Essay in Print

I received my copy of The New Quarterly 125 today, in which you can find my essay, "A Walking Shadow." It was one of the hardest, most personal things I've ever written and while looking at it in print saddens me, I am very proud of the essay. The issue looks like it has some really fine stuff in it, including work by D.W. Wilson, a talented young fiction writer I read with last year at IFOA, and the always interesting Jeffery Donaldson.

[Yeats] has redeemed the dullness of the 'raving autumn' passage, but it has served its turn because a poem cannot be always elevated, always sublime, it has to have flat passages. Just as acrobats will sometimes appear to make a mistake, so poets know that poems are performances which must now and then seem to put a foot wrong in order to make the words dance perfectly the next moment.

--Tom Paulin

Rachel Lebowitz, poems in print

If you're browsing the racks at your local purveyor of fine print media, you might keep an eye peeled for the latest copies of Geist and Prairie Fire. The former has three poems in it by my enormously talented wife, Rachel, and the latter has two. All five are from Rachel's manuscript Cottonopolis. Poems from the book have been getting a lot of play, including ten in a past issue of Grain, five of which were selected by Carmine Starnino for The Best Canadian Poetry 2012. Rachel has just finished proofing Cottonopolis, which will be off to the printers for a March release by Pedlar Press. This will be an event not just for this household, but it should be for anyone interested in contemporary literature.

Years earlier he had decided that too regular a beat was bad art. He had fortified himself in his opinion by thinking of the analogy of architecture, between which art and that of poetry he had discovered, to use his own words, that there existed a close and curious parallel, each art unlike some others, having to carry a rational content inside its artistic form. He knew that in architecture cunning irregularity is of enormous worth, and it is obvious that he carried on into his verse, perhaps unconsciously, the Gothic art-principle in which he had been trained – the principle of spontaneity, found in mouldings, tracery and  suchlike – resulting in the ‘unforeseen’ (as it has been called) character of his metres and stanzas, that of stress rather than of syllable, poetic texture rather than poetic veneer; the latter kind of thing, under the name of ‘constructed ornament’, being what he, in common with every Gothic student, had been taught to avoid as the plague. He shaped his poetry accordingly, introducing metrical pauses, and reversed beats; and found for his trouble that some particular line of a poem exemplifying this principle was greeted with a would-be jocular remark that such a line 'did not make for immortality'. The same critic might have gone to one of our cathedrals (to follow the analogy of architecture), and on discovering that the carved leafage of some capital or spandrel in the best period of Gothic art strayed freakishly out of its bounds over the moulding, where by rule it had no business to be, or that the enrichments of a string-course were not accurately spaced; or that there was a sudden blank in a wall where a window was expected from formal measurement, have declared with equally merry conviction, 'This does not make for immortality.'

--Thomas Hardy, Life

Forthcoming ISBNs etc.

Yes, it's been a while. I've been much occupied with matters non-literary, having co-purchased, with my wife and mother, an income property in Moncton, NB. I also picked up a surprising amount of railroad work over the xmas holidays, so it's been a busy time.

But a more literary 2013 awaits. I just sent edits of a chapbook manuscript back to Karen Schindler of Baseline Press. The chappie is titled Baffle and will be out this fall in a ltd. edition run of 60 copies. This fall will also see the publication of a rather more hefty volume: Career Limiting Moves, a collection of my essays and reviews from the past decade or so. That manuscript needs a fair bit of attention in the weeks to come, so I shan't be idle, lack of day-job notwithstanding.

Speaking of which, funding was cut for my editorial contract at Reader's Digest, which was not a great shock, given the state of the magazine industry, but still has left a sizable income hole for me to fill. I'm actively interested in picking up additional freelance editing work, so if you've got something you think I could help you with, drop a line and we can discuss rates. Once I get my desk cleared off, I plan to set up shop formally as a red pen for hire. I'll be offering such services as manuscript consultations/pre-submission edits; essay and thesis editing; consultation on grant applications; copy editing; proof reading; etc.

Forthcoming essay

I have an essay in the soon-to-be-published issue 125 of The New Quarterly. TNQ's new editor, Pamela Mulloy--who was very patient and accommodating with me as I first failed to deliver the essay on time and then failed to deliver it on topic--previews the piece thoughtfully on the TNQ website: 

An elegant, honest disquiet prevails in Zachariah Wells’ essay “A Walking Shadow.” The essay, part of our “Day Jobs” series, started out as a piece about his working on the Halifax to Montreal train as a service attendant while maintaining a career as a writer. However as things started to falter in his life, the essay took another shape. As I mentioned in an email exchange with Wells, the charm of working in the field of literary arts is the unexpected gem we receive when soliciting work. So while not the essay we originally conceived this one sears with humanity as he writes of his father, the rocky future in railroading, his own history, and the question of what lies ahead.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN DEBENTURE

Would I be doing x if not for y?

Fucked if I know. Can't imagine why

not, but then neither can I stir the cream

and sugar from my coffee. The disinterest

rate is indexed to entropic dégrin-

golade and life is but a lucid dream:

you can change the outcome on the fly,

but it takes absurdly rigid discipline.

Audio: New York and Perth

Obviously, I'm in the middle of a difficult time. I left home a week ago today not knowing if my father would still be living when I returned. His condition had deteriorated rapidly since being diagnosed with lung cancer in September and he took a major turn for the worse after being admitted to a hospice last week. The day before I was to leave for New York, I said to my mother that I should cancel the trip. She told me I should do no such thing and that my father would have said the same. So I went, deciding to cut an Ottawa high school visit out of my schedule and take a plane home instead of the train.

 I arrived in New York late Thursday morning. When I checked in with my mother that evening, I learned that Andy had died a few hours earlier. This made being away harder yet, but also made it all the more important that I carry on. My father had a powerful aversion to preciousness and hated to have a fuss made over birthdays and such. In one of the last conversations I had with him, he was reading the obits in the Charlottetown Guardian and vociferating about the purple prose they contained. "Not for me," he said, "I'll have none of it! Just put me in the ground. Or burn me."

 So, I'll say no more on that subject. Here is the audio from two of the readings I did. First, the Best Canadian Poetry launch at The Corner Bookstore in New York's Upper East Side. Second, my reading with Elizabeth Greene and Matthew Tierney at the First Edition Reading Series in Perth, Ontario.


 

I.M. Andrew Wells (April 8, 1936-October 25, 2012)

THE POETRY IN HIM

The poetry in him’s not hard to miss—

Lear’s Kent, steady servant, taking cover

when cynics stormed the stage, but never

hiding out. No lies in him, his honest

talk not florid, stripped of artifice

and ornament. Plain. Don’t take his silence

for indifference, don’t mistake it for a lack

of love, nor his boxer’s skill for violence,

his aptitude with axe and saw and maul

for bloodlust. Flawed? Yes, but what he hacked

apart he raised into a home, a small

solid shield against impending weather,

and at its heart a Jøtul blazing hot.

My father was not a man who said a lot.

The Big Apple and Perth

A couple of events coming up. I'll be reading in NYC at launches for the Best Canadian Poetry 2012 on Oct. 26. There's one reading at 2 and another at 6.

The following day, I blast back over the border for a reading in pretty little Perth, Ontario. Details on that reading, here.

Poem Online

I have a new poem up at The Toronto Review of Books, as part of a terrific little feature curated by TRB poetry editor Moez Surani.

DOMUS

Doped on the day-bed in the maple-stained
sunlight flowing through the bow window he built—

it leaked and, though stopgapped, dark watermarks
still flaw the stanchions that anchor the panes—

my father, propped up on pillows, reclines,
gnarled, arthritic hands crossed on his breastbone,

mouth open a crack and jaw slack, so that
his bottom lip underhangs the top and his face

makes an uncanny true-flesh facsimile
of the death mask of Brunelleschi,

at rest beneath the improbable, homely
softwood cathedral he raised with his hands.

The Moving Scene

I have an essay up at Contemporary Poetry Review on the poetry and poetics of description. CLM followers might have a feeling of deja vu, as I posted an audio version of this piece some time ago after I delivered it as a lecture at UNB. See, I'm doing my bit for the planet by recycling.

Why I Am not a People's Poet

Herewith, the talk I didn't give at Mount Allison University yesterday. Enjoy.
 

BCP, upcoming events

I am pleased to announce that, for the second time, a poem of mine will be gracing the pages of Tightrope Books' annual Best Canadian Poetry anthology. "One and One," originally published in The Winnipeg Review, was chosen by Carmine Starnino for this year's book, which includes work by a number of friends and five (!) excerpts from Rachel's forthcoming long poem sequence Cottonopolis, which will be published in the spring by Pedlar Press.

A cool thing about being in this anthology is that I'll be reading at two launch events in New York City on Oct. 26. Which happens to be the day before I read in Perth, ON, at the First Edition Reading Series. Nothin but jetset glamour in the poetry world, I tells ya.

NOISE

I don't know if it's awol during daylight hours

or if the tinnitus in my left ear is merely

dimmer when I'm out and about my business,

its whine too fine a frequency, drowned in the din

of the city's traffic so I forget it's there

until, horizontal in the dark, I'm ready

to receive it. Or, like now, it makes its nuisance

presence known when I sit before a blank screen

wondering what to write. I shouldn't complain

too loudly; as auditory snafus go, mine

is pretty minor. My sister's hyperacusia—

which has plagued her since, doing foley work for film,

she was bombarded by a misfired mortar shell

of sound—makes the normal noise of living hard

to bear. I can't pinpoint when my little hum

got going, don't know if it's grown louder or if

one day it simply fluttered down and lit upon

my shoulder, singing. It's probably the product

of damage less traumatic than my sister's:

my imperfect employment of ear defenders

on the airport tarmac and in the thrumming innards

of the Hawkers I offloaded. I remember

landing in Hall Beach one summer and, once the prop

stopped spinning, I cracked the cargo hatch to such

an immaculate bare flash of silence that I

half-wondered if I'd been struck deaf—until Jonah

fired up the forklift and rumbled up to greet us.

Flying home, I sat mid-cabin in the empty

freighter, reading Dylan Thomas poems aloud,

thinking, wrongly, that the pilots wouldn't hear me

with their headsets on, over the racket of those

Rolls Royce engines I'd parked myself between. And then

there was the neighbour who heard me reading Horace

through the wall in the wee hours and asked, awkwardly,

if I prayed at night. And were the voices that I heard

as I lay abed in Resolute Bay the dark

season hallucinations of a man left

too much alone by the shore of the Northwest Passage—

or signals picked up by my fillings? I listed

to the static of the HF radio enough

to know the tricks the magnetosphere plays on the ear.

John Cage, in his quest for perfect silence, encased

himself in an anechoic chamber, only

to experience the flow and sizzle of his

blood and nerves as auricular phenomena.

I once tried unsuccessfully to give a message

to a woman on a train, until, looking up

from her book, she switched her hearing aid on. “Sorry,”

she said, “I prefer to hear nothing when I read.”

Naively, I've since caught myself at odd times

envying that option, prone to distraction

as I am—but then it strikes me that an intermittent

buzzing could mean that I am yet among the quick.

Public Poetics

I'll be giving a talk at this conference--as long as the timing's right at my soon-to-expire day-job. Failing that, I'll post the talk online. It looks like it'll be a stimulating couple of days.

UNDERTOW

On a furlough from work, I travel home with my family to visit my family. It is mid-August and hot, so we go to the shore, to the beach at French River, where as a child I went with my mother (who is working today, and so cannot join us) and brother (who is moving a shed from one field to another). I am not fond of beaches, especially not in summer. I am no swimmer and prefer cool shade to unbroken exposure. But my wife loves the ocean, as does our boy, so if I am here with no enthusiasm, neither am I reluctant.

The water is all crested combers and tumult, but we find a calmer spot where a shoal extends far into the surf even though the tide's halfway out. My wife and boy make for the waterline; I stay behind. They wade in. I catch snatches of Kaleb's laughter as the small waves nearly knock him down. I catch myself framing the moment as a future memory, possibly a poem. I catch myself editing out my nephew—my brother's step-son, actually, whose childhood is unrolling on the same plot of land as mine and my brother's—because, charming boy that he is and worshipped by my son as elder cousins are, he would be an extraneous actor in the dramatis personae of this poem. I catch myself making a mental note to re-read Don Coles' “My Son at the Seashore, Age Two,” in case my incipient poem might be too similar to his, or in case a sly allusion to it should prove a propos. Any poem with such a cast and backdrop, after all, cannot but be bound up in memory, time and oblivion.

The whole recursive rumination ends sharply when I see my wife has been waving me to join them. I've brought no swimwear, but the sea is so shallow and the air so hot it doesn't matter. The water is warm but cooling. It laps the hem of my knee-length shorts and wicks upward. I am glad to be here instead of cooking on the griddle-hot sand. Pleasure craft, tour boats and trawlers jounce by, just off the shoal, which is marked by buoys, though the sharp line between the reddish sand bar and the cobalt deep water would be guide enough to keep a boat from grounding.

Rachel has me mind the boys while she takes a swim. She wades out further on the shoal, then starts swimming in the same direction. I holler three times before she hears me and stands up, puzzled. I wave her over and she comes. Walk out, swim in, I say. There's an undertow. It's been the death of better swimmers than you. Stay where your feet can touch bottom.

Even as I hollered at my wife, I caught myself framing another future memory: The Day Rachel Drowned. There is no lifeguard at French River and few bystanders near enough to help had the undertow sucked her under and out.

*

Back on the beach, I talk with a man from Quebec City whose schnauzers Kaleb wants to meet. We speak in French and he mistakes me for a francophone, which happens often in such encounters. Not, I expect, because my French is so good, but more likely because my haphazard melange of chiac, joual and français-comme-il-faut marks me as a dialect speaker foreign wherever he goes. The man is surprised to learn that I'm from here. He's been coming to the Island, to this beach, for thirty years. I first visited French River around the same time, I tell him, when I was the boy's age. We talk about how the shoreline has morphed. Storm surges. Sandstone. Warming. Erosion. The grottoes further down the beach, he says, are gone.

That was where we used to go. Sheltered, shady at the right time of day, safely away from the undertow.

*

That night, Rachel observes that I have written three love poems to her and that all three are set in places other than our home. And all on shorelines, I point out. Resolute Bay. North Cape. Vík. Walk out. Swim in. Repeat.

Dear Peter

A'right, so I haven't been using this space for non-literary content much of late, but I wanted to put this up somewhere other than Facebook. I really can't express how much contempt I have for Defence Minister Peter MacKay, but I gave it a shot this evening, when I sent him this email:

Dear Mr. MacKay: 

You helicopter-hopping turncoat hypocrite. Shall I add nitwit to the list, sir? I just now heard you say on CBC radio that you are concerned about service reductions to Via Rail's operations in the Maritimes. You went on to say that service might be restored if people were willing to use the train more. Perhaps you are aware that the service cuts are a direct response to decreased funding for Via legislated by the government. Perhaps you are aware that the government is formed by the party you belong to. Perhaps you are aware that party only exists because of your willingness to sell out the values of the party to which you used to belong. Perhaps you are aware that your party's majority in parliament is not reflective of majority support, but a byproduct of a broken electoral system, Machiavellian strategising and apathy?

You are probably not aware that Via has not touched service on much less frequented routes, such as the trains to Churchill and Senneterre. You are probably also not aware that declines in ridership--which have been much exaggerated, given that ridership actually rose last year on The Ocean--are THE DIRECT CONSEQUENCE of large and small service reductions that have been ongoing for years--including recent refusals by Via to increase the size of The Ocean's consist, despite being consistently sold out. Ridership declines are also the indirect consequence of Canada's strong dollar, which has led to a drastic decrease in visits by American tourists--which is the direct consequence of your Party's love affair with the Alberta tar sands and the "Dutch disease" that love affair has caused. So don't blame Maritimers or "local policies" for this, you ass. Do something about it.

Sincerely,

Zachariah Wells
Halifax

Some love for the Snowman

Very pleased and proud to learn that the Canadian Authors' Association has given Goran Simic their poetry prize for Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, a book I had the honour to edit. I think this is the first official  award Goran has received in Canada, though of course it was around five years ago that I had the pleasure of presenting Goran a somewhat more ... ad hoc prize when From Sarajevo, With Sorrow was disqualified for the Governor General's Award--so this is a particularly sweet turn of events, from my perspective.