Praise song for the bankers.
Each day they go about their chicanery, scamming the scammers, catching each others' eyes or not, bullshitting or about to bullshit. All about us is greed. All greed and scramble, corn-pone targetted sin, each one of them with oiled tongues. One is bitching on CNN, damning a saver, stashing a flier, repairing the PR flack-shredded shield.
All are creating cacophony with credit default swaps, mortgage brokered carry traded bond Ponzi floats, Fed bedding, five hundred eighty-six trillion in derivatives, Congressional nod-nod-wink-wink, stimulus scams, and, above all, the promise of "change".
A woman and her son don't wait to cuss.
A farmer looks at the noisy sky where helicopters drop pesos in bundles bigger than cotton squares, and notes Bernanke's wave. A teacher says: "Take out your calculators. You have only a year to solve the problem."
We encounter each other like hasty promissory notes, promises reserved as napkins under leaky punch bowls.
Why did Madoff and the AIG team cross the road? They ran out of dupes to scam on one side.
We walk into that place we cannot yet see, and call it hope.
Say it plain, that China owns us. Sing the names of those who've brought us here: Nixon and the yellow allergy (gold, that is) and the press (printing, that is); Clinton's Glass-Steagall amnesia; Greenspan's decade-long national Viagra allowance leaving us limp and dry; Bush's "shop till you drop"; Paulson's rate slash-and-burn; Pelosi's feckless hypocrisy; greedy and paid-off and scammed lenders; greedy and gullible and scammed buyers.
Some live by: "scam him before he scams me."
Others by "create the hedge rules, then you don't have to worry about how much you take."
What if the mightiest word is energy? Spiritual, fossil fuel, intellectual, electrical, windy, oceanic, physical. Energy that identifies, remembers, and acts on grievances.
In today's false sparkle, this start of winter, anything can happen, any sentence served.
Blessings, as the Chinese say, for these "interesting times";
No lobby'll round up bankers/Fed for their century crimes.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
Tom Wayman's High Speed Through Shoaling Water
The last collection of Tom Wayman's poetry I read was approximately a quarter-century ago. None of it entered my bloodstream or memory, except for a ghostly residue of "words for the people". Wayman, the prole poet. But -- and I'm being serious -- who are these "common people" beloved by populist wordsmiths? It always struck me as an uproarious irony that anyone would dare to assume the voice of poet-laureate-of-the-silent/dependable-worker when the latter camp (minus the author's condescending assumptions) is as diversified as the multilingual, multi-experienced, multi-tempered, multi-spiritually attuned, multi-power scaled populace that makes up the entire Oh!-Canadiana. To the book.
High Speed Through Shoaling Water (2007) has the consistency, taste, and fluidity of lumpy porridge. And, the biggest fault of all, it's devoid of raisins. The horrors of bad porridge, sans raisins. No salt, either. No wonder cookbooks sell more than poetry. The ingredients in the latter texts are often lacking or wrong or wrongly combined. Despite my underwhelming experience with this author's much earlier work, the above reaction came as a surprise since I was led to believe (back cover) that Wayman was a contemporary "Beowulf, a Homer" (The Globe and Mail) and "Canadian Neruda" (Prairie Fire).
The first two sections of this transgressively verbose book concerns the speaker, Wayman (no masks for this honest relater) as nature's sober recorder: "I climbed through dense conifers and brush/gradually thinning to subalpine/meadows". The observations lie as linguistically and rhythmically flat as the page that allows the type. And "Alps Alturas: Sixty" says nothing, or rather, as with any throwaway effort, is forced to scramble for an awkward profundity in the closing lines as a way of throwing dust in the reader's eyes after an unconvincing pantheistic sermon. Hence: "around whose shore/nothing is made by hands."
Tongue-scrunching abutments are legion, rhythmic killers only were there a rhythm in previous lines to create a death: "scribbled tasks/rested", "blasts trigger", "aloft into the thermals" are just a few examples, Olympic figure-skating preliminary trials where the fall occurs on a simple test, thus cancelling any chance to nail the triple lutz.
Before leaving the first two sections, a few words on what I consider to be one of among a handful of worst poems I read the last years: "Grove". Its conceit -- trees as "dignified parents" -- is embarassing in its ersatz surface psychology. Groaners abound: "Like all parents", "quietude of these trees" (I suppose this redundancy was a highfalutin way of hammering home the earlier "silence and patience" -- more on Wayman's rampant redundancies later), and the final, "respectfully/wish to raise/to a larger life". Among the twenty publications that accepted one or more of the efforts in this volume is Horsefly, which allowed "Grove". I wonder what else was in that particular edition.
Part three involves social concerns, and here Wayman is on familiar footing. And, if possible, here is where he descends even further because -- on top of uninteresting diction, musical misunderstanding and neglect, line-break confusion, overly reverential emotion -- the plodding, sincere spokesman for the people re-emerges. "Outrider" is a representative manifesto, here: "preservers and shapers of/uninstituted truths/oracles keeping up, keeping pace/singers of another road". So in this nauseating final quatrain one's made to understand, by the most unironic of stances, that there are two distinct sets of forces (political? artistic only? spiritual?) in (Western? world? Canadian?) society -- the other, fashionably new tribe, and the faithful, traditional, underdog clan. Leaving aside the fact that tribes and clans are unsophisticated, crudely antagonistic towards anyone not "like them", one could stampede an army of horses over the argument of the halo-self-placing outrider. "[T]ruths/oracles", "shapers", "singers": it's wonderfully easy to throw up impressive labels, identify yourself (without particulars) with those labels, at once both smug and humble in self-regard. The only reason, it seems to me, this is accepted as "ennobling", is, again, because it's not promulgating a Romantic "egocentricity", but an "inclusive" superiority. Which just means ego, here, is collective, and therefore more dangerous.
"In The Dumper" is a "speaking for the working masses" poem, which contradicts his besieged, lone wolves stance in "Outrider". In this verselet, the quoted eleven lines are from a hard-bitten, long-time employee to a greenhorn. In all my years of blue-collar labour, in companies with or without unions, I never heard anyone talk like this. "Crap" is a euphemism. How many bricklayers, galvanizers, carpenters, construction workers, glaziers, tool-and-dye makers, welders, forklift drivers have you ever met who've referred to pinching a loaf, laying a steaming three-coiler, taking a dump or shit (the latter of which is redundantly employed, to diluted effect) as "tak[ing] a crap"? This may seem ridiculously picky of me, but since Wayman bases his polemic(s) on plain speech, on unambiguous honesty, it's not only right but necessary to call him out on these inaccuracies. And why would the speaker tell the newbie to "bring a paper"? (Wayman misses a good opportunity here for a joke -- with a pertinent point.) Ah, but the irony of "democracy and freedom" in the news was just too tempting to pass up. How that relates to an employer who needs employees to produce rather than goof off is beyond me. But then, as is easily observed by anyone who's lived long enough in the varied work world, there are fair and unfair employers as well as salt-of-the-earth and nasty workers. But complexity isn't a good approach for a "people's spokesman".
There's much more. The unintentional humour in "Love Loss Ballad": "I stand yet again in the self-serve to pump/into the tank"; the constant unrevelatory vagaries, one example from "Young Claus": "His second wife was a classmate/and into weird stuff"; the atrocious redundancies, examples of which could be lifted from every single poem, one of them (two in one line!) being "Autumn Secrets": "swirl out in a cascade". Why swirl "out"? Swirling involves curling, twisting, which by definiton is an outward movement. And "cascade" is an imaginative conclusion the reader should reach if the preceding is clear and effective. Despite the attempts at imagery in this poem, I couldn't see a thing. Naming, and unfocussed suggestion.
Well, it's a day off from that hardscrabble proletarian nose-to-the-grindstone silent (in one hundred and fifty-two pages or so) oppressee witnessing. Think I'll pick up my weathered copy of The Iliad for a spell, for corrective enjoyment, and to make any link, however faint, with what I just read, keeping an open mind of course, just to see what that unnamed writer of the G&M saw in the prolific egalitarian voice of all (or most?) of us that I may have missed.
The author of High Speed Through Shoaling Water has nothing to say, and no way of saying it. Will I read another of his books a quarter-century hence? No way, man.
High Speed Through Shoaling Water (2007) has the consistency, taste, and fluidity of lumpy porridge. And, the biggest fault of all, it's devoid of raisins. The horrors of bad porridge, sans raisins. No salt, either. No wonder cookbooks sell more than poetry. The ingredients in the latter texts are often lacking or wrong or wrongly combined. Despite my underwhelming experience with this author's much earlier work, the above reaction came as a surprise since I was led to believe (back cover) that Wayman was a contemporary "Beowulf, a Homer" (The Globe and Mail) and "Canadian Neruda" (Prairie Fire).
The first two sections of this transgressively verbose book concerns the speaker, Wayman (no masks for this honest relater) as nature's sober recorder: "I climbed through dense conifers and brush/gradually thinning to subalpine/meadows". The observations lie as linguistically and rhythmically flat as the page that allows the type. And "Alps Alturas: Sixty" says nothing, or rather, as with any throwaway effort, is forced to scramble for an awkward profundity in the closing lines as a way of throwing dust in the reader's eyes after an unconvincing pantheistic sermon. Hence: "around whose shore/nothing is made by hands."
Tongue-scrunching abutments are legion, rhythmic killers only were there a rhythm in previous lines to create a death: "scribbled tasks/rested", "blasts trigger", "aloft into the thermals" are just a few examples, Olympic figure-skating preliminary trials where the fall occurs on a simple test, thus cancelling any chance to nail the triple lutz.
Before leaving the first two sections, a few words on what I consider to be one of among a handful of worst poems I read the last years: "Grove". Its conceit -- trees as "dignified parents" -- is embarassing in its ersatz surface psychology. Groaners abound: "Like all parents", "quietude of these trees" (I suppose this redundancy was a highfalutin way of hammering home the earlier "silence and patience" -- more on Wayman's rampant redundancies later), and the final, "respectfully/wish to raise/to a larger life". Among the twenty publications that accepted one or more of the efforts in this volume is Horsefly, which allowed "Grove". I wonder what else was in that particular edition.
Part three involves social concerns, and here Wayman is on familiar footing. And, if possible, here is where he descends even further because -- on top of uninteresting diction, musical misunderstanding and neglect, line-break confusion, overly reverential emotion -- the plodding, sincere spokesman for the people re-emerges. "Outrider" is a representative manifesto, here: "preservers and shapers of/uninstituted truths/oracles keeping up, keeping pace/singers of another road". So in this nauseating final quatrain one's made to understand, by the most unironic of stances, that there are two distinct sets of forces (political? artistic only? spiritual?) in (Western? world? Canadian?) society -- the other, fashionably new tribe, and the faithful, traditional, underdog clan. Leaving aside the fact that tribes and clans are unsophisticated, crudely antagonistic towards anyone not "like them", one could stampede an army of horses over the argument of the halo-self-placing outrider. "[T]ruths/oracles", "shapers", "singers": it's wonderfully easy to throw up impressive labels, identify yourself (without particulars) with those labels, at once both smug and humble in self-regard. The only reason, it seems to me, this is accepted as "ennobling", is, again, because it's not promulgating a Romantic "egocentricity", but an "inclusive" superiority. Which just means ego, here, is collective, and therefore more dangerous.
"In The Dumper" is a "speaking for the working masses" poem, which contradicts his besieged, lone wolves stance in "Outrider". In this verselet, the quoted eleven lines are from a hard-bitten, long-time employee to a greenhorn. In all my years of blue-collar labour, in companies with or without unions, I never heard anyone talk like this. "Crap" is a euphemism. How many bricklayers, galvanizers, carpenters, construction workers, glaziers, tool-and-dye makers, welders, forklift drivers have you ever met who've referred to pinching a loaf, laying a steaming three-coiler, taking a dump or shit (the latter of which is redundantly employed, to diluted effect) as "tak[ing] a crap"? This may seem ridiculously picky of me, but since Wayman bases his polemic(s) on plain speech, on unambiguous honesty, it's not only right but necessary to call him out on these inaccuracies. And why would the speaker tell the newbie to "bring a paper"? (Wayman misses a good opportunity here for a joke -- with a pertinent point.) Ah, but the irony of "democracy and freedom" in the news was just too tempting to pass up. How that relates to an employer who needs employees to produce rather than goof off is beyond me. But then, as is easily observed by anyone who's lived long enough in the varied work world, there are fair and unfair employers as well as salt-of-the-earth and nasty workers. But complexity isn't a good approach for a "people's spokesman".
There's much more. The unintentional humour in "Love Loss Ballad": "I stand yet again in the self-serve to pump/into the tank"; the constant unrevelatory vagaries, one example from "Young Claus": "His second wife was a classmate/and into weird stuff"; the atrocious redundancies, examples of which could be lifted from every single poem, one of them (two in one line!) being "Autumn Secrets": "swirl out in a cascade". Why swirl "out"? Swirling involves curling, twisting, which by definiton is an outward movement. And "cascade" is an imaginative conclusion the reader should reach if the preceding is clear and effective. Despite the attempts at imagery in this poem, I couldn't see a thing. Naming, and unfocussed suggestion.
Well, it's a day off from that hardscrabble proletarian nose-to-the-grindstone silent (in one hundred and fifty-two pages or so) oppressee witnessing. Think I'll pick up my weathered copy of The Iliad for a spell, for corrective enjoyment, and to make any link, however faint, with what I just read, keeping an open mind of course, just to see what that unnamed writer of the G&M saw in the prolific egalitarian voice of all (or most?) of us that I may have missed.
The author of High Speed Through Shoaling Water has nothing to say, and no way of saying it. Will I read another of his books a quarter-century hence? No way, man.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Sharon McCartney's The Love Song Of Laura Ingalls Wilder
The quantity of Canadian book-length poem sequences and narratives has exploded lately. Steven Price's Anatomy Of Keys and Stephanie Bolster's White Stone are just two of the volumes that make fictional left and right turns from the biographical arteries of the historical figures which engender those authors' concerns. Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid is an obvious antecedent, still influential, if for no other reason than belonging to the academic canon. But whereas Ondaatje's popular creative slant on the outlaw was cinematic in procedure (highly influenced by the great Western, "Once Upon A Time In The West", directed by Sergio Leone), the contemporary reenactments of this encompassing approach focus more on character complexity and depth while using that depth to both mirror and comment upon the social entrenchments of the time and place. Billy wanted to splash images in the collected mindscape (as opposed to Hopkins' inscape) in an attempt to imprint those visuals in the readers' memory, and since the language and psychological means Ondaatje employed were consistently ill-formed and shallow, the cinematographic impatience acted as unidimensional dramatic seduction rather than revelatory dance. ("Once Upon A Time In The West" transcended its images to make profound statements on historical inevitability, accomplished and physical vision, honour, and greed.)
Sharon McCartney's The Love Song Of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2007) is in the best bracket of this tradition. Not content or interested in transcribing Wilder's and Lane's (the creators of the Little House books) narrative, McCartney uses the source material as a way to explore silent -- no, rather, repressed -- connections. I was very surprised to stumble onto the math of the list of individual voices: only 13 of the 54 poems have a human speaker. As for the rest, we hear from animals, but also from bugles, churns, even the appendages of the various characters -- "Pa's Penis", "Mr. Clewett's Feet". Now this is a hilariously cheeky way not simply to circumvent, but to defrock the sometimes stuffy remonstrances of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy. I often sympathize with the latter admonition when reading of "crying rain" or "angry sun", but when the poem's procedure exists as a first-"person" horse assessing a life-long relationship, the only pathetic attribute should be the one ascribed to the smug poetic churl beefing about "expropriation" and "wild fancy".
That said, the danger here is that it's not easy to enter into the interior passions of fires and boards and horses. From the latter, "Lady, to Prince", a more serious psychological fallacy occurs. Horses, after breaking, are not unhappy unless they're mistreated. And "the world must be benign" also misunderstands equine emotion: after the biological fears of fire and falling, the horse's most pervasive problem is boredom. Hence, in those that succumb, withdrawal, cribbing, and crankiness.
Of course, McCartney is using not only the Little House books as jumping off points. Her speakers' generational, sweeping histories are coloured and delineated for deeper purposes, as well. But jumping off into what? There are many exciting analogies, even mini-allegories. "Uncle George's Bugle" is soaked in nostalgia, but also present passion, a transcending sexual play, simultaneously hilarious and sad: "to be tongued again,/ .... a new melody/piercing the unpopulated woods."
It's a credit to McCartney that she's able to imbue such feeling into inanimate household necessities and structures. Unfortunately, the aggregate personalities accrue towards either stoic resignation or grumpy resentment ("Wolf in Moonlight" is a gorgeous exception, overrunning with power and stance). With a seeming prairie-stacked cast of original actors, I would have loved to have experienced more emotional variation. And the author has the talent to have brought that out.
Still, I'm cavilling more than my overall feelings warrant. There are many passages of effective sound mated with sense: "zigzagging, ears flat, a panicked glance/backward" (from "One of Pa's Traps"); "a sip of port with each sigh,/his respite from rote insipidity --/no pain" (from "Mr. Clewett's Feet"); "I can't bear a weakness/as debilitating as rust, blistering my blade." (from "Pa's Ax").
I never watched Michael Landon strolling down the hill with branch across shoulder to carry twin bucket scales of familial justice, nor did I read the (I'm assuming) antiseptic takes on pioneer life as prairie romanticism as penned by Wilder and Lane (O.E. Rolvaag's Giants In The Earth would make for a dour corrective), but I can't see as how those prior creations would be more interesting than McCartney's . It's all fiction. In this case, as in any other, for that matter, imagination and craft beat moral prescription.
Sharon McCartney's The Love Song Of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2007) is in the best bracket of this tradition. Not content or interested in transcribing Wilder's and Lane's (the creators of the Little House books) narrative, McCartney uses the source material as a way to explore silent -- no, rather, repressed -- connections. I was very surprised to stumble onto the math of the list of individual voices: only 13 of the 54 poems have a human speaker. As for the rest, we hear from animals, but also from bugles, churns, even the appendages of the various characters -- "Pa's Penis", "Mr. Clewett's Feet". Now this is a hilariously cheeky way not simply to circumvent, but to defrock the sometimes stuffy remonstrances of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy. I often sympathize with the latter admonition when reading of "crying rain" or "angry sun", but when the poem's procedure exists as a first-"person" horse assessing a life-long relationship, the only pathetic attribute should be the one ascribed to the smug poetic churl beefing about "expropriation" and "wild fancy".
That said, the danger here is that it's not easy to enter into the interior passions of fires and boards and horses. From the latter, "Lady, to Prince", a more serious psychological fallacy occurs. Horses, after breaking, are not unhappy unless they're mistreated. And "the world must be benign" also misunderstands equine emotion: after the biological fears of fire and falling, the horse's most pervasive problem is boredom. Hence, in those that succumb, withdrawal, cribbing, and crankiness.
Of course, McCartney is using not only the Little House books as jumping off points. Her speakers' generational, sweeping histories are coloured and delineated for deeper purposes, as well. But jumping off into what? There are many exciting analogies, even mini-allegories. "Uncle George's Bugle" is soaked in nostalgia, but also present passion, a transcending sexual play, simultaneously hilarious and sad: "to be tongued again,/ .... a new melody/piercing the unpopulated woods."
It's a credit to McCartney that she's able to imbue such feeling into inanimate household necessities and structures. Unfortunately, the aggregate personalities accrue towards either stoic resignation or grumpy resentment ("Wolf in Moonlight" is a gorgeous exception, overrunning with power and stance). With a seeming prairie-stacked cast of original actors, I would have loved to have experienced more emotional variation. And the author has the talent to have brought that out.
Still, I'm cavilling more than my overall feelings warrant. There are many passages of effective sound mated with sense: "zigzagging, ears flat, a panicked glance/backward" (from "One of Pa's Traps"); "a sip of port with each sigh,/his respite from rote insipidity --/no pain" (from "Mr. Clewett's Feet"); "I can't bear a weakness/as debilitating as rust, blistering my blade." (from "Pa's Ax").
I never watched Michael Landon strolling down the hill with branch across shoulder to carry twin bucket scales of familial justice, nor did I read the (I'm assuming) antiseptic takes on pioneer life as prairie romanticism as penned by Wilder and Lane (O.E. Rolvaag's Giants In The Earth would make for a dour corrective), but I can't see as how those prior creations would be more interesting than McCartney's . It's all fiction. In this case, as in any other, for that matter, imagination and craft beat moral prescription.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
READING BERRYMAN'S SONNETS BACKWARDS
Mocks, kills a vitiable gloaming, sparse
In conclusion, antipodal lovers
Breaking silences while, working, they parse
For clues, legendary or nondescript,
Regaling recall, envying others
Who rise in their slumbers, wise and wide-lipped.
Often I stop and sway at the syntax
Whose coin, lyric pleasure, blasts cold facts.
So bless us, John! as we coil your bon mots
In sedulous hiving, this reader salutes
Your word-play, brave un-grandeur, formations,
While sounds, like heliacal weathered knots,
Unravel, open in sea-swelled cahoots
With flawed gambols and imagination.
In conclusion, antipodal lovers
Breaking silences while, working, they parse
For clues, legendary or nondescript,
Regaling recall, envying others
Who rise in their slumbers, wise and wide-lipped.
Often I stop and sway at the syntax
Whose coin, lyric pleasure, blasts cold facts.
So bless us, John! as we coil your bon mots
In sedulous hiving, this reader salutes
Your word-play, brave un-grandeur, formations,
While sounds, like heliacal weathered knots,
Unravel, open in sea-swelled cahoots
With flawed gambols and imagination.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Ethereal Beauty #100
I was the ultimate lonely hydrogen atom
Clinging to whichever deluded body was open.
A thin stripped beam of silver wire streaming
Through two boxes, forever apart,
Fired sparkless charges.
Alchemical misfit turning gold to zinc to dross, air-spasm,
I puffed my opus pipe, lines
Precious, ash-strewn, palled.
I was always in Amontillado's tomb,
Each of the six-thousand-plus bricks
My perfect seal.
Clinging to whichever deluded body was open.
A thin stripped beam of silver wire streaming
Through two boxes, forever apart,
Fired sparkless charges.
Alchemical misfit turning gold to zinc to dross, air-spasm,
I puffed my opus pipe, lines
Precious, ash-strewn, palled.
I was always in Amontillado's tomb,
Each of the six-thousand-plus bricks
My perfect seal.
Ethereal Beauty #99
Columns of yellow-gold smoke
In harbours of air rise in forests
Where graves fold in fresh loam.
In harbours of air rise in forests
Where graves fold in fresh loam.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Comments on My Review of Robert Duncan's "Bow"
Thank gawd I finally corrected one small part of my technical ineptness by allowing, two weeks ago, comments to show up in my email. Otherwise, I probably never would have seen a comment on my review of Duncan's Bending The Bow. Here's a link to that Jan 27 post, with its attendant dialogue.http://brianpalmu.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html
If you've read Duncan, either that volume or anything else by him, please jump in. He's obviously still important in contemporary influence and concern. But rather than an academic connect-the-dots influence puzzle, I'd rather deal with the poems, which often get ignored or, at best, glossed over, when talking about "new styles or forms".
If you've read Duncan, either that volume or anything else by him, please jump in. He's obviously still important in contemporary influence and concern. But rather than an academic connect-the-dots influence puzzle, I'd rather deal with the poems, which often get ignored or, at best, glossed over, when talking about "new styles or forms".
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