Due Process

I haven't said a lot about the ongoing FUBAR of Steven Galloway's firing from UBC. I haven't said much because I'm not that invested in what is euphemistically known as the "literary community" and, frankly, because I don't know much about the case. Nobody except those involved does--for mostly very good reasons. Like the law. Near-perfect ignorance, of course, hasn't stopped a lot of other people from having strong opinions about how things have gone down. And then, a horribly misconceived letter started circulating, signed by all manner of CanLit luminaries, who, despite knowing next-to-nothing, thought that it was incumbent on them to grease the wheels of justice. Unacknowledged legislators, antennae of the race, etc. When it was pointed out by other writers that this anonymously authored letter was markedly biassed towards Galloway and threw his accusers under the bus, a number of writers, horrified that they had been blindly duped into condoning rape culture (because they are apparently not so good at reading, even though they do it for a living), scrambled to remove their names from the letter. Others, including Margaret Atwood, who is looking more and more like Signal and less and less like Noise, have dug in their heels.

Some who signed the letter say they did so in spite of not liking its wording. The wording of the letter IS the letter. #ubcaccountable

— wayne johnston (@waynejohnston17) November 17, 2016

One thing I do know about this matter is that Mr. Galloway's dismissal is the subject of a grievance being pursued by his union. This is what due process looks like in a unionized workplace. I know, because I'm a shop steward in my union local (Unifor 4005) and I write a LOT of grievances, for matters both minor and grave. (These days, I write more grievances than anything else, unfortunately. I could tell you some stories. Except I can't. Because it's private information and all.) It's not a perfect process and it can take a godawfully long time for the grievance procedure to resolve anything, but if/when employer and union fail to work things out on their own, the matter will go before an independent arbitrator, who will render an impartial, and binding, judgment. In my experience, arbitrators get it right far more than they get it wrong. This is because they weigh all available facts and arguments in a detached and rational manner. And they get it right far more often, I guarantee you, than dozens of self-righteous writers flailing about rhetorically.

Yesterday, I came across a rare beam of light, in the form of a Facebook post by a writer named Dorothy Palmer. She says pretty much all that needs to be said about this shitshow.

Blurble blurble

Jason Guriel on the lowly blurb. Like him, I've had reviews I've written misappropriated and manipulated by publishers to appear more praiseful than they were. Dirty pool, but you have to tip your cap, I suppose. 

On the few occasions I've been asked to furnish a pre-publication blurb, I've declined, for many of the reasons Jason touches on: a)I'm not famous enough--not nearly!--to boost your sales. b)The blurb is a seriously degraded currency and I don't wish to contribute to its further decline. c)I probably won't have sufficiently unmixed feelings about the quality of your book to blurb it with wholehearted enthusiasm. 

My own books of poetry have gone without blurbs, by my own wishes. The last two, we've gone with the full text of a poem, since what can tell a reader more about the contents of a book than a representative sample? I very nearly got one from Barry Lopez for my first book, but it arrived after the book had already been published. Best kind of blurb: from one of my literary heroes, but not out there for the public to see. For my book of essays, I pulled a Zizek and selected something never intended to be used for that purpose: a dismissive couple of sentences from an interview with George Bowering, who was apparently unimpressed with my reviewing work, but took too many pains to demonstrate how little he cared for it.

POEM IN SEPTEMBER

First rain in five weeks—
sumac and creeper aflame
spreading asters bloom
tire treads ripping wet asphalt.

Interview posted

Of all the things I've written in my life, I don't know if anything's received more attention than the short article I wrote for The Walrus recently on real estate and related matters. This morning, Ryerson University's radio station aired this interview with me:

Article online

I haven't been doing a lot of freelance work of late because I'm very busy these days in my role as Chief Shop Steward in Unifor Local 4005. But the other day Carmine Starnino asked me to adapt a Facebook post about my adventures in real estate into a web piece for The Walrus. That piece is now up. I got into the specifics and details (although some were cut for length) because I think these are too often things that are not talked about, things it's almost taboo to talk about--but they're things we should be talking about. Class has become a really sticky wicket. It's very strange to be, as I am, simultaneously an artist, a seasonal grey-collar worker (who has been on EI almost every year since 2003), a labour rights activist, and a landlord. My priorities are often in conflict and are very hard to integrate. I certainly didn't cobble all these things together on purpose; it's symptomatic of how a person needs to hustle these days to get ahead--even if one is born with a lot of advantages.

Interview online

When I was in Vancouver in June, I met up with photographer and Vancouver Review founder Mark Mushet. We had a conversation and he took some portraits of me. Our talk is now up on the VR website.

Pivot podcast: Blackman, Warner and Wells

Loyal CLM readers may remember a much talked-about reading I was doing in February at the Pivot reading series. I meant to post the podcast when it went up last month, but it slipped my mind till now. Click play to hear Jeff Blackman, Pat Warner and, finally, meself.

A CAIRN FOR WM HAWKINS

Bill, I know you loved driving down to the sea
from that crazy river-abounding town,


as all things that flow—and all things flow
quoth Heraclitus—ineluctably must. So here I be


on this beach doing what I like doing best
(because I too, pressed by the mouths I feed


and wearied by work, have turned from poesy,
which is to say it has abandoned me):


I am stacking one red rock atop another,
taking them as they come, fitting them snug


with no chisel or hammer, giving to each face
a bit of batter, so that one stone supports


the stones it leans upon and settles firm
against the hearting. Which is a stupid


futile stay against entropy, since even
the cliffs at my back are one good storm


from crumbling, but fuck it, Bill, it should
withstand at least one tide, and it served


no sensible function in the first place, now did it?

METTLE

The rebel Viking hairs that copper-threaded
my Semitic iron spade were first to fade
silver as fuck tomorrow ceded way to fretting


over pension and investments. Berserk
no more in middle age, nihilistic
abnegation whelmed by surging waves


of care for kin and colleagues' welfare,
I laid aside my pen and page, muted
rage and issued antiseptic grievance.


And grieve I did, my father, for you, whose
rogue and sober ways have forged me
even as your blood and the auburn hairs


of the grizzled beard you daily shaved bequeathed
to me the tempered mettle of my steel—
and debility in speaking what I feel.

Sum gets some love

My book Sum was published over a year ago. It got one review right away, in Quill & Quire, but not much noise about it since. Until today, thanks to reviewer Alison Goodwin in Arc Poetry Magazine. I don't usually comment on my reviews, but this one is uncommonly perceptive. I know how challenging it can be, how much work it takes, to say much of substance in a 500 word piece, having written a lot of them myself, and Goodwin, whose work I don't recall having seen before, really nails it here.

As a writer and editor, I've always felt that if you are conscientious about how you put your book together, it will lead a good reader to make connections and hear rhymes you didn't necessarily know were there to be heard. A lot of my critical work has involved ferreting out such correspondences (the title of my next prose collection will be Correspondences, in fact). There are a lot of intentional echoes and references in Sum and I arranged the poems deliberately to make the most of the book's motifs, to make the book itself a poem. Goodwin has picked out a couple of things I hadn't consciously considered before, which is a real treat.

Cinema of the Present meets The Prelude

An essay of mine on Lisa Robertson and William Wordsworth, an earlier, abridged version of which was published by Arc Poetry Magazine, has just been published online by The Critical Flame.

Review Online

My review of Elena Johnson's debut collection, Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra is now up at Arc Poetry Magazine's site.

Sun, Wind & Wood

I just found out that Sun, Wind & Wood, a 1977 NFB doc about alternative/renewable energy R&D on PEI is online. My father is featured prominently in it, and yours truly even makes a couple of cameos. Ultimately pretty grim, since we're only really starting to see the kind of investment of "social capital" in these technologies that my dad advocated as urgent forty years ago.

Sun, Wind and Wood by Dorothy Todd Hénaut, National Film Board of Canada

A few disconnected incidents

It was always a matter of wonder to Vandover that he was able to recall so little of his past life. With the exception of the most recent events he could remember nothing connectedly. What he at first imagined to be the story of his life, on closer inspection turned out to be but a few disconnected incidents that his memory had preserved with the greatest capriciousness, absolutely independent of their importance. One of these incidents might be a great sorrow, a tragedy, a death in his family; and another, recalled with the same vividness, the same accuracy of detail, might be a matter of the least moment.

 ...

As he looked back over his life he could recall nothing after this for nearly five years. Even after that lapse of time the only scene he could picture with any degree of clearness was one of the greatest triviality in which he saw himself, a rank thirteen-year-old boy, sitting on a bit of carpet in the back yard of the San Francisco house playing with his guinea-pigs. 

In order to get at his life during his teens, Vandover would have been obliged to collect these scattered memory pictures as best he could, rearrange them in some more orderly sequence, piece out what he could imperfectly recall and fill in the many gaps by mere guesswork and conjecture.

-Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute

Tree Reading Series Featured Reader 23 Feb 16 - Zachariah Wells

Miriam Toews' Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture

I attended a great event tonight at my alma mater, the University of King's College. Miriam Toews, also a King's alum from a few years before my time, delivered the Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture, an annual talk named for a young King's student who committed suicide. Toews was there to talk about suicide, about the right to die and her writing life, which has been very much entangled in these questions, since she has written books about her sister and her father, both of whom took their own lives. She said she regretted that she hadn't helped her sister go to Switzerland, to end her life in a peaceful way, in the company of people she loved. Instead, her end was solitary and violent. As Rachel reminded me, both Toews' sister and father used trains as the instrument of their death. I was saying to Rachel afterwards that, in all the discussion right now about right-to-death legislation, assisted suicide, etc., something I've never heard mentioned is the trauma that suicide, as a prohibited individual act, visits on others and how giving people a legal, regulated avenue to pursue their own death might mitigate that trauma. I thought of Russell Wangersky's book Burning Down the House, in which he writes so poignantly of the PTSD he suffered as a result of his work as a firefighter. How many first responders have been permanently scarred by witnessing the effects of violent self-inflicted death? And of course, I thought of my colleagues, especially those engineers who become, in a sense, the helpless agents of other people's intentional demise. Just a few months ago, in November, I was on a train full of people that ran over a suicide victim. There were people on board who were profoundly upset by it, even without seeing the body. That person who killed herself, irony of ironies, worked in a hospital. There's debate as to whether assisted suicide should take place in hospitals or in other venues. One thing I know: a gravel roadbed in the dark and the snow is no place for it.

Public Spanking

Daniel Karasik ponders the eros of the online mob.

Rachel Lebowitz, Cover Woman

Hey, lovers of the written word, Rachel Lebowitz's most recently published essay can be found within the pages of Arc Poetry Magazine 79, on newsstands now. Rachel has had an incredibly good rate of success placing these essays and they are getting ever closer to becoming her next book, which will blow many minds when it appears. Very wisely, the good folks of Arc have put Rachel on the cover:

MY DETRACTORS HAVE NO PULL

When, out of lassitude, I cease to scrawl
the rude and sordid things my detractors
were wont to bemoan, my detractors
miss it much, but take credit for the shift
in tone, the numpties, claiming I've been
declawed. By what? By the frequency
of their whinging? By the teardrops massing
at their ducts? By the solemn brick facade
of their virtuecratic mugs? Fat chance,
fuckwads, it's just that I've found less lumpen
trolls and bears to taunt. Funny how when
you babies get what you want, you still
find it wanting, what? Funny how I still
give zero-point-zero flying fucks. Aw, shucks.

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.