Dulce et Decorum Est

Thought I'd repost my reading of Wilfred Owen's great war poem, given the day:

Reminder: Essential Kenneth Leslie launch in Ottawa

Off to Ottawa tomorrow morning to launch The Essential Kenneth Leslie. If you're in town, I hope you can make it. Details here. 

The book was published in the spring, and I read from it in the Annapolis Valley this summer, but this is actually the first official launch, due to how crazy busy I've been. Plans for a Halifax launch fell thru, unfortunately, but I'd like to set something up for the new year. It would be good to get to the north shore of NS, too, where Leslie was born and raised. It's been 38 years since a collection of his poetry was published, so I figure being a bit late launching it is not such an awful thing. I'm glad that the Ottawa launch is going to be on Remembrance Day, since Leslie played a big role on the homefront during WWII and such non-combatant heroes deserve to be remembered, too. He has certainly not been forgotten by anyone who knew him in life, but it's high time more people got to know his writing and his incredible life story.

Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman

Seven poems from Goran Simic's forthcoming Biblioasis collection, a book I had the privilege and pleasure of editing for the press. I also edited Joshua Trotter's debut collection, All This Could Be Yours, which, if it isn't on your radar yet, should be. Brilliant book. Three poems from it will be showcased in the forthcoming issue of Arc, along with a wee interview with me about Josh's work.

The Sunlight on the Garden

Just found this. Someone has done a bit of an edit on my reading of Louis MacNeice's amazing poem "The Sunlight on the Garden."


Louis MacNeice - The Sunlight On The Garden
Uploaded by poetictouch. - Arts and animation videos.

ONE AND ONE

For every one there is a one, and one
and one make one, divided.

For every one a one must die, and every
death is one, provided

every other is a one and one
is every other.

An other and a one make one,
husbanded and brided.

The union of a one and one
makes other, suicided.

Self-murder of the one-in-one is mother
of the other one and one

another's one-in-ones conspire to smother
other ones, while lovers

wire their one and ones
implacably together.

One is bound and gagged by one, one
saws and frays the knot

of one, and one
lets slip the tether.

Some Love for Kenneth Leslie

A new review of The Essential Kenneth Leslie is up on the book review website ForeWord Reviews. Very nice.

In other Kenneth Leslie news, I'll be in Ottawa on November 11, launching The Essential Kenneth Leslie, with help from superb Ottawa-area poets David O'Meara and Peter Richardson. The launch will also feature a screening of Chuck Lapp's excellent documentary about Leslie's life, God's Red Poet. The launch will be held at Ottawa Arts Court, 2 Daly Ave., with doors at 7 pm.

A wonderful thing about this event is that Leslie's daughter, journalist Rosaleen Dickson, and granddaughter, Elizabeth Dickson, will be in attendance. Elizabeth is presently writing a biography of Leslie.

UPDATE: David O'Meara unfortunately had to cancel. Fortunately, the city of Ottawa is blessed with many excellent poets and readers; Stephen Brockwell will now be joining me and Peter in reading Kenneth Leslie's work.

Call for Papers: Elizabeth Bishop Symposium

I've been asked to pass along the following call for papers. Think I might just submit something myself, as I'm planning to do a paper on Bishop next semester.


“It must be Nova Scotia”: Negotiating Place in the Writings of
Elizabeth Bishop

June 9-12, 2011 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Call for papers

To mark the centenary of Elizabeth Bishop’s birth, and to celebrate her contribution to world literature,
a special conference will be held 9-12 June 2011 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Working under the
title, “It must be Nova Scotia:” Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop,” the conference
will focus on Bishop’s examinations of place and placelessness, her fascination with borders and shifting
cultural geographies, and her unique position as an artist who lived and wrote both for and against
competing definitions of “home.”

We encourage proposals from scholars and creative artists who are engaged with Bishop’s work from
a range of perspectives. Strong presentations might address, for example, the relationship between
the local and the global in Bishop’s work, her sometimes contested status as a Canadian/ American/
Brazilian writer, or the importance of “questions of travel” and forced migration in her life and work.
The conference will feature a keynote address by the celebrated Irish novelist and Bishop scholar,
Colm Tóibín, and participants will have the opportunity to tour the Bulmer home in Great Village, Nova
Scotia, a place where Bishop lived through some the most formative and traumatic experiences of her
childhood and a site she often returned to in her most celebrated poetry and prose. As part of the
Scotia Festival of Music, an array of world-class musical performances inspired by Bishop’s work will also
be incorporated into the program. Selected essays from the conference will be collected and the editors
of the volume will seek publication from a leading university press.

Interested scholars are invited to submit a 300-word abstract as well as a brief CV (two pages maximum)
to the following address: bishopns@dal.ca. Electronic submissions only please. Deadline for submission
is 1 January 2011.

My duty is to follow this dark river to its source: Echoes of Heart of Darkness in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

(Because a couple of people have asked to see this, I thought I'd post the paper I recently wrote for my Contemporary British Fiction class at UNB. Probably of no interest to anyone who hasn't read the Mitchell and Conrad novels, and possibly of no interest to those who have.) 

***

I think of it in terms of when I walk into a cathedral I don't really understand the mechanics of the force that is keeping tons and tons of stone up for hundreds of years above my head, but nonetheless the cathedral stays up. (Raja)

With the cagey modesty typical of his public persona, David Mitchell does not say outright that his writing is cathedralesque, but the Gothic church really is the perfect analogy for his tour-de-force novel Cloud Atlas. The priest stands at the pulpit delivering his sermon; the choir performs a hymn; the lead-seamed stained glass windows admit and transmute light, casting projections and shadows upon the assembled; the multi-ethnic congregation mumble their prayers in unison; the frieze-panelled walls and ornamented nooks and corners, spandrels and corbels, all call out competing and complementary, refracting and interpenetrating myths; meanwhile, immutable laws of physics and architectural ingenuity conspire to support the whole improbably elegant, awe-inspiring jumble. Cloud Atlas is just such a luminescent, harmonious Babel of stories, a Borgesian bouillabaisse of clamouring narratives. Most obviously, there are the novel's six principal tales, each belonging to a different genre, but Mitchell's unabashedly intertextual technique also spins dozens of other yarns into each linked novella. Some pop up at intervals (appropriately, for a book so concerned with reincarnation and Nietzsche's theory of the eternal recurrence), while others make but a brief cameo before disappearing for good into the “multitude of drops” (Mitchell, 529) that constitute Cloud Atlas's ever-shifting sea. Mitchell's frame of reference is catholic (of course!): he is as apt to allude to a contemporary television show as he is to the myths of classical antiquity (again, appropriately so in a novel concerned with how stories are told and how they mutate with the passage of time). Even though many of the nods Mitchell makes towards texts outside his novel are explicit (with stories and authors named and acknowledged), it would take an army of forensic exegetes to collect and identify all of the literary DNA evidence in the book. My intention is to focus rather on one very important, but curiously obscure, carrier beam in the secret architecture of Cloud Atlas. Unlike, say, Melville or Nietzsche, two key Cloud Atlas touchstones, the name of Joseph Conrad never appears in the text of Mitchell's novel, nor do the titles of any Conrad books. This, in spite of the fact that Cloud Atlas is not only shot through with allusions to Conrad, but, I would argue, is in constant dialogue with Heart of Darkness.¹ Mitchell, in the acknowledgements to Cloud Atlas, says—again, cagily—that “[t]he character Vyvyan Ayrs quotes Nietzsche more freely than he admits” (Mitchell, 531). The same claim could be made of Mitchell's relationship to Conrad. Both structurally and thematically,² Mitchell adopts and adapts Conrad's techniques and ideas, which borrowings are evident on both the macro (narrative structure, theme) and micro levels (dropped hints and allusions) and culminate to suggest powerfully that Cloud Atlas has a secret heart of darkness.

At first glance, one is hard-pressed to imagine two novels more structurally disparate than Heart of Darkness and Cloud Atlas. The former is so brief that it is often classified as a novella; the latter sprawls to over 500 pages. The former follows a single plot-line, narrated by a first-person protagonist in three sections in an unflaggingly straight line from beginning to middle to end; the latter consists of six discrete, but intercalated and interpenetrating novella-length narratives, each written in a distinct genre (travel journal, epistolary, thriller, memoir/picaresque, dystopian/sci-fi/interview and oral epic, respectively) and style, each set in a different time and place.

There is, however, one crucial common denominator: the frame narrative. The principal action of Heart of Darkness is narrated by Charlie Marlow, but Marlow's tale is introduced, and occasionally interrupted, by an unidentified narrator who, along with “The Director of Companies,” “The Lawyer” and “The Accountant,” comprise the immediate audience for Marlow's yarn, as the five men, aboard the “cruising yawl” Nellie, wait for the tide to turn on the Thames at Gravesend (Conrad, 7). Mitchell, essentially, employs the same framing technique as Conrad, but multiplies it. Not only is each main story embedded in its successor, which it interrupts, but each also frames within it one or more small stories³. In the “Sloosha's Crossin'” sections, for example, Zachry's narrative incorporates, among others, yarns told by Truman the Third (Mitchell, 272) and Meronym (Mitchell, 298).

For both authors, framing devices are not mere whims or matters of convenience, but complements to the respective novels' thematic concerns and reflections of the authors' preoccupations with how stories can and should be told. Heart of Darkness is generically related to the sailor's yarn, but Conrad takes pains to distinguish his protagonist—and his modus operandi—as a more thoughtful specimen than his fellows, as the framing narrator explains that Marlow

... did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (Conrad, 9)

Mitchell is similarly invested in the reinvention and transcendence of genre clichés and limitations, and we find Conrad's metaphor of nut and shell nestled within the framed text of Isaac Sachs' notebook,⁴ as Sachs attempts to work out certain temporal conundrums reflected by the structure of Cloud Atlas:

One model of time: an infinite matrioshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of 'now' likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. (Mitchell, 409)

It is more than a little tempting to speculate that Mitchell puts inverted commas around “shell” not merely because Sachs is using the word figuratively, but because he is quoting Conrad. Such speculations might seem tenuous, were it not for certain plainly deliberate signposts planted by Mitchell, seemingly to point the reader down Conrad's Congo. One of the first, and most substantial, framed narratives in Cloud Atlas is the story of the subjugation of the wilfully peaceful Moriori people by the warlike Maori. The story is narrated by the preacher D'Arnoq⁵ and recorded by Adam Ewing in his journal.(Mitchell, 11ff) Spelled backwards, the name D'Arnoq, which does not seem to exist outside the pages of Cloud Atlas, is a very slight mutation of Conrad.⁶ Mitchell promptly quashes any doubts about the intentionality of this coincidence:

The name of Mr D'Arnoq is not well-loved in the Musket. 'A White Black, a mixed-blood mongrel of a man,' Walker told me. 'Nobody knows what he is.” Suggs, a one-armed shepherd who lives under the bar, swore our acquaintance is a Bonapartist general hiding here under assumed colours. Another swore he was a Polack. (Mitchell, 16)

Cagey as always, Mitchell is obliquely telling the reader that he has imported a disguised Conrad into his novel to conduct a covert campaign.⁷ Broadly, that campaign consists of the introduction of a complex discussion of human nature and the false dichotomy of “savage” and “civilized” humanity.

After D'Arnoq “unlock[s] a Pandora's Box of history” (Mitchell, 10) by relating the plight of the Moriori, his next sortie involves introducing a live specimen of the doomed tribe to Ewing. Some time after setting sail from the Chatham Islands aboard the Prophetess, Ewing learns that he has an uninvited cabin-mate: Autua,⁸ a fugitive Moriori slave, hidden away behind coils of rope by D'Arnoq. Ewing, who wants no part of D'Arnoq's “'good causes'” (Mitchell, 26), is resentful of this imposition and casts about for ways to “convince Cpt. Molyneux of my innocence in Mr D'Arnoq's plot” (Mitchell, 28). Mitchell's choice of the word “plot” is crucial here, as it is a plot of Conrad's, from “The Secret Sharer,”⁹ into which he has dropped poor Adam Ewing. It is through his exposure to Autua—unlike Legatt, an improbable double, who eventually saves Ewing from the predatory Europeans Goose and Boerhaave, causing Ewing to recognize him as a peer—that Ewing gains enlightenment and decides, at the end of his narrative, to become an Abolitionist (Mitchell, 528).

The secret sharing relationship, in which one party more-or-less involuntarily plays host or companion to another, recurs throughout Cloud Atlas: Frobisher and Jocasta; Luisa and Javier; Luisa and Sixsmith; Sonmi and Yoona~939; Zachry and Meronym and, parodically, Aurora House's escapees and Mr. Meeks.¹⁰ In both Heart of Darkness (and by extension “The Secret Sharer”) and Cloud Atlas, secrets (and the correlated themes of truths and lies) are viewed with considerable ambivalence. For Marlow, the secret of Kurtz's descent into savagery is an enormous burden, a “duty” (Conrad, 68) he carries with him back to Europe and which forces him into “a choice of nightmares” (Conrad, 62): he must either tell Kurtz's Intended the horrible truth, or lie to preserve her illusion of Kurtz as a beacon of humanity. The latter, a sort of moral suicide, is no easy option for Marlow, who “hate[s], detest[s], and can't bear a lie ... There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies” (Conrad, 29). Secrets are similarly shrouded in ambivalence in Mitchell's novel. The sharing of a secret brings two or more characters into an intimate relationship and forges solidarity, but secrets are also fraught with danger. Yoona~939's secret leads to her death and would likely have also killed Sonmi had she been less successful in keeping it. The secret shared by Frobisher and Jocasta—their Oedipal affair—turns out not to be a secret at all, but a means for Ayrs to manipulate his amanuensis. Luisa's secret relationship with Javier puts the boy in jeopardy when Fay Li threatens to harm him in order to control Luisa—whose life is threatened precisely because of the secret shared with her by Sixsmith. And Zachry's secret, which is also a lie, has about it a Marlovian stink of corruption: “secrets jus' rot you like teeth if you don't yank 'em out” (Mitchell, 317).

Once inserted into Adam Ewing's life and journal, the dialectical analysis continues, in one form or another, in each subsequent chapter of Cloud Atlas. Mitchell takes pains to remind the attentive reader that, even though D'Arnoq disappears from the novel, Conrad is never far below the surface. Like Conrad, Mitchell peppers his book with leitmotifs; many of these motifs are either consonant with key devices in Heart of Darkness (among them, tropes of light or flame; maps; rivers; blindness and sight) or are clear allusions to Conrad's novel. An exhaustive inventory of these devices is beyond the scope of the present discussion, but only a few key examples are needed to demonstrate how pervasive Conrad's influence on Mitchell's novel is.

First, there are references to the Congo, both overt and slightly submerged like snags, which serve as signposts, or hyperlinks, to Heart of Darkness. In “Letters from Zedelghem,” we learn that “the Crommelyncks did well from Congo investments” (Mitchell, 62), while in “Half-Lives” one of Javier's stamps features “a paddle-wheeler churn[ing] up an inky Congo” (Mitchell, 97), and Joe Napier's crisis of conscience occurs at his cabin, next to a “lost river” lined by “ancient oaks” (Mitchell, 450), a clear, if covert allusion to the “primeval forest” (Conrad, 29) on the banks of the Congo.¹¹ Second, and even more persuasively, there are phrases lifted straight from the text of Conrad's novel. Adam Ewing writes of a hog-farmer who “said the Maori had performed the White Man a service by exterminating another race of brutes” (Mitchell, 16), echoing almost verbatim the infamous post-scriptum to Kurtz's pamphlet for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs (Conrad, 50). Kurtz's other famous utterance—“The horror! The horror!” (Conrad, 68)—reverberates throughout Cloud Atlas, is very nearly inscribed in the name of the racist missionary Giles Horrox, and is, somewhat ironically, mouthed verbatim by Timothy Cavendish, in reference to his incarceration in Aurora House (Mitchell, 371). The most chilling hyperlinks between the two books are the two severed heads mounted on poles found by Zachry and Meronym at Cluny's Dwellin' (Mitchell, 314) and Saint-Sonmi's Dwellin' (Mitchell, 319) in the wake of the Kona's pillage, corresponding to the stake-mounted skulls Marlow spies outside Kurtz's compound (Conrad, 57).

Why does Mitchell go to such lengths to weave Conrad's text into his own? In short, it is to show that, however literary and societal fashions may change, the human realities unearthed and exposed by Conrad via Marlow are fundamental and cross-culturally universal. As Sonmi says when the archivist protests that he does not “see how ... such evil could take root in our civilized state,”

It is a cycle as old as tribalism. In the beginning there is ignorance. Ignorance engenders fear. Fear engenders hatred, and hatred engenders violence. Violence breeds further violence until the only law is whatever is willed by the most powerful. (Mitchell, 360-1)

The same thought is taken up in Morty Dhondt's view that “[t]he nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence” (Mitchell, 462). These philosophical musings are recapitulated aphoristically in Henry Goose's First Law of Survival: “The Weak are Meat the Strong do Eat” (Mitchell, 508). Mitchell takes this dictum to what seems its ineluctably logical conclusion in the “Sloosha's Crossin'” section, which is fitting, since this dystopian future world is, structurally, the dark heart of Cloud Atlas. Here human hunger—the same voraciousness that Marlowe sees in Kurtz, “as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him” (Conrad, 59)—has led to a denuded, toxic planet, with humanity on the brink of extinction: “'human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too.'”(Mitchell, 286) Meronym's discourse on the both/and nature of civilization and savagery could well be a paraphrase of Heart of Darkness:

“List'n, savages an' Civilizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old'uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ'lized heart beatin' in their ribs.” (Mitchell, 319)

In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz, the acme and incarnation of Western culture—“[a]ll Europe contributed to [his] making” (Conrad, 50)—commits horrific atrocities and “preside[s] at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which ... were offered up to him” (Conrad, 50). By contrast, Marlow is struck forcefully by the “restraint” shown by the putatively savage African cannibals crewing his boat, who do not turn on, and eat, the whites, despite outnumbering them and despite being very hungry.¹² To Marlow, this is “one of those human secrets that baffle probability” (Conrad, 43), which he contrasts explicitly with Kurtz, who “lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts” (Conrad, 57). This reprises Marlow's opening rhetorical gambit, in which he asserts that England “also ... has been one of the dark places of the earth” (Conrad, 9), when its natives were the barbaric savages and Rome's soldiers the civilizing invaders. By describing modern Brussels as a “whited sepulchre”¹³ (Conrad, 13)—clean on the outside, but dark and death-filled at its core—Marlow makes it plain that the darkness of European society is no figment of the past.

Physical strength, Marlow asserts, has far more to do with determinations of who is civilized and who is savage, than any innate racial qualities:

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. (Conrad, 10)

The immutability of these individual and social realities is the grim message conveyed by both Conrad and Mitchell. For Marlow, there is no such thing as “Progress,” as he sees “nineteen hundred years ago” as “the other day” (Conrad, 9). “The mind of man,” he says, “is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future” (Conrad, 38). Kurtz's death is an event of no special significance for the world, because he will, as he insists, return¹⁴ (Conrad, 61). The synchronicity of past, present and future—recall Sachs's notebook entry, quoted above—the fallacy of progress¹⁵ and the “eternal recurrence” of events are, if anything, even more central for Mitchell. The idea that the “oldest” and most optimistic story (Adam Ewing's) and the furthest in the future and darkest (“Sloosha's Crossin'”)¹⁶ are both happening at the same time is the only thing that saves Cloud Atlas from being an utterly desperate book. Had the “terrorsome cold” truth (Mitchell, 318) of the Prescients in “Sloosha's Crossin'” been placed at the end instead of the middle, the change to the overall tone of Mitchell's book would be seismic.

While there are no happy endings promised by either the notoriously pessimistic Conrad or by Mitchell—for whom chronological “endings,” as such, are necessarily beside the point—they both present uncannily similar possibilities for holding darkness at bay. When confronted by the brutal, ugly truth of human nature stripped of its illusory “cloak of time,” Marlow says it is a “deliberate belief” (Conrad, 38) that is required to stay civilized. This is something picked up and elaborated upon by Adam Ewing in Cloud Atlas's closing pages, as Ewing recovers from his poisoning and reflects upon his “recent adventures” which have made him “quite the philosopher”¹⁷ (Mitchell, 527):

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.

What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief.

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. ... Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this: — one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. ... In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. (Mitchell, 527-8)

Ewing's clear-eyed hope for a better future, in spite of the dark heart of human nature's “many-headed hydra” (Mitchell, 529), and in defiance of Wagstaff's exhaustedly cynical assertion that all beliefs turn to “rats' nests and rubble” (Mitchell, 506), is a striking departure from the tragic pessimism of Conrad: Heart of Darkness ends not with a “deliberate belief” but in a deliberate lie. That Mitchell positions Ewing's last entry at the very end of Cloud Atlas is his way of answering Marlow's beginning: this also, Mitchell says through Ewing, can be one of the bright places on earth.

WORKS CITED

Barry, Shane. “Silver Daggers and Russian Dolls - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, in interview.” Three Monkeys Online. March 2005.
<http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/als/_david_mitchell_cloud_atlas_interview.html>

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1988.

Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2004.

Raja, Nazalee. “Secret Architectures: A Conversation With David Mitchell.” The Agony Column. 16 May 2005.

<http://www.bookotron.com/agony/columns/2005/05-16-05.htm>

1As well as, to a lesser extent, with “The Secret Sharer.”

2Structure and theme are actually coextensive in Cloud Atlas, but for the sake of analysis, I will discuss them, to some extent, discretely.

3Some of the stories are also framed in virtually the same manner as Heart of Darkness. Adam Ewing's journal, for instance, has been edited and published by his son Jackson, who interjects twice with footnotes (Mitchell, 21 & 521). Sonmi's story is framed by the questions posed by the archivist. And we learn at the end of “Sloosha's Crossin'” that Zachry's yarn, for all its vivid immediacy, is, like Ewing's, presented by his son (Mitchell, 324). In a book preoccupied with the truth and authenticity of stories, these frames serve as reminders that each teller of a tale puts his or her own spin on it, however subtly or unintentionally.

4One suspects that Mitchell inserts Sachs' notebook entry—just before the physicist is blown up, and therefore at the last possible moment—as a means of encrypting some of his own pre-composition notebook elaborations. He has said that structure was the starting point for Cloud Atlas and has used the Russian doll metaphor to describe that structure (Barry).

5D'Arnoq's peroration, “unbroken three hours” (Mitchell, 10) after he begins it, is strikingly similar in duration to Marlow's Congo yarn.

6Which is itself an Anglicization of Konrad, the penultimate name of the Pole Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski who would become one of England's greatest novelists.

7By making D'Arnoq a “White Black,” Mitchell also appears to be exonerating Conrad, who has been much maligned in post- colonial critques (most notably by Nobel Laureate Chinua Achebe) as a racist. The reversal of Conrad's name may simply be a strategy on Mitchell's to use Conrad while avoiding blatant asynchrony (the action of Heart of Darkness post-dating by several decades Adam Ewing's adventures), but one suspects that Mitchell might have wanted to disguise Conrad in order to bring his ideas into Cloud Atlas without subjecting them to the knee-jerk reactions that Conrad seems to inspire in many contemporary readers and critics.

8The palindromic character of Autua's name is a further enticement to read names in this chapter backwards.

9In which a criminal fugitive, Leggatt, is secreted within the nameless narrator's cabin, just as Autua is in Ewing's. While the particulars of the Ewing-Autua meeting closely resemble the Legatt scenario, the latter needs to be understood as an iteration of the earlier Marlow-Kurtz relationship. “The Secret Sharer” is therefore not nearly as important a source text as Heart of Darkness.

10Mr. Meeks, with his speech faculties damaged by a stroke or dementia, is the ideal secret sharer. The only thing he is supposed to be able to say, appropriately, is “I know! I know!” (Mitchell, 376), but he will never tell what it is he knows.

11This is also, significantly, the last image to pass through Napier's mind before he dies.

12The motif of the hungry, but “inexplicably” restrained savage is picked up by Mitchell, when Adam Ewing worries: “what bestial depravity might a savage not be driven to by an empty stomach?” (Mitchell, 29)

13Mitchell must have had this trope in mind when he had David Frobisher describe another Belgian city, Ostend, as having “coffinesque streets” (Mitchell, 47). It is worth noting, also, that Frobisher (the namesake of a famous English explorer, Martin Frobisher, who sailed to Baffin Island and brought back a load of fool's gold), like Marlow, goes to Belgium in a speculative quest for a job that has not been advertised. And like the unnamed “Company” that hires Marlow, Frobisher's employer also believes that he is engaged in a civilizing activity (Mitchell, 82).

14As will, “one bright dusk,” Timothy Cavendish (Mitchell, 404).

15Whose most passionate advocate in Cloud Atlas is the plainly delusional Giles Horrox (Mitchell, 506-7).

16It is significant that the name of Adam, the Judaeo-Christian first man, is the name not only of the protagonist of Cloud Atlas's oldest story, but also the name of Zachry's abducted brother in the most futuristic tale. It should also be noted that Mitchell's pairing of Adam (an “A” name) with Zachry (a “Z” name) matches up not only two significant Biblical figures, but actually encodes God's dictum “Ego sum Alpha et Omega.” The beginning and the ending are one. Furthermore, Zachry's name, in Hebrew, signifies “What Jehovah hath remembered.” His story, at the furthest fringe of human time, is both memory and prophecy. None of these details is accidental and, in concert with a dizzying array of other references and allusions, they are textual reifications of Mitchell's thinking about time and eternity—thinking for which he owes much to Conrad.

17In other words, he has gone from being a sea-going diarist simply relating the incidents of his travel to a storyteller more like the Marlow presented by the framing narrator of Heart of Darkness. It should be noted that these philosophical ponderings take place while Ewing “hear[s] naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity” (Mitchell, 527). The invocation of the river as metaphor for time brings us back into contact with Conrad's Congo—just as Ewing prepares to ventriloquise ideas articulated by another fictional character who post-dates him.

WTF???

POPLAR AND HOP

Latest autumn windstorm's lopped one of
the Lombardy poplar's brittle uprights.
Prone to borers, cankers and wetwood,
fast grower bound for an early demise,
I'd never have planted the thing—was here
before we were. It's always looked blighted,
half-dead, but as hardscape it's handy. I love
how the hop bine shoots a new spring runner
up the trunk to tangle with the tree's upper
branches. When the poplar leaves are gone for good,
the broad green palms of the hop'll still flutter.
But the breeze, which had calmed, is rising.
Bad mojo to speak of the future, not wise:
the next felling windstorm's always near.

The Always Delightful Stephen Fry on Language

INFINITE MERSEY

Just before the bog-
leached, tea-stained

Mersey spills
and thunders

over Mill Falls'
polished slate

outcrop (severed
from its mother-

lode of metamorphic
Africa in the late

Proterozoic
five hundred

million years ago)
and pours

into a foam-
scummed pool below,

a granite boulder
splits the river

like the shoulder
of some Titan

felled and fallen
in the flow.

Here, we chose
to make our camp.

When late sunlight,
breaching over-

cast, lands
at that just-so

slant, the erratic
stone, kindled, glows

like a thousand-
candled lamp.

So it will go,
until the soapy, bog-

leached, tea-stained
Mersey scours

it down and
lays it low.

Kejimkujik

update

I recorded a bunch of audio at the Poetry Weekend (unfortunately, we had to miss the final set of readings, due to parental considerations), but haven't had the chance to upload it all yet. I'm off to Fredericton for classes tomorrow; I hope to have a chance once I get back, but we're heading off to PEI for Thanksgiving weekend. Busy as all heck, trying to balance school, travel, freelance work and family stuff; looking forward to December already... I've decided to start riding the bus to and from Fredericton, which is more than twice as expensive as riding my bike, but will turn travel time into work time, which is frickin priceless.

Against Project Descriptions, as such: an open letter to the Canada Council for the Arts

I just finished writing a grant application to the Canada Council. I decided, against the better judgment of sensible folk, to use the space allotted to a "project description" to explain why I am not including a project description. Because I wrote this in the hopes that it would generate fruitful discussion about these matters, I've decided to share my argument with a creative writing program officer at the CC, and with anyone else who cares to hear about it. I know there are a lot of writers who share my basic position on this matter; if you do, I urge you to share your thoughts with the Canada Council. Herewith, my non-project description:

Description of Project

In past applications, I have written several paragraphs describing the project for which I was requesting support. I did this even though I am not a writer who works from any sort of pre-formulated plan and therefore had no “project” per se. I did this because I believed that perfect honesty would hurt my cause. Because I am not overly fond of prevarication and because I am a perhaps unreasonably proud person, I toyed with the idea, this time, of tersely describing my proposed project as “a book of poems” and leaving it at that. I have decided, instead, to provide a reasoned argument defending my decision not to describe a project, as such.

This is, in many ways, more difficult and, I recognize, more risky an approach than the fabulation of a straightforward project description. I have been advised against proceeding thus by other writers who have read drafts of this text, as they are concerned that it is an arrogant approach that will potentially alienate jurors who might otherwise be predisposed towards supporting my application. I have decided not to follow my friends' well-intended advice, for several reasons. First, I see no cause to conceal my working methods; however erratic they may seem to an outside observer, they have stood me in good stead. Second, I think more writers need to apply for support from a position of pride and strength, rather than as duplicitous suppliants; if I am not willing to do this myself, then I am a hypocrite. The present government tends to regard publicly funded artists as parasites; rather than keep a low profile to avoid attracting the Conservatives' wrath, as I have heard several artists say we should do, I think this is the time to stand up and be counted, to be boldly unapologetic about our worth to society. A grant application may not seem the place or time to do this, but if we fail to model positive behaviour even within the relatively safe confines of our artistic enclaves, I do not see how there can be much hope of us doing it in a broader public setting. Finally, I am proceeding likewise because I believe that the notion one must have a project has had an insidiously pernicious effect on the sort of poetry books that have been written and published in this country, placing too much emphasis on the book as unit of production. Stuart Ross, a veteran of the Canadian writing scene whose work has won widespread acclaim and been nominated for a shelfload of prizes, recently spoke out about this in a column in Sub-Terrain magazine: “Does a focused Project or Theme make for a better book of poetry? Nope — more often than not it means oat-meal-like homogeneity. Or some interesting idea stretched beyond its natural limit to achieve “book length.” But it sure makes it easier to describe what you’re working on when you have to fill out a grant application.” Obviously, if a writer of Stuart's bent happens to be on a jury, he won't punish an application for want of a coherent description. Perhaps there are many such jurors out there, but the impression given, and received, is that the project description is important and that it must be adhered to if monies are to be granted. A writer friend confided to me once that she did not think her project was working out, but that she felt obliged to follow through on it, having received a grant. She cannot be the only such conscientious soul to have felt this way and to have therefore wasted time and energy in the production of mediocre work. The Canada Council exists to support artists, not to influence the genre of art being produced. Whatever the intentions behind asking for project descriptions, the effects are not altogether salutary.

First off, I must say that I do see the rationale behind asking for a project description, even if I don't agree that it should be required. The sums of money being disbursed are not insignificant, and one wishes to be sure that taxpayers' dollars go to people who will make good use of them. When it comes to writers without much of a track record, a well-written pitch can only help a jury, desperate for objective criteria in a highly subjective field, to form an impression of a writer's credibility. Young writers, aware that they work in a competitive field, will naturally try to outdo their peers in crafting the most persuasive-sounding descriptions possible. This is why I had no insurmountable qualms about writing detailed, albeit somewhat fanciful, descriptions of my projects in previous applications, two of which have been successful. When going to a job interview, one shaves and puts on a tie; one doesn't go as one's slovenly self.

Once a writer has established something of a pedigree and amassed a basket of awards and credentials, however, it seems that past performance, along with a sample of recent writing, should be amply sufficient to judge their application's merit. I could tell you all manner of fine things about what I intend to write—I have spent much of the past dozen years, after all, turning out polished verse and magazine prose, so eloquence and balderdash come to me naturally—but it is the poems I have already written and the books I have already published that should make or break my case, regardless of whether my description is an honest plan, a cynical strategy or a half-cocked fantasy.

None of my poems has been written according to a pre-conceived blueprint. The variety of subject matter, form, voice and technique in my enclosed writing sample reflects my credo that with every poem one writes, one starts fresh. Having composed a poem on one subject and/or in a certain manner, I am not interested in following the same patterns again. I want to surprise myself and my readers, which is, as a goal, rather difficult to convey in advance of its advent. Writing for me has always been experimental, a process of discovery, rather than an agenda of tasks to be checked off upon completion. Sometimes, I write prolifically. Often, I don't. Much of the creative work I do does not qualify as grantable art, much more yet fails to amount to anything worthwhile, but most if not all of what I decide to publish contributes to literary culture. If I were perfectly honest in a project description, I would have to admit that there is some chance that I will not write a single poem during the period covered by the grant. History suggests otherwise, but it is nevertheless a potentiality I confront on a regular basis. The thing is, one never can say how much work a poet gets done when she appears to be doing nothing at all. One year, I spent several months in an anhedonic funk, during which I wrote almost nothing despite having a wealth of free time; at the end of it, I wound up producing what I think will stand as one my very best poems. This is why “project descriptions” are, frankly, absurd for so many of us (even while, I concede, there are some who seem to work very well within the parameters laid out by a project description).

I may not have much of a clue what it is I will do next, but patterns established over the past decade-plus suggest that it will be something—and that the something in question will have an impact on culture, in however marginal a way, as tends to be the case with small-press literary activities. I won't rehash my C.V., as you have it in front of you already. I have done a substantial quantity of good work and that work has received positive notice, grants, prizes, anthologizations. One thing I do know is that the less I have to chase after income to ensure that my family continues to enjoy a reasonably high quality of life, the more likely I am to get good work done—the more opportunity I will have to read, reflect and learn what it is I might do next. I look forward to discovering what that work will be, and a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts will go some distance towards helping me do so. I have every confidence that a grant at this stage of my development as a writer will be money well spent. I hope that you agree.

Poetry Weekend!!!

I'm heading to Fredericton tomorrow. Nothing noteworthy about that, I head to Fredericton every Wednesday morning these days. But this time, instead of spending one night, I'll be staying till Sunday night. This weekend is the annual UNB Poetry Weekend, an awesome marathon of verse that's been happening since 2004. In that time, I only missed once, a couple of years ago when I was reading at the Ottawa Writers' Festival. Rachel and Kaleb are coming along. Not sure how much K will get out of it, but R will be reading along with me and who knows who all else. Ross Leckie calls the PW the most disorganized literary festival in Canada ("unorganized" would perhaps be more apposite, as the "dis" prefix suggests that it's accidental, which it ain't) and in keeping with that, I haven't yet heard who's reading when. I'll be making every attempt to record the readings, as I have in the past, but the challenges of running a poetry marathon while parenting may overwhelm me. We'll see. Should be a good time, regardless.

Audio: Wells, Compton and Klaassen in St. John

Another old reading, newly uploaded. From April, my reading with Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen and Anne Compton in the gorgeous UNBSJ bookstore in downtown St. John, NB:

Audio: Wells and Klaassen in Charlottetown

I was cleaning up files on my audio recorder and found a few things I never got around to uploading and posting. Some five months after the event, here's my Charlottetown reading with Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen:

Speaking Sense to the Silly

Just when you think the last embers have gone cold and the fire can safely be declared dead--up it flares again! Jeet Heer continues to argue with old whassisname. Who is nothing if not verbose.

On the opportunism of anthologists

Shane Neilson in the Globe on why editors shouldn't put their own work in their anthologies. I agree (Shane is kind enough to point out that I avoided this sin). Every anthologist should repeat as a mantra: Don't be Louis Untermeyer. Don't be Louis Untermeyer.

A bit of love for Kenneth Leslie

This appears to have been out for a while, but I just stumbled upon it now. The Midwest Book Review has published a warm little blurb about The Essential Kenneth Leslie. The page it's on is ridiculously long, so I'll just reproduce the review here:

The Essential Kenneth Leslie
Zachariah Wells, editor
The Porcupine's Quill
68 Main St., Erin, Ontario, N0B IT0
9780889843288, $14.95, www.porcupinesquill.ca

Passion is something that can be felt through text. "The Essential Kenneth Leslie" is a collection of the man's work compiled by fellow poet Zachariah Wells. Kenneth Leslie's prime was decades ago, but his work still holds up well today, providing much insight and thought from his time to today. "The Essential Kenneth Leslie" is a treasure trove of poetry, highly recommended. "Success": There was a dream;/he fulfilled it./There was a wish;/it came true./There was a fire;/and he killed it./There was a spark;/and it flew!

Reviews online

My reviews of Steve McOrmond's Good News About Armageddon and Alice Major's Memory's Daughter are now up at the Quill & Quire site.

My readership just exploded

Picked up a copy of the October issue of Reader's Digest today. I've been doing freelance work for RD on contract for almost a year now. My main role is editorial (drumming up material for stories, editing stories and digesting "pickups" from other magazines, acting as a liaison with writers, etc.), but I parlayed that into a writing assignment for them, which has just been published. Hence the title of this post. More people will probably read this article than all of the books I'll publish in my lifetime, combined.

My article, entitled "Doctor Igloo," is a profile of an old friend of mine, Dr. Paul Stubbing, who worked as a physician in Iqaluit for three decades. I came to know Paul through his kids--his son Mike, now a partner in the accounting firm Grant Thornton, was in my grade at high school in Ottawa, and we became, and still are, good friends. I got to know Paul better when I went to Iqaluit in the mid-'90s, and would have the occasional meal at the Stubbings' bay-side home. A poem in my first book is based on a story he told me over one such dinner, and is dedicated to him. So it was very meaningful for me to have the opportunity to shine a spotlight on one of the country's unsung everyday heroes--the sort of guy who would never seek out this kind of attention, and deserves it all the more because of that. (My story is far from the only recognition he's received of late, as Paul was also recently appointed to the Order of Canada, thanks to the initiative of some fellow long-time northerners.) The story is not available on line, but RD can be purchased pretty near anywhere.

This issue of RD also features a digested version of a story I scooped from my good friends at Riddle Fence magazine: Monica Kidd's harrowing experience of breaking her back on a canoeing trip in BC. Very powerful piece. And neat to see an essay that originally appeared in a small literary mag get reprinted in as big a forum as RD. Conventional wisdom says there's not much overlap between these two types of magazine, but the more I work with RD, the less fervently I believe it.

Old School

Regular CLM readers--if there are any left out there--will recall that a few months ago I said I was going back to school, after an almost decade-long hiatus. Well, the time has come. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I'm riding my motorcycle to Fredericton for my first couple of classes at UNB. The good folks there have been most accommodating. Not only have they accepted all of the credits from my earlier foray into grad school, but they're paying me to attend. Part of the deal is a TA-ship, which will take the form of an editorial role with The Fiddlehead. I'll be taking one academic course this semester and a CW course of my own devising next semester (I've yet to work out the finer points, but it will have something to do with rhetoric and description in poetry and will involve some public lectures), along with a non-credit Research Methods course and, of course, my thesis (which will be a collection of poems).

It's a good time for me to finish this degree, as I'm laid off from work long enough to get the courses in. What use the degree might be I don't yet know, but it'll be a way for me to refocus my attention on literature that isn't necessarily Here and Now, which I've been meaning to do for a while, being rather fatigued with the general mediocrity and petty intrigues that predominate at any given time in literary circles. I'll still be a busy freelancer while studying at UNB and might get the odd railroad trip, particularly over xmas, so I don't expect CLM--which has always been the fruit of my idleness--will be as dynamic as it has been in the past. Then again, some of the things I dig up in my studies may well spur blog posts. We'll see.

Happy autumn, everyone. My favourite season.

New online look for Biblioasis

Thanks to my good friends at Sobule Design, my good friends at Biblioasis now have a brand new website. There are still bugs to be worked out and some finishing work to be done, but it looks great. I love it when friends do good work for friends who do good work.

In Praise of Limestone

Above, a shot of what I've been up to in my "spare" time this summer. More here, for anyone interested.

Blog, blog, blog

Jacob Mooney, who clearly has more time for blogging than yrs truly (I have one foot out the door as I type this) weighs in with a thoughtful post about blogging. One thing I've noted is that, however "well read" CLM is, my traffic has been steadily dropping since November. It may be that I've been blogging less (or less interestingly); it may be that more people are following blogs thru one feed engine or another and so dropping in randomly less often. Or it may be that people are simply reading (my) blog(s) less. All I know is that I gots to go.

Handmade

After a day of finishing work on a flagstone patio in my backyard, it's fitting that, upon checking my email, I learned that my gorgeously designed book has been chosen for a Literary Press Group campaign promoting books that are beautifully made. Sweet.

"Zach had always been... different."

I'm a half-blood!

So disturbing

Apparently, some poets' work is tailored for toddlers:

Enormous Boons

Jake Mooney in conversation with Peter Norman

I've raved about Peter Norman's poetry here before; here's another chance to see what a smart feller he is.

Enjoy the Silence

Recent drought of posting due to yours truly being busier than a hen picking pepper out of horseshit. Mostly railroading, with an unhealthy dose of freelance work. Hardly any time for my family of late, much less for you lot. But never fear, I'll be back.

Reviews online

The following reviews are now online, for your reading pleasure:

Suzanne Hancock, Cast from Bells

Camille Martin, Sonnets

ORTHOPAEDIC DEVICE

After his accident, one-quarter shaved
(plus spot buzzes for i.v. and pain patch)
with what looks for all the world like a massive
safety pin running the length of his smashed
upper leg to keep the snapped humerus
stable, that the two halves might fuse back
usably, Sammy lounges, unaware
of his luck and the fact that his eight-life brush
with the Black Cat (viz. the bumper or tire
of whatever car hit him) has cost us
two dozen times his replacement value
and then some. And then there's our small son, who
loves that cat fiercely, but whom we must watch
like anxious parents, to ensure he
does his beloved no permanent injury.

Some Love for Jailbreaks

Always nice to see written responses to a book two years after it's been published (i.e., long after it's been actively promoted and stocked by stores, in 99% of cases), but I was especially pleased to be alerted to this review of Jailbreaks by Jonathan Ball. I appreciate the review not so much for the generous things it says about the quality of the book--I take praise or censure as pretty much value-neutral qualities in reviews of my work--but for the clarity and intelligence of certain insights Ball has. Most notably this: " I’ve never been convinced that the sonnets of the more radical poets, poets whose work I admire profoundly, have ever really been that great. " Which is, for me, far more the issue at hand than aesthetic affiliation, which was of no interest to me in assembling the book. Ball goes on to mention a specific sonnet by BP Nichol, which I was glad to see. That sonnet, which has been anthologized by Gary Geddes, was on my longlist and came close to making the cut, but I ultimately felt that it had only made it that far because of my own eagerness to be as eclectic as possible in my choices; I cut it because I couldn't in good faith include it at the expense of a stronger poem. Ball's assessment of that poem's failure--both as a poem and as a poke in the sonnet's ribs--is bang on.

One of the things I was hoping Jailbreaks would do is open up and reorient discussions of what it means to be "traditional" or "innovative." So I was also glad to see Jonathan point out poems by Klein and Elsted, poets who aren't associated with the avant-garde, but who are far more innovative in their manipulations of diction, syntax and grammar--particularly in the two poems cited--than most poets who claim to be "experimental." Elsted's poem was one of my favourite discoveries while doing research for the book, not just because of its formal uniqueness, but because I knew of him only as a printer/publisher prior to coming across his lone trade poetry collection in the stacks at Dalhousie's Killam library.