Some love for Meniscus

Dan Wells has pointed out a wee spate of reviews for Shane Neilson's outstanding collection Meniscus. I like that Jennifer Still, in the Free Press review, makes reference to Shane's "unsentimental range of emotion." Ezra Pound, for all his interest in experimentation and innovation, once said that "only emotion endures." Of course, in poetry, emotion of the sort that endures only occurs (for the reader) when the right combination of skill and guts (on the part of writer), not to be mistaken for a simple spill of guts, comes into play--and that combination is on display again and again in Meniscus; it's the brimming surface tension on which Shane's poems stride.

Dr. Ursus wants you...

...to read Track & Trace. Couple of books--Johnstone and Pool--on that list that I haven't read. Guernica produces many worthwhile books, but for some reason they often fly under the radar. I have the second volume of Wayne Clifford's epic sonnet sequence, but have yet to sit down properly with it. The first was terrific and I've loved what I've heard of the second at a couple of launches.

The wrong arguments of unstupid people

The delightful Michael Robbins on reviewing. If only more reviewers displayed a sense of humour in their work. This is something about William Logan--whom Robbins cites as an exemplar of style--that I think most of his detractors completely miss the boat on: the guy is fucking funny. But poetry is serious stuff. No guff.

Everything Brian Palmu Read

Well, all the poetry, anyway. He includes a couple of brief reviews of Jailbreaks and Track & Trace:

Edited: Zach Wells, Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets. “What’s left out?” is usually the first question asked of an anthology. It’s a strange reverse take, especially in this case, since the title doesn’t include “The Best” before “99”. Hey, I would have liked something by George Faludy. But the initial question should always be “what’s in?”, and what’s in is very fine, indeed. A various, quality-saturated volume, surprising when considering that 99 poets (actually 100 since one poem is co-written) are included. Absolute favourites are hard to pinpoint, but perhaps my three top picks would be Eric Ormsby’s frightening “Childhood Pieties”, George Johnston’s moving “Cathleen Sweeping”, and the piece to which the volume owes its name, Margaret Avison’s gift-packed “Snow”. Lest these three point me out as a fossil (if praising the work of 50 years ago makes me such), I was both surprised and delighted to discover recent poems (and some poets) unfamiliar to me. Peter Norman’s “Bolshevik Tennis!” was delightful, especially so as a political sonnet immediately brings to mind message-stuffed solemnity. Here, Norman’s stripped-court conceit is fun, and the reader doesn’t have to choose different sides of the missing net to laugh. And there’s also a funny existentialist poem! I haven’t perused a thirty-pound tome of them, lately. David O’Meara’s “Postcard From Camus” lifts the philosophical weight from that polarizing author with the paraphrasable defence, “it was the sun!” Wells’ notes on the poems include intelligent historical context, but are also highly personal, and in that spirit, I’d challenge his take on Adam Sol’s “Sonnet With The Morning Paper” in which he claims a “suckerpunch” at the turn, “[b]y toying with the reader’s expectations”. The hints are more than subtle, though, in the development: “stealing morning” (the first word bringing out the homophone in the second); “enmeshed in … wire”; “raucous tribe”; “conspire”; “spooking”; “mesh fences”. As for “enmeshed”, a few duds were nestled in amongst the firecrackers -- David McFadden’s “Country Hotel In The Niagara Peninsula” and Mike Barnes’ “First Stab” -- but in a book covering one hundred years of sonnets, limited to Canada, from traditional subjects and form to any subject in forms at first hard to identify with the grand(ma)pappy (isn’t being politically correct cute?) of them all, Wells has worked hard to provide a living repository that colourfully fills a neglected alcove in our national literature.

Zach Wells, Track & Trace. If there are more than a handful of Canadian poets currently writing better music in which the poems are meant to be heard as cadence, dynamic shift, and sonorous repetition and variation, I haven’t chanced upon them yet. I could fill a lot of space here with examples, but that would be longer than a trailer, and would defeat the surprise, the discovery in the context of an entire poem. But here’s a few: “Tender tight fists of fiddleheads/fronding into bitter-leafed ferns.” (from the opener, “What He Found Growing In The Woods”, a fine metaphorical study of birth and death); “chunks of trunk thunking like dud munitions” (from “Nimble & Poise”); “[t]he sudden stink of mussel mud drifting” (from “Mussel Mud”). In fact, mud stink is a sensory motif wafting through T&T, decomposition as difficult beauty, the rot in life not only natural and inevitable, but strangely transcendent, at times. I’m not partial to Wells’ anaphoral poems; the procedure distracts from the back end listing, and the insistence dulls rather than amplifies. And there’s still a straightjacketed concision, at times, which strangles feeling. That those feelings are strong and honest makes this a greater frustration. I was delighted by the often subtle meaning, only apparent in elementary form after several readings, and that the meaning cohered in a curious winterized vision, creatively enacted in Seth’s specific sequence of drawings.

Jim Johnstone's Top 5

Jim Johnstone has posted a list of his five fave Canadian poetry collections of 2009. Mine snuck in to clinch fifth spot, for which I'm honoured, but with all due respect to Jim, I'd've put Joe Denham's Windstorm ahead of mine, for sure--possibly ahead of all of them. Some great company on that list. Of the other four titles, three are favourites of mine, including of course Shane Neilson's Meniscus, which I edited. The other book, Tonja Gunvaldsen Klassen's Lean-To, I haven't read yet, but seeing as it also made Carmine Starnino's recent top 10 list, I'm thinking I should give it a whirl.

I won't be posting any top 10 or five or any other-numbered list myself. For one thing, tho I read a fair number of contemporary collections every year, I'd feel fraudulent ranking the best without having read close to all of them. For another, creating a ranking would be a gross misrepresentation of my relationship to reading; obviously, I'm no relativist and believe in aesthetic standards--I believe in the more-or-less objective existence of the good, the bad and the ugly--but beyond that I think it's a fool's errand to try to divide good books into better and best. It's a bit like ranking people, really. I also think the year of publication is a pretty random basis for generating a list. What I will do, once 2009 has officially expired, is post a list of books I read over the course of the year, regardless of year of publication, that I enjoyed and think are worth reading.

A couple nifty interviews

One with Thomas Lynch, one of my favourite contemporary poets and essayists, who happens to live in Michigan.

And one with Damian Rogers, whose very sharp first collection Paper Radio I just finished reading and will be reviewing

The Savanna Hypothesis

for Arthur Danto and Dante Alighieri

As if modernism never happened,

people cling to recidivist models.

Rice Crispies are bland, but oh, how they snap and

crackle in their milk! The man in lederhosen yodels

his ass off on the Matterhorn, unaware

that he's a Swiss cheese cliche of outmoded

old-school pastiche. Worse: he doesn't fucking care!

A dozen avant-tarde blowhards just exploded:

Jesus was steeped not in piss but in piss-

warm Mountain Dew--he's stoked for a second

kick at Canaan. Or Kanata, perhaps. What is this?

I couldn't tell ya, but sure as hell's a fecund

stew! Brother, you had me at hello:

I know what I like and I like what I know!

Review online

My review of Soraya Peerbaye's Poems for the Committee on Antarctic Names is now online. Bah humbug.

UPDATE: My review of John Barton's Hymn is also up.

Gary Barwin on biodiversity

I first saw this post of Gary's as a note on Facebook, to which I responded:

1 3/4 thumbs up to this, Gary. As you know from past chats we've had, I'm all for the spectrum.

Re footnote 2: I would say that an appreciation of a 16th C poem _independent_ of its historical or social context is 100% possible, if not to all encounterers of same, then at least to someone who's read a lot of poetry and has a broad and deep knowledge of the language. Most, if not all, of the words are, after all, parsable--even if orthographically odd-looking--and the person who wrote it, for all his or her paradigmatic and circumstantial differences, is still equipped with, for all intents and purposes, fake hips and codpieces notwithstanding, the same bits as the 21st C reader, including, most importantly, a brain that has physically evolved very little in the intervening eye-blink. Knowledge of context naturally _enriches_ one's understanding and hence appreciation of the old poem, which is why I personally like to read unobtrusively annotated versions of such texts. But I'd emphasize "unobtrusively" here because I prefer to encounter a poem first as something spoken from one person to another, rather than as a curated artefact. Such encounters often provoke my curiosity about the ground in which the poem grew, in the way that tasting a really good wine makes me wonder about the soil conditions and climatological circumstances of the place and time of its vintage. But an oenophile don't need to know these things to savour the vino (a real clever one could reverse engineer them, but that's another matter). Which is one reason I have a hard time buying the oft-heard argument that certain types of art are under-appreciated because we lack the critical vocabulary to discuss them properly. Critical vocabularies, it seems to be, get built of bricks made of man-that-was-awesome and how-the-fuck-did-they-do-that.

Last Minute

Just found out that Rob Taylor has included Jailbreaks on his list of last-minute gift ideas. It's probably too late for xmas now, but why stick to a regimented gift-giving schedule, eh? Some fine company on that list; the Newlove, Solie and Guriel books are all recent faves of mine. Haven't read all of the Ferguson book yet, but have already come across some delightful things in it. That said, I would be remiss in not pointing out that Jailbreaks is the best per-poem bargain on the list. But if you're looking for real bang for your buck, Unsettled has 87 poems--yeah, I know, but it's too late to change that now--and retails for a mere $11.95!

Did a bit of railroad work over the last week and family stuff for the next few days; off to PEI tomorrow morning after opening up the gifts presently piled under our potted pine. Happy whatever-you-do-this-time-of-year.

Jordan Davis on reviewing

He has many good insights on the subject.

"The only real New Formalist in English is Geoffrey Chaucer"

Timothy Steele, in conversation with David Kosub.

Hat Trick!

I found out about this a while ago, but it's official now: For the third time in five years, yours truly, despite what some deem a loutish insensitivity to the intentions behind poets' work, has won Arc magazine's Critic's Desk Award for best short review, for my review of Don Domanski's selected Earthly Pages. Fellow snarkist Carmine Starnino took the prize for best long review, for his essay on David O'Meara's Noble Gas, Penny Black. The judge this year was the esteemed Russell Brown, U of T prof and literary editor extraordinaire. Carmine and I plan to celebrate by eating a bad poet's liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

Erratum: I initially said that Carmine won for his review of Atwood's The Door. As he has pointed out, he actually won for a much more appreciative review. Our celebratory meal plans, however, remain unchanged.

Cowboy Small

Oft-cited

A very nifty essay on sonnets and maths in a UK fusion journal, which cites a few of yours truly's observations on the sonnet from my intro to Jailbreaks. (PDF link; essay starts on p. 48)

So. Friggin. Cool.

Thanks to The Afterword for posting this.

ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD

I'll have one because the night is young

And one because it's old

One to try and buy some fun

And one because it's sold

I'll have one for the coming dark

And one more for the road

I'll have one for my wife and son

And one for burning coal

One because the job is done

And one to fill my bowl

I'll have one for the dying spark

And one more for the road

I'll have one because my heart is lead

And one because it's gold

One to help me lose my head

And one I'd like to hold

I'll have one for the shooting stars

And one more for the road

I'll have one to pour the plaster out

And one to break the mold

One to make me rave and shout

And one to stop me cold

I'll have one for the speeding cars

And one more for the road

I'll have one for the hand I'm dealt

And one because I fold

One to make me meek and mild

And one to make me bold

I'll have one for the circling shark

And one more for the road

I'll have one to stop the falling rain

And one to kill the cold

One to slow my swirling brain

And one to still my soul

I'll have one for the singing lark

And one more for the road

Best Canadian Poems

Al Moritz talks to The Afterword about his editorship of The Best Canadian Poems. Haven't seen this yet, myself. The first edition was a very pleasant surprise.

Millestones (sic)

It's somehow appropriate that the dumb bit of doggerel preceding this post was the 1000th post to appear on this blog. And this vapid observation is the 1001st! Long live teh internets!

CHEZ CLAUDETTE

Feel like you're stuck
in the same old routine,
bogged and clogged in a rut?
My friend, you're in luck:
Claudette has twenty-nine types of poutine!