Ethereal Beauty #39

Guilt? Sure, my entire life's
Been an infestation of febrile
Lyrics bouncing around the inside
Of my soft cranium perambulating
In ambulances of vertiginous skies.
Shy, and without a clue (was it
Mr Mustard with a confusing poem
In the outhouse?), I venture through
Medical records the state psychiatrist
Pasted on the canary cage bottom
Bespotted with applause after
Boring bulletins of moping disgrace.

Oh sure, musclemen on high, dried
And toasty in the arms of sensational
Beauties, I flaunt nothing, and envelop
The ether with lies and such, but I do go
On, don't I? And on .... and on .... and on ....

Breakfast of chumps, bratwurst and boilermakers.
God, shoot me a mission in happy-face semaphore.
I'll be waiting the rest of my life
For one lonely snapshot
Of the ethereal conundrum
Smiling unambiguously on farm equipment
In the sweating morass of my dreams.

Ethereal Beauty #38

Barking thoughts multiply in my rotating head,
Evaporate like essence of embalming fluid
On the nutsac of an invalid, invalid
With leaf.

Sending McGonagals to teenage models
Who click with shock my party pic, the caca
Of my call coffined in shady outcrop,
I perspire.

I was a reverse ringer for a verse knock-off
Amongst Lewis Carroll animals when
My barbellated mug twitched like a robin's nest
In heat

And I succumbed to vapid vers libre upchuckings
From my saltpetered Adam's apple lurching
Crazily up-and-down like a porn extra
Piledriver.

Flounce, my dear(est) dry perfumed battleax, I’ll bounce
Cough drops off your nubile ass, chalk my horns, rub hands
As Satan's kin commence to tunnel through my brain,
Locked up.

Quiet, quiet, forebodings of my yesteryears,
There'll be peace in the valley, piece in my dreams,
Clad and glad with the collecting handmaiden's brood
Heaving.

Unleashed unto the funkiest corners of the globe,
My legacy of slack-jawed proof will continue
The tortuous recordings, the tethered soul
Of groans.

Chris Banks' "Bonfires" and "The Cold Panes Of Surfaces"

It's not often I concentrate fully on a book (or books) of poetry, and still come away empty and bored. There're often a few redeeming features in many poetry collections: after all, one benefit of poetry over a novel is that if the latter is bad, you're stuck with 200 + pages of bad. A bad (or competent but banal, which amounts to the same thing) poem is no great loss. Another one is just a page turn away. But Chris Banks' first two volumes of poetry left me emotionless.

A frequent set-up of Banks is to start with a mild anecdote, and then build it into a spiritual, difficult "truth". This is so typical of contemporary poetry that to do the popular conceit any justice would need a compelling slant, a profound and startling conclusion, a unique musical intertwining with the emotional barrenness he (in this instance) is trying to (re)create.

One of many examples (from "Apple Tree", from The Cold Panes Of Surfaces):

"while I await you here, watching this apple
tree fall into ruin. And to look at all this

but not think of loneliness is difficult, for
we come to know the limits of who we are

through those we love, and when they leave
we have only absence to make its home in us"



Decaying nature is associated with the absence of one's love. OK. That's been done a million times before, but I don't mind. It's what one does with a common, oft-used link that matters. The first thing that strikes me is the banality of the language. The common response to this charge is that this is "language that honours its emotion by its conversational simplicity". Or, to put it another way, it's a conversation, not art. The latter is not the former. Art adds and subtracts. It's shaped. It manipulates language and emotions. It's self-conscious, and uses a grab-bag of effects to startle and sing.

The above extract? Overreaching for a profundity that is not evoked by the language of the poem, or by its occasional relating. As well:

People don't "think" of loneliness, they feel it. Or, rather, if they (only) think of it, it occurs as a shallow idea, not a powerful emotion.

"We" don't come to know the limits of who "we" are. Don't speak for me. Only yourself. You can't even speak for your absent love. I don't come to know the limits of who I am by who I love. Possibilities amplify and expand when in love. When I feel limited, it's because of an existential lack (not the situational lack of a loved one). I've felt elated, many times, both in and out of relationships; I've also felt free and lonely at different times in the same, and different, relationship(s). Lack is not conditional on loving someone. "when they leave/we have only absence to make its home in us" is trite, a cliche of cliches.

I was promised "humour" by Emily Schultz on both books' blurbs. (The second blurb was a word-for-word recycle.) In fact, humour and breathlessness were combined in "way(s) that Canadian poetry seldom does".

I didn't find a sliver of humour in either book, unless you count the reporting of his father's " "I wanna be a cowboy./Let's get hitched" " (from Bonfires).

And I didn't detect any "breathlessness", though why that should be a stand-alone descriptor for merit is beyond me. (How do you measure breathlessness? I would think by a lack of commas, periods, by long sentences, by conversational enjambments, by long lines, by heightened or unneccesary emotion. I didn't see many of those elements in either book; most long sentences were broken up by short lines.)

And I reject the communal suffering the books encourage and exalt (however subtly).

Matt Rader's "Living Things"

Matt Rader's Living Things was a delight to read. What's most important is that it's a delight on a first read because of the arranged music, as well as on repeated readings because of its suggestiveness and connections.

It was also a delight because of its surprise: I'd read his first collection, Miraculous Hours, with only moderate interest. Aside from the imaginative title piece, much of the rest of the volume was a personal reminiscence that didn't transform its particulars. And the diction and tone was often pedestrian.

What that tells me is that Rader is a serious practitioner. He probably incorporated, humbly, the lessons from that first effort, and worked hard at adding music, colour, tone, variation, other-voiced perspective (the first-person tree manifestos are ravishing), and stylistic wrinkles into his repertoire.

Often, a plaudit is used that "this first book is remarkable for its maturity", and I find it just as often to be an overblown assessment. Not enough is made of the remarkable progression of some poets. Since Rader's excellent second effort vaults his first so dramatically, I anticipate his next with great interest.

Tim Bowling's "Low Water Slack" and "The Memory Orchard"

I wanted to enjoy the Bowling titles quoted in the header. The subject matter, especially of the former -- salmon fishing at the Fraser's evacuation -- is of interest to me. I've lived my entire life (save a year) in the area; my father worked on a seine fishing boat many summers, and I have vivid memories of being on board as a tyke, with a wealth of smells, sights, and tastes; and, in a larger and more general sense, the issues (overfishing, local culture, lineage, natural of-the-moment spirituality, amongst others) are important and timeless.

But the shaping is bloated, the tone often precious (though, to Bowling's credit, at least unintentionally so, to my mind), the insights leaden and obvious, and the language straining to abstractions, this despite the physical immediacy and vibrancy of its origins.

Bowling loves the narrative vein, so it's not surprising that he's written novels, as well.

There are some affecting historical interludes (can't quote poem titles or lines as I don't have the books at the ready) that showcase Bowling's compassion and generational understanding, and he manages some tighter lyrical interplay here.

It's too bad. Concrete compression would add a world of enjoyment and memorability to his efforts.

Ralph Gustafson's "Homage To Antaeus"

HOMAGE TO ANTAEUS
(from “Two Antagonist Poems”)

The boulder the angel sat on can have
Its resurrection, I am after
Sensation most times now
Rather than eternity. I would rather
The barebone boulders -- that oversoaring
Mycenaean dome lacking
Agamemnon in it,
The exalted vaulting itself the legend,
Helen beautiful and the whole of Troy
Burnt rafters because of her. I’d rather
Go out and look at stars burning
To a cinder, unimplicated
Whether God is up there
With his unimpregnatable mother.

Grass that is grass
Stone that is stone

Music whose meaning is the sound it creates --
The diver’s grace, pagan sun on crystal --
Wisdom to stub my toe on the steps
Of the bridge at the Accademia in Venice;
I look at the scar on my left knee
I dropped on still there from last
July, the joy incorporated.


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In a time when Western creators in their 40s and 50s write poem after poem of depressive pleas to acquire a pale enlightenment, and those in their 20s and 30s write of existential angst and the impossibility of grace, it's always a treat to experience Gustafson's sane voice. He was 82 when he wrote this, with two near-death diseases already behind him.

Ethereal Beauty #37

I drink my Nyquil from a Listerine cup;
On shrunken peas and bacon fat I nightly sup.

Over at the Legion, I had a kiwi fruit;
The longshoremen laughed at my series of loud toots.

Downed a Shirley Temple, licked my vanity mirror;
Dropped Fred Flintstone overalls to roof-raising jeers.

Scrubbed my ass with a hemlock switch, downed my meds;
Ate twenty packs of M and Ms including all reds.

A boozy harpie smiled and sat upon my knee.
Trapped, I yelled, "ethereal slut!", then tried to flee.

She brained me with a schooner mug, kissed my mouth;
Much to my horror, there were stirrings from down south.

I tongued her dentures, she bit my lip and hollered,
Ran to the bouncer who grabbed my pink dog collar.

He put cinnamon sticks up my nose; I peed my pants.
Longshoremen howled on the floor (as I stole a glance).

They booted my ass out the door; I wept like a child.
Jesus had some followers, but I'm more meek and mild.