SubscribeFebruary 22nd, 2012
late February
A week now since I saw the first snow drops. Tiny heather blooms at the house next door. Chickadees and starlings in the white spruce, their wild chatter, and the sun. When asked to define pleasure, this is what I say.
February 22nd, 2012
Anne Carson_poetry_fragments
I am currently re-reading Carson‘s Glass, Irony and God. It’s still stunning in its quiet erudition.
I first ran into her work about a decade ago. “The Glass Essay” was the first thing I read of hers. It’s some 38 pages long. Simultaneously a poem, essay and memoir, it begins like this:
I
I can hear little clicks inside my dream.
Night drips its silver tap
down the back.
At 4 A.M I wake. Thinking
of the man who
left in September.
His name was Law.
My face in the bathroom mirror
has white streaks down it.
I rinse the face and return to bed.
Tomorrow I am going to visit my mother.
SHE
She lives on a moor in the north.
She lives alone.
Spring opens like a blade there.
I travel all day on trains and bring a lot of books—
some for my mother, some for me
including The Collected Works of Emily Brontë.
This is my favourite author.
Also my main fear, which I mean to confront.
Whenever I visit my mother
I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,
my lonely life around me like a moor,
my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of
transformation
that dies when I come in the kitchen door.
What meat is it, Emily, we need?
The analogy my head makes with respect to Carson’s writing is perfume. You know the stuff sold in Dollar Stores? One blaring smell of rose? Meant to be nice in its simplicity? Not Carson, although she reads simply.
Carson reminds me of the perfume my mother used to wear. Mitsouko. Carnations, spicy floral, the smell of memory with a dark edge and a red heart.
Here’s another fragment from The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide
XXVI. How do Romans know who is the stranger? Pronto. Evil picks him out. Anna Xenia explained this to me. "Every stranger is a villain in the true sense."
Can you feel it under there? The tidal force of knowledge and piercing commentary?
Have you ever had a friend you loved very much but cut herself, over and over? She could handle no more pain, no more authority over her, no pushing, nor pulling and so all you could do is show another way, gently, without speaking the obvious truth, and do that for months, and years, building beauty over decades like a slow moving piece of healing theatre?
I feel like that when I read Carson. Like she’s building beauty.
And yet, there is violence there as well. A last fragment from “The Truth About God”
God's Christ Theory God had no emotions but wished temporarily to move in man's mind as if He did: Christ. Not passion but compassion. Com—means "with." What kind of withness would that be? Translate it. I have a friend named Jesus from Mexico. His father and grandfather are called Jesus too. They account me a fool with my questions about salvation. They say they are saving to move to Los Angeles.
Think about what “Translate it” does to the poem’s meaning. Keep thinking about the various ways you could attach “translate”. It’ll make your head hurt with its forced expansion. Of all things, perhaps I love this pain the most about reading Carson.
February 20th, 2012
poetry outloud_read by starlings
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Originally published by The Malahat Review Spring 2007
February 20th, 2012
David Lee, another poem
I’ve been thinking about death today. The thing is that I don’t view death as a tragedy really, not in the sense of a fall, or as in opposition to life. Death for me is only those moments when the system is breaking down, moving outside the narrow parameters of balance that keep it ticking over. Once the cell (or body) system steps too far past that chemical harmony then “death” vanishes like colour from bleached hair. At that point that which was the cell or the body is now the functioning—important in its own right—chemical material (the cell’s corpse) from which life might, or might not, arise when the material is recombined at some future time and place.
Anyway, I was reading this evening from Lee’s book and found this wondrous poem. Exactly, I want to tell him. Exactly.
On Turning Up a Fossil in My Garden Natural extinction need not connote a forced or meaningless fall into oblivion: instead, one of the simple facts of life, the ultimate fate of all species, not tainted by a stigma of failure: like breath, frequent in occurrence but unworthy of inordinate praise, not especially provocative as conversation. As when two lovers cease their heavy breathing, and part, and the moonlight seeps into a darkened room: seem clearly with no apprehension, animosity, fear.
From Lee’s So Quietly the Earth
February 19th, 2012
awesome / ASL poetry
via deafjam
February 18th, 2012
David Lee, a poem
I’m reading So Quietly the Earth by David Lee. Here’s one of the early poems.
The Grand Staircaise
Each person
Has one big theory to explain the universe
But it doesn't tell the whole story
And in the end it is what is outside him
To him, and especially to us
Who have been given no help whatever
In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely
On second-hand knowledge.
John Ashbery
A vast and primeval inland sea. Sand and debris washed from the highlands, sediment on the slippery film of ocean floor. Water forcing its weight downward lime and silica cementing these particles into a mass of living rock. The earth trembled, convulsed great stone to the edge of sea. Rivers dragged their waters over dihedrals. Marshes and lakes. Ancient tides. A winter eon and silence of brackish water. Summer and swampy pastures, lumbering dinosaurs. Layer piled on layer as rivers and tides built deeper, dark veins of shale and sandstone rising from a limestone pedestal. Water broke on bedrock. New seas splashed the earth. A thousand feet of blood rock over the chocolate belts. Winds turned, prehensile, tore down a western mountain, drowned the fertile sea in an inundation of sand. Dunes choked rivers, shallow lakes. The great desert piled two thousand feet, a riser of stone. And the sea returned. A shallow re-invasion teemed with shellfish, reptiles. Bodies mixed with sand, leached iron pigment from desert rock, metamorphosed to a plane of carmel lime, solidified. The land yawned, toyed with sea. Sandbanks and gravel covered mud and silt. A drab winter crossed horizon. Under a long cloudless night earth slumbered in gray dreams until birds called the sky and the land stirred. Sea dreamed away. Mountains folded with the waking, thrust heavenward. Clear water in bowls of stone between. Rivers drained from highlands eroding fragile ribs carrying the mountains grain by grain to inland lakes. A pink sediment spread the earth. The land rose. In a great arch it swelled two miles above the belly of sea. Rivers carried away rock strata, dug into earth. And the land broke, dividing into great pieces, plateaus, etched by deep fault lines where rock separated, valleys and basins. Delineaments. Rains fell. Seasons turned. Winds came. The earth breathed.
I absolutely love this poem. Hah! Now that’s a narrative to have. The only thing in it that bothers me is the use of “heavenward” in the 6th stanza. There do seem to be moments in Lee’s work that stray out of the world but so far (which isn’t very far), I love his poetry.
February 12th, 2012
Tony Tost, poetry
I’m reading Tony Tost‘s first published book of poetry (and winner of the Walt Whitman Award) invisible bride.
From Story South here is a brief selection from that work.
It’s like waking up and kissing a mirror good morning. The challenge is finding a reason. One approach is holding onto the ball, staying in bounds, waiting for the clock to run out. There are lots of reasons strutting around, flapping their wings, but they are often stupid reasons. Entire towns sell their souls for any number of reasons; people die for one, maybe two reasons. I had a pet chicken. Echo. He was my favorite chicken. Had him when I was a child (first chicken best chicken). Tonight the night is a black moth. A spoon grazing my lips. Tonight the night is a black mouth. They killed my favorite chicken. Tonight the night is a black month or a red month. It’s December. A man passes a door three or four times before he realizes it’s the way out.
There’s more over at the site.
The whole book forms a kind of narrative and frankly that’s what interests me about it. The opening sequence, as much as I recognize the masterful handling of image and feeling, also irritates me because of its conceptual foundations. (I’m a bit touchy about idea, I think).
It starts like this:
The Man's Vision begins with the child's Sob.
Who shall say what one's Vision has to offer another? Yet, in many cases, Vision's pat h is presented with such singular exactness of fidelity that we are perfectly safe in submitting the minds of even the youngest children to its influence: the gatehouse will hold firm and keep out the invaders, and the fires shall illuminate the archers manning the battlements. Fire is indeed a sweet and proper vision for children; it is most instruc- tive and fascinating, and forms a realistic preparation for the afterlife, with a more serene and thoughtful appreciation of its meaning. We might fan our flames by a thousand and one simple observations; for instance, that the same sun which ripens by beans illumines an inner ward with is a nightmare of smoke and flames and the screams of horses and men.
And now post “afterlife” I have to work at it. It has stopped being emotionally intelligible to me.
As it happens I was reading about “new materialism” today. Partly that’s because I am seeking an ordering principle for a developing poetry manuscript. Tost’s work reminds me of William Blake, or some cross between an Alchemical Mystic and Shaman. There is undeniable power there yet I would rather be allowed to find my “path” on the actual earth, the one we really inhabit.
Where are the narratives based on the relationships between levels of chemical and biological functioning systems? Where are those stories? Those hero ones, the Visions, and Archetypes, they are all based on the relationship between the real and the unreal and so cannot guide us out of the miasma we have made of our species and environment. For that we need an actual road, one we can actually walk.
Bah.
February 9th, 2012
poet laureate
There’s an interesting bit in Talon Book news about the fact that Calgary is choosing its first poet laureate. I really do wonder how one goes about that? Just like any other job interview?
Calgary’s search for a poet laureate is entering the final phases with a handful of local poets up for the prize: derek beaulieu, Daniel Bennett (better known to you as Transit), Kris Demeanor, Diane Guichon, Tyler Perry and Sheri-D Wilson.
derek beaulieu
Daniel Bennett (Transit)
Kris Demeanor
Diane Guichon
Tyler Perry
Serri-D Wilson
February 6th, 2012
Rita Ann Higgins, two poems
A recent discovery, Rita Ann Higgins book Goddess on the Mervue Bus is a delight. The title alone was worth the price of the book.
Here’s a poem called Poetry Doesn’t Pay.
People keep telling me Your poems, you know, you've really got something there, I mean really. When the rent man calls, I go down on my knees, and through the conscience box I tell him, 'This is somebody speaking, short distance, did you know I have something here with my poems? People keep telling me.' 'All I want is fourteen pounds and ten pence, hold the poesy.' 'But don't yo realise I've got something here.' 'If you don't come across with fourteen pounds and ten pence soon you'll have something at the side of the road, made colourful by a little snow.' 'But.' 'But nothing, you can't pay me in poems or prayers or with your husband's jokes, or with photographs of your children in lucky lemon sweaters hand-made by your dead grand aunt who had amnesia and the croup. 'I'm from the Corporation, what do we know or care about poesy, much less grand amnostic dead aunts.' 'But people keep telling me.' 'They lie. 'If you don't have fourteen pounds and ten pence, you have nothing but the light of the penurious moon.'
I particularly liked the line “They lie.” Uhuh.
I love poems that focus on those not normally seen as cultural heroes. Here’s one more—called Lizzie Kavanagh
There's nothing wrong with Lizzie Kavanagh, 'Kavvy'for short, she has that coat for ages. It's maroon imitation fur, extras include one leatherette belt. When it was new she only wore it to her mother's and Quinnsworth. Now she wears it everywhere, she says it brings her luck, once she didn't have it on at bingo and 'Never Been Kissed' was called and she only needed one number for a full house, after that she swore— it was definitely the coat. There's a comfortable depression on the seat of it from travelling on the Shantalla bus to see her sister-in-law. She says she'd be lost without Aggie— that's her sister-in-law, and mother— that's her mother. There's nothing wrong with Lizzie Kavanagh, she just likes bingo, her mother, Aggie— that's her sister-in-law, and maroon imitation— that's her coat.