Wells and Lebowitz, Best of the Best

A bit late with this "news," but hey, I haven't posted anything since February, apparently, so I'm sure no one's keeping track anymore...

This year, Tightrope Books has published, for the 10th anniversary of their Best Canadian Poetry in English series, a selection of 90 poems from the previous nine years. Molly Peacock and Anita Lahey have kindly included my poem "One and One" and excerpts from Rachel's Cottonopolis sequence. We recently got our contributors' copies and there are many other fine works included, no surprise.

This poem of mine has proven to be quite successful, as poems go, which is further proof that there can be no formula for writing "good poetry." As I said when I first posted it on CLM, I'm at a loss to account for where it came from or what, precisely, it might mean. Its cycling syntax and basic diction seem to have broken the Poetry Assessor machine, which scored the "One and One" at 9.4, which, I was told by the person running the Poetry Assessor's Twitter account, is--or was at the time--the highest recorded score for any poem run through the Assessor's software. FWIW, caveat emptor, etc.

Commentary on "Waypoints" recital

I just came across an unfortunately lukewarm review of last month's recital. But hey, no press is bad press, etc. I have an obvious bias, but I don't really hear any "Broadwayish" elements in the composition. Ah well.

Toronto performance of "Waypoints" song cycle

If you're in Toronto during the day tomorrow, I hope you will attend the latest performance of the song cycle "Waypoints," lyrics by yours truly, scored by Erik Ross, sung by Phillip Addis, accompanied on piano by Emily  Hamper.

I read The Dark Is Rising to my son.
Outside, the dark has risen with passionate
intensity and weak light contends to gain
conviction. The falcon veers back late,
alights upon her master's sleeve; rooks
gather and agglutinate; an unseasonal
skein of geese thrums south, wing-
beats synced to distant drums. Meanwhile
the centre holds. And holds. And mutters
its appeasing song: We are better
than this, we will not be brought low, we must
save our strength for the fights that matter
most. But the darkness is upon us, son,
and throngs midwinter's gibbous moon.

Don Coles, on rhyme

If that search for the rhyming sound to end your line with, that clink that locks the rhyme in, isn't a true search, i.e. if it doesn't send the shaft down to the deepest level this poem you're working on can live at, deeper than you could have reached without this self-imposed rhyme-search, then you stopped digging too soon, you accepted a word merely because it rhymed, it simply slid into place without making anything new happen; and if this occurs even twice, no, even once, your poem's probably already dead in the water, it's already, flottaison blême et ravie, lost to human sight.

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