Since the dredging of my archives for scurrilous matter is the theme of Freedom to Read Week this year, I thought I might republish a piece I wrote for Arc Poetry Magazine back in 2008. Enjoy, muck misers (and others).

Eskimo Nell: ‘Anon’ takes on Robert Service

Long before literacy was common and print was mechanized, ballads were composed, recited and passed down the generations. Thanks to collectors such as Francis Child, some of these folk ballads, such as “Barbara Allen” and “Sir Patrick Spens” have entered the canon of English literature, even if there is some debate over which version is best. (98 variants of “Barbara Allen” were recorded in Virginia alone.)

In the 17th Century, the so-called broadside ballad, often humorous and satirical, circulated as a sort of proto-newspaper. Because of its folk origins and populist topicality, the ballad was not seen by many “serious” (viz. educated and well-heeled) poets as a meet vessel for poetry—not, that is, until its literary revival in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798.

Since then, a number of poets have used the ballad form quite memorably, including Kipling, Poe, Alfred Noyes and of course Robert Service, particularly in his most famous poems “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” If these latter-day ballads have not ramified in the manner of the old poems, it’s because they were published on paper, so more-or-less authoritative versions have precluded the piecemeal mutation once the norm

But the anonymous ballad didn’t die in the 20th Century. Just as Service drew on the rich tradition of oral balladry for his tales of “strange things done in the midnight sun,” so did the creator(s) of the pornographic satire “Eskimo Nell” draw on Service. Appropriately enough, I first read “Eskimo Nell” in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, in my copy of The Faber Book of Blue Verse—and would occasionally, after a few glasses of illicit liquor, treat friends to a reading of it.

My own poems have, at times, been accused of being indecorously crude in their language and subjects. I’ve had reading hosts advise me to “choose more audience-appropriate work next time”; high-school teachers have asked me to avoid “the f-bomb” when reading to their classes; a CBC radio host once edited out of an interview my reading of a poem about finding two dogs in flagrante delicto. I have a serious soft-spot for raunch and I’m none too fond of taboo. Finding “Eskimo Nell” brought great joy to my heart.

I later learned that the version in my Faber anthology was not the only one out there. One version of Nell’s opening goes:

When a man grows old and his balls grow cold and the end of his nob turns blue,

When it’s bent in the middle like a one-string fiddle, he can tell a tale or two.

So find me a seat and buy me a drink, and a tale to you I’ll tell,

Of Dead-Eye Dick and Mexico Pete, and the gentle Eskimo Nell.

Just like the old oral ballads, however, this is far from the only extant version. The days of a purely oral literature are long gone, but the advent of the Internet in some ways parallels the pluralistic authorship of pre-literate cultures. Here’s another version of Nell’s opening:

When a man grows old, and his balls grow cold,

And the tip of his prick turns blue,

Far from a life of Yukon strife,

He can tell you a tale or two.

So pull up a chair, and stand me a drink,

And a tale to you I will tell,

About Dead-Eye Dick and Mexican Pete,

And a harlot named Eskimo Nell.

I like some parts of each version better. The original and evocative simile “Bent in the middle like a one-string fiddle” is infinitely superior to the rather banal “Far from a life of Yukon strife,” but “a harlot named Eskimo Nell” seems far more apposite than the (perhaps ironic) “gentle Eskimo Nell.”

Here’s another variant:

When men grow old and their balls get cold and the tips of their knobs turn blue,
Looking back on life, 'midst struggle and strife, they could tell you a tale or two. 
So buy me a drink and I will think and a tale to you I'll tell
Of Dead-Eye Dick and his muscular prick and a whore named Eskimo Nell.

Here, the sidekick Mexican (or Mexico, in some versions) Pete disappears, upstaged—like most other men—by his partner’s membrum virile.

Then there’s this “composite version” edited by some guy online who thinks he knows better (he really just makes a mash of things):

Now way out west where the very best and worst live side by side,

I’ve a tale to tell of Eskimo Nell and the men and women who died.

Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since no one actually dies in the poem—though there are reports of petits-morts…

The real ballad of Eskimo Nell cannot be said to exist, as such. There are unsubstantiated rumours that Nell was written by a young Noel Coward, but the earliest known print record of it is from a songbook published by South African university students in the 1940s. The poem as a whole varies considerably in length and detail from one version to the next. Were the origins of “Dan McGrew” more obscure, it’s easy to imagine it morphing into a similar multitude of near-copies. But if “Dan McGrew” can’t be re-written, it can certainly be written back at. Many have dismissed “Eskimo Nell” as disgusting doggerel, tittilatingly funny at best, offensively sexist and racist at worst. Others see it as being more subtly subversive, and I’m inclined to agree. This is a far more complex poem than, say, “There once was a man from Nantucket.”

Whereas Service’s tall tales feature the exploits—and exploitations—of rugged white men in the vast feminine wilds of the Yukon, the eponymous heroine of “Eskimo Nell”—a native female voice markedly absent in Service’s boreal ballads—literally, and effortlessly, unmans what anthologist Tom Atkinson calls “two of the most machismo characters in all of literature”:

But Dead-Eye Dick would not come quick; he meant to conserve his power,

When in the mind he’d grind and grind for more than a couple of hours.

She lay for a while with a subtle smile while the grip of her cunt grew keener,

Then giving a sigh she sucked him dry with the ease of a vacuum cleaner.

She performed this feat in a way so neat as to set at complete defiance

The primary cause and the basic laws that govern sexual science.

Granted, this is far from a radically feminist scenario, but Nell’s gifts verbal as well as sexual, as she zings Mexico Pete thus:

“When next, my friend, you two intend to sally forth for fun,

Get Dead-Eye Dick a sugar stick, and buy yourself a bun.”

The suggestion of the pathetically phallic (“sugar stick”) and yonic (“bun”) imagery of those lines is that Dick and Pete would be better off fucking each other than taking on a real pro like Nell (a neat underscoring of the homoerotic tensions latent in Service’s work). And the anonymous authorship lets us imagine a woman writing this riposte to Service’s testosterone-laden gold-rush epics. In this version of the poem, as in many others, Nell has the last word. Of course, with an anonymous ballad, the last word is never really written.

Bailey Lamon on the fascism of the new left

Further to my last post, self-described anarchist and social worker Bailey Lamon has written a really excellent op-ed piece that touches on so many of the problematic issues raised by these attempts to have me barred from various reading venues.

Montreal Reading Report and some notes on satire, censorship and the freedom to read

Rachel and I had a great reading last night at the Atwater Poetry Project. Unfortunately, some technical issues prevented them from recording it as they usually do, but, graciously hosted by Atwater curator Deanna Radford, we read to an attentive audience of approximately thirty and, on the eve of Freedom to Read Week, a very thoughtful post-reading discussion followed, in which we addressed some of the stickier issues that writers face.

It's no small irony that this Canada Council-funded reading came very close to being cancelled because of pressure being placed on Deanna to do so. This pressure came not from secret police, not from government censors, not from fundamentalists or fringe terrorists, not even from Quebec's office de la langue française, but from, of all things, a writer and scholar. Rachel and I were already en route to Montreal by train when this person decided to publicly shame Deanna and past curator Symon Jory Stevens-Guille for extending hospitality to the likes of yours truly. Vastly overestimating his capacity to inspire a boycott or ban, this fellow boldly predicted, on the Atwater series' Facebook page, that if the event was not cancelled, it wouldn't matter because only four people would be there. When one woman raised a thoughtful and nuanced objection to his rhetorical fusillade, he proceeded to mansplain to her that she was complicit in endorsing rape culture. Yes, he did. Another poet made a plea for more temperate discourse, as in days of yore before the advent of social media. It was strongly implied by a spoken word performer that perhaps this poet was also feeling nostalgic for slave ownership and legal marital rape. Yes indeed. Clearly, there is a terminological vacuum to be filled: we have Godwin's Law for the invocation of Nazism, but there is as yet, to the best of my knowledge, no equivalent for spurious non-sequiturs about slavery and spousal abuse.

The reason that this scholar and this orator were so exercised about my presence in Montreal (a city I stealthily visit on an almost weekly basis in the course of my duties on the railroad) is a rather stale, old one. You see, he felt it incumbent on himself to remind the unsuspecting public that, some seven years ago, yours truly had authored and self-published, on this very blog, an horrifically offensive lipogram, and that, on the strength of such a Kilimanjaro of overwhelming evidence, its author must be the vilest sort of misogynist creep.

Said lipogram has been no stranger to controversy, although it lay dormant and undisturbed in the digital dust of the CLM archives for four years before any ire was raised against it. Its author, I can assure you, attached no great value to the piece, seeing it very much as a product of a specific point in the spacetime continuum with little to no relevance outside of its immediate contexts, and I therefore never attempted to publish it elsewhere or otherwise disseminate it more widely. Its author also acknowledges the blindingly obvious observation made by its detractors that the sentiments contained within its univocalic text are extraordinarily odious. Fortunately, I do not and never did identify with the speaker in the poem, who was consciously constructed as a strawman reification of certain caricatured assessments of my person and of my arguments, made by certain other persons affronted by said arguments' substance and tone. The idea was to give voice to the imaginary critic who hates women and will aggressively try to shut them up. The decision to write the poem using only one vowel, "i," was further intended as a challenge: the poem dares the reader to identify the source of such a stiltedly awkward speech--the "I" of the poem--with the "I" of the author. The use of the lipogram as form was further intended to send up the oft-heard notion that certain forms of avant-garde "experimental" writing are more intrinsically progressive than other, more traditional and supposedly conservative, forms. The author of the poem finds it wickedly ironic that a piece intended to satirize inflated rhetorical poses and the hypocrisy of self-identified progressives has managed to generate so much overheated rhetoric and so many reactionary gestures in turn. The poem has certainly enjoyed its private gotcha moments in recent years.

Once sufficiently untethered from the context in which it was originally composed, the lipogram was dredged up three years ago as part of the pretext for an op-ed about sexism in the “literary community.” Attempts were made to shame the poem's author into renouncing and deleting it and apologizing to the person supposedly assaulted in its lines. Since I never intended the poem as a sincere expression of my feelings about another person, but as a sendup of that person's slurs about my writing and my person, I could do no such thing. To delete the poem under such pressure would be a tacit admission that it was something I never believed it to be and that I was someone far viler than I, for all my manifest flaws, have ever been. (I also have considerable contempt for the practice of many bloggers and social media pundits of deleting posts to save face once their flaws have been pointed out.) Several individuals contacted me privately and to anyone so courteous, I was pleased to provide my account of the poem's origins, contexts and intentions. Some people seemed more or less satisfied with my explanations, others clearly were not. Which is fine. Some said they could no longer associate with me. So it goes. If the affection and loyalty of an individual are so easily alienated by a single ambiguous text, then they can't have been worth much in the first place, say I. The poem has, if nothing else, proven an effective litmus test for fairweather friends. As for providing the same explanations publicly, I have till now declined to do so because I am reluctant to police readers' interpretations of a text. I am only modifying my policy now out of respect for friends and colleagues who have implored me to do so.

I trust I am not alone in being alarmed by certain writers' eagerness to see another writer banned, censured, censored and shunned for the sin of creating a character with a hideous worldview. This is precisely the sort of well-intentioned wrongdoing we should be talking about during Freedom to Read Week in a country in which there is little to no official censorship or mortal danger for writers. I have made no public mention of it heretofore, but I feel that I should now let it be known that at least one reading venue, Montreal's Librairie Drawn and Quarterly, has made it known to my publisher that they will host no readings by me, because of my authorship of The Poem in Question. It has been claimed that my poem constituted an attempt to silence the person lampooned in its lines. Even if that had been the case, which it was not, I certainly never judged said person to be so easily quelled. (Many of the assumptions about my motives for writing and posting the poem seem to be based on the fundamental notion that I am a singularly unintelligent and unselfconscious person--as if I could have ever thought that this might be an effective way of winning allies to my supposed cause or of shutting up my mortal foe for perpetuity!) If you are truly opposed to the suppression of one writer's voice, I cannot for the life of me see how you could endorse a speaking ban of another. (One detractor has gone so far as to tell a reading host that the series he curates should only host feminists. One wonders if this is assured by having readers swear on a copy of The Second Sex.) Freedom of expression is not worth defending if it only protects approved sentiments.


I am on my way to Ottawa, another erstwhile hometown, tomorrow for a reading on Tuesday and then on to Toronto, where my venue host has been slammed for inviting me in the first place and for failing to take me off the roster once reminded of my sins. Another writer scheduled to read there has decided to withdraw, which is her prerogative, but unfortunate. It was telling, I think, that none of the people so vocal on social media showed up at the Montreal event, where civil discourse prevailed. It is far easier to demonize an other if you are able to avoid actual contact with his or her person. I suppose I owe a debt of gratitude to my detractors, because they may have actually succeeded in increasing the number and commitment of last night's audience. One friend of mine from my non-writing life attended the reading--the first time in his life he had been to one--with his nine-year-old daughter, precisely because of the controversy. Other writers said that they had been on the fence about coming because of scheduling conflicts, but felt that, once I'd been targeted in this way, attendance became mandatory. Several others, unable to make it, wrote to make it clear that their non-attendance had nothing to do with the controversy. I expect that things will be much the same in Toronto because the writing scene is, for the most part, populated by thoughtful, intelligent people who understand that disagreement is not grounds for dismissal.

Upcoming events

Hey, if anyone's out there--and if "there" is Montreal, Ottawa or Toronto--please be advised that I will be doing three readings over the next few days:


Saturday, February 20, 7 pm, Montreal: The Atwater Poetry Project, with Rachel Lebowitz

Tuesday, February 23, 8 pm, Ottawa: The Tree Reading Series, with Ben Ladouceur

Wednesday, February 24, 8 pm, Toronto: Pivot Reading Series, with Jeff Blackman, Hoa Nguyen and Patrick Warner



Hope to see you there!

Poem online

Further to my last, long ago, post, I've learned that my poem "Once Upon an Island" is up on The Buzz's website.

Poem reprinted

An ooooold poem of mine, "Once Upon an Island," has been reprinted from my 2004 chapbook Fool's Errand in The Buzz, PEI's arts monthly.

Tanks, but no Tanks

As pretty much anybody who will be reading this knows, a couple of weeks ago Michael Lista published a piece of long-form journalism on Canadaland.com about Scott Griffin's role in a $15 billion deal that will see a Canadian company selling light armoured vehicles (LAV) to Saudi Arabia. Griffin, of course, is the patron of a lucrative poetry prize that bears his name, so this news is of particular concern, or should be, to people who read and write poetry, not least of all because Saudi Arabia, as Lista points out, has been especially brutal in its punishment of a writer, Raif Badawi, whose only crime was criticizing the Saudi government.

Poets' antennae are easily--often far too easily--set aquiver by perceived injustice. Consider some recent tempests in the pobiz teapot. Jason Guriel's mildly sceptical review of Alice Oswald's Memorial was likened to a "Twitter rape threat" by poet Helen Guri, thanks to some creatively dubious close reading of Guriel's diction in the piece. Both Frederick Seidel and Kenneth Goldsmith were widely attacked for their poetic responses to the shooting of Michael Brown and the ensuing race riots in Ferguson, Missouri. Conceptual poet Vanessa Place was also recently accused of racism in her work. Most recently, white poet Michael Derrick Hudson was roundly denounced for publishing poems under the Chinese pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou. And of course, there's the ongoing matter of gender imbalance in reviewing, which has seen many names named and shamed.

Most of these issues are legitimate causes for concern, even if the call-outs and ostracizations they generate are extremely problematic. Hopefully, however, everyone can agree that no piece of writing or act of cultural appropriation, however offensive it might be, could ever be equated with selling arms to a tyrannical state that routinely uses violence to control its own people, and which is widely known to sponsor terrorist organizations. But, while some people in the writing world are disturbed by the revelation of Scott Griffin's ties to an arms deal that is, by all appearances, a violation of Canadian law, this group of very well-educated citizens, normally so keen to speak out against social injustice, global capitalism, militarism, etc., has of a sudden gotten all "let's take a step back and appreciate the nuances of this dilemma" on us.

A lot of the (muted and limited) response to Lista's article has consisted of hand-wringing, head-shaking, cognitive dissonance diminishment, complicity mongering and, in a few cases, spectacular acts of moral gymnastics, of the sort offered up by no less a figure than Margaret Atwood, as quoted by Lista in his article, making Hitler-invoking NRA-style arguments that tanks don't kill people and it takes a good guy with a tank to stop a bad guy with a tank. Poet and critic Clint Burnham has contributed my favourite bon mot on the situation:

Poets line up to not bite hand that feeds barely any of them

— Clint Burnham (@Prof_Clinty) September 24, 2015

Some of the things I've heard, paraphrased and condensed:

• We're all complicit. Look at your RRSP portfolio. Look at the gas you put in your car. Look at your electronic gadgets and your sweatshop shirts.
• The Griffin endowment was funded before this arms deal and is self-sufficient, so the prizes aren't tainted by dollars from Saudi Arabia.
• We always knew that Scott Griffin made parts for tanks. Is it so much worse to sell tanks to the Saudis than to the Americans? Just because we go to his gala and drink his wine doesn't mean we endorse his business practices.
• Griffin also owns House of Anansi Press, so if we're going to boycott the prize, does that mean we also can't buy Anansi books?
• A Saudi prince owns a big share of Twitter, so if you have an issue with Griffin, you'd better close your Twitter account, you hypocrites.
• All money is blood money.
• Lista's motives are suspect.
• This is a distraction from the real story, which is about the Conservative government allowing this deal to take place.

It all amounts to saying that we're in no position to take a position--or that this is the wrong thing to be taking a position on. There's some validity to it, I suppose, even if it leads by reductio ad absurdum to the conclusion that we can't stand on anything because everything is made of sand. And I don't believe for a second that those dancing around this topic would endorse taking no stands or that the taking of stands is a zero-sum game. 

The degree to which I'm unable to disentangle myself completely from the webs of globalized capitalism and all its ills is something I'm aware of daily (and it's something that Lista cops to in his article). I do have some red lines, however. I have no RRSPs in large measure because I know how hard it is to invest ethically; I'm hoping to retire eventualy on a combination of my Via Rail pension, CPP/OAS and proceeds from real estate investment. Of course, my mortgages have come from a big bank and who the hell knows what they're doing with the money I'm giving them. We do have an RESP for my son's future education (funded by us, other family members and government top-ups) and I'm not sure where that money is invested, as the documentation the bank gives us isn't transparent. I will not shop at Walmart or Amazon because of the way they treat employees, their union-busting tactics and the way they use their buying power to outcompete smaller retailers. I also don't shop at Chapter's or Indigo. I'm too well-informed about these retailers and their negative impacts on booksellers and small publishers to give them money. But it's still possible to buy my books from them and I know I make other consumer decisions that are less well-informed. Less absolutely, I have never bought a car, though I rent cars, own a motorcycle, burn fossil fuels in my home's furnace and even my "green" employer consumes an enormous quantity of diesel per annum moving people across the land.

(Lista's motives, it seems to me, are irrelevant. Even if this was part of some elaborate spite or revenge campaign on his part, the facts are not of his invention. And the story, while adding colour to the bigger picture of our government's too-cozy relationship with the Saudis, in no way diminishes or excuses the fact that none of this would have taken place had Harper's party not brokered the deal. It's significant, I think, that journalists have been less conflicted about the ethics of this story, qua story, than poets have, probably because the facts of it are unimpeachable and Lista has disclosed his biases--and has pissed off fewer journalists than poets over the years.)

So yeah, the world is complicated, and complicity is impossible to avoid. But equating our complicity  in purchasing commodoties and making ignorant investment choices with that of Griffin is nonsense. Griffin is making money directly by selling shock absorbers to a company that will put them in tanks, which will be sold to a country that is one of the world's greatest human rights abusers. It doesn't matter if "that money" isn't the money that funds the prize. The prize bears his name and you can't divorce his present business dealings from his involvement in the prize. If, knowing what we now know, you take his money and keep your mouth shut, you are not merely complicit, you have given yourself an upgrade to tacit condoner. Past shortlistees and winners of the prize become part of the Griffin circle and go into the pool of potential future jurors and even trustees. I'm not going to call out any individuals who have accepted, or will in future accept prize money from the Griffin Foundation because I think calling people out on blogs and social media is fucking gross and because yeah, life is complicated and I don't know what pressures are driving other people's choices. I've made a conscious choice not to depend on writing for my living and I've never been a part of the Griffin inner circle*, so it's a lot easier for me to speak my mind. So no, I won't call you out. But I am calling on you to abandon the exercises in rationalization and look deep into your conscience and decide if this is something you can endorse. Maybe people are already doing so, but I'm not seeing much evidence of it yet. And I'm not the only person paying attention. 

*My decisions in the past to publicly criticize the institution and its operational procedures have no doubt precluded this ever happening. Long before this story broke, I thought of the Griffin Prize as a great exercise in reputation engineering at the expense of rigorous critical appraisal of contemporary poetry. Literary prize culture has always been an irritant to me because of the way it turns writing into a spectacle and a rigged competition. The Griffin is a particularly egregious example of a rich person buying himself an instant measure of culture credibility. How gauche and arrogant is it to establish a prize and name it after yourself? (At least Jack Rabinovitch named the Giller Prize after his late wife.) And since its establishment, the Griffin has become a real coterie affair. I don't buy the trickle-down argument that it's good for poetry. It's been very good to a few poets, some of whom might actually deserve it. By far Griffin's best endeavour is the Poetry in Voice high school recitation contest, which is far more about poetry than the Prize is and far less about glitzy galas and Scott Griffin himself. I was pleased to act as a judge for PiV a couple of years ago. But I don't think I could accept if I was asked again now.

IFOA 5 Questions

I'm reading at the International Festival of Authors next month and in advance of those readings, the good folks at the festival asked me a few questions, which I've answered and they've blogged.

Review online

My short review of Ricardo Sternberg's fine collection Some Dance has been posted on Vallum magazine's website.

THE YIPS

No one sees them coming and no matter
your skill set, they'll get you. The routine
mechanics of making the play on your mind
until mind outplays arm and a batter
not even busting hard down the line
finds himself safe. Every ball seems to find
you and you can't find the right footing.
Steve Blass Disease. Sax Syndrome. Sasseritis.
It's all in the head, say the true-blue
dualists, but head stays stubbornly rooted
to shoulders and head has felled the mightiest
soldier. Oh, Chuck Knoblauch, what can you do?
Press reset. A new position might fit—
but it could be that you'll just have to quit.

I is on Verse Daily

No, that's not bad grammar, it's a fact. My poem "I" is featured on Verse Daily.

Essays in Print

I just received my contributor copies of Arc Poetry Magazine 77 in the mail. Neck-deep in non-literary summer busyness, it's nice to be reminded that I wrote a couple of things not so long ago.

In the issue are two essays I'm very proud of. One is a memorial for my late friend Elise Partridge, focused squarely on her poetry. I wish she was still here to read it. I hope you read it, but more than that, I hope you read her poetry.

The other piece is a longer essay on the works of Lisa Robertson. It's a greatly abridged version of a piece too long for Arc to print whole, but I hope to polish up and publish the long version in the not-too-distant future. Still, I think the piece as published is a pretty good minority take on Robertson's relationship to the canon of English poetry.

The mag has some other good-looking content, including the always-sharp Sarah Neville on Jeramy Dodds' version of the Edda and a rave review of Kerry-Lee Powell's Inheritance, written by Phoebe Wang.

In Good Company

(Back Row: poet and Lexicon Bookshop co-owner Alice Burdick; Left: M. Travis Lane; Right: Robyn Sarah; photo: Karen Runge)

I recently had the enormous pleasure and privilege of launching my new collection in Halifax, Lunenburg and Moncton with Robyn Sarah (launching her new book My Shoes Are Killing Me) and M. Travis Lane (launching Crossover, which Robyn edited for Cormorant Books). I've been thinking about these readings a lot over the past few days. Robyn and Travis are such classy people and consummate poets. They are also very skilled performers of their own work, which is rarer than it ought to be. We had a lot of fun on this mini tour and I consider myself very lucky to have spent three days in their company.

Poem Online

The good folks at the exciting new e-magazine, Partisan, have just published my poem "Rye," which they accepted prior to the publication of Sum, where the poem also appears. If you haven't already checked out Partisan, you should have a look around the site. They've published some really crisp things already. And they recently added Alexandra Oliver to their masthead, which is a very smart move in my books.

Hometown Launch

Upcoming Launch

Hey, if you're in Charlottetown on Saturday, you should swing by the Confederation Centre Library, where the incomparable M. Travis Lane and I will be launching our books at 2 pm.

DETAILS

Launch online

Got home yesterday from a five-city book tour. I've made recordings of three of the launches; two others were taped by other folks in Kingston and Hamilton. The latter, featuring readings by Robyn Sarah, Don McGrath (reading his translations of Robert Melancon) and myself, has been posted by Adrian Hoad-Reddick.

Review Online

My review of Garth Martens' debut collection, Prologue for the Age of Consequence is now up at the Arc Poetry Magazine site.

Sum Reviewed

Quill & Quire has posted Jason Wiens' review of my new book on their website.

Sunday Poem

My poem, "The Wound," from my brand new book, is the Sunday Poem over on the Vehicule Press Blog.

Article Online

A promotional piece I wrote for the Literary Press Group's "All Lit Up" blog has just been posted. Not something I usually do: a)a promo article and b)write about prose fiction. But these are four really enjoyable collections of not-quite-usual stories, so I was glad to have the chance to shed a bit of virtual ink on them.

Bard Battles

In my near-total neglect of this blog--and in my war-on-many-fronts busyness--I failed to mention that I was reading last night at the annual Poetry Now Battle of the Bards at Harbourfront in Toronto. Well, I was. And it went well. A very solid set of readers. I did not win--that honour went to Talya Rubin, and well deserved--but I was among five readers (including Kate Hargreaves, who has designed my last two books, Liz Worth and Deanna Young) chosen to appear at the International Festival of Authors in the fall. I did this back in 2011, and it's quite the event, so I'm pleased and honoured to have been selected again.

Last night was also my first opportunity to hold a copy of the new book, thanks to Kate picking up a few, still warm from the press at Coach House. It's pretty damn beautiful and I feel very fortunate.

Susan G. Cole, who hosted last night's show, did a nice little write-up on it today. I chose to go with a single longer poem and read my dramatic monologue "Achromatope," which is based on Oliver Sacks's story "The Colourblind Painter." If there was "moving melancholy" in my reading, it's probably in part because I was thinking all day about Sacks's recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. Though I once received correspondence from Dr. Sacks after I sent him a broadside print of "Achromatope," I can't claim to know the man, so I didn't feel comfortable dedicating the reading to him, but in retrospect that was dumb. So when I read it again at Harbourfront, I will dedicate it to him.

HOW IT CAME ON

Not consistent, but in
clusters, in lacustrine


conglomerations, in lack
lustre congress, in lacunar


conundrums, drums
con sordino, in schools


of sardine shoaling
in shallows, in shadows


and splotches of sickled
shivelight, in shimmers


and speckles, in specks,
freckles and moles, in tunnels


and tubes, in tubs and tubas
and turbines, in turbot's


turbercles, in tubercular
fits, in fletches, flitches


and flits, in flatlands
and mesas, in ditches,


in dikes, in tidal insistence,
in bridles and britches,


in fasces and faces, in flashes
and flexes and fluxion, in fluent


dysrhythmia, flaring
and falling, setting fire


to synapses and scuttling
sense to its apsis.

Lisa Robertson on Meter

Counting syllables really trained me to carry my ear down to that micro level of attention. I spend a lot of time counting syllables. For a while I had to stop myself from counting syllables when people spoke.

Masterful!

Brian Campbell has reviewed Career Limiting Moves, the book, for Rover Arts. Check it out.

Review reprinted

My review of Ricardo Sternberg's collection Some Dance, originally published in Vallum, has been reprinted in the latest issue of FreeFall. I'm practically a syndicated columnist!

Elise Partridge, 1958-2015

I learned yesterday that my dear friend Elise Partridge has died. I knew her time was running out--I'd known it for almost a year--but I was really hoping she'd hang in long enough to see her final book come off the press this spring. Knowing this was coming in no way makes it less painful for those who knew and loved her--for me--but given how much pain and suffering she'd already been through, there is some comfort in the thought that she need endure no more of it.

As word got out about Elise's death on social media yesterday, many people wrote of how kind she was. And she was. Elise wasn't that awful thing--a "nice" person--she was a person of great spirit, authentically generous in a way that no nice person is. I first met her, briefly, in March 2006, when I did a reading in Vancouver. She introduced herself to me after the reading, said a few enthusiastic words and, as I recall, left precipitously. She seemed unaccountably anxious. Not long after, I had an email from her apologizing that she was "ridiculously shy when meeting new people." She said a few lovely things about my poems and about my review work. And her comments weren't merely perfunctory compliments, of the sort one encounters all too often in any collegial environment, but the kind of sharp, perceptive observations that can only be the product of thoughtful attention. Not long after that, Elise wrote to offer me a complimentary subscription to the London Review of Books, a perk her husband Steve (a medievalist in the UBC English department) had acquired in exchange for writing a review for LRB. She thought, rightly, that the high quality long-form reviews in LRB would appeal to me.

When I moved to Vancouver from Halifax the following year, Elise did more than any other person (outside of Rachel's family) to welcome me to the city. She invited me to become a member of the Poetry Dogs, a semi-regular reading circle that would meet at a member's house to discuss whatever poems people had brought along. Members, besides Elise and Steve, included Barbara Nickel, Stephanie Bolster, John Donlan, George McWhirter, Christopher Patton and, later, Matt Rader. The only condition was that they had to be someone else's poems, someone not a member of Dogs. It was in Dogs sessions that I really learned how acute and uncompromising a reader Elise was. Anyone who came under her tutelage--as when she was poet-in-residence for Arc Poetry Magazine--could only have come away with their poems much improved.

Elise was someone who was more intimate with death than anyone in the First World should have to be, but something that distinguished her personality, and the poetry that was so much a product of it, was her refusal to be gloomy in the face of death. She would never have agreed with Larkin that "death is no different whined at than withstood." And she never succumbed to despair. Her oeuvre is full of poems about death, but they are playful, virtuosic poems, acts of resistance, testament to the size of her spirit, the defiance of her breath.

In an early email to me, she was irked by a reviewer who had "insulted [her] character and artistic integrity by charging [her] with 'trying to dazzle.'" She ended that letter with a piece of advice for me: "If you ever get slandered with the show-off label, my suggestion is to reply, 'I'm not TRYING to dazzle--ah just DOES!'" And she did. I miss her already, but she has left so much behind.

Plus ça change

Wordsworth, on Robert Southey's unfavourable review of Lyrical Ballads: 

"He knew that money was of importance to me. If he could not conscientiously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have declined the task of reviewing it."

THE PROOF OF THE GRAPE

The index of a vintage
is the season's history: how many
photons have fallen

through the skin. Equations
predict excellence. Unlike
the nose of connoisseurs,

the maths involved
are flawless, however
maculate the soil.

Deprive the vine of water,
it will eke its taproot deeper
down through solid strata

where it draws not only
succour for the turgor
of its foliage and fruit,

but hauls up half-formed
metaphors from minerals
lying latent in the clay,

imparts them to the grape
flesh where they mingle
and intensify as the sun-

washed clusters ripen.
These metaphors remain
embryonic until tongue

-cognized and -constituted
by a seasoned sommelier
who nearly knows them flawlessly.

The index of a vintage,
however reason may explain it,
retains intrinsic mystery—

the grape escapes its proof.

The Rage of Extemporary Criticism

As it very seldom happens that the rage of extemporary criticism inflicts fatal or lasting wounds, I know not that the Laws of benevolence entitle this distress to much sympathy. The diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because for the most part he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of literature with resistless weapons and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea.

                      -Samuel Johnson

ZW on Patreon

Happy new year, everybody. Impressed by the concept and by the results people have achieved using the crowd-funding patronage site Patreon, I've decided to set up my own page. As I state on the page, I am not doing this because I need the funding, but so that people who enjoy/admire my writing can support it directly if they're willing and able. Any support is enormously appreciated, much of it will be paid forward to other artists, and I've built in considerable quid pro quo "rewards" for anyone who does chip in a few drachmas. This isn't something I'll be flogging on an ongoing basis; I just wanted to set it up and let people know about it this once. I have set a "milestone goal," but that's more day-dream than ambition; I shall by no means be disappointed if I never meet it.

Mark Sampson's Year in Review

My old friend Mark Sampson has also included CLM in his ten favourite books of 2014. Thanks, Mark!

Brian Palmu on CLM and Cottonopolis

I'm not a big fan of book-biz year-end best-of lists in general, but there are better ways it can be done. Brian Palmu has listed his favourite books of 2014, but, refreshingly, these are books he read this year, rather than books published this year. He also doesn't stop after he's reached an arbitrary number of "best books." And, pleasingly to this household, he has included my book of essays and Rachel's Cottonopolis.

McMANSION

Welcome to your turnkey cul-de-sac,
where faux Tudors and ersatz cedar-sided
colonials sprawl cheek by jowl, and back

on a hemlock-shaded ravine: your own private
wilderness oasis and buffer against the berm-
baffled traffic beyond. This ticky-tacky

facsimile is the acme of blandeur:
gauche rooflines, cultured stone and off-the-rack
opulencies galore—all the doo-dads

and knick-knacks the status anxiety
of your executive lifestyle demands,
and priced to move fast. This high society

dream could be yours, but it won't last.

A Quiet Tryst of Living Voices

Our poems are conversations in every meaningful sense. They are an exchange between ourselves and those parts of ourselves that belong to other people. Intimate whisperings, productive tensions. They challenge and tease us, lead us to say things that we have not thought to say. They gives the courage to have a self and to lose it too, which is surely the most we can ask of any conversation.
...
We are made up of voice and we are the relations between voices, inside and out. They are our judgement and our redemption, our ipseity and our selflessness, our origin and our promise. Perhaps their revelation is possible in real conversation. It may be, after all, what we live for. As Yeats says, "what do we know but that we face / one another in this place?" I suppose there will always be something ethereal and unreal about conversations as long as I feel as anxious about them as I do. But in every ghostly encounter--the ones we have with friends at Tim Hortons and the ones we listen for when we write--we recognize the voices we love and think: it is good of them to come back the way they do and share a part of themselves with us, good to hear them again. And our hearts warm to a quiet tryst of living voices, ones that, if we are lucky, will choir among themselves long afterward.

--Jeffery Donaldson, "Ghostly Conversations," from Echo Soundings: Essays on Poetry and Poetics

New book next spring

So, I have a new book of poems coming out in the spring. The final edits have been submitted for typesetting and design work is underway. Here is one potential cover idea crafted by Biblioasis designer Kate Hargreaves. Not final, but I quite like it.

Essay online

I have just discovered that an essay on Elizabeth Bishop's "The Bight" that I published in The Worcester Review a few years ago has been uploaded to the interwebs. So you can read it, if you like to read such things.

Rigorously Pent

Over on the Biblioasis blog, Amanda Jernigan has contributed a few words in praise of my book Track & Trace. It's nice to hear anyone appreciate my work, but it means an awful lot coming from Amanda, who is a superb poet in her own right and one the very best readers of poetry I've ever met. Nice also to hear her appreciating Seth's contribution to the book. I still can hardly believe I published a book designed by him. I'm a lucky fella.

Lista on McKay

Michael Lista, in one of his strongest columns to-date for the National Post, has weighed in on Don McKay's doorstopper Collected Poems. He gets it mostly right, I think, but when he says that McKay has "spent a lifetime avoiding seeing the human in the natural world," he has done little more than repeat the press kit. As I argued in my long review essay of McKay's oeuvre-in-progress seven years ago (an updated version of which can be read in my recently published prose collection), this isn't really what happens in McKay poems. Rather, I'd rephrase Lista's statement thus: "Don McKay has spent a lifetime pretending to avoid seeing the human in the natural world." In actual fact, he does it all the time, especially if you compare him with that pre-eminent observer of the non-human world, John Clare--a birdwatching poet who comes up remarkably infrequently in prose by and about McKay. What appears to be a disjunction between McKay's poetics and his poems is actually evidence that McKay's poems tend to be more versified poetics than poems in their own right. Which is another reason, I think, he has been well-received by academic readers: not only do his poems tell you what you should be observing, as Lista points out, they also tell you what you should be thinking while you observe, and they tell you what you should be thinking about the poems themselves. They are therefore very easy to write about and to package in an interpretive argument.

I've just finished reading, as it happens, a book that is very useful in shedding light on the popularity of a poet versus that of his or her peers. In The Drunkard's Walk, mathematician Leonard Mlodinow helps to account for variations in subjective evaluations. He explains, for instance, why a $60 bottle of Bordeaux might be rated more highly by experts than a bargain-bin screwtop that beats the highbrow vintage in blind taste tests:

Expectations also affect your perception of taste. In 1963 three researchers secretly added a bit of red food colour to white wine to give it the blush of a rosé. They then asked a group of experts to rate its sweetness in comparison with the untinted wine. The experts perceived the fake rosé as sweeter than the white, according to their expectation. Another group of researchers gave a group of oenology students two wine samples. Both samples contained the same white wine, but to one was added a tasteless grape anthocyanin dye that made it appear to be red wine. The students also perceived differences between the red and the white according to their expectations. And in a 2008 study a group of volunteers asked to rate five wines rated a bottle labeled $90 higher than another bottle labeled $10, even though the sneaky researchers had filled both bottles with the same wine.

It isn't hard to translate these results into poetry world terms; it's no stretch to imagine showing a group of Canadian poetry lovers the latest "Don McKay" poem (actually written by someone else) and then to watch them finding six ways from Sunday to praise its virtuosity. Or, conversely, to imagine McKay sending his own new poems off to magazines under a pseudonym and getting most of them back with polite rejection notes. We don't have to imagine it, because similar sociological experiments have been performed. In a later section of his book, Mlodinow writes of an experiment with pop music:

The popularity of individual songs varied widely among the different worlds [the experiment involved dividing 14,341 participants into nine "worlds," each of which was given different popularity data for a selection of forty-eight songs by bands unknown to the participants; the ninth group received no popularity data at all], and different songs of similar intrinsic quality [as defined by the ninth world's rankings of the songs] also varied widely in their popularity. For example, a song called "Lockdown" by a band called 52metro ranked twenty-six out of forty-eight in intrinsic quality but was the number-1 song in one world and the number-40 song in another. In this experiment, as one song or another by chance got an early edge in downloads, its seeming popularity influenced the shoppers. It's a phenomenon that is well-known in the movie industry: moviegoers will report liking a movie more when they hear beforehand how good it is. In this example, small chance influences created a snowball effect and made a huge difference in the future of the song.

I see all kinds of evidence for this kind of social dynamics in the popularity of McKay. Just the other day, this idolatrous blog post came up on my Facebook feed. I sent the link in an email to a few critic colleagues under the subject heading "Sociology." One wrote back "That reads like the missive of someone who has found meaning through a cult." Which is hyperbolic, but the post certainly is evidence of how social capital accrues, compounds and ramifies in the rarefied atmosphere of the poetry business. In other words, a significant reason that people love Don McKay is that people love Don McKay. Humans, however much they may be aware of the arbitrariness of prestige and wealth, still defer to prestige and wealth, another point elaborated by Mlodinow:

I was watching late-night television recently when another star ... appeared for an interview. His name is Bill Gates. Though the interviewer is known for his sarcastic approach, toward Gates he seemed unusually deferential. Even the audience seemed to ogle Gates. The reason, of course, is that for thirteen years straight Gates was named the richest man in the world by Forbes magazine. In fact, since founding Microsoft, Gates has earned more than $100 a second. And so when he was asked about his vision for interactive television, everyone waited with great anticipation to hear what he had to say. But his answer was ordinary, no more creative, ingenious, or insightful than anything I've heard from a dozen other computer professionals. Which brings us to this question: does Gates earn $100 per second because he is godlike, or is he godlike because he earns $100 per second?

Mlodinow then goes on to show that the development of DOS and Gates' subsequent meteoric rise hinged on seemingly insignificant, chance events. Such random events, combined with charisma, explain why McKay is rated so much more highly than a host of contemporaries who are at least as good at writing poems as he is. Lista is bang-on that it's no "sinister plot or top-down conspiracy." It's far more banal than that.

UNB Poetry Weekend 2014

After missing the last couple of years, I was back at UNB's annual Poetry Weekend this year and brought my digital recorder with me. I was there with Rachel and our son, so part of the weekend had to be dedicated to kid-friendly activities (as Kaleb said to me when I suggested he might listen to my reading, "But daddy, that would be BORING!"), so we missed the first set of readings on Saturday. I've uploaded the other five recordings to Internet Archive.

Review in print

A while back, a review I wrote for the Telegraph Journal fell victim to an editorial changeover, but fortunately, the good people at Vallum found a home for my thoughts on Ricardo Sternberg's most recent book, Some Dance. I just received the issue in the mail today. It includes, among many other things, a three-page poem by Karen Solie, intriguingly called "Via." Which I will read as soon as I finish editing my damn book.

Mark Kingwell on Jailbreaks

My superlative publisher, Biblioasis, is celebrating ten years of kicking ass in the book world this year. Part of the party is testimonials from people about favourite Biblioasis titles. Philosopher and public intellectual Mark Kingwell has chimed in with some very flattering words of praise for Jailbreaks, my anthology of sonnets:

Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets is one of the best anthologies of poetry I know, and in my top five contemporary poetry books ever. Zach Wells selects sonnets from across the country, across generations, and across styles. For those who think sonnets all look the same, there is much to learn here about the range of poetic possibility within a single set of formal constraints. Among other clever things, Wells's introduction argues that the fourteen lines of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet forms are poetry's finest vehicle for introducing, developing, and concluding a well-formed thought. These poems are thus phenomenological jailbreaks, consciousness busting out -- in good order -- from the buzzing prison-yard of our jumbled minds. A book to dip into or read cover to cover, with delight on every page.

[I pasted the text of Mark's commentary because the link doesn't work anymore.]

Anthologized

My poem "There Is Something Intractable in Me" has been included in a new anthology edited by Shane Neilson for Frog Hollow Press: Play: Poems About Childhood. I haven't had a chance to dig into the book yet, but at a glance it's an intriguingly eclectic collection of poets and poems.

Finding in 'primitive' languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concepts of 'good' or 'beautiful', so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. The first speakers of language took the raw material of their surroundings and pressed it into metaphor to suggest abstract ideas. The Yaghan tongue--and by inference all language--proceeds as a system of navigation. Named things are fixed points, aligned or compared, which allow the speaker to plot the next move. Had [Thomas] Bridges uncovered the range of Yaghan metaphor, his work would never have come to completion. Yet sufficient survives for us to resurrect the clarity of their intellect.
What shall we think of a people who defined 'monotony' as 'an absence of male friends?' Or, for 'depression', used the word that described the vulnerable phase in a crab's seasonal cycle, when it has sloughed off its old shell and waits for another to grow? Or who derived 'lazy' from the Jackass Penguin? Or 'adulterous' from the hobby, a small hawk that flits here and there, hovering motionless over its next victim?

...

The layers of metaphorical associations that made up their mental soil shackled the Indians to their homeland with ties that could not be broken. A tribe's territory, however uncomfortable, was always a paradise that could never be improved on. By contrast the outside world was Hell and its inhabitants no better than beasts.

--Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

Reprinted poem online

My poem "We Are More or Less," recently reprinted by Geist magazine, is now up on their website and making the rounds on social media. It's not a bad time for this to be posted, with the rupture of the under-built Mount Polley tailings pond and Canadapologist Shane Koyczan poised to go on tour with David Suzuki et al. Yup, we are more.

Poem reprinted

My spoken-word poem/op-ed rant "We Are More or Less," which was originally published in Vancouver Review, has been reprinted (with a slightly modified title) from Career Limiting Moves by Geist magazine in their latest issue.

 You can also hear me deliver the piece:

Interview and poems online and in print

I'm pleased and honoured to be featured in the very first issue of The Humber Literary Review. They've posted an interview and two poems on their website.

The poems are both from the manuscript of my next collection, which is to be called Sum. I have just recently sent the manuscript in to publisher and editor (my good friend Carmine Starnino, who also edited Track & Trace), and I'm told it should be in print early spring of 2015.

Translation lost and found

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any left) will recall that I went to Mexico a couple of years ago to take part in the Linares International Literary Festival, organized by Irish-Canadian expat Colin Carberry. With the help of a crowd funding campaign, I hired a translator, Lidia Valencia Fourcans, to convert ten of my poems into Spanish. After I came back from Mexico, my publisher asked me if Lidia and I could write something for Biblioasis' translation blog. We did, and sent it on, but in the midst of much other busyness at the press, the blog went into hibernation before my piece was posted. One of the things Jesse Eckerlin has done since joining team Biblioasis is reanimate the translation blog. Then I remembered that I still had this piece. And now, at last, it's up on the blog, for your reading pleasure.

And I still have some copies of the translation chapbook, if anyone wants to buy one.

Alexis vs. Gilmour

Anne Kingston has done a nice job writing up the rather dreary "feud" between two novelists who talk a lot of shit. She highlights my response to a particularly smelly piece of Andre Alexis bullshit in her piece, but seems to think the title of my book is meant more unironically than it is.

Confirmation Bias at Work

It seems to me that, when we lost our aesthetic pleasure in the human presence as a thing to be looked at and contemplated, at the same time we ceased to enjoy human act and gesture, which civilzation has always before found to be beautiful even when it was also grievous or terrible, as the epics and tragedies and the grandest novels testify. Now when we read history, increasingly we read it as a record of cynicism and manipulation. We assume that nothing is what it appears to be, that it is less and worse, insofar as it might once have seemed worthy of respectful interest. We routinely disqualify testimony that would plead for extenuation. That is, we are so persuaded of the rightness of our judgment as to invalidate evidence that does not confirm us in it. Nothing that deserves to be called truth could ever be arrived at by such means. If truth in this sense is essentially inaccessible in any case, that should only confirm us in humility and awe.

--Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam

I have a lot of time for what Robinson says here. Unfortunately, she follows this paragraph, the last in the introductory essay of her collection, with an essay so thoroughly tendentious in its arguments (broadly, against what she calls "Darwinism"), so selectively blind to extenuating testimony, that it could have been the target of the quotation above. In the first essay, she castigates writers on Calvinism for having no works by Calvin in their bibliographies. I got so irked reading caricatures of various philosophers and scientists in the second essay that I flipped to the back to check out her bibliography. There was none. It's pretty shocking that she seems to have been deaf to these ironies.

Here is an excellent response to Robinson's essay.

Some love for CLM

My old friend Mark Sampson (who I've known since we lived in the same dorm at the University of King's College in 1995-96) has posted a review of Career Limiting Moves on his blog. I'm especially glad that he highlighted my review of Souvankham Thammavongsa's Found, as it's a piece I'm particularly proud of. (I was also glad to hear recently that Thammavongsa's wonderful follow-up collection, Light, has been shortlisted for Ontario's Trillium Prize.)

Waypoints broadside

When I was crowdfunding my trip to Paris a few months ago, one of the perks available was a broadside featuring the four poems set to music by Erik Ross and performed by Phillip Addis and Emily Hamper. I got word from Gaspereau the other day that, after some mechanical problems at the press that delayed production, the Waypoints broadside has now been printed. Andrew Steeves has produced only twenty copies, exactly the number I need to fulfill the perk claims, so there will be none for sale. Nevertheless, it looks so pretty that I just had to share.

Earlier this month, on Mother's Day, the full four-song sequence was performed for the first time at Montreal's Conservatoire de Musique (the score for "Broken" was not finished early enough for it to be rehearsed for the recitals in Toronto and Paris). I was in attendance, along with Rachel and a number of friends, among the seventy or so audience members (mostly members of Montreal's Société d'Art Vocal, which was hosting the recital). It was another brilliant performance and people were excited that I was actually there, since the creators of most of the music they hear are no longer living. The Société provided excellent hospitality, including a post-recital reception at their private club. So good to hear the full sequence; it will be interesting to see, in coming years, if any other performers incorporate it into their repertoire.

SUNK COSTS

The fact that I persist despite the futile
nature of this brutal quest is no
proof that I want reason. If bloated
bait lingers on my line and I hammer stakes
three fingers deeper into carbonized
humus, you mustn't see me as apostle
to St. Anthony, follower of fool's
errands or keeper of extinguished flames.
Ceteris paribus et mutatis mutandis,
if I don't brake or bail, it's because I can't
go on, but, like Sisyphus who is,
of course, just like the rest of us, I must.
Now is no time to reckon or cut loss—
now is when I must honour my sunk costs.

Messy procedure

I've been reading Don Paterson's commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets in desultory fashion for many months (its home during that time has been on top of my toilet's water tank). The book is often brilliant and funny, occasionally sloppy and maddening. One of the things I love about it is Paterson's engagement with earlier exegeses of the sonnets, but perhaps my favourite parts are the digressive excursions he makes from time to time, commenting on poetry and criticism more generally.

In his commentary on Sonnet 148, he talks about Helen Vendler's "kabbalistic tour de force that uncovers many buried correspondences, DEFECTIVE KEY WORDS, chiastic and structural patterns--absolutely none of which, I suspect, WS was either aware of or had intended." He continues:

By now, you may be getting the impression that I don't think Vendler's is the way to do criticism. Yes and no: HV is often brilliantly illuminating, but her commentary on the Sonnets suffers from a double-whammy of misperceptions.
     Firstly, too much stuff is described as deliberately planned effect that I'm certain arose from nothing more than human feeling and instinctive decision-making, driven through the local compositional exigencies of the sonnet form. Secondly, and more sinisterly, HV seem sot assume that the poem actually has a deep essence, pattern or structure which we can usefully abstract and codify in this way. It doesn't; the game of poetry is to keep those things in play, and to fix and codify them is to misrepresent their protean nature, and their total dependency on the dynamic process of subjective reading; otherwise you're conferring a reality they don't possess. This is the theistic fallacy in another guise. I think many of the deep patters and symbolic underpinnings that HV diagnoses are not integral to the poem itself, but only back-formed from her sometimes too-careful reading; which is to say they're here, and not Shakespeare's. If they do really exist, they must be in the hands of some remote third party, who at some point will confirm the accuracy of the brilliant exegesis. But there's just you, me, and this wee poem. That's an open game. However HV too often plays a closed one, poring over the Sonnets as if they were a holy book--as if it actually possessed rather than generated some meaning, and finds nothing more or less than the richness of her own mind. A relief that it's so rich, since one invariably learns so much from its company. But the Sonnets were the work of a brilliant and fallible human, and they shouldn't be interrogated like the Book of Thoth.
     Everyone composes in a roughly similar way. Frost's notebooks are pretty much like mine and like those of my friends, the difference lying only in the genius of the results. There are both a thousand ways to write a poem, and precisely one: messy procedure. The poem may take on a crystalline and even algebraic appearance in the end, but for all its ferocious technique, that final poem was reached through a dynamic process with feeling and instinct at its heart--and was not guided by the kind of structural blueprint and organizational intelligence that critics like HV divine at every turn. You see the problem: it looks like a subtle distinction, but there's actually a massive difference between suggestion that the structure is somehow anterior to the poem, as opposed to merely an emergent feature of its final form, with which its pattern of feeling and lyric is not properly separable.
     Poets want us to lose ourselves in the surface our their language, not its hidden machinery--not least because that machinery is often hidden from the poets themselves. Not that we should always honour that desire: as you'll have noticed, I'm all for putting the poem into dry dock, so we can see what's going on beneath the surface, find what keeps it afloat, and marvel at its construction. But to talk as if that's where the deeper or larger truth of the poem might reside is wrong. To find that, we need to set it back in the water. The truth of a poem is in the cut of its jib, the breath in its sails, the clever route it charts to its new poet, and the skill and speed and grace with which it moves.

CLM excerpt online

Jesse Eckerlin has posted my review of Goran Simić's From Sarajevo, with Sorrow on the Biblioasis International Translation blog. The review, originally published (2005) in the now-defunct Books in Canada, predates my involvement with Biblioasis and my friendship with Goran, whose subsequent poetry collection, Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, I had the pleasure and honour of editing for the press. Funny routes one winds up taking in this game.

AMBITION

To own the podium
in the Victim Olympics;
to deserve the odium
of well born limpets.

Bryson on CLM

Michael Bryson has just posted a thoughtful and penetrating review of Career Limiting Moves on his blog. Since Michael and I go way back, as he makes plain from the get-go, it's a personally-inflected piece, but he also manages to say some things about my work that strike me as true, but which I hadn't thought of in precisely such terms before. Which is none too common in reviews--but most welcome.

Bachinger on CLM

Jacob Bachinger, a writer and teacher based in the northern wilds of Manitoba, has posted some thoughtful comments about Career Limiting Moves on his blog.

Hamilton panel writeup

The Puritan proves that not all bloggers are created equal, with Ryan Pratt's concise, thoughtful and accurate response to the recent panel in the Hammer. (Scroll down for my audio recording of the panel.) What's not touched on much in this piece is the pretty great Q&A with the audience. Amanda Jernigan did a masterful job, as Pratt acknowledges, of mediating the discussion. Overall, I'd say it was the most successful of the four events.

Speaking of stunted

A rather sloppy, tendentious response to the Toronto panel has been posted on The Puritan's blog. If nothing else, it demonstrates that the blogosphere's earnest contributors need to work harder if they want to meet basic journalistic standards. They could at least listen to the posted audio instead of relying on scribbled notes to cobble things haphazardly together again from memory.

UPDATE: Phoebe Wang of The Puritan has posted a defence (consisting mainly of excuses) of Tracy Kyncl's post. Oddly, the fact that Ms. Kyncl possesses an MA and is the editor of a magazine actually makes the sloppiness of her post seem more egregious; I had assumed previously she was an undergrad. I've responded to Ms. Wang with an elaboration on my objections above. And that's as much time as I'm prepared to waste on this.

Stunted critical credos

A wee excerpt from Career Limiting Moves, read at the recent Toronto panel talk, filmed by Pino Coluccio:

ZW reads AO

I read a poem at Ben McNally Books, from Alexandra Oliver's Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, in her absence.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry in Windsor

What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry in Hamilton

What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry, Toronto edition

CNQ: The Montreal Issue

The arrival of Canadian Notes & Queries is always an event, but I haven't been this excited about getting my copy in a while. The Montreal issue contains a wealth of literary delectables, including a piece I commissioned from American poet and critic Bill Coyle on Robyn Sarah's most recent collection and a reprint of my appreciation of Peter Van Toorn's sui generis sonnet "Mountain Leaf." The latter is accompanied (for subscribers) by a postcard print of the poem, beautifully designed and illustrated by Biblioasis's own Kate Hargreaves (whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Windsor the other day). 

Maybe it's time to subscribe, hey?

Audio: What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry, Montreal Edition

I realize belatedly that, although I sent out all kinds of invitations via social media and email, I've been neglectful in posting here about my four-day, four-city promotional tour for Career Limiting Moves, the book. I'm home now from a blitz of Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton and Windsor, accompanied by Jason Guriel (who recently published his own prose collection, The Pigheaded Soul) and Anita Lahey, whose prose collection The Mystery Shopping Cart is still warm off the press. They're both excellent books and their authors are great company, so it was a hyper-stimulating pleasure to do these events with them. The tour was the brain child of my publisher, Biblioasis, proving once again that they're one of the best. Below is the audio from the Montreal event, hosted by Adrian King-Edward of The Word and moderated by Carmine Starnino, who edited both Jason and Anita's books and who, of course, has been a colleague and friend of mine for years. I'll be posting audio from the others shortly.



Here, also, is an article written in advance of the Montreal panel.

Tomorrow!