As discussed in the Munro post, I decided to slowly work my way through her short story collections, beginning from the beginning as it were. I have just wrapped up reading her first collection Dance of the Happy Shades, and my current plan is to read Proust's Within a Budding Grove before starting in on Munro's The Lives of Girls and Women. This is the one collection that it is probably better to read straight through in a short period of time, whereas the others might actually be more effective if you only read one or two stories a day and not gorge oneself.
It is true that many of these stories are pretty downbeat, so reading too many at once can be overwhelming. They generally are about children on the cusp of young adulthood (about to lose what innocence they still had) or young women that find themselves very constrained in their life choices. While it may not be an exact parallel, I was actually struck thinking of a few of the women in Faulkner, particularly Light in August (admittedly the most recent Faulkner I haved read). First, there is the nurse (in the orphanage where Joe Christmas grew up) who was carrying on a desultory affair with someone (a travelling salesman?) and who ended up being a complete "B" when Christmas caught her at it (really going above and beyond the pale in trying to have him expelled and thus setting him along a bad path), but there is also the waitress that Christmas takes up with right before he leaves the home of his adoptive parents. She would fit into a Munro story, though a bit more worldly than many of her characters, except perhaps the girls from "Thanks for the Ride."
A few people have criticised Munro for holding fast to the "epiphany" short story approach, but that seems to be the nature of short stories. You get an idea across, and usually it does involve the main character either revealing something hidden about themselves (to the reader) or realizing profound something about themselves. So that doesn't bother me that much. Actually, there is a bit of variety in Dance of the Happy Shades, including one story written from the perspective of a young wife who is trying to stick up for an elderly neighbour (in the face of suburban conformity and the idea of "progress") in "The Shining Houses" and a young man sowing his oats in "Thanks for the Ride." That last story is by far the most different from all the others in the book.
Much more often you have a youngish girl trying to rebel against authority (her mother, grandmother or to a lesser extent her employer (in "Sunday Afternoon") but not making much headway. Life is fairly tough, and illness or other disaster can strike out of the blue ("Day of the Butterfly"). "The Peace of Utrecht" is interesting in that, even after their mother's death, the sister who was left behind to care for their mother doesn't seem to be able to escape from her cage, i.e. small town life. Like a bound foot freed from years inside its binding and tiny shoes, she has grown cramped. I could write at some length on how small town life is particularly ill-suited for people who are a little bit different or a bit rebellious and those that can get away (to the big city) probably should, but this has been expanded on at length elsewhere, and I am a bit short on time today. Atwood's novels also frequently feature fraught relations between mothers and daughters, particularly in Lady Oracle, but it doesn't necessarily dominate the narrative as in Munro, though of course that is at least partly the consequence of working in a shorter form. (While I haven't read them yet, many of Munro's later stories do reach novella length.)
Men cannot be relied upon -- not fathers ("Walker Brothers Cowboy" sort
of suggests the father had an affair), brothers (the snitching
brother in "Boys and Girls") and particularly not suitors ("An Ounce of
Cure," "Postcard" and even "Sunday Afternoon," where we can sense
things will end poorly beyond the end of the story proper). Male strangers can be quite scary ("Images") or just creepy ("The Office") and accidentally bring break things without meaning to ("A Trip to the Coast").
I really hadn't recognized the first few stories, and I truly don't recall ever reading "The Office," where the first-person narrator is a housewife who rents an office to write in during the evenings, then finds herself blocked by the obtrusive landlord. (I love how Munro inserts the word "slatternly," which has really fallen out of circulation.) But I vaguely recall reading "An Ounce of Cure" and "A Trip to the Country," and I definitely read "Boys and Girls," so I presume that I did read this before for a Canadian lit. class. Still, it was pretty much like reading the stories again for the first time.
"Postcard" and "Day of the Butterfly" are probably the most purely depressing of all the stories. "Boys and Girls" is interesting in how you see a young girl kind of fall into the trap of gender role conformity and that is a bit depressing, though it is definitely a well-written story. "Dance of the Happy Shades" has a mixed resolution. It is quite clear that the mothers will drop the music teacher after a disastrous recital/party, but the teacher has somehow managed to find a student who actually has talent and can play the music of the spheres or some such thing. That actually makes it worse for the mothers, since the teacher never could make their children play that well...
Of all the stories, the one that I really liked the most was "Red Dress--1946." First, it has an absolutely killer line: "I lay on the couch in the kitchen, reading The Last Days of Pompeii, and wishing I was there." (I may have to figure out how to incorporate that into a poem.) Truly, Munro has a streak of sly humour that isn't always noticed (the same with Carol Shields).
Okay, some spoilers follow...
Anyway, the teenaged daughter has just the right mix of self-loathing and outward embarrassment she feels about her mother (and the often out-of-fashion clothes that the mother sews and makes the daughter wear). The daughter's friend, Lonnie, is at an advantage because her mother is dead and her father more or less leaves her to her own devices. Anyway, the story builds to a school dance that the daughter is dreading attending. The red dress her mother is sewing is for this dance, and she is sure it makes her terminally uncool. While she and Lonnie talk endlessly about boys, once she gets to the dance, she is so determined to avoid rejection by the boys, that she retreats first to "the wall" and then to the girls' bathroom. She encounters an older girl there, Mary Fortune, who seems to care nothing about boys at all (I'm not sure if Munro is actually hinting that Mary is a proto-lesbian, but it is possible.) Mary invites the daughter to leave the dance and go to a soda shop. The daughter is somewhat flattered and sees a different path open up before her (where she is a bit of an outcast along with Mary -- and Lonnie is not quite as close a friend, since she is still boy-crazy). She seems to be even a bit exhilarated about this, but then as she is getting her coat to leave, a boy comes up and asks her to dance. She snaps back into a "normal" life and even gets a first kiss on the way home. She thinks: the boy "had been my rescuer, that he had brought me from Mary Fortune's territory into the ordinary world." The story closes with a vision of her mother hoping for the best for her daughter, and the daughter not quite knowing how to close the gap between them. I just think this story works on so many levels and is so incisive.
While I am not going to try to figure out the order in which these stories were written or published, it wouldn't surprise me too much if "Red Dress--1946" was one of the later ones written, since it is so deep in so many ways. I'm fairly sure that Munro's work continues in this general direction, getting more at the subtle differences between people, particularly mothers and daughters, and why they end up disappointing or even hurting each other even when they don't mean to. This can be kind of difficult territory, but Munro mines it quite well on balance.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Spoiler silliness
I had an interesting experience today, which was a bit of a flashback to my elementary school days where I was "the spoiler." Generally, I ran my mouth a bit faster than I should have. Anyway, I was on the train home with a couple of people from work on the train back and just heard her saying something about how relatively easy it was to not find out about the World Series. Sadly, I missed the first part of the conversation where she must have been saying how she was trying to avoid the news. I said I found that incredible since it was all over, and she was like "Dude." Now I obviously wish I hadn't said anything, since I hardly care about sports at all and would have easily moved onto another topic.
However, it is completely unrealistic to expect that certain sporting events can be put on hold for 24 hours (ok, 20 hours) while you do other things (and then to try to shame people who tip you off accidentally!). A typical game or a tv show, fine, but the outcome of the World Series, the Superbowl or especially the Stanley Cup? What kind of a bubble are you living in? It pretty much means no internet at all and absolutely no email, since even the subject line of messages from friends will most likely contain spoilers. What I dislike the most about people who insist on a spoiler-free existence is that it squelches the water-cooler conversations that make up an important part of office life. In a way it is actually quite selfish to try to maintain this bubble, particularly for really key events that are meant to be discussed openly, such as the World Series. Now I don't want to go too far in condemning the anti-spoiler squad, but it does strike me as one more example of the extreme atomization of society that we are facing that people think that can insist on time-shifting events to suit their own needs and getting everyone else to play along and humour them.
That said, I wouldn't have said anything (and I really said next to nothing about the game) had I known that she really didn't want to know. And of course, I will continue to put up spoiler warnings here for the plots of books and obscure movies, given that it is fairly unlikely everyone (anyone?) will have already experienced them. But I am not going to tiptoe around discussing the outcomes of sporting events if it is actually relevant to the topic under discussion.
However, it is completely unrealistic to expect that certain sporting events can be put on hold for 24 hours (ok, 20 hours) while you do other things (and then to try to shame people who tip you off accidentally!). A typical game or a tv show, fine, but the outcome of the World Series, the Superbowl or especially the Stanley Cup? What kind of a bubble are you living in? It pretty much means no internet at all and absolutely no email, since even the subject line of messages from friends will most likely contain spoilers. What I dislike the most about people who insist on a spoiler-free existence is that it squelches the water-cooler conversations that make up an important part of office life. In a way it is actually quite selfish to try to maintain this bubble, particularly for really key events that are meant to be discussed openly, such as the World Series. Now I don't want to go too far in condemning the anti-spoiler squad, but it does strike me as one more example of the extreme atomization of society that we are facing that people think that can insist on time-shifting events to suit their own needs and getting everyone else to play along and humour them.
That said, I wouldn't have said anything (and I really said next to nothing about the game) had I known that she really didn't want to know. And of course, I will continue to put up spoiler warnings here for the plots of books and obscure movies, given that it is fairly unlikely everyone (anyone?) will have already experienced them. But I am not going to tiptoe around discussing the outcomes of sporting events if it is actually relevant to the topic under discussion.
7th Challenge - 4th review - Vermeer's Light
This book turned up in the mail much sooner than I expected, so I might as well review George Bowering's Vermeer's Light. This is a very generous collection for a stand-alone collection, i.e. not a "best of" or collected poems. There are well over 100 poems in the book, which comes in at 170 pages of poems, along with an essay. The poems were written between 1996 and 2006, with one major exception "Grandfather," which I will return to in a bit. As Bowering relates in the Preface, these poems were written during a time of great upheaval in his life. His wife passed away, after a fairly long (3 year) struggle with cancer on top of the multiple sclerosis she had been dealing with. Then in 2001 he retired (he was on the faculty of SFU) and shortly thereafter he was named Poet Laureat of Canada, so he traveled quite a bit and gave readings and led workshops and wrote. Then he moved to Ontario for a couple of years and took up with a new sweetheart (the one he married midway through the writing of My Darling Nellie Grey). He convinced her to move back with him to Vancouver in 2004. Quite a few of the poems reflect these events, though not all are autobiographical.
There are 6 poetry sequences: Sitting in Vancouver; A, You're Adorable; Fragment, Trieste, Dec. 1981; Imaginary Poems for AMB; Six Little Poems in Alphabetical Order; and West Side Haiku, as well as a couple of multi-part poems: "The PGI Golf Tourney..." and "Lost in the Library". The rest of the poems are essentially stand-alone poems, though "Q & A" reads like a series of very, very short poems. For the most part, these longer poems and sequences are the more interesting to me, and that's what I will focus on in this review.
I liked the idea of Sitting in Vancouver a bit more than the execution. Bowering lists various places he has been, many of them related to his late wife's condition -- the multiple sclerosis clinic, Vancouver Hospital, UBC Hospital and YVR. These are basically observational poems. He makes comments about the other people in these places and curiously enough generally does not dwell on why he is at all these hospitals (classic avoidance of course). So there is a morbid air to them, even though illness and death are generally not addressed head on. I think of the bunch, the most interesting is the one where he is sitting in the SFU Cafeteria. Now I haven't been there, but I have been at the SFU library and student centre, and they are bleak places that feel stuck in the middle of nowhere. I'm pretty sure the SFU Cafeteria is no different, and that seems to put Bowering in a bad mood: "Can't believe all the fat boys, / fat girls / lined up for burgers / fries and Coke." He compares his lot to other more famous poets and seems to feel that they wouldn't be stuck out at SFU like he is: "Allen wouldn't be here, Atwood / she wouldn't be here." Maybe there is just a touch of pride that he will put up with this situation, but in general, he seems pretty discontent. On the whole this series of poems comes across as a bit of downer.
The next long sequence, however, is my favourite of the bunch: A, You're Adorable. This was published in 1998, and Bowering claims that the publisher didn't know for a while that he was the author (he used the pen name Ellen Field). I admire Bowering for submitting work under different names, and I think he had to up his game. I half wonder if he stopped around 2006, since I thought a lot of his work in Teeth was subpar and probably only was published because it carried his name. Anyway, this is a series of poems, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet and being very playful about it. Often the letter is repeated and must be read on multiple lines to make the following words make sense, like "almost Defenceless, nearly / footloose, loving every De- / tail since." or "Enuff of questions, / how about if 'E gives us (you and me) / nothing but answers from now / on / paper, or something."
These are really quite different from many of his other poems, though the occasional repetition of words is something he consciously did in some of the sequences in My Darling Nellie Grey. These poems are short and often a lot of fun. I think they benefit from being read out loud, and I'll do more of that over the next week or so. While he didn't explicitly say so, I think he probably was dedicating them to A(ngela) his wife, who was struggling with various illnesses by that point.
Imaginary Poems for AMB were written shortly after the death of his wife, Angela. They are suffused with grief and other emotions. The one that stuck out the most for me began: "I wonder if you send me / my dreams of you--- / Did I do something that day / to deserve your visit---" and later he wonders "If I write poems for your ear / am I talking to myself---". Even the most fervent agnostic ponders these questions in the face of the death of close ones, though the hard core atheists recognize this for that wishful thinking that is the root of so many religions.
For me, the collection is front-loaded with the best work coming in these three sequences, though A, You're Adorable is worth the price of admission, as they say. "Q & A" and "Ask a Stupid Question" are the precursors to the "Shall I Compare Thee" section of My Darling Nellie Grey. "Ask a Stupid Question" adopts the voice of a cynical (NYC?) cab driver who answers poetic questions such as "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind" with the sardonic retort "I'd guess about three months." The poem ends appropriately enough: "Jesus, Lady, don't you know anything?"
As I mentioned, the collection ends with the essay "Rewriting My Grandfather" where Bowering explains the genesis of the poem "Grandfather," then reworks it 8 or so times. This is really an interesting exercise in watching a poet at work, at least one who is into Oulipian games. Some of the reworked poems are better than others, as one might imagine. It was a nice bonus to a solid poetry collection, and I was glad I was able to pick Vermeer's Light up relatively inexpensively.
There are 6 poetry sequences: Sitting in Vancouver; A, You're Adorable; Fragment, Trieste, Dec. 1981; Imaginary Poems for AMB; Six Little Poems in Alphabetical Order; and West Side Haiku, as well as a couple of multi-part poems: "The PGI Golf Tourney..." and "Lost in the Library". The rest of the poems are essentially stand-alone poems, though "Q & A" reads like a series of very, very short poems. For the most part, these longer poems and sequences are the more interesting to me, and that's what I will focus on in this review.
I liked the idea of Sitting in Vancouver a bit more than the execution. Bowering lists various places he has been, many of them related to his late wife's condition -- the multiple sclerosis clinic, Vancouver Hospital, UBC Hospital and YVR. These are basically observational poems. He makes comments about the other people in these places and curiously enough generally does not dwell on why he is at all these hospitals (classic avoidance of course). So there is a morbid air to them, even though illness and death are generally not addressed head on. I think of the bunch, the most interesting is the one where he is sitting in the SFU Cafeteria. Now I haven't been there, but I have been at the SFU library and student centre, and they are bleak places that feel stuck in the middle of nowhere. I'm pretty sure the SFU Cafeteria is no different, and that seems to put Bowering in a bad mood: "Can't believe all the fat boys, / fat girls / lined up for burgers / fries and Coke." He compares his lot to other more famous poets and seems to feel that they wouldn't be stuck out at SFU like he is: "Allen wouldn't be here, Atwood / she wouldn't be here." Maybe there is just a touch of pride that he will put up with this situation, but in general, he seems pretty discontent. On the whole this series of poems comes across as a bit of downer.
The next long sequence, however, is my favourite of the bunch: A, You're Adorable. This was published in 1998, and Bowering claims that the publisher didn't know for a while that he was the author (he used the pen name Ellen Field). I admire Bowering for submitting work under different names, and I think he had to up his game. I half wonder if he stopped around 2006, since I thought a lot of his work in Teeth was subpar and probably only was published because it carried his name. Anyway, this is a series of poems, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet and being very playful about it. Often the letter is repeated and must be read on multiple lines to make the following words make sense, like "almost Defenceless, nearly / footloose, loving every De- / tail since." or "Enuff of questions, / how about if 'E gives us (you and me) / nothing but answers from now / on / paper, or something."
These are really quite different from many of his other poems, though the occasional repetition of words is something he consciously did in some of the sequences in My Darling Nellie Grey. These poems are short and often a lot of fun. I think they benefit from being read out loud, and I'll do more of that over the next week or so. While he didn't explicitly say so, I think he probably was dedicating them to A(ngela) his wife, who was struggling with various illnesses by that point.
Imaginary Poems for AMB were written shortly after the death of his wife, Angela. They are suffused with grief and other emotions. The one that stuck out the most for me began: "I wonder if you send me / my dreams of you--- / Did I do something that day / to deserve your visit---" and later he wonders "If I write poems for your ear / am I talking to myself---". Even the most fervent agnostic ponders these questions in the face of the death of close ones, though the hard core atheists recognize this for that wishful thinking that is the root of so many religions.
For me, the collection is front-loaded with the best work coming in these three sequences, though A, You're Adorable is worth the price of admission, as they say. "Q & A" and "Ask a Stupid Question" are the precursors to the "Shall I Compare Thee" section of My Darling Nellie Grey. "Ask a Stupid Question" adopts the voice of a cynical (NYC?) cab driver who answers poetic questions such as "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind" with the sardonic retort "I'd guess about three months." The poem ends appropriately enough: "Jesus, Lady, don't you know anything?"
As I mentioned, the collection ends with the essay "Rewriting My Grandfather" where Bowering explains the genesis of the poem "Grandfather," then reworks it 8 or so times. This is really an interesting exercise in watching a poet at work, at least one who is into Oulipian games. Some of the reworked poems are better than others, as one might imagine. It was a nice bonus to a solid poetry collection, and I was glad I was able to pick Vermeer's Light up relatively inexpensively.
Rob Ford - Busted
I do try to steer away from the really political stuff, but I am so glad that the police have busted Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, i.e. they have recovered the alleged video showing him smoking crack, along with a long surveillance trail of him contacting the alleged drug dealer Alexander Lisi. I'm sure there will be lots of updates, but the breaking news is found here and here and here. Sadly they cannot actually charge him with a crime for what appears to occur on the video, though of course there might be obstruction of justices charges or the like. And Toronto has no recall mechanism, and possibly no way for the City Council to actually force Ford to step aside. But I think even the most thick-skinned politician, such as Ford, will realize there is simply no way he can remain in power after these revelations. Anyway, what a way to start the day!
So he has admitted to taking crack cocaine, even before the infamous video airs! But he is still hanging tough and won't resign, and possibly still planning on running again next fall. And he and his brother are basically digging in and bashing the police chief of all things! (And it is so so sad how tribal politics have become that many of his supporters will go along with this pirouette.) But I suspect that in the end, he will find the fall-out from when the video actually airs will be so damaging that he will step aside. Maybe that is just wishful thinking...
So he has admitted to taking crack cocaine, even before the infamous video airs! But he is still hanging tough and won't resign, and possibly still planning on running again next fall. And he and his brother are basically digging in and bashing the police chief of all things! (And it is so so sad how tribal politics have become that many of his supporters will go along with this pirouette.) But I suspect that in the end, he will find the fall-out from when the video actually airs will be so damaging that he will step aside. Maybe that is just wishful thinking...
Poetic influences
My mind has been segueing all over the place. Let me see if I can get the main thread(s) down. Over the past couple of months, I have been reading a fair number of young and occasionally not-so-young poets who were clearly influenced by Frank O'Hara, most notably Denise Duhamel and now Artie Gold (an Anglophone poet based in Montreal who seemed equally influenced by O'Hara and Jack Spicer). George Bowering writes in the introduction to the Collected Books of Artie Gold that when he first encountered (and taught!) Gold, O'Hara was barely being read by Canadian lit. majors or poets, though the situation has certainly changed with time. (I wonder if those that followed O'Hara early in his career all became poets themselves, much like the thousand or so people who bought the first Velvet Underground record -- all of whom supposedly went on to form their own bands... RIP Lou Reed.)
O'Hara came to my attention in my second year of undergrad when I got into a poetry writing course with a professor who had known a lot of the key figures from the New York school. At least that is how I remember being introduced to O'Hara's works, though of all the figures the professor brought to my attention, I suspect I would have encountered O'Hara through Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology or somewhere else, since over time, O'Hara has become so influential. Still, I might have not paid nearly as much attention had my attention not been focused. Other poets that the professor promoted included Ted Berrigan, Faye Kicknosway, John Sinclair, Jim Harrison, Jim Gustafson and I believe Ed Sanders. Some of whom remain very obscure. The following summer, at NELP, I was introduced to the work of Jane Kenyon, though unfortunately she was too ill to actually meet the class, which would have been quite memorable, I am sure. I think all of the other poets that I have read, I mostly found out about them by reading widely and then following the poets that these poets looked up to. More recently I have occasionally followed leads generated by listserv discussions or even Amazon suggestions. To circle back very briefly to Bowering, I definitely see lots of flashes of humor and playfulness in his work, which could certainly be found in O'Hara or Ted Berrigan for that matter. However, unless I am totally misremembering what Bowering wrote in an essay, he was more inspired by some of the Beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson and some of the others in the Black Mountain School. I'm not really sure I see that (the Olson influence), but to be fair, I have not cracked Olson's Maximus Poems (something to start if I ever finish Pound's Cantos I guess).
I'll try to wrap this up quickly as I still have a review (of Bowering's Vermeer's Light incidentally) to get to. While there are a lot of very disparate poets that I like quite a bit, and even some where I share a somewhat similar poetic sensibility, I just am not sure I would consider myself that influenced by any particular poet. But perhaps someone else would feel differently. Anyway, I will list my top 10 favorite poets (in alphabetical order) and then another group of 15 that I rate very highly.
Paul Blackburn (my favorite Black Mountain poet*)
T.S. Eliot
Faye Kicknosway
Philip Levine
Audre Lorde
Frank O'Hara
Sharon Olds (but stopping at The Father!)
Adrienne Rich
Anne Sexton
Charles Simic
John Berryman
Robert Creeley
Emily Dickinson
Alan Dugan
Jane Kenyon
Galway Kinnell
August Kleinzahler
W.S. Merwin
Marge Piercy
Charles Reznikoff
Harvey Shapiro
Gary Snyder
Gary Soto
Wallace Stevens
W.B. Yeats
A few thoughts. Had I drawn this list up 10 years ago, I probably would have included some Beat poets such as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti; however, my tastes have changed and Beat poetry in general hasn't held up that well in my view. I probably would also have put Yeats in the higher category and possibly included Dylan Thomas in the second category. I might have included W.C. Williams, but I don't find I read him for pleasure, so while I respect him and his work, he doesn't really belong here. That might change some day if I really delve into his work (as I once did with Wallace Stevens). Langston Hughes and E.E. Cummings are sort of just off the edge of the list, partly because they wrote so much, and yet only a relatively few poems speak to me. (One could say the same about Blackburn or O'Hara, whose poetic output was high but the quality was highly variable to say the least, but even their weaker poems spoke to me more.)
For better or worse, the list does not include any poetry in translation. It is much harder to justify how U.S.-centric it is (to say nothing of the fact that nearly all of these are 20th Century poets with only a small handful still publishing in the 21st Century), but these generally are the poets that write within a space/context that makes sense to me, and certainly it is not a fluke that most of them are urban poets. I am still sort of feeling my way into the Canadian canon, but I would say that Robert Kroetsch is probably my favourite Canadian poet, followed by George Bowering, then Louis Dudek and Al Purdy. W. H. New is in there somewhere as well.
I'll close with a relatively short list of poets whom I respect in the abstract but haven't read enough of their work to truly know them. It is possible that after I did that I would rate them higher and put them on one of these lists some day. Perhaps time will tell...
W.H. Auden
John Betjeman
Basil Bunting
Randall Jarrell
Maxine Kumin
Denise Levertov
Howard Nemerov
Kenneth Rexroth
Theodore Roethke
Muriel Rukeyser
Delmore Schwartz
W.C. Williams
* Honestly, I would not characterize Blackburn as a Black Mountain poet -- he is much closer, in my mind, to the New York School (O'Hara in particular) -- but that's where he is generally placed, so whatcha gonna do?
O'Hara came to my attention in my second year of undergrad when I got into a poetry writing course with a professor who had known a lot of the key figures from the New York school. At least that is how I remember being introduced to O'Hara's works, though of all the figures the professor brought to my attention, I suspect I would have encountered O'Hara through Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology or somewhere else, since over time, O'Hara has become so influential. Still, I might have not paid nearly as much attention had my attention not been focused. Other poets that the professor promoted included Ted Berrigan, Faye Kicknosway, John Sinclair, Jim Harrison, Jim Gustafson and I believe Ed Sanders. Some of whom remain very obscure. The following summer, at NELP, I was introduced to the work of Jane Kenyon, though unfortunately she was too ill to actually meet the class, which would have been quite memorable, I am sure. I think all of the other poets that I have read, I mostly found out about them by reading widely and then following the poets that these poets looked up to. More recently I have occasionally followed leads generated by listserv discussions or even Amazon suggestions. To circle back very briefly to Bowering, I definitely see lots of flashes of humor and playfulness in his work, which could certainly be found in O'Hara or Ted Berrigan for that matter. However, unless I am totally misremembering what Bowering wrote in an essay, he was more inspired by some of the Beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson and some of the others in the Black Mountain School. I'm not really sure I see that (the Olson influence), but to be fair, I have not cracked Olson's Maximus Poems (something to start if I ever finish Pound's Cantos I guess).
I'll try to wrap this up quickly as I still have a review (of Bowering's Vermeer's Light incidentally) to get to. While there are a lot of very disparate poets that I like quite a bit, and even some where I share a somewhat similar poetic sensibility, I just am not sure I would consider myself that influenced by any particular poet. But perhaps someone else would feel differently. Anyway, I will list my top 10 favorite poets (in alphabetical order) and then another group of 15 that I rate very highly.
Paul Blackburn (my favorite Black Mountain poet*)
T.S. Eliot
Faye Kicknosway
Philip Levine
Audre Lorde
Frank O'Hara
Sharon Olds (but stopping at The Father!)
Adrienne Rich
Anne Sexton
Charles Simic
John Berryman
Robert Creeley
Emily Dickinson
Alan Dugan
Jane Kenyon
Galway Kinnell
August Kleinzahler
W.S. Merwin
Marge Piercy
Charles Reznikoff
Harvey Shapiro
Gary Snyder
Gary Soto
Wallace Stevens
W.B. Yeats
A few thoughts. Had I drawn this list up 10 years ago, I probably would have included some Beat poets such as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti; however, my tastes have changed and Beat poetry in general hasn't held up that well in my view. I probably would also have put Yeats in the higher category and possibly included Dylan Thomas in the second category. I might have included W.C. Williams, but I don't find I read him for pleasure, so while I respect him and his work, he doesn't really belong here. That might change some day if I really delve into his work (as I once did with Wallace Stevens). Langston Hughes and E.E. Cummings are sort of just off the edge of the list, partly because they wrote so much, and yet only a relatively few poems speak to me. (One could say the same about Blackburn or O'Hara, whose poetic output was high but the quality was highly variable to say the least, but even their weaker poems spoke to me more.)
For better or worse, the list does not include any poetry in translation. It is much harder to justify how U.S.-centric it is (to say nothing of the fact that nearly all of these are 20th Century poets with only a small handful still publishing in the 21st Century), but these generally are the poets that write within a space/context that makes sense to me, and certainly it is not a fluke that most of them are urban poets. I am still sort of feeling my way into the Canadian canon, but I would say that Robert Kroetsch is probably my favourite Canadian poet, followed by George Bowering, then Louis Dudek and Al Purdy. W. H. New is in there somewhere as well.
I'll close with a relatively short list of poets whom I respect in the abstract but haven't read enough of their work to truly know them. It is possible that after I did that I would rate them higher and put them on one of these lists some day. Perhaps time will tell...
W.H. Auden
John Betjeman
Basil Bunting
Randall Jarrell
Maxine Kumin
Denise Levertov
Howard Nemerov
Kenneth Rexroth
Theodore Roethke
Muriel Rukeyser
Delmore Schwartz
W.C. Williams
* Honestly, I would not characterize Blackburn as a Black Mountain poet -- he is much closer, in my mind, to the New York School (O'Hara in particular) -- but that's where he is generally placed, so whatcha gonna do?
Monday, October 28, 2013
Rough weekend
This ended up being a particularly frustrating weekend, since the elements for having a good weekend were in place, but things either didn't quite gel or ended up being pretty negative all the way around. It doesn't help that the way I am "built" I always glom onto the negative aspect of things and that ends up overwhelming the positive aspect(s). So the difficulties in getting home from the hockey game on Friday will loom larger than the experience of being at the game (and even the fact that my son was so thrilled to go*). Why can't I let this go? After all, we managed to get home, even though I had to pay for a cab. But I really can't let it go when events or people in particular let me down, and Car2Go and the TransLink bus system really did let me down, leaving me feel completely stranded and upset. Probably I just hate the feeling of helplessness of being forced to rely on the bus system so much that when it lets me down (as it has so many, many times over the past 2 years) that it just magnifies the negative feelings I have about Vancouver.
My wife has not gotten over some cold, and I keep worrying I will catch it from her. I found myself pretty exhausted all weekend, so when things did go wrong that just magnified them that much more. Anyway, while the weather wasn't great, I did take the kids to a local Halloween party on Sat. And that wasn't too far away, so we were back within about 90 minutes. Then I cooked some slightly odd butternut & potato pie (probably would have been better with white flour but I used whole wheat flour, making it even heavier). But I just felt kind of drained.
Sunday the weather was much better, so I planned to go early to Stanley Park for the Halloween Ghost Train. It takes freaking forever to get there from our place. My daughter started complaining that she was starving while we were waiting for the second bus. I told her she was just going to have to wait until we got to the park, and we were maybe 1/3 of the way there when she threw up on the bus. This is starting to become an on-going thing with her (barely making it out of cab to the airport (and throwing up in the airport itself), then once throwing up on a plane). It's so upsetting because you feel helpless and a bit guilty for not listening (not that I thought this would happen) but then ultimately so frustrated because I can't tell if this is related to motion-sickness or an over sensitivity to gas fumes or just boredom and her way of getting us to listen to her. (But at the same time, she just won't tell us -- clearly -- that she thinks she is going to throw up and give me any warning.) Would this still have happened had she had lunch first? Quite possibly, and that would have been even worse, but maybe not, and that doubt makes me doubt myself as a parent. Mostly it makes me feel completely trapped. I cannot take her anyplace that involves being in a bus (and probably a car) for over 45 minutes. That means the trip to Seattle is out-of-bounds and definitely Portland is off (again, totally undermining any point of being in the Pacific Northwest). Maybe a train ride would be possible, but not even sure I want to risk that (to say nothing of the fact that the schedule for trains leaving from Vancouver is so sucky). It just reinforces so dramatically that living in Vancouver without a car (where virtually every bus trip takes over 45 minutes vs. 20 minutes in a car) is not working for us. I really have come to hate this place now (and am so disenchanted with the Vancouver planners & politicians who want to drive car drivers out of town). I would definitely have gotten a car by this point (and maybe been able to make some of these local trips that I have now ruled out) except that we won't be here all that much longer. But I can't wait until this particular phase of hers is over -- will it be another year or two? There was some science fiction story about a boy that kept pressing this button to skip over the tough parts of life -- and then found he has grown old and has given up most of his life. However, I would be willing to skip over two years of my daughter's childhood if it meant being past the vomiting and other body control issues.
Anyway, after this happened, I had to take them off the bus and clean her up and then find some kind of bar for her eat. At least, they were just in regular clothes so her Halloween costume wasn't ruined... I was so frustrated and flustered that I decided we were not going on to Stanley Park. I found a place to eat close to the Central Library and then after she claimed she was better, we went to the library and got a few more books and CDs. (It turned out that the big library Book Sale wrapped up on Sat., so even that didn't work out for me. Just one more damn thing...) Anyway, we got home fairly uneventfully, though I decided we would do the Canada Line rather than take the local bus, which shaved 15 or so minutes of travel time off the journey. (I don't think I will risk her being on a TransLink bus that takes more than 30 minutes from here on out, but just in general I am going to cut down on the times that I take her anyplace.) This experience really drained me and I didn't get a number of things done the rest of the day.
In an effort to be a bit more positive, I should not forget that, even though she spends a lot of time shunning me in favour of her mother, my daughter still wants to play a lot of games together in the evening (and she has a pretty good imagination.) Also, Sat. was not such a bad day, and I should try to hold onto it more -- and to look forward to trick-or-treating with the kids on Thurs (and hope that the rain does hold off). It looks like I should manage to get through Swann's Way before November begins. Apparently, November is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann's Way (and Proust had to pay to publish it -- how fitting for today's economy where self-publishing is again on the rise). I will also be able to finish Munro's The Dance of the Happy Shades and presumably review it this week. The first few stories seemed totally unfamiliar, but I did recognize (very vaguely) 3 of the middle stories, so I assume that I did in fact read this for a CanLit class at UToronto.
Anyway, I have decided that in the month of November, I am going to focus more on writing, probably writing on the bus, since I have quite a bit of time to kill and a relatively compact notebook that should work well for this task. I'll start off working on the sestinas and then work on this play (basically a reworking of Lear) and see how it goes. Obviously, this means I will read less, but I think that is an acceptable tradeoff.
I decided I would start off with the grocery list mentioned in this post, but I went back to the original, dropping coffee in favour of ice. This is the first stanza, and I'll see how much further I can get tonight:
In many ways, I seem a child of snow and ice,
receiving no warmth from my mother's milk --
and later rejecting the heart-warming properties of beer
or other libations. As for the comforts of bacon,
those too have been forsaken, leaving (buttered) bread,
cookies and cake as my main vices, which, under my frigid layers, smoulder and smoke.
Signing off for now...
* My son said several times it was one of the best times of his life, and I when I probed (asking didn't he say that delivering the mail to the neighbours was one of the best times of his life!) he said that he could think of 100 "greatest moments" out of millions of moments that he had been alive. What a great attitude, but not one that I've ever been able to adopt (I think he is more like my parents in having a fairly sunny attitude). This isn't precisely the same as counting one's blessings, but not that far off. There is an interesting character in Rajiv Joseph's play Animals Out of Paper who fills notebooks with his "blessings," including some things that are quite painful, but he reckons that even painful events are part of the "blessing" of being alive. I would certainly be happier if I could adopt such an attitude, but I know it is beyond me.
My wife has not gotten over some cold, and I keep worrying I will catch it from her. I found myself pretty exhausted all weekend, so when things did go wrong that just magnified them that much more. Anyway, while the weather wasn't great, I did take the kids to a local Halloween party on Sat. And that wasn't too far away, so we were back within about 90 minutes. Then I cooked some slightly odd butternut & potato pie (probably would have been better with white flour but I used whole wheat flour, making it even heavier). But I just felt kind of drained.
Sunday the weather was much better, so I planned to go early to Stanley Park for the Halloween Ghost Train. It takes freaking forever to get there from our place. My daughter started complaining that she was starving while we were waiting for the second bus. I told her she was just going to have to wait until we got to the park, and we were maybe 1/3 of the way there when she threw up on the bus. This is starting to become an on-going thing with her (barely making it out of cab to the airport (and throwing up in the airport itself), then once throwing up on a plane). It's so upsetting because you feel helpless and a bit guilty for not listening (not that I thought this would happen) but then ultimately so frustrated because I can't tell if this is related to motion-sickness or an over sensitivity to gas fumes or just boredom and her way of getting us to listen to her. (But at the same time, she just won't tell us -- clearly -- that she thinks she is going to throw up and give me any warning.) Would this still have happened had she had lunch first? Quite possibly, and that would have been even worse, but maybe not, and that doubt makes me doubt myself as a parent. Mostly it makes me feel completely trapped. I cannot take her anyplace that involves being in a bus (and probably a car) for over 45 minutes. That means the trip to Seattle is out-of-bounds and definitely Portland is off (again, totally undermining any point of being in the Pacific Northwest). Maybe a train ride would be possible, but not even sure I want to risk that (to say nothing of the fact that the schedule for trains leaving from Vancouver is so sucky). It just reinforces so dramatically that living in Vancouver without a car (where virtually every bus trip takes over 45 minutes vs. 20 minutes in a car) is not working for us. I really have come to hate this place now (and am so disenchanted with the Vancouver planners & politicians who want to drive car drivers out of town). I would definitely have gotten a car by this point (and maybe been able to make some of these local trips that I have now ruled out) except that we won't be here all that much longer. But I can't wait until this particular phase of hers is over -- will it be another year or two? There was some science fiction story about a boy that kept pressing this button to skip over the tough parts of life -- and then found he has grown old and has given up most of his life. However, I would be willing to skip over two years of my daughter's childhood if it meant being past the vomiting and other body control issues.
Anyway, after this happened, I had to take them off the bus and clean her up and then find some kind of bar for her eat. At least, they were just in regular clothes so her Halloween costume wasn't ruined... I was so frustrated and flustered that I decided we were not going on to Stanley Park. I found a place to eat close to the Central Library and then after she claimed she was better, we went to the library and got a few more books and CDs. (It turned out that the big library Book Sale wrapped up on Sat., so even that didn't work out for me. Just one more damn thing...) Anyway, we got home fairly uneventfully, though I decided we would do the Canada Line rather than take the local bus, which shaved 15 or so minutes of travel time off the journey. (I don't think I will risk her being on a TransLink bus that takes more than 30 minutes from here on out, but just in general I am going to cut down on the times that I take her anyplace.) This experience really drained me and I didn't get a number of things done the rest of the day.
In an effort to be a bit more positive, I should not forget that, even though she spends a lot of time shunning me in favour of her mother, my daughter still wants to play a lot of games together in the evening (and she has a pretty good imagination.) Also, Sat. was not such a bad day, and I should try to hold onto it more -- and to look forward to trick-or-treating with the kids on Thurs (and hope that the rain does hold off). It looks like I should manage to get through Swann's Way before November begins. Apparently, November is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann's Way (and Proust had to pay to publish it -- how fitting for today's economy where self-publishing is again on the rise). I will also be able to finish Munro's The Dance of the Happy Shades and presumably review it this week. The first few stories seemed totally unfamiliar, but I did recognize (very vaguely) 3 of the middle stories, so I assume that I did in fact read this for a CanLit class at UToronto.
Anyway, I have decided that in the month of November, I am going to focus more on writing, probably writing on the bus, since I have quite a bit of time to kill and a relatively compact notebook that should work well for this task. I'll start off working on the sestinas and then work on this play (basically a reworking of Lear) and see how it goes. Obviously, this means I will read less, but I think that is an acceptable tradeoff.
I decided I would start off with the grocery list mentioned in this post, but I went back to the original, dropping coffee in favour of ice. This is the first stanza, and I'll see how much further I can get tonight:
In many ways, I seem a child of snow and ice,
receiving no warmth from my mother's milk --
and later rejecting the heart-warming properties of beer
or other libations. As for the comforts of bacon,
those too have been forsaken, leaving (buttered) bread,
cookies and cake as my main vices, which, under my frigid layers, smoulder and smoke.
Signing off for now...
* My son said several times it was one of the best times of his life, and I when I probed (asking didn't he say that delivering the mail to the neighbours was one of the best times of his life!) he said that he could think of 100 "greatest moments" out of millions of moments that he had been alive. What a great attitude, but not one that I've ever been able to adopt (I think he is more like my parents in having a fairly sunny attitude). This isn't precisely the same as counting one's blessings, but not that far off. There is an interesting character in Rajiv Joseph's play Animals Out of Paper who fills notebooks with his "blessings," including some things that are quite painful, but he reckons that even painful events are part of the "blessing" of being alive. I would certainly be happier if I could adopt such an attitude, but I know it is beyond me.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Progress through Proust
Can I paste a widget? (Sorry -- apologies to Marvin Gaye)
I know there has to be a more elegant way of doing this -- I really wanted something like a large thermometer where I could customize each tick with the book title and page count, but I'll just settle for something that works... Still not sure I will get all the way through this opus, but this is where I shall track my progress to date.*
X Swann's Way
Pages: 462
Read: 462
(Note: have finally completed Swann in Love!)
X Within a Budding Grove
Pages: 556
Read: 556
(Note: am done with Madame Swann at Home.)
X The Guermantes Way
Pages: 620
Read: 620
X Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah)
Pages: 549
Read: 549
X The Captive
Pages: 422
Read: 422
X The Fugitive
Pages: 284
Read: 284
(Albertine's gone. Ohh nooo.)
X Time Regained
Pages: 401
Read: 401
Done at last, done at last! Can hardly believe I am done at last!
(Ok, very inappropriate, I know. But I do feel freed from having this burden lifted. Now the sensible thing to do would be to take even a quarter of this effort and use it to become a "real" writer, the same way the Narrator does in the last 50 pages or so of Time Regained.)
* It's kind of fascinating that 90% or so of the pages discussing these progress meters are all tied back to NaNoWriMo (National (November) Novel Writing Month). I guess I could take that as a Sign (or at least a sign that November is nearly upon us), but I am not going to tackle a novel (in a month!) this year and probably not next year either. Just too many other tasks I am too far behind on. Still I will set some manageable goals of writing more (and surfing the web less), probably starting with resurrecting my broken sestina series.
I know there has to be a more elegant way of doing this -- I really wanted something like a large thermometer where I could customize each tick with the book title and page count, but I'll just settle for something that works... Still not sure I will get all the way through this opus, but this is where I shall track my progress to date.*
X Swann's Way
Pages: 462
Read: 462
100%
X Within a Budding Grove
Pages: 556
Read: 556
100%
X The Guermantes Way
Pages: 620
Read: 620
100%
X Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah)
Pages: 549
Read: 549
100%
X The Captive
Pages: 422
Read: 422
100%
X The Fugitive
Pages: 284
Read: 284
100%
X Time Regained
Pages: 401
Read: 401
100%
Done at last, done at last! Can hardly believe I am done at last!
(Ok, very inappropriate, I know. But I do feel freed from having this burden lifted. Now the sensible thing to do would be to take even a quarter of this effort and use it to become a "real" writer, the same way the Narrator does in the last 50 pages or so of Time Regained.)
* It's kind of fascinating that 90% or so of the pages discussing these progress meters are all tied back to NaNoWriMo (National (November) Novel Writing Month). I guess I could take that as a Sign (or at least a sign that November is nearly upon us), but I am not going to tackle a novel (in a month!) this year and probably not next year either. Just too many other tasks I am too far behind on. Still I will set some manageable goals of writing more (and surfing the web less), probably starting with resurrecting my broken sestina series.
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