almost meditative in this poem and a few others in this section. This is a strand of her poetry that becomes stronger in the next collections, but I'll get to them in due course.
The final section contains only a single, long poem, "Moving to a Colder Climate." This ends up seeming very much like Sharon Olds and her confessional poetry, particularly where she delves into her childhood and how her dealings with her parents were fraught with a lot of anxiety and anger. However, she still was deeply affected by their deaths and found that she loved them despite everything. Indeed, "Moving to a Colder Climate" does remind me in certain sections of Olds' The Father generally and "The Race" specifically.
What we find out is that her father had some incredibly bad luck. His business partner in the boatyard apparently embezzled or something, and that was a large part of the reason he had to give that up and become a hired hand of sorts. Her father built a house for himself and Munro's mother, but it caught fire and her mother (foolishly) went back in for something and died in the flames. As one might imagine, he was never quite the same. At the same time, Munro does not shy away from indicating how chauvinist he was towards her, particularly when she was growing up, and what a control freak he was about all kinds of things, including what books she checked out from the library.
He'd urge, To thine own self be true,
then swear, I will make a woman of you,
by which he meant
pleasant, conventional, deferential,
decorative. ...
He also had some strictures about how mothers must subordinate themselves to their children. And was quite racist towards one of Munro's non-white boyfriends (perhaps the one with whom she lived in San Francisco). Munro tries to keep both sides in balance as she evaluates the influence he had over her, which was quite immense to the point that he reappears as a ghost in the living room.
I hadn't really expected such a complicated picture of her father from the poems in the first section which suggested she had a fairly conventional childhood, though in "Moving to a Colder Climate" she really lets quite a bit hang out. Still not quite to the extent that Sharon Olds does, however. What is somewhat intriguing is that Munro seems to retreat from confessional poet mode in her subsequent collections, so this might have been the last she really had to say on the subject of her complex father. It's certainly an interesting poem, but I do like the first two sections of the collection more.
* Edit: While I don't want to SPOIL it, the plot of Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities involves the loss of a brother, and one could definitely say that his unwillingness to live a conventional life led to a pretty bleak fate.
Up to this point, the first batch of poems are generally uplifting vignettes of Munro's remembrances of growing up. Her father teaches her about life on a camping trip, making sure that she has survival skills. He is definitely a man's man, but that is what makes sense, living in largely rural areas in B.C.
However, with knowledge of what is to come, there are certainly a few warning signs in the first batch of poems in the collection, particularly when Munro sort of casually mentions that her father owned and lost a boatyard. But most achingly in the early going in "Missing Person" when she talks about her brother who has essentially become a loner and then vanished off the grid: "Traced to Edmonton and thin air." This is always the worst case scenario for parents -- that their child will somehow fail to thrive, get into drugs and vanish. Here, Munro must take on the worry and perhaps even a bit of the guilt (though she doesn't discuss that) as both her parents are dead by this point. It's a moving but sad poem.
As an aside, the semi-renowned Chicago photographer Art Shay lost his son at a somewhat younger age (than Munro's brother) while he was out more or less hitchhiking his way around the world, trying to find himself, and sadly eventually running into trouble. It sounds as though this son, Harmon, was simply unlucky and wasn't driven/dragged down by the internal demons that haunt Munro's brother. I'm not sure that makes the pain any less, however. I always break up when I see this image of Harmon in the snow at age 6 or so. I guess I didn't mean to sidetrack this review,* but it is such a beautiful and heart-breaking image.
The poems after this sort of return to a more chronological order, going to Munro's young adulthood when apparently she moved to San Francisco. The poem "Midsummer, After Watching Bullitt" is a catalog of what life was like back in simpler days: "everyone / was thin then, before pasta became popular, living on grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs and celery sticks stuffed with Velveeta..." She recalls other aspects of being poor, like cockroaches in the kitchen and having to sleep on a hide-a-bed in tiny apartments.
Certainly some of her dissatisfaction stems from how the world turned out. The hippies eventually became middle class and voted for Reagan (or Mulroney). "we didn't guess the Selma March would fade, or that McDonald's would spawn millions / the sixties seemed so full -- we didn't imagine always being in a rush, or how our lives would grow more labyrinthine..." But it seems clear she would pretty much drop anything to go back to those days before being burdened with the full weight of adult responsibilities. I know I would. Anyway, this is one of the poems from the collection that really speaks to me.
I also like "Intercourse," though this seems to be tied to economic ties and nothing more intimate. It's actually a poem about a freight train and freight transport more generally, which then leads her into a reverie of her own train travel, including a train ride through Quebec. "Transports / tying a country together. / The slow strip of a whistle uncovers / longing ... / ... The way I longed to / speak French after a trip to Percé. Riding a little train / across the Gaspé..."
The next section of the collection seems to delve into her middle aged life. In the title poem "Point No Point," she discusses the whole move from the city (presumably Vancouver) to Vancouver Island. "We left the city, moving to this coast and its colder climate when I turned fifty and wanted to change my life. What was I expecting?"
What she finds is a more immediate connection with nature as she walks down her driveway into the trails that lead to Point No Point. "Out on the point, cormorants and gulls queue in the gale and stare across the strait at the Olympics. A trawler gurgles by. I think of the smell of coffee and diesel as I step carefully on wet rock, the swell and dip of the deck." This poem is growing on me. It and a few others in this collection put me in mind of the Vermont poet David Budbill. If I ever manage to publish the transportation poetry anthology, I think I would try to include this in the nature walks section, even though it is a bit of a stretch.
I also like "Morning with Cats" where Munro describes how the morning is so magical, mostly because of a very thick fog that has settled around her house, that she decides not to split wood or light the furnace but to put on Mahler's Fourth and watch the cats. "Fog coats the windows with seed pearls. Music loves / the kitchen's plain details. I watch one cat drink rapidly. / We eat a little. What a lush romance to have a life." There is something almost meditative in this poem and a few others in this section. This is a strand of her poetry that becomes stronger in the next collections, but I'll get to them in due course.
The final section contains only a single, long poem, "Moving to a Colder Climate." This ends up seeming very much like Sharon Olds and her confessional poetry, particularly where she delves into her childhood and how her dealings with her parents were fraught with a lot of anxiety and anger. However, she still was deeply affected by their deaths and found that she loved them despite everything. Indeed, "Moving to a Colder Climate" does remind me in certain sections of Olds' The Father generally and "The Race" specifically.
What we find out is that her father had some incredibly bad luck. His business partner in the boatyard apparently embezzled or something, and that was a large part of the reason he had to give that up and become a hired hand of sorts. Her father built a house for himself and Munro's mother, but it caught fire and her mother (foolishly) went back in for something and died in the flames. As one might imagine, he was never quite the same. At the same time, Munro does not shy away from indicating how chauvinist he was towards her, particularly when she was growing up, and what a control freak he was about all kinds of things, including what books she checked out from the library.
He'd urge, To thine own self be true,
then swear, I will make a woman of you,
by which he meant
pleasant, conventional, deferential,
decorative. ...
He also had some strictures about how mothers must subordinate themselves to their children. And was quite racist towards one of Munro's non-white boyfriends (perhaps the one with whom she lived in San Francisco). Munro tries to keep both sides in balance as she evaluates the influence he had over her, which was quite immense to the point that he reappears as a ghost in the living room.
I hadn't really expected such a complicated picture of her father from the poems in the first section which suggested she had a fairly conventional childhood, though in "Moving to a Colder Climate" she really lets quite a bit hang out. Still not quite to the extent that Sharon Olds does, however. What is somewhat intriguing is that Munro seems to retreat from confessional poet mode in her subsequent collections, so this might have been the last she really had to say on the subject of her complex father. It's certainly an interesting poem, but I do like the first two sections of the collection more.
* Edit: While I don't want to SPOIL it, the plot of Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities involves the loss of a brother, and one could definitely say that his unwillingness to live a conventional life led to a pretty bleak fate.
Friday, December 26, 2014
8th Canadian Challenge - 11th Review - This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For
I read Al Rempel's This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For some time ago, probably all the way back in January! In my defense, I have generally found it harder to review poetry collections than novels, as it is very hard to convey the overall feel of a collection. Typically I only end up focusing on the two or three poems I like best, and that can perhaps skew the review towards my mood at the time. But I'll do my best.
In late 2013/early 2014, I was reading a fair number of poetry collections that I had been tipped off to by the BC Poetry in Transit series. Here are the actual subway placards for 2013, and here is a page with a more general overview of the program. I'd already heard of W.H. New's YVR, but several of the others were new to me. (In general, 2013 looks a bit stronger than the 2014 offerings, though I think I'll check Jane Munro's Blue Sonoma out of the library.)
As it happens, the title poem, which is probably the strongest in the collection, is reprinted in its entirely on the subway placard. I'll just reprint the first and last lines:
the trains bend and bend and follow the recursive river
and they carry everything I need
...
somewhere in the North Pacific, my plastic obsession
is being stirred into the brine by an invisible finger
If I am following this, I think what Rempel is discussing is how the freight trains are carrying all kinds of unnecessary consumer goods, many of which will ultimately end up in landfills or, worse, be flushed out to the ocean. He may also be thinking of several news reports from a couple of years ago about the large number of shipments from Asian (of mostly plastic items of one type of another) that ended up going overboard and cluttering up the ecosystem. We as humans really only have ourselves to blame for this despoiling of nature, though in the case of a place further north, like Prince George, BC where Rempel resides, much of the pollution comes from outsiders. Obviously, a cheerful message for Boxing Day,* but it is always worth keeping in mind to keep excess consumption to a minimum and to recycle as much as possible and to absolutely not dump in the ocean.
The general anxiety becomes far more specific and pointed in "Have a Bath" where a parent's fears for his (or her) child becomes quite overwhelming. Danger lurks behind every decision that one makes:
what isn’t a question of risk management? we send
our children off in automobiles and buses.
one minute, their smiles bobbing in the window —
but we mustn’t think of it, mustn’t imagine
gasoline tankers or ditches. we’re not sure
how much reality we make with our minds.
Just thinking of the boogeyman can summon him up! This is particularly on point, since we are just starting to let our oldest walk around the neighbourhood (a bit) on his own and perhaps next year he'll be able to walk to school on his own. Anyway, the parent finally tries to relax a bit in a hot bubble bath, but still seems very edgy. The final line emphasizes how much generalized anxiety has settled in: "wait for the phone to ring", i.e. it is only a question of when (not whether) disaster will strike.
Moving on, to a slightly more positive poem (though one that still implicitly criticizes the wastefulness of the North American consumer) "We Love Bananas":
here’s what we do with bananas. we buy them just
when they’re turning yellow. we play the Tarzan
theme song in our heads as we carry them to the car.
we place them in a ceramic bowl and leave them
out with the still life. we forget to eat them and they go
soft. we put them on the top shelf in the freezer.
we throw them out when we can’t fit
the box of pizza in. we’ve already bought more.
I'll end with a poem about ferries -- "Leaving the Terminal." While I found a few good poems about ferries while researching my poetry and transportation anthology, they are still relatively rare. This poem launches into the voyage from the start:
we’re on board
and the ocean rises to meet us.
the men at the gates are left standing with their safety vests on,
recede with social conventions and the rebuke of seagulls.
we should talk about the light —
it’s gone.
...
your hand on my arm draws me back
not to you, but to the beating rain
which runs rivulets down the ferry windows
lit up in the ferry’s strange light
what is it? you ask
it's dark.
I found over time, the lack of capitalization felt a bit gimmicky, especially since Rempel didn't go full-cummings and eliminate all punctuation. Note also that "I" remains capitalized throughout. It's a small point, I suppose.
In general, this struck me as a collection that tended towards darker themes. Relationships were somewhat fraught and miscommunication common. There was a sense that disaster, particularly environmental collapse, was just around the corner. If the end of the world was coming, we wanted something else, perhaps something more glamorous...
That isn't to say there aren't more light-hearted poems in the collection, but the ones I thought were the strongest had at least some dark elements to them. I'll try to remember to look up Rempel in a few years to see if he puts out another collection and how closely it follows Apocalypse.
* Edit: I probably should not pick on my neighbours, but I was just astounded by the amount of wrapping paper they were tossing out on Boxing Day (at least it was being recycled), indicating a somewhat out-of-control Christmas.
In late 2013/early 2014, I was reading a fair number of poetry collections that I had been tipped off to by the BC Poetry in Transit series. Here are the actual subway placards for 2013, and here is a page with a more general overview of the program. I'd already heard of W.H. New's YVR, but several of the others were new to me. (In general, 2013 looks a bit stronger than the 2014 offerings, though I think I'll check Jane Munro's Blue Sonoma out of the library.)
As it happens, the title poem, which is probably the strongest in the collection, is reprinted in its entirely on the subway placard. I'll just reprint the first and last lines:
the trains bend and bend and follow the recursive river
and they carry everything I need
...
somewhere in the North Pacific, my plastic obsession
is being stirred into the brine by an invisible finger
If I am following this, I think what Rempel is discussing is how the freight trains are carrying all kinds of unnecessary consumer goods, many of which will ultimately end up in landfills or, worse, be flushed out to the ocean. He may also be thinking of several news reports from a couple of years ago about the large number of shipments from Asian (of mostly plastic items of one type of another) that ended up going overboard and cluttering up the ecosystem. We as humans really only have ourselves to blame for this despoiling of nature, though in the case of a place further north, like Prince George, BC where Rempel resides, much of the pollution comes from outsiders. Obviously, a cheerful message for Boxing Day,* but it is always worth keeping in mind to keep excess consumption to a minimum and to recycle as much as possible and to absolutely not dump in the ocean.
The general anxiety becomes far more specific and pointed in "Have a Bath" where a parent's fears for his (or her) child becomes quite overwhelming. Danger lurks behind every decision that one makes:
what isn’t a question of risk management? we send
our children off in automobiles and buses.
one minute, their smiles bobbing in the window —
but we mustn’t think of it, mustn’t imagine
gasoline tankers or ditches. we’re not sure
how much reality we make with our minds.
Just thinking of the boogeyman can summon him up! This is particularly on point, since we are just starting to let our oldest walk around the neighbourhood (a bit) on his own and perhaps next year he'll be able to walk to school on his own. Anyway, the parent finally tries to relax a bit in a hot bubble bath, but still seems very edgy. The final line emphasizes how much generalized anxiety has settled in: "wait for the phone to ring", i.e. it is only a question of when (not whether) disaster will strike.
Moving on, to a slightly more positive poem (though one that still implicitly criticizes the wastefulness of the North American consumer) "We Love Bananas":
here’s what we do with bananas. we buy them just
when they’re turning yellow. we play the Tarzan
theme song in our heads as we carry them to the car.
we place them in a ceramic bowl and leave them
out with the still life. we forget to eat them and they go
soft. we put them on the top shelf in the freezer.
we throw them out when we can’t fit
the box of pizza in. we’ve already bought more.
I'll end with a poem about ferries -- "Leaving the Terminal." While I found a few good poems about ferries while researching my poetry and transportation anthology, they are still relatively rare. This poem launches into the voyage from the start:
we’re on board
and the ocean rises to meet us.
the men at the gates are left standing with their safety vests on,
recede with social conventions and the rebuke of seagulls.
we should talk about the light —
it’s gone.
...
your hand on my arm draws me back
not to you, but to the beating rain
which runs rivulets down the ferry windows
lit up in the ferry’s strange light
what is it? you ask
it's dark.
I found over time, the lack of capitalization felt a bit gimmicky, especially since Rempel didn't go full-cummings and eliminate all punctuation. Note also that "I" remains capitalized throughout. It's a small point, I suppose.
In general, this struck me as a collection that tended towards darker themes. Relationships were somewhat fraught and miscommunication common. There was a sense that disaster, particularly environmental collapse, was just around the corner. If the end of the world was coming, we wanted something else, perhaps something more glamorous...
That isn't to say there aren't more light-hearted poems in the collection, but the ones I thought were the strongest had at least some dark elements to them. I'll try to remember to look up Rempel in a few years to see if he puts out another collection and how closely it follows Apocalypse.
* Edit: I probably should not pick on my neighbours, but I was just astounded by the amount of wrapping paper they were tossing out on Boxing Day (at least it was being recycled), indicating a somewhat out-of-control Christmas.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
8th Canadian Challenge - 9th review - Failure to Thrive
I'll just open with a short observation drawn from Alexander Herzen's My Past and Thoughts. There seems to be a bit of a contradiction in how he and his coterie would argue so seriously about philosophical ideals, but then he has a general aside how he dislikes the serious young men of Germany but the Americans are even worse. (I think he tries to square this by describing some of the high-jinks that his Russian friends got up to.) While I probably would have gotten on reasonably well with Herzen as an adult, I was extremely serious in high school (this old before your time is exactly what Herzen dislikes). (Actually, I am trying to recall some of that moral fervour in The Study Group -- how successfully is still to be determined.) Generally, Herzen tried to be open minded and understand where people are coming from and why they act the way they do. As he aged, he definitely became more empathetic, though he seemed to take an instant dislike to overly bureaucratic types, whom he kept running up against.
At any rate, I should try to find a way to dampen down my general antipathy to Millennials, given what a bad hand they have been dealt in terms of a bad economy and far fewer of the benefits that the Boomers got (Gen X falls somewhere in between), and if the worst environmental scenarios play themselves out, then they will definitely be forced to deal with this at a time when they should be looking forward to retirement. I see from some general surveys that they actually do take an interest in the environment and that they generally are less materialistic with respect to the big-ticket items like cars (and they may never have their own homes). However, the ones that I encounter seem to never take their eyes off these tiny little screens, and consequently, they seem to be extremely shallow and interested in the most trivial of things, aside from their more general problem of over-sharing (that will certainly come to haunt them later).
Despite these proclaimed intentions, I often fall short. I will have to say that Suzannah Showler's Failure to Thrive did little to change my perception of Millenials as trivial and unserious. So this review starts from a fairly negative place, and I will understand if you decide to bail at this point.
There was one serious misconception on my part and that was I read "Whale Fall" as "Whale Fail," i.e. when Twitter goes down. However, a whale fall is a real phenomenon that would be somewhat familiar to someone living in Newfoundland for instance. I liked the lines from the last stanza: "Because this is one way the earth ends; / abyssal, superlative with all-dark, / an absence too thorough / to be imagined in a living body."
However, it is unclear whether Showler spent much if any time on the coast(s) to really feel whales in her bones, as she is from Ottawa and did her creative writing program in Toronto. It seems she has actually decamped to Columbus, Ohio. I guess none of this matters, but she isn't a place-based poet in the sense that some of the eastern poets are. She tends to focus more on little ironies with her fairly-cerebral poems and draws on cyberspace as her "place." (In fact, Showler says that "Whale Fall" was inspired by a Radiolab program, apparently this podcast in fact.)
I think my favourite from the collection is probably "Pretty Good Time at the Olfactory Factory," which tries to generate strong smells in the mind of the reader:
Incidentally, the cover of the collection has an image of a Scratch 'n Sniff sticker, which presumably relates back to this poem.
I also was amused by the idea that her idea of a disaster was being dragged by an invisible force back to Ottawa. This is a poem from the section Sucks To Be You and Other True Taunts (which is perhaps appropriate the part of the book where she sounds the most like a Millennial). The poem is "Why Don't You Go Home and Cry About It?"
I have a feeling about a very slow
apocalypse where we are all drawn
back to our hometowns by something
like a magnet that attracts whatever
inside us is most mediocre and true.
...
... I'll need something
to think about when I am caught,
post-apocalpytically, in Ottawa,
Ontario, the capital of Canada,
where my parents still live.
I found there were a few decent poems, which is not bad for a first collection, but on the whole Showler's voice and preoccupations are not of great interest to me, and that is at least in part due to generational differences. I even found myself out of sympathy with the Radiolab folks who take some really interesting material, but cut it oddly and add a bit too much attitude and snark to it. I can tell it's going to be a long, painful time for me as the Millennials come to the fore (while still living in their parents' basements) as I am so out of step with them.
At any rate, I should try to find a way to dampen down my general antipathy to Millennials, given what a bad hand they have been dealt in terms of a bad economy and far fewer of the benefits that the Boomers got (Gen X falls somewhere in between), and if the worst environmental scenarios play themselves out, then they will definitely be forced to deal with this at a time when they should be looking forward to retirement. I see from some general surveys that they actually do take an interest in the environment and that they generally are less materialistic with respect to the big-ticket items like cars (and they may never have their own homes). However, the ones that I encounter seem to never take their eyes off these tiny little screens, and consequently, they seem to be extremely shallow and interested in the most trivial of things, aside from their more general problem of over-sharing (that will certainly come to haunt them later).
Despite these proclaimed intentions, I often fall short. I will have to say that Suzannah Showler's Failure to Thrive did little to change my perception of Millenials as trivial and unserious. So this review starts from a fairly negative place, and I will understand if you decide to bail at this point.
There was one serious misconception on my part and that was I read "Whale Fall" as "Whale Fail," i.e. when Twitter goes down. However, a whale fall is a real phenomenon that would be somewhat familiar to someone living in Newfoundland for instance. I liked the lines from the last stanza: "Because this is one way the earth ends; / abyssal, superlative with all-dark, / an absence too thorough / to be imagined in a living body."
However, it is unclear whether Showler spent much if any time on the coast(s) to really feel whales in her bones, as she is from Ottawa and did her creative writing program in Toronto. It seems she has actually decamped to Columbus, Ohio. I guess none of this matters, but she isn't a place-based poet in the sense that some of the eastern poets are. She tends to focus more on little ironies with her fairly-cerebral poems and draws on cyberspace as her "place." (In fact, Showler says that "Whale Fall" was inspired by a Radiolab program, apparently this podcast in fact.)
I think my favourite from the collection is probably "Pretty Good Time at the Olfactory Factory," which tries to generate strong smells in the mind of the reader:
- Coconut-sweet wind laced with salt / bending around the near-albino mesa / of potash burped out of the prairie.
- Bike lock in winter coaxed open / with a crème brûlée torch.
- A Scratch 'n Sniff sticker / with all the good stuff / scratched out of it.
Incidentally, the cover of the collection has an image of a Scratch 'n Sniff sticker, which presumably relates back to this poem.
I also was amused by the idea that her idea of a disaster was being dragged by an invisible force back to Ottawa. This is a poem from the section Sucks To Be You and Other True Taunts (which is perhaps appropriate the part of the book where she sounds the most like a Millennial). The poem is "Why Don't You Go Home and Cry About It?"
I have a feeling about a very slow
apocalypse where we are all drawn
back to our hometowns by something
like a magnet that attracts whatever
inside us is most mediocre and true.
...
... I'll need something
to think about when I am caught,
post-apocalpytically, in Ottawa,
Ontario, the capital of Canada,
where my parents still live.
I found there were a few decent poems, which is not bad for a first collection, but on the whole Showler's voice and preoccupations are not of great interest to me, and that is at least in part due to generational differences. I even found myself out of sympathy with the Radiolab folks who take some really interesting material, but cut it oddly and add a bit too much attitude and snark to it. I can tell it's going to be a long, painful time for me as the Millennials come to the fore (while still living in their parents' basements) as I am so out of step with them.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
8th Canadian Challenge - 6th review - Other People's Lives
Another very tardy review that I have finally come back around to. I actually had to reread long sections of Chris Hutchinson's Other People's Lives to refresh my memory, but in some ways that is a good thing, since poetry often takes a few readings.
I find there is definitely some interesting stuff in this collection, which I found a bit stronger overall than Unfamiliar Weather. There is a lot of intensive use of language, in the sense of a great deal of attention to unconventional words and words that may have been chosen as much for their sound as for their meaning, and towards the end of the collection, perhaps even Hutchinson is starting to drift into John Ashbery territory (which I don't like as meaning seems completely secondary or even tertiary in an Ashbery poem).
Other People's Lives is on the Brick Books imprint, which has put out quite a few strong collections over the past few years. I was particularly taken by Mortal Arguments by Sue Sinclair, as well as the follow-up collection, Breaker. I review both in this post.
Almost all the poems in Other People's Lives are free verse. However, I was intrigued by the rhymes and near-rhymes in "Homeless" which is in sonnet form. Here are just the final words of each line: "streamed / mushrooms / believed / bloomed. / past, / bone / cans / moonstones. / withdrew / reopening. / knew / dwelling / sight, / light." Rhyming mushrooms and bloomed is boss. I was less impressed with reopening/dwelling. I'm kind of on the fence with past and cans. I don't think it entirely works, but I probably would have accepted past/canned or passed/cans. Anyway, an interesting experiment.
"Entertaining*" is at one level a description of a party that is being thrown, but at the same time it is a bit of a mediation on the impossibility of communication. It starts relatively innocuously: "Tonight, your friends will come / with masks of coloured smoke, / butter-tongued admonishments, / promises punctuated with the sucking of breath ...". Despite the host's efforts "everything / you meant to say rushing into this vacuous pit faster / than your ability to lift your head...". The evening ends in "ill health / and fashionable ruin." Of course, that could describe many evenings where a great deal of alcohol is involved, but part of the tragedy seems to be in not being able to break through and explain oneself clearly, even to friends with whom one is presumably close.
In the middle of "Nineteenth-Century Loner" comes the following passage, which is largely opaque to me. The words flow well, but they strain against meaning:
Let's picture the suburbs at night
conspiring against the ornamental opulence
of the dream-state, and him whispering to
and from the death of sleep recurrently
as waves breaking upon the glassy moonlit sands
where no one goes unless alone and
prone to ludicrous imaginings.
Does this simply mean that this loner is drifting in and out of sleep (from his suburban home)? The passage is so over-written (overwrought) if that is the plain meaning, but that seems to be the point. Certainly a fair number of the late Victorian poets were prone to such florid passages. As I said, this strikes me as moving close to Ashbery, and I think Hutchinson's next collection takes him still a bit further in this direction.
In "Game" Hutchinson seems to directly address what he is up to in some of his poems: "Is it a game, this semantic shuffle, or that / which gets you to the breakfast table--the goal / not the centre, but life's ironic fringes-- / obsessed not with words, but with their hinges?"
I think I will end (for now at least) with "As It Was" which seems to be describing a fairly typical day in the city for this incipient Language poet: "The city was a beautiful day. / Out on the grid, the open grid, vehicles / multiplied a certain domestic resonance. / Signs stopped. Whatever it was they were / thinking moved us...".
So I hope this gives you a taste of what Hutchinson is up to with these poems. They are not nearly as straight-forward as many of the other collections I have reviewed, but Hutchinson is clearly someone who cares about words and their impact, even if clarity is a secondary consideration at times.
* Perhaps a minor rift** on Henry Green's Party Going?
** I just noticed that I should have written riff, but this is good too.
I find there is definitely some interesting stuff in this collection, which I found a bit stronger overall than Unfamiliar Weather. There is a lot of intensive use of language, in the sense of a great deal of attention to unconventional words and words that may have been chosen as much for their sound as for their meaning, and towards the end of the collection, perhaps even Hutchinson is starting to drift into John Ashbery territory (which I don't like as meaning seems completely secondary or even tertiary in an Ashbery poem).
Other People's Lives is on the Brick Books imprint, which has put out quite a few strong collections over the past few years. I was particularly taken by Mortal Arguments by Sue Sinclair, as well as the follow-up collection, Breaker. I review both in this post.
Almost all the poems in Other People's Lives are free verse. However, I was intrigued by the rhymes and near-rhymes in "Homeless" which is in sonnet form. Here are just the final words of each line: "streamed / mushrooms / believed / bloomed. / past, / bone / cans / moonstones. / withdrew / reopening. / knew / dwelling / sight, / light." Rhyming mushrooms and bloomed is boss. I was less impressed with reopening/dwelling. I'm kind of on the fence with past and cans. I don't think it entirely works, but I probably would have accepted past/canned or passed/cans. Anyway, an interesting experiment.
"Entertaining*" is at one level a description of a party that is being thrown, but at the same time it is a bit of a mediation on the impossibility of communication. It starts relatively innocuously: "Tonight, your friends will come / with masks of coloured smoke, / butter-tongued admonishments, / promises punctuated with the sucking of breath ...". Despite the host's efforts "everything / you meant to say rushing into this vacuous pit faster / than your ability to lift your head...". The evening ends in "ill health / and fashionable ruin." Of course, that could describe many evenings where a great deal of alcohol is involved, but part of the tragedy seems to be in not being able to break through and explain oneself clearly, even to friends with whom one is presumably close.
In the middle of "Nineteenth-Century Loner" comes the following passage, which is largely opaque to me. The words flow well, but they strain against meaning:
Let's picture the suburbs at night
conspiring against the ornamental opulence
of the dream-state, and him whispering to
and from the death of sleep recurrently
as waves breaking upon the glassy moonlit sands
where no one goes unless alone and
prone to ludicrous imaginings.
Does this simply mean that this loner is drifting in and out of sleep (from his suburban home)? The passage is so over-written (overwrought) if that is the plain meaning, but that seems to be the point. Certainly a fair number of the late Victorian poets were prone to such florid passages. As I said, this strikes me as moving close to Ashbery, and I think Hutchinson's next collection takes him still a bit further in this direction.
In "Game" Hutchinson seems to directly address what he is up to in some of his poems: "Is it a game, this semantic shuffle, or that / which gets you to the breakfast table--the goal / not the centre, but life's ironic fringes-- / obsessed not with words, but with their hinges?"
I think I will end (for now at least) with "As It Was" which seems to be describing a fairly typical day in the city for this incipient Language poet: "The city was a beautiful day. / Out on the grid, the open grid, vehicles / multiplied a certain domestic resonance. / Signs stopped. Whatever it was they were / thinking moved us...".
So I hope this gives you a taste of what Hutchinson is up to with these poems. They are not nearly as straight-forward as many of the other collections I have reviewed, but Hutchinson is clearly someone who cares about words and their impact, even if clarity is a secondary consideration at times.
* Perhaps a minor rift** on Henry Green's Party Going?
** I just noticed that I should have written riff, but this is good too.
Monday, June 2, 2014
7th Canadian Challenge - 15th review - Unfamiliar Weather
This is actually the third book of poems by Chris Hutchinson that I read, but I figure I might as well review them in their proper (published) order. There is a fairly strong arc going from largely straight-forward poems (with perhaps an emphasis on lucidity and clarity -- the way I try to write my own poetry) to more focus on the language itself (sometimes at the expense of meaning) in Other People's Lives and A Brief History of the Short-Lived. While he doesn't quite reach John Ashbery territory by A Brief History, he is getting a bit close for my taste, and I personally think his best work is the middle volume, which I'll try to review this weekend. I'll keep a bit of an eye on his future volumes, but I expect he is moving in a direction that doesn't really interest me (a bit too academic and sterile).
Unfamiliar Weather is broken into four parts. I found the second part the most interesting, though I did like "Small Burdens" -- the multi-part poem that opens part one. In this collection and basically in his second collection, I generally thought the multi-part poems worked the best. That is also what I often find for George Bowering. Given that Hutchinson briefly lived in Vancouver, it is certainly possible he was inspired by Bowering.
"Small Burdens" takes up a different "thing" that often bothers people and devotes a calendar day to each one. So Monday is all about the weather: "Your eyes have starved all winter ... / ... / How you staggered delirious to meet the spring." Spring doesn't quite turn out as planned and the "you" of the poem only wants to go back to bed.
Tuesday brings up politics: "Today, bus fare went up again, it's rained / the last ten days of June and your neighbourhood floods / with heroin and cops. So where should you complain?" Writing to local politicians is essentially as futile as throwing stones "at the Milky Way."
Wednesday the poet takes public transport ("The Bus") and finds it lacking. Going on a date on Thursday is apparently nerve-wracking.
Friday (and not Monday?) brings up work as its own special burden: "Is this all there is? Squeezing life / into the cracks, into the small openings of the day."
I still don't quite get why going to the movies on Saturday is a burden, unless it is simply realizing that one's life will never be as glamourous. And Sunday is "art": "your small world spinning apart / around a deep-felt nothingness you consider / art..." This burden is considerably more abstract than the others. But it's a fun little series.
The second section seems to have mostly been written while in Vancouver, but looking back over his recent move across Canada.*
In "Translations," the poet speaks to a former lover:
Do you remember the summer
we spent in bed, how after love our eyes would wander
out the north window, unreel above Burrard Inlet? I used to imagine
the mountains were prehistoric waves about to smash this town to bits
we might reconstruct one day into an image of whatever future
we desired. What you envisioned I never thought to ask.
While the bus in the poems in the first section are local buses, Hutchinson also writes on long-distance bus trips and how they enable one to change one's life if one is willing to take a journey without looking back. Nearly all of the poems in this section speak to uprooting oneself from the East (apparently with Toronto as an intermediate destination) and traveling 5 provinces west, settling in Vancouver (at least as of the writing of these poems -- Hutchinson ultimately got a job in the States teaching poetry and moved South).
From "Lost in Transit": "The world is very small at the greyhound station. / Your destination is the size of a baggage tag, / your past, already fading like a bruise./ Lost in transit, everyone's a stranger / to themselves ..."
While this poem is a bit didactic, I can relate to this idea of uprooting oneself in the hopes of finding something better out there...
I would say that "At the Greyhound Station" covers much the same ground but is a bit more artistically satisfying:
Grounded here
at the Greyhound station, a woman
flicks her cigarette at the curb, shuffles her feet,
kicks at stones like annoying
afterthoughts or fragments of remorse
...
And I want our stories
to intertwine, fuse like two headlights
fixed on the road ahead ...
...
Cramped back into my seat
I am a solitary pilgrim again, the sky gone
faint behind the tint of my thin reflection
...
continually getting lost and falling in love
with a stranger's life.
I would agree with Hutchinson that imagining the lives of one's fellow passengers can be a game to pass the time. One is oddly vulnerable when travelling on these long-distance trips, and generally a bit more open to or receptive to others. Of course, that is only if one is travelling alone. And this may have been more true in the 1980s or even early 1990s before everyone had cell phone service that covered a bit chunk of rural Canada. There is definitely less "romance" in imagining a stranger's life when they are blurting it all out in a one-sided telephone conversation. Then they are just one more annoyance (or part of the "burden" of public transportation to return to the poem that kicked off this collection).
I thought the third and fourth sections were ok, but definitely did not live up to the heights of these cross-country migration poems of the second section. However, I did enjoy parts of the poem, "Variations on a Theme," which closed Unfamiliar Weather; it both tapped into the persistent ache of a dissatisfied soul and added one last dash of Can. con. to this collection:
Another glass to prolong the moment
since you can't sleep anyway; only
the cat is lost in its important slumber.
But listen: on the radio, Glenn Gould
hums off-key behind his piano--
the way you too sing
these crude little songs
to keep the whole universe
company.
* It is certainly a bit amusing to me that I am reversing Hutchinson's path -- from the States to Vancouver to Toronto. However, I plan on stopping there and not going on to Montreal...
Apparently, Hutchinson was just in Vancouver (last Wed.) doing a poetry reading in support of a fourth collection called Jonas in Frames. While this probably would have been interesting, I had some obligations I simply couldn't shake off. And apparently, I missed an earlier reading in Toronto, so I guess I will not be seeing him read live any time soon.
Unfamiliar Weather is broken into four parts. I found the second part the most interesting, though I did like "Small Burdens" -- the multi-part poem that opens part one. In this collection and basically in his second collection, I generally thought the multi-part poems worked the best. That is also what I often find for George Bowering. Given that Hutchinson briefly lived in Vancouver, it is certainly possible he was inspired by Bowering.
"Small Burdens" takes up a different "thing" that often bothers people and devotes a calendar day to each one. So Monday is all about the weather: "Your eyes have starved all winter ... / ... / How you staggered delirious to meet the spring." Spring doesn't quite turn out as planned and the "you" of the poem only wants to go back to bed.
Tuesday brings up politics: "Today, bus fare went up again, it's rained / the last ten days of June and your neighbourhood floods / with heroin and cops. So where should you complain?" Writing to local politicians is essentially as futile as throwing stones "at the Milky Way."
Wednesday the poet takes public transport ("The Bus") and finds it lacking. Going on a date on Thursday is apparently nerve-wracking.
Friday (and not Monday?) brings up work as its own special burden: "Is this all there is? Squeezing life / into the cracks, into the small openings of the day."
I still don't quite get why going to the movies on Saturday is a burden, unless it is simply realizing that one's life will never be as glamourous. And Sunday is "art": "your small world spinning apart / around a deep-felt nothingness you consider / art..." This burden is considerably more abstract than the others. But it's a fun little series.
The second section seems to have mostly been written while in Vancouver, but looking back over his recent move across Canada.*
In "Translations," the poet speaks to a former lover:
Do you remember the summer
we spent in bed, how after love our eyes would wander
out the north window, unreel above Burrard Inlet? I used to imagine
the mountains were prehistoric waves about to smash this town to bits
we might reconstruct one day into an image of whatever future
we desired. What you envisioned I never thought to ask.
While the bus in the poems in the first section are local buses, Hutchinson also writes on long-distance bus trips and how they enable one to change one's life if one is willing to take a journey without looking back. Nearly all of the poems in this section speak to uprooting oneself from the East (apparently with Toronto as an intermediate destination) and traveling 5 provinces west, settling in Vancouver (at least as of the writing of these poems -- Hutchinson ultimately got a job in the States teaching poetry and moved South).
From "Lost in Transit": "The world is very small at the greyhound station. / Your destination is the size of a baggage tag, / your past, already fading like a bruise./ Lost in transit, everyone's a stranger / to themselves ..."
While this poem is a bit didactic, I can relate to this idea of uprooting oneself in the hopes of finding something better out there...
I would say that "At the Greyhound Station" covers much the same ground but is a bit more artistically satisfying:
Grounded here
at the Greyhound station, a woman
flicks her cigarette at the curb, shuffles her feet,
kicks at stones like annoying
afterthoughts or fragments of remorse
...
And I want our stories
to intertwine, fuse like two headlights
fixed on the road ahead ...
...
Cramped back into my seat
I am a solitary pilgrim again, the sky gone
faint behind the tint of my thin reflection
...
continually getting lost and falling in love
with a stranger's life.
I would agree with Hutchinson that imagining the lives of one's fellow passengers can be a game to pass the time. One is oddly vulnerable when travelling on these long-distance trips, and generally a bit more open to or receptive to others. Of course, that is only if one is travelling alone. And this may have been more true in the 1980s or even early 1990s before everyone had cell phone service that covered a bit chunk of rural Canada. There is definitely less "romance" in imagining a stranger's life when they are blurting it all out in a one-sided telephone conversation. Then they are just one more annoyance (or part of the "burden" of public transportation to return to the poem that kicked off this collection).
I thought the third and fourth sections were ok, but definitely did not live up to the heights of these cross-country migration poems of the second section. However, I did enjoy parts of the poem, "Variations on a Theme," which closed Unfamiliar Weather; it both tapped into the persistent ache of a dissatisfied soul and added one last dash of Can. con. to this collection:
Another glass to prolong the moment
since you can't sleep anyway; only
the cat is lost in its important slumber.
But listen: on the radio, Glenn Gould
hums off-key behind his piano--
the way you too sing
these crude little songs
to keep the whole universe
company.
* It is certainly a bit amusing to me that I am reversing Hutchinson's path -- from the States to Vancouver to Toronto. However, I plan on stopping there and not going on to Montreal...
Apparently, Hutchinson was just in Vancouver (last Wed.) doing a poetry reading in support of a fourth collection called Jonas in Frames. While this probably would have been interesting, I had some obligations I simply couldn't shake off. And apparently, I missed an earlier reading in Toronto, so I guess I will not be seeing him read live any time soon.
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