FIRST LESSON IN SHIT DISTURBING

On a ramble

down the creekbed

I kicked a log

that spanned

the stream.

From an unseen

orifice in its

underside streamed

a host of irate

white jacket

wasps. I froze

and watched

them buzz about

my knees

and rubber-booted

feet for what

might have been

an hour. One by

one they retreated

to their hidden

hive, my heartbeat

slowing one

by one, until

the last wasp

disappeared inside

and I paused

one beat

longer—then

kicked the log

and ran.

Review online

A few months back, Garrick Davis, the editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, a site I've long read and admired for its erudite and incisive criticism, approached me about contributing to CPR. Having a very full dayjob and freelance dance card these days, I'm not writing much by way of reviews, so I asked him if he'd be open to co-publishing a piece I had written for Canadian Notes & Queries, on the recent anthology Modern Canadian Poets. Happily, Garrick agreed to this and the other day my review went up on the CPR site.

One of the anthology's editors, living up to his name, if falling considerably shy of his namesake in wit, has already responded. (He has an unfortunate history of leaving no wound unwhined.) The only thing I have to say about this hilarious epistle is that, while I may well be an autodidact, I also have an MA in English. Which isn't nearly as impressive as having a PhD, natch. What was that about obsessive appeals to authority? Right.

Some deliquescent, quasi-mystical vacuity

...There will always be something in any poem, some reverberation of the numinous, which is not patient of explication, otherwise it would not be a poem.

     But I must insist that I am not endorsing a lapse into some deliquescent, quasi-mystical vacuity. That would be an insupportable cop-out. The poet may ask of his reader the willing suspension of disbelief; he does not, ever, ask for any diminution of the critical faculties. On the contrary, he would have the reader's critical faculties raised to the highest possible degree. No one can be more aware of the fact that, if everything means everything, then nothing means anything. Purgatory would be for me a perpetual mooning about in some gormless Dream-Analysis Workshop. The poet attempts to work within the most stringent of strictures; he abhors above all else the slovenly, the imprecise, in thought or in language.

--Richard Outram, "An Exercise in Exegesis," from Richard Outram: Essays on His Works

William Logan on the virtues of getting it wrong

Once the genius of Shakespeare, or Coleridge and Wordsworth, or Whitman, or Eliot is generally agreed, the critics who backed the wrong horse are generally written out of literary history, or held up to ridicule. Yet those critics of whom time makes fools—John Wilson Croker on Endymion(“We almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody”), Francis Jeffrey on The Excursion (“This will never do”), and many another—are often more worth reading than the critics of the day who got it right. We know what the latter critics will say—their taste is what our ears have been filled with; but, unless we read the other critics with attention, we can forget what an uncertain thing a poet’s reputation was at the start, forget what withering glances the poems themselves had to overcome, forget that, if the naysayers had had their way, literary history might have been different. 

Audio: Wells at U. Ste. Anne

Finally got around to uploading my second reading for students at Université Ste. Anne. You can listen to it here, should you wish. (I thought I had edited out a bit of dead air at the beginning, but it still seems to be there.)