6th Canadian challenge - 11th review

I decided that my review of Sue Sinclair's Mortal Arguments didn't seem to adequately convey the strengths of the collection.  I will add a bit here, before moving on to review her follow-up collection Breaker.

The "Ways of Leaving" section starts off with "At the Platform, Newcastle."  I particularly like the lines: "there was none of the pain / you'd expect until the train pulled / out and the piece of us / that is time / ripped apart."

The rupture between family or friends separated by a journey, esp. a long and perhaps permanent one, can be quite challenging.  I actually have fairly weak ties to most people, but still, it does seem preferable in terms of emotional impact to be the one who leaves (since one usually has something to look forward to at the end of a journey).  Certainly, in general I've lived up to my vow to be the leaver and not the leavee.  Probably my favourite set of paintings on this theme are at the MoMA -- they are called States of Mind by Umberto Boccioni.

The Farewells

Those Who Depart

Those Who Stay

These images could have been appended to the post on mobility/rootlessness, but that was pretty long as it was.  And they do seem to fit the poem in the sense that the journey is a train journey.

Perhaps even more central (than struggling with religion) to the final section of Mortal Arguments ("Patience") is wrangling with death and/or oblivion.  Indeed, the poet declares in "St. Phillip's": "No one really / believes in death or dying, / its unwilled oblivion."

However, the voice is less convinced in "Dusk": "Under the surgical gaze of the stars / we bare ourselves, wait to see what can be done."

And in "Forever" death is imagined almost as a parlor trick (on the unwitting): "you can't imagine / that time might turn itself inside out, showing / that what you thought was the infinite / was only its lining."  After death, friends and family members "will pull a square of bright silk ... / then let it go, watch it drift away."  This is certainly one of the more melancholy poems of the collection.  Though the conclusions drawn may be a bit different, it does have interesting parallels with my poem, "My Tailor." 

Turning to Breaker, the poems that explore religion and/or the sublime are not as fresh or seem a bit cruder than in Mortal Arguments.  But I think Sinclair still rises to the occasion with slightly off-center language and metaphor.  Though in terms of the percentage of poems where this stands out may be slightly lower (and more poems come across as a bit more straight-forward and perhaps not as carefully constructed with thought-provoking metaphors).

I like the first stanza of "Sunburst," but am not as interested where the poem goes afterwards:
"Objects in their endless sleep,
hearts beating once, maybe
twice an hour. The clouds drifting
just under the skin of the visible."

In "St. Philip's, Rain," the relationship with the divine seems very fraught: "the rest of us sick with longing for a god / we no longer believe in, our faces / like spoons, plain and hungry."  While not everyone feels this need to believe, Sinclair expresses this longing well.

"Metropolis" contains interesting metaphors: "The city is a piano, its pedals sunk / deep underground."  Then "We [commuters or city dwellers in general] become paper shredders for obsolete decades."  I don't even know precisely what this means, though it may well be discussing the idea that cities (which are dominated by gesellschaft relations) are part of the project of modernity and that the past is routinely churned up and discarded.  Sinclair continues with this thought: "History might disappear entirely if we work hard enough."

Sinclair has a few other urban poems -- often looking what happens when "routine" city life is disrupted or interrupted.  In "Blackout," people "prowl the streets, greet everyone / as the intimate strangers we've become / ... soon a line of bicycles glides past, following / the glow of a single headlight as though / chasing a butterfly."

In addition to the shout-out to bicycles, Sinclair sneaks in a few poems on transportation into Breaker, and these are generally the ones I like most. "Driving North" focuses on night-time driving, ferries turn up in "Sixth View of Bell Island" and both "Delay" and "View from the Train" are about train rides.  In "Delay" the train never arrives.  "All of us thinking about home and how / we're not there and will or won't be missed, / how the surface of our life goes on elsewhere / even as we stand here."

Yet Sinclair suggests it isn't such a great thing to be on the train after all in "View from the Train": "The air in the car is sour with the breath / of strangers ... / The train pushes steadily on, / repeating the same clicks and clacks, chugging along as if / it will never stop."

To return to the Boccioni paintings, Sinclair definitely seems to be suggesting that the difference between the two phases of staying and going are not nearly as clear cut as they seem at first, or more centrally that one's personal satisfaction is probably not going to be altered that much by being on a moving train or being left on the platform.  I'm not at all sure I would agree with her, esp. if one is stuck on a platform but expected to be on the train, but there is certainly something to the notion that people make all kinds of changes in their situation (like going on journeys) and then end up no happier than before they set out.

Breaker is definitely another thought-provoking collection with a number of poems I enjoyed, though I do rank Mortal Arguments somewhat higher.

6th Canadian challenge - 10th review

As might be surmised from my recent posts, I have been kind of submerged in my old poetry, trying to get the best of it up on the blog.  This will probably continue through Feb., and I won't have nearly as much time for reviewing.  Also, at the moment I am reading more books on the theme of "the road trip," and naturally more of these books are by Americans.  In general, I've kind of gorged myself on others' poetry over the past 6 months and am kind of tired of it.  I think I have 1 more collection by W.H. New and 3.5 books by Sharon Olds to go, and, after that, I think I will be done with poetry for quite a while.

In any event, I did want to get to this review before the end of the year.  Mortal Arguments by Sue Sinclair is one of the best collections I've come across in the last couple of years. The collection kind of grew on me slowly.  The collection is divided into five sections: Abundance, Private Lives in Public Places, Heed, Ways of Leaving and Patience.

On rereading the collection there are fewer poems than I remembered that seem to be about transcendence and the difficulty of putting words to sublime (typically religious) phenomena.  In fact, sublime itself is an overused word; I prefer ineffable.  There are a few of these, primarily in the third section Heed.

"Sympathy" may be the most "explicit" about the paucity of language, and indeed human experience: "The blindness of perception, what we seek / never quite available, reflections skimmed / off the surface. / ... the abundance of the hidden."

"Witness II" has some lines along the same lines: "the elocution of the stars,/ unpronouncable, perfect syllables.  God encrypted / in the world."

Other poems consider other aspects of reconciling a personal deity with the infinite universe that science has revealed to us ("Bounty" and "Prayer II").  I found the same kind of general tension in Mary Oliver's earlier collections (sometimes the tension was more between faith and wanting to live in the modern world), though her later work has taken Oliver down an uninteresting path leading to (more or less) unquestioning faith.  And certainly I do think that Breaker (Sinclair's next collection) is less interesting than this one for various reasons.  But as I said, there is less overt religiosity in these two overall collections than in those of Oliver.

If the religious tension had been the only thing going for the poems, I wouldn't have been that interested, but I find her use of metaphor quite interesting and challenging.  She doesn't always go for the obvious one, which leads one to ponder what she had in mind longer.  Having to work a bit harder (but not too hard) is a feature of the better Metaphysical poems and some of the earlier work of the Modernist poets (T.S. Eliot in particular but not Pound by the time of The Cantos).

Here are some, more or less selected at random:

"Vacation": "The ocean roams / like a stray dog"

"Dreamlife of Houses": "Your sheets like the skin of another animal"

"Days in Between I": "The day is a cruise ship"

"Calgary": "The city, a glass bottle left / upright in the middle of the prairie."

"Prairie": "the sun has parked its car / in front of your door / and refuses to move."

"Night Fare": "Taxis float like water lilies / on the slick tarmac."

"Night Fare" is probably my favourite in the collection, though I also like the streetcar poem "From Spadina Station."  In both cases, the modes of transport are anthropomorphized to some extent and they are eagerly awaiting passengers.

In "Night Fare," the poet proclaims "they [the taxis] know too much about you, / the shine of each door a warning.  / You won't give them the satisfaction."  And the reader walks home. In some ways the tone (and certainly the use of the imperative) reminds me a bit of my own A Gradual Slipping Out of Circle.

In "From Spadina Station" the poet stays home, trying to sleep, while it is the streetcar pushing on through the night that is her surrogate.  Her dreams then take the form of a cat pacing in her apartment.  In some ways, there may be just a bit too much going on in this poem, though I did appreciate that it wasn't a straight-forward "dream poem," as those are pretty boring in general.

In general these poems reward second and third readings, since they are just slightly askew and the obvious choice in language and/or metaphor is rarely taken.

Vancouver culture

I probably have mentioned this before, but the cultural scene is pretty dire here.  And what is particularly upsetting is how amateurish so many of these companies and institutions are.  Take for example, the Queen Elizabeth Hall.  The sight lines are poor, but the dance company doesn't take that into account, staging a lot of the action at the front of the stage.  Much more upsetting to me is how the seats line up exactly, rather than being offset, so you almost guarantee being blocked by the person in front of you (it certainly was when we went to see The Nutcracker).  There is an upcoming production of Swan Lake in the same hall, and I decided to pass.

Other halls are slightly better, and the Chan Centre has better seat alignment, though in this case it is in such a remote location (very far side of UBC) that I probably won't go again.  Also, the restroom and lobby layout is terrible.

I've never shaken my grudge against The Cultch.  On top of being relatively inaccessible, they provided terrible transit directions on their website and an incorrect map!  This caused me to miss a production of Waiting for Godot, and I have decided to never go again.  The box office is also quite amateurish and indirectly spoiled an event over at SFU where the SFU box office used The Cultch's computer system, which was totally fouled up when I went to see The Far Side of the Moon.  I don't like trying to reach anything at Granville Island, and I've basically given up on trying to get to UBC.

It is a real shame that Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company closed, as that was kind of the closest to Victory Gardens (I saw Red there, which was their second-to-last production).  Arts Club seems just a bit closer to Goodman, and certainly overpriced for what it actually offers.  I've gone once, but probably won't go again.  One of the main downtown movie theatres is shutting down and I think that is going to put a big crimp in VIFF.  I didn't even go this year, though I went a few times last year, before the family arrived.  For whatever reason, I don't get really stoked by going to see foreign films in theatres.  Maybe it is just one too many things to care about and track.

I do enjoy Bard on the Beach for what it is, but it tends to go for slightly sloppy and populist versions of Shakespearean plays.  It looks like I will only go to one production in 2013 (Hamlet), just as I only went once in 2012 (Macbeth).  To be fair, I would have gone to see Findley's Elizabeth Rex this summer if I hadn't seen such a terrific production at Chicago Shakespeare last year (and I don't want to risk having a great production over-written with an average one in my mind).

And don't get me started on how lousy the Vancouver Art Gallery is.  The permanent collection is an embarrassment (unless you love, love, love Emily Carr), though some of the touring exhibits have been nice.

On a more personal level, I am really bummed that the Pacific Rim String Quartet have more or less hung up their bows and called it a day.  One of the very first things I did after arriving in Vancouver was to go to one of their concerts.  I ended up seeing three out of five (and took my son to one) and thought they were quite good for a local ensemble.  One less quality offering in the city... 

So out of everything on offer in Vancouver, I have pretty much scaled back to VSO at the Orpheum (not the Chan Centre), occasional student productions at Langara College and the occasional play at Firehall Arts Centre.  Well, Ninja Pirates may not be totally defunct after all, and I may go see their next show, and occasionally there are other interesting co-op productions.  Still, this seems quite paltry for a city this size. It is definitely a "push factor" for sure.

The Palace: Palace Portrait

I believe this is the last poem in the series that was inspired directly by a specific piece of artwork, though the one about the train to the palace was inspired in a generic way by Giorgio de Chirico's work. Anyway, this came about because I had been looking at a painting of Fernando Botero called La familia del Presidente (which is a riff on Velazquez and his paintings of Spanish royalty).  It is owned by MoMA, but I am not sure it has been on display for some time.  Most likely, I saw it back during an exhibit they did on Latin American art.

The poem also apparently draws on this painting as well, though I am not sure when or where I would have seen it. But certainly the puffiness and general ridiculousness of the figurehead ruler should come through in the poem -- and ideally the rest of the series.

 

Thinking back, it seems likely I was also influenced a bit by the sculpted pieces of Marisol Escobar, though I can't find a specific piece I might have been drawing on.  Some of the details in the poem don't match up; some are clearly things I added, but a few do seem like a direct reference to another piece (not the Botero painting). Well, it must remain a mystery for the time being.

Palace Portrait  

The imperial family is sitting for a painting.
The emperor wears a scarlet red sash
and all his medals. 
They have to strap him to the chair
to keep him from tilting over.
He is upset that his uniform is tight.
It will be let out in the morning.
The old tailor was thrown out of the palace
from the tallest tower.
In the morning a new tailor will be selected
from a line that already stretches out for nearly a mile. 
The empress sits on his right.
She wears her weight in diamonds.
His mistress sits a little behind and to the left. 
The zipper on her black dress is made of silver. 
The pearl necklace, however, is not real.
His brother is a soldier,
in fact a seven-star general,
who poses holding a cannon ball.
His other brother is a cardinal
who breathes heavily through his nose.
He also has put on flesh,
and his red robes reach only halfway around. 
One of the boys is trying to ride the dog.
The others giggle.
The emperor’s oldest daughter scowls.
She wants to slap the brat,
but she has to hide the ring on her finger.
Her father would definitely kill her suitor,
no, kill all her suitors if he knew about it.
Last night never happened, she decides.
The painter picks up his brush.
“Quiet!” commands the emperor.
“Nobody move!”

A Rage of Angels: Deliverance

This poem closes out the "A Rage of Angels" series.  It is thematically the least like the rest of the poems in the series, though perhaps there are some hints of things going a bit awry in the first one: the Angel of the City.  Still, it does serve as a bit of a rude awakening from the others.

In many ways, it is a fairly dark poem, perhaps closest in spirit to The Way It Was When I Was There.  Given they do have quite a bit of overlap at least in tone, it might just be too much for the two poems to actually co-exist in the same collection.  It doesn't appear that will ever be an issue, however.  I think of the two, I like Deliverance a bit better.

The most obvious inspiration is Jose Rivera's play Marisol.  I suspect I had seen the play before writing the poem, but I am not 100% sure (I saw the play for the first time in 1995).  I would have had experience dealing with homeless people in NYC by this point, but I think I also recollect a Toronto-based poet in a poetry group I attended in 1993 borrowing (figuratively) a homeless man's sign and incorporating it into his poem (and at least another established poet -- probably either Alan Dugan or Charles Reznikoff -- has done the same).  Just for the record, I did not steal the words off of a homeless woman's sign. In addition to filching from Marisol, there may be some flashes of Findley's Headhunter in there.  Again, I cannot recall exactly when I read that book for the first time.  Perhaps if I keep digitizing my files (and ultimately my diary), I will be able to track down some answers.  In the meantime, I present "Deliverance":

Deliverance

I woke in a city.
Was I in—
the city of lights,
the city of love,
the endless city,
the eternal city
or simply the unspeakable city?
I recall a bridge on fire,
cars falling through into a dark river,
a crowd scattering under black clouds.
It could have been the city of desperate angels.
Desperate men
sell themselves on the street,
organ by organ.
The rain does not rain down,
will not put out these fires.
Small children stumble through the streets,
stalked by alley cats.
One woman crouches under a broken plate glass window,
hiding a brick behind her back,
the other hand holding a sign:
“I want to be good —
Please help”
in red ragged letters.
Growling dogs drag scraps of dirty, unspeakable meat to dark corners.
When two angels bump into each other,
heads averted or perhaps bowed,
they struggle.
One loses half its feathers,
while the other sits heavily, nursing a knife wound.
Both weep and pray for deliverance.

Poem: The Way It Was When I Was There

This poem is somewhat newer, though I can't pinpoint exactly when I wrote it.  Probably in the late 1990s.  Drawing Lots in the Bottom of the Boat, while also apocalyptic, is almost gentle in comparison.  I'm not sure there was any specific incident that inspired the poem, though I am always up for writing about the end of the world...  More seriously, I think I did borrow just a bit from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker Trilogy (the man that actually ran the universe and his cat (or kitten) in a shack on some back-water planet). I also have a small shout-out to my former self when I reference the blue yak -- there was a period when I was doing automatic writing at NELP (a summer program in New England that I participated in between my sophomore and junior year in college), and I kept coming up with the figure of the blue yak during these exercises.

The Way It Was When I Was There

The old man
with the beard
kept coming in and out the door.
Thunder poured out his mouth.
The firmament went from a pale blue
to an acid yellow.
I tried to sit in my chair,
but I was shaking so much
it kept toppling over.
The rain started to fall
and didn’t let up that day
or the next.
Dead fish washed up on my steps.
The old man
came back in a boat.
His breath smelled of garlic.
Flames seemed to flicker beneath his beard.
I couldn’t understand his words.
I couldn’t stay in my seat.
I leapt up onto my bed
and threw books at the two-headed snakes
coming out of the closet.
Out the window,
I could see the water had turned black;
lightening skittered across the sky.
A window shattered in the front of the house.
I thought I heard a wild dog barking --
or perhaps the blue yak bellowing.
I wish the old man would come back.
The air is turning to lead.

The Palace: Inside the Palace

This was the second poem written in the series, and when this poem emerged (more or less complete), that was when I decided to write the entire Palace Suite, though some of the poems took much longer to gestate than others.  This poem was inspired by the bronze statue The General by Hugo Robus, which is frequently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC (not at present apparently, however).  It appears the Met in NYC also has a version of the statue (also not currently on display).  This time the artwork sparked the poem (along with a life-long love of Looney Tunes), but the subject doesn't completely dominate the resulting poem (at least in my opinion).  The "fearless leader" residing in the Palace was always intended to be a bit of a buffoon, which is established here.

Inside the Palace

The lights still bum
in the imperial library.
All are asleep except the emperor.
Even his head is nodding.
His chin hits the gold braid of his uniform.
The doors burst open.
The general rides his sagging horse
up the marble staircase.
He slides sideways out of the saddle,
then suddenly snaps to attention.
Even his moustache stiffens.
The news is not good.
The emperor scowls.
His ears flush.
He grabs a gun
and shoots the horse.
The general twitches his moustache
as if it were on a string.
The room shrinks,
and the two pull their chairs together
until their knees touch.
The general leaps up,
throws all the maps into the fire.
“What is to be done,” they whisper.
“What is to be done?”