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.