Before we split six years ago, a girlfriend bought me a few books of poetry for my birthday. One of them was Roy Miki’s Surrender, the 2002 winner of the GG. It has an appealing orange cover, but upon opening it, I discovered -- in fragments of several “poems” -- the colour to be its only appealing sticking point. It subsequently got lost in a box where neglected articles find their (usually) permanent homes, though I recently rediscovered it amongst other bric-a-brac. Here’s an admittedly slapdash critique of the contents of this theory infestation.
MAKE IT NEW
“I have altered my tactics to reflect the new era”
Is there anything more unappealing than an opening statement which, self-importance to the fore, declaims its self-conscious procedure?
“the hallucinated cartoons spread their wings”
A phrase without context followed by a painful cliché.
“plumed echoes”
I tried wrapping myself in this one for a minute or two. Should I have tried harder? And would it have been worth it? Feathered sounds, and which enter one’s consciousness by “declension”, no less. Ah, but then we have the alternate “contractual fumes”, which certainly clears things up. Ah ha ha, but then I tripped up again: clarity is for those old “traditionalist” fogies. I don’t mind suggestiveness. In fact, under the right circumstances, and under a rigorous cross-checked metaphorical caroming, I welcome it. Unfortunately, “Make It New” lives up to its title only in an arrogantly processed word-splash.
MATERIAL RECOVERY
“the abstraction summons all/to suspension in the shaft of/the escalators”
And the cratering elephant in the middle of the rec room looms incandescent in the periphery of marginalia, a double negation ushering in the bifurcated rumblings of vectors and tangents, roaming minions of ellipses leaping across bunkered appropriations. Imbroglios of referents. Musings of fragmentary fibula-fixings.
ATTRACTIVE
“murmur’s master stroke”
Oh, the self-regarding and smug half-smile. Betcha don’t think I know what’s goin’ on, eh?
“let's get serious, a poetic text has to resonate”
Quite. Though I’d substitute “poem” for “poetic text” (what the fuck’s a “poetic text”?). And this, of course, is not a poem.
MATERIAL RECOVERY TWO
“resin does not resonate/ricochet does not return”
Resin is to ricochet as droopy drawers is to fluorocarbon. Resin to recind to re-sin. Resonating to ….?
KIYOOKA
“morning light laves/this futon couch”
I suppose this is the first instance of (back cover) “the lyrical”. Is there an emotion hidden in the futon, or in the one observing it? For all the “risk” of the grammar-smashing previous lines, is there any emotional risk or intellectual complexity in the futon couch (isn’t this a redundancy?) or in the lines of this “poem” which follow (“pro life ration/is only/ a word/after all/is sd/& done”)? I’m asking many questions here, dear reader, because I’m honestly trying to negotiate a “framework for discussion” , since confident declarations and conclusions about what I’m reading are simultaneously frowned on and laughed at. But life -- and art -- are fragments. Meaning is an anachronism. Language is a minefield of pin-pulled duds. And universities pay good money to any prof with a slant, a theoretical addendum.
SPEED BUMPS
“the odometer of social declension is set to warp speed”
Then I suppose we’re a million leagues under water since this was written. Proportion is usually a good thing. So is context. So is truth. Doesn’t this sound important? The intrepid poet/reporter/recorder, documenting social ills. It also helps to be on the right side of politically correct history. Then no matter what you say, or more appropriately, how you say it, a free pass is a pre-fab check-off. (Now Chekhov, there was a guy who wrenched compassion from the coldest intellectual.) It’s being on the right side, the side of “exposing” “blasphemies of language use” that crafts and affixes the seminar room halo.
MATERIAL RECOVERY THREE
“embouchure/souvenir/diastolic/leverage”
Can I play, too? “fiddle/wrench/systole/sycophant”
LOW SIGNAL
“the reliance on/supper is a ploy//left over from/previous eras”
Tell that to anyone before the age of refined fossil fuels. The growing and eating of supper was not only the focal point, but the time-and energy-consuming sine qua non of existence. But, then, middle-class intellectuals need to create personal moral banks where credit derivative swaps can be initiated to those also in need of a defining vagary.
I’m such an idiot, though. It’s an irony when you don’t think it so, a suggestive diatribe when you think it foolish, or both at once, or none at all. Remember, language is the enemy. Or, rather, only the language which acts confidently.
KNOCKS AT THE DOOR
“the point of theory is to prick you -- you asshole.”
Ahha, a subtle assfucking by the arbiters of what poets should or should not say.
“don’t say it. Not yet.”
Too late.
“wait till the light changes”
Poetry is always set on green.
MATERIAL RECOVERY FOUR
“I.e./equivalence tempts/human subjects”
The perfect marriage of unmusicality with abstraction, one usually defining the other.
A MID INITIAL
I like wordplay when it’s witty, musical, and when it serves a larger purpose. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly (considering what’s gone on before), this “poem” lacks any delight or purpose for its boring multiple word meanings, unless you think a reader is so dense that patronizing exhibitions of “fin etude” are necessary.
SUBVERSION IN TOKYO
Reading this "poem" was like listening to a Sunday sermon when I was six years old, and all I could think about (over the droning gibberish) was going outside to play. Time for a break for that overrated ploy, supper, and to rest my befogged occipital lobe.
MATERIAL RECOVERY FIVE
“the sausages, so steamy and/graspable, were shaped to/resemble blocks of tofu”
Don’t read that fragment if under the influence of Jim Beam (not that I’ve yet turned to that ploy in getting through to this book’s end). “Toy boat” repeated a hundred times at warp speed would be more easily negotiable.
A WALK THROUGH PORTAGE MALL
I suppose this one would be a hit amongst en garde-ists everywhere for its mix of archival speech, typographical “originality”, commentary on commentary, fractured narrative, and theoretical framing. I got lost, though, and not in a fruitful way. It’s ironic that for someone whose biggest concern is language, and the ways it’s destroyed by bureaucratic laziness and cynicism, the “poems” in Miki’s Surrender are themselves devoid of rhythmic and sonic flavour.
MATERIAL RECOVERY SIX
The idea is interesting -- noting the elements underscoring each line (“past”, “fantasy”, “now”) -- but a good poem will elicit those links from a discerning reader. This poem, like so many others in this volume, doesn’t trust that reader, but instead brags about its “complexity” of perspective. If you take out the markers, the language of the anecdote is as flat as granny’s breasts on the Beverly Hillbillies.
INTERIOR POEM
“vainglorious summits beckon abysmal/rounds of canticles colchis diffused hounds/in autumnal glaciers bark new of the demise/of freight trains colonial notes unleash torrents”
This is what happens when lyricism is mistaken for stream of consciousness without coordination. I know, I know, that’s the point here. But then lyricism can’t be the positive it’s made out to be among surrendering supporters of Surrender. Can’t have and eat that cake. Of course, I’m wrong again: surely, it’s a lyrical parody, no?
MATERIAL RECOVERY SEVEN
“nothing to report”
This "poem" should have stopped after the first three words.
WINNIPEG c. 1950
“the leaves always/shiver in the snaphot”
I like the reactive feeling between the line break. And the similar “the eyes filled with frames/of bicycle spokes turning” evokes the idea of imagined motion in solidified memory.
FOR e.d.
“was also racing too”
?
If this is a mocking conclusion to, an acerbic parody on, a rhymed contemplation on the evanescence of time (O hoary staple of traditonalists’ concerns!), fine. But what’s the point? That bad lyricism exists? Of course. But unless the idea is fleshed out in detail, either by the provocative limning of a particular abuser, or by an actual good lyrical poem, it’s a slight and uninteresting gambit, a “corrective” theoretical wank.
FOOL’S SCOLD
The witty title is the best thing about this wannabe-Kafka roll-on. Dialogue is always welcome in a poem, but the conversation here (with a knowing, and by now boring, nod to the bludgeoned theme of misapplied and cynical self-protective messaging) acts solely on the level of ideological explication, not sensuous interplay and striking phrase-making.
ON THE SUBLIME
“fear is driven/deeper into the social debt of syntax controls”
The accumulated abstractions about the evils of bureaucratic evil are unconvincing. It’s not that I disagree with Miki, it’s that he’s yet to evoke this idee fixe into an artful shaping of immediate and specific detail. We’re to take the Japanese internment as a horrific given, though ironically, we’re not shown how the horror, the insensitivity, is manifested. I’ve seen more affecting poems written in first-person on the horrors of WWII by people who weren’t even born at the time than I have about Miki’s superior word-derisions.
“the encounter has ripple effects that/accumulate and announce the dispatch”
Says Miki. Show, don’t tell. Isn’t that workshop maxim still in vogue?
“the few who are/deaf to tonal variations listen to the heat waves instead”
Indeed.
MATERIAL RECOVERY EIGHT
Banal iteration of bureaucratic malfeasance. Can there be one, just one, dramatic, vivid account of this hammer-on-head leitmotif?
SURRENDER IS A VERBAL SIGN
Interminable, this (what?) meandering damnation of collective syntax descends into a shaking finger at advertising slogans. The last, and final, section 15 is a piss-poor attempt to redraw Ionesco’s hilarious non-sequitur The Chairs.
MATERIAL RECOVERY NINE
“atonal costumes//texts so conducive to/fronds of obverse reflection”
Huh?
ON SPECS
Glances, gestures, numbers, events, noise, procedure, circumstances, syllable, problem …..
If the idea is to awaken complacency in league with the language-mangling, language-subverting powers-that-be into a counterforce, aping those numbing abstractions doesn’t seem to be the best way to go about it.
SO
“like a mouse scurrying/around the bookcase/its furry brown body/could be a mirage”
An effective suggestive vision (or non-vision, I suppose) of how memory first fades, then alters history, then doubts , completely, seminal veracity.
MATERIAL RECOVERY TEN
“speech is/the black squirrel/in search of/buried peanuts//on erased paths”
A good, though inferior, addition to the opening lines of “So”.
ANTICIPATION ALERT
Twenty pages of in-club professorial hand-jobs, this mishmash of boring poetics is another repetition in the unfortunate line of Olson’s The Maximus Poems. Theoretical senseless and sense-less digressions on digressions are bad enough, but when they come with the Pound-Olson adoring thrice-removed-from-the-initial-cipher footnotes, it’s best to turn the pages. Quickly.
MATERIAL RECOVERY ELEVEN
More mocking of collective media-driven self-serving adspeak on the one hand, bad and high-flown emotivity on the other. The flogged horse is not just dead, but decomposing, pungently, on the page. Is there anything that Miki is for, besides abstract truth with a capital T? Not a jab, just an honest question.
WATCH SIGNS
I was initially going to write that by this time, poem #30 of 33, the one-note tone of Surrender is one more reason for its unremarkable existence. But that’s doing a disservice to even the notion of tone. Tone means music. The “one note” here, as in the rest of the book, is a groping-towards tuning of broken instruments.
AERIAL PORTS
“a sequel to “Watch Signs””
Thanks for the heads up. I didn’t read the rest of it.
MATERIAL RECOVERY TWELVE
What a ridiculous “arguement”. The superfluities of the modern age somehow negate the realization (in writers, too?) of great poems. We (always the collective “we”) are so benumbed and amused by the syntactical manipulations of the advertisers, and their corpus of consumer-crazed cheerleaders, that the poor great masterpiece (Surrender?) slides “into the blue carpet below”. Boo hoo.
OVER HEARD
Gobbledygook shrouded in more self-importance.
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I’ll be donating this book to the library. I’m sure it’ll eventually find a better home.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
LOST LAGOON
Roving the funereal alcove,
Animals betray their geometrical sentries
To shock and blot diminished light.
The lagoon’s an amber glass sheet
Stretching into corridors of bulrushes.
A swan glides like a motorized toy,
White wings tight as boarded oars.
The tight buds of April
Dot the canopy of arbutus,
Pink on green in a shock
Of windy morse code on the forest edge.
Animals betray their geometrical sentries
To shock and blot diminished light.
The lagoon’s an amber glass sheet
Stretching into corridors of bulrushes.
A swan glides like a motorized toy,
White wings tight as boarded oars.
The tight buds of April
Dot the canopy of arbutus,
Pink on green in a shock
Of windy morse code on the forest edge.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
THRILLER
My schnozz was a dusty, rotten mushroom,
And though I bleached my face with Ajax
I still ended up, wholesale, in the tomb.
Goes to show how hollow are payoffs to the max.
And though I bleached my face with Ajax
I still ended up, wholesale, in the tomb.
Goes to show how hollow are payoffs to the max.
SHAKING OFF THE BOSS
Hungover, bright May, on the roof again,
Shakes deposited across the steep incline,
Two-by-four studs nailed here and there, since ten
C-notes don't get you scaffolding, or wine
To replace afternoon sweat. Greg, the ‘boss‘:
"If you fall off, soon’s you hit ground, you're fired."
Ripped tippler wants to skim the account; his loss,
Since Roy and I would strap his ass to a tire
If the Prime Ministers get passed from
The King of Archimedes Street to this shifty
Pest trying to fob off the tough tasks, rum
Flask in tartan shirt. Want a rift? See?
Start your starter shakes along the gutter line;
Tote your own bundles, strip the faded tar.
Nine hours left, boss, you'd fade away in the mine.
Couldn't cut it in Stewart, more time in the bar.
Powder-blue chalk lines snapped; wake up, dopey boss! --
Time to hook inside the top floor, King's daughter
Strutting through: "Guys're doing a great job -- awes -
ome!", smile a protractor. I know I oughter
Get back on the roof but I have to say
"Dormer's not the only protrusion",
As she feigns shock with a coy sashay.
Sun's climbing, I'm Icarus in collusion
With Prometheus, taking both sides:
Splayed on Earth, soaring cock-of-walk on apex.
Hammer those shakes, Roy! We'll let doofus deride
His alter ego, mumbling while his tape rests
Against dumb arms. Let's finish our own jobs
And hit the backroom Chinese restaurant:
Gambling; vodka in teapots; Mandarin gobs
Of Buddha's Feast chicken strips; Tsing Tao wants
In bottles three-at-a-time. Our waiter
Stoic and proud, quiet with folded-down palms.
Somewhere the sun sets. Leagues of algae shift. Later,
The wide working-day memories calm.
Shakes deposited across the steep incline,
Two-by-four studs nailed here and there, since ten
C-notes don't get you scaffolding, or wine
To replace afternoon sweat. Greg, the ‘boss‘:
"If you fall off, soon’s you hit ground, you're fired."
Ripped tippler wants to skim the account; his loss,
Since Roy and I would strap his ass to a tire
If the Prime Ministers get passed from
The King of Archimedes Street to this shifty
Pest trying to fob off the tough tasks, rum
Flask in tartan shirt. Want a rift? See?
Start your starter shakes along the gutter line;
Tote your own bundles, strip the faded tar.
Nine hours left, boss, you'd fade away in the mine.
Couldn't cut it in Stewart, more time in the bar.
Powder-blue chalk lines snapped; wake up, dopey boss! --
Time to hook inside the top floor, King's daughter
Strutting through: "Guys're doing a great job -- awes -
ome!", smile a protractor. I know I oughter
Get back on the roof but I have to say
"Dormer's not the only protrusion",
As she feigns shock with a coy sashay.
Sun's climbing, I'm Icarus in collusion
With Prometheus, taking both sides:
Splayed on Earth, soaring cock-of-walk on apex.
Hammer those shakes, Roy! We'll let doofus deride
His alter ego, mumbling while his tape rests
Against dumb arms. Let's finish our own jobs
And hit the backroom Chinese restaurant:
Gambling; vodka in teapots; Mandarin gobs
Of Buddha's Feast chicken strips; Tsing Tao wants
In bottles three-at-a-time. Our waiter
Stoic and proud, quiet with folded-down palms.
Somewhere the sun sets. Leagues of algae shift. Later,
The wide working-day memories calm.
TWELVE DAYS AND I AM A STAR
Twelve days, Mr Ho-Ho, and I am a star.
I'm phoning friends with payola and the word.
Greater than Egypt’s pyramid scheme, or “Bird“,
I'll cut the concert in bulletproof car.
You laugh I'm just the opening act,
but I get things revved for an aging KISS.
I’ll upstage those fogeys, on macaque make-up piss.
I'll tear the house down and that's a fact.
They won't dare pull me offstage so quick
when I swear and spit and rage and flash
at seas of strawberry-vined young punk gash.
Up asses with gusto I'll lodge guitar picks.
Breakdance with beer, boys! Party time tonight.
Record company suits'll be kissing my ass
when tunes sound like synthesizers passing gas.
After a quick million, I'll quit and get tight.
I'm phoning friends with payola and the word.
Greater than Egypt’s pyramid scheme, or “Bird“,
I'll cut the concert in bulletproof car.
You laugh I'm just the opening act,
but I get things revved for an aging KISS.
I’ll upstage those fogeys, on macaque make-up piss.
I'll tear the house down and that's a fact.
They won't dare pull me offstage so quick
when I swear and spit and rage and flash
at seas of strawberry-vined young punk gash.
Up asses with gusto I'll lodge guitar picks.
Breakdance with beer, boys! Party time tonight.
Record company suits'll be kissing my ass
when tunes sound like synthesizers passing gas.
After a quick million, I'll quit and get tight.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Carmine Starnino's THIS WAY OUT
This Way Out (Gaspereau; 2009) is Carmine Starnino’s fourth collection of poetry. The immediacy of my reading/review of Peter Richardson’s Sympathy For The Couriers was a fun experience, so I’m doing the same here. Part of that immediacy and fun echoes from the poems themselves, so it’s a natural reaction. Here’s all twenty-eight poems in order of their appearance.
NEXT DOOR CAFÉ
Reading the first five and nine-tenths lines created a feeling identical to that of the speaker’s opener: “We were bored.” The lassitude and caroming plural pronoun confusion, the directionless “dark” finally explodes with the appearance of “bison”. It’s fascinating that light has to be stolen or coerced or bargained for (“cadged”, with a play on “cage”). I see this as a criticism on the sanctity and necessity, the given of Grace (yes, the capitalization has ironic purpose) for epiphany. How is joy, or at least relief, achieved? Who knows? But more to the point, who cares? This reminds me of the joke: “I’m happy, but I don’t know why” (said with honest perplexity). The rest of the poem has the speaker still involved in the lives of the habitués of darkness, but at a self-possessed, creative remove. Here, then, it’s no surprise technically (though a delightful surprise in musical shift) to experience the onrush of concrete nouns: shot glasses, whisky, tables, cellphone, lighter, cigarette, stools. Even adjectives and directives become tactile: lamped, cue. The “uh” disgust of “Sun-up found a few run aground, up shouldered hulls” marks a further distancing between observer and observed, the latter becoming more desultory and piteous not by the line, but by the phrase. There’s a pithy, affecting use of ship/ship passage metaphor in the poem’s last lines: hulls, keels, slewing, with “smashed” (in the second-to-last line) the unfortunate, but inevitable, conclusion to another word (poem’s line two) which then takes on ominous overtones, and which challenges the reader with a missed foreshadowing.
OUR BUTCHER
A funny allegory on critic as gleeful slaughterhouse hack which takes a gentler turn (never divorced from bloodiness) towards the love of assessment and handling. Poetry as a living thing, “risen again”. (I like the “again”, the glory of initial creation.) Also, the butcher as careful practitioner: note the multiple uses of many adjectives, verbs, nouns.
FRONT DOOR
A subtle poem, still easy to confound after multiple readings. The “key”, the two people (probably lovers, but possibly friends at opposite ends of the risk/security spectrum). The door is given anthropomorphic cachet, and it doesn’t much work for me, though the brief lines and suggestiveness of the pair salvages what could have been a dry idea.
VITA BREVIS
I’m familiar with “Early Truffaut”, but not “late Rosselini”, though the previous lament for desired affiliation -- rather, genuine entrenchment -- makes clear the “chasing”. Poems steeped in local detail run the risk of alienating readers unfamiliar with the territory, but Starnino uses landmarks and cultural esotericism to service emotional vividness, movement, and recognition. Reading this poem after anything in the first section of Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking is to make plain the emotionless, plodding transcription of endless historical detail in the latter volume, detail technically mangled and ideologically driven. Long after boring “walkabouts” have worn out their treads, threads, and treatises, poems like “Vita Brevis” will still be around to delight anyone who treasures authorial vulnerability, idiosyncrasy, colour, and mood.
SHAG
A hilarious encapsulation of the cupidita eterna, both canine and human. “Nearly put me off sleep for good”, the opener, takes on additional meaning after the rounded final one and one-half lines. “Dogged” is funny, and I also voiced the two syllable version, also appropriate.
HEAVENOGRAPHY
I usually skip sentence and line beginners that repeat and fill the entire poem, but Starnino’s strategy of run-on typeset prose works to affirm the clouds’ evanescent omniprevalence, “stuck between going and gone”. ”Atmospheric farting around” is a riot, an alternative version to Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory”. There’s a storm hidden in many, however. The insistence of “working-class” perhaps hopes to mimic grim, shoulder-to-wheel feats in certain poetry schools. Or am I wrong in seeing (among other such projects) Christian Bok’s seven year Sisyphean Eunoia behind this? The clouds’ perishability, their self-elevated confusion -- the parallels are many and witty. (“Working-class clouds are above it all, regard the hydraulics that give them their height as a right.”)
THIS WAY OUT
The title poem is a fond neighbourhood reminiscence. Set in nine stanzas, each of seven lines (for God’s Earth adornments? That old futzer makes a few humorous appearances mid-go), “This Way Out” is an amused, mocking moniker for progress and sure-footed direction. “Parc Ex//God said, and up sprang side streets of shoebox/flats (plus rats), chain-link fences, plain-/penny bricks, and paint-splashed garages.” Yes, God created light, four-legged critters, and those endlessly fascinating and mischievous bipeds, but shouldn’t He also take a bow for rats and dilapidated buildings? No? What a grandiose vision, then, of God. And (since we’re made in His image) of us. The H-bomb and four-corner imperialism is related to grandiosity. But perhaps I digress.
Detail is vivid; movement is quickened through compression, and even the sonic repetitions are quick (“sticks: Parc Ex”, “ice. A good price”, “a room, a roof,”, “this. What bliss.”), to amplify the emotion the assonance evokes. A few quibbles. The excellent “where balding towels and pink panties/drip dry together” is weakened with its completion, “like arranged marriages”. The other half of the metaphor was suggestively , absently, powerful before I came to those three words. And for a poem soaked in the everyday, the specific, the awe-fed unique, the generic “my paper”, “plonk/and beer”, “double-/parked cars”, “spice smells” chloroformed the senses a tad. I wanted the paper, the wine, the beer, the car, the spices, named. “The price paid for a new story//of creation” is delightful, a double play on God and the building itself.
NINE FROM ROME
A set of nine variously strung sonnets, each letter to a different friend, the sequence proceeds, with oscillations, from immersion in image and detail to contemplation, and finally, spiritual stocktaking and confident conclusion. Notice how the first in the sequence (to Michael) calls up Nietzsche’s famous “try[ing] to live/always in expectation of some impossible grace”, and how the intelligent-negative approach of the author relaxes into it by sequence end. “[T]ired of antiquities” (to Norm) mirrors the speaker’s having “had enough” of his tiresome past, or perhaps more accurately, his tired rehashing of it. The “gods that fill the hand” and “a thrill too quick for art” further deride the social pressure to mine the past, while counteracting the habit by praising the present, the felt, the non-referential, culminating in the last enty’s “unpoemed emotions”. There are other notable passages. When the lovers, on a walk, come to the proverbial fork in the road, they don’t take the one less traveled, but neither, instead opting for descent into “the uriney gloom”. What a tart, clever, brilliant response to that tired Frostian chestnut, the final lines enshrined, to which thousands of New Age sheep whose experience with poetry consists of anthologies edited by Wayne Dyer, swoon. (I would have thought this letter would have been addressed to David.) "You're next, jaws of wall hiss at me. I shrug.” (this one to David). Yes. And the triple scythe-swipe of the previous sentence inters the very idea. The second-to-last word of the last poem (to Mary) is key to the entire sequence (not given away here). It’s not ambiguous in notion. Only in specific unfolding.
PUGNAX GIVES NOTICE
When was the last time you read a poem set in the Roman Colosseum, a vivid character study by turns humorous and pensive? I love the first line -- “He’s done with it, the tridents and tigers,”-- for several reasons. I’m partial to poems that enter the ring already sticky with emotion. Garcia Lorca’s duende, the ecstatic dance a hair this side of death, often begins with a sense of a story, or movement in full swing, the poem (in this case) being a fragment of something else unable to contain the outsized emotion. The reader (at least this one) is disoriented, but agreeably so. What kind of a poem uses “tridents” in the first line? I love that word. It brings back memories of watching cartoons at seven years of age, some villain (usually Satan, as I recall) prodding the fork onto some beleaguered soul. And there’s a cartoonish association to fights in any ring (video games, anyone?) which the humour (“the chintzy palm branch prizes”) feeds, though, as the poem develops, that two-dimensional cut-out warrior becomes a “rounder’ figure, to borrow Forster’s term. Age brings fatigue, but also an understated wisdom, as Pugnax would rather “dawdle at the baths, tame his nights with tea,/be spellbound by the smell of soap, find a wife”. A play on nights/knights, an internal rhyme that helps the spell. The preceding quote is also a charming irony, a reversal of the heroic staple where the woman stays at home with her safe and dainty pleasures -- tea, soap -- while her man slays dragons or gladiators. Full circle, Mr. Mom, finding his feminine side -- whatever the cliché, the point is that Pugnax has grown. And the shocking juxtaposition of new experiences -- baths, tea, soap, and then wife -- recalls the gorgeous passage in Robert Lowell’s “The Old Flame” (“a new landlord,/a new wife, a new broom!”). I’ve read that passage to quite a few people. Many get the charm, but to them it’s hokey. To me, it’s heartbreaking (in the context of the complete poem). “Pugnax Gives Notice” approaches that great New England reminiscence.
SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO
A sort of vignette next to Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower”, more mellow in mood. Musically resounding and metrically intricate, and I’m guessing most will understand the reason for the monorhymes.
FLEA MARKET ECLOGUE
This felt like an exercise. An interesting one, but not necessary. Even if it’s a “true story”, or based on one, I didn’t feel either of the two had an immediacy, either individually, or between them. I love a good eclogue -- MacNeice’s immediately come to mind -- and perhaps because of past associations, prefer the rhetoric heightened exponentially while not sacrificing believability.
DOGE’S DUNGEON
W/out beeing puhdantik, uh revulooshunairee taik onn uh die eeng topik, w/out yr avredge tweed-n-pype pooh-poohing, lol! Ann leeve thoze Etruskanz alone, Fartists!
DELTA HOTEL, SAINT JOHN
Lots of movement here. Images are deftly merged with psychology, so it’s easy to miss the metaphorical skewering and multiple definitions on a first go-round: “stalls”, “Tip Top suit gone to seed”, “knotted”, “bluffing”, “business cards”.
LUCKY ME
Section Two of This Way Out begins with a reverie on father, and like the prize in either hand, the outcome of the choice is a formative joy as well as a later warning (“shutting illusions off”). This is fearlessly intelligent family reminiscence, and the metaphysical gold that results is worth the hard excavation and pressure-washing. I’m also impressed that “Trident” makes another appearance (line three); I’m hoping I’ll hit the trifecta on a submarine poem in the last half of the book.
TALE OF THE WEDDING RING
Precious, the fantasy conjures Irving Layton’s “A Song about Woman”. The latter’s “ ‘she is perfect, my lovely daughter!’ “ is a tone-strong contrast to “Tale Of The Wedding Ring” ‘s last-line Billy Joel cliché.
FILM NOIR
Atmosphere without particulars lacks bite. I wanted more of the mysterious “we” to be fleshed out, a la Len Gasparini’s similarly placed “Empire Theatre”. “Film Noir” has many dramatic, even charming, possibilities which were missed.
WHISTLING
The Wordsworth epigram leads to a symbolic whistling lesson -- the hard beginnings of transposed listening to voice and composition. You don’t need a pedantic explanation of onomatopoeia to appreciate “My whistling’s more like whiffling”.
MORNING AFTER
A sensually linked revelry, the symbolism of the title making the substitutions obvious. Some nicely turned phrases touching one another, and combining in unusual ways, like sampling small portions of a gourmet smorgasbord. I won’t quote here since the pleasures are diminished by separation.
FOUR MONTHS PREGNANT
Ha! The defenselessness of a napper, especially so in the presence of a ruthlessly, unsentimentally observant poet. Deployed in (more or less) non-traditional hexameter, the end rhymes mimic the tonal shifts nicely. Note the assonantal chiming of the separated first and eighth line “mind” and “sky” which act as a lovely pause before the surprising (humorously in the first/second lines; darkly in the eighth/ninth lines) unfolding. Really, a wonderful contrast between pregnancy and moribund fate. Unflinching, marrying sex and death. Bravissimo!
LAST THOUGHTS
There is simply too much going on here for a mini-review. How’s that for a cop-out? Actually, I don’t want to give much away here, even by suggestion. A tour de force, compressed with consummate skill, actions calling to painfully parallelled thoughts, images crisp with overtones. This is the best in the book. I hope it’s repeatedly anthologized.
TO THE COUPLE IN APARTMENT 949
“It’s no laughing matter”, but the poem is. A bracing exploration of that common experience of the noisy neighbours. Some funny references -- folkloric, plaque-inscribed, superstitious -- in the last stanza.
DEATHS OF THE SAINTS
Strong rhythms. This is a joy to read aloud, the rollicking peaks-and-valleys trade acting as counterpoint to the horrific historical record.
SQUASH RACKETS
Reverberating motion from line one to line sixty-two, a fiesta of sound and sense and imagination. Even more impressive to me since I hate squash (but love racquetball -- though I now have a new appreciation for that dead-ass squash ball: “small, hot, beating in bird-panic”). Game and match to Starnino on this one.
DUCKS ASLEEP ON GRASS
Can’t say too much or else this review will self-dest --
The rolling “b”s act as foreboding pulse. Another joy to read out loud.
VIRGINIA
A subtle, clever analogy on the conceiving, gestation, marketing, and ultimate discovery -- “the wind drags everything to pick up its scent” -- of a book of poems, disguised as an appropriate “making hay” experience. Wryly humorous and wistful.
PIMPINELLA
The death-bed scene is usually the kiss of death as a subject for poetry, inviting mawkish soldering by the poet/bedside sitter to his or her fading beloved. Starnino, wisely, as is frequently the case in This Way Out, opts instead for concrete substitution. The last recognition is painful (in experience, not poetic crafting), a psychic tattoo.
THE BUTTERFLIES I DREAMT IN CHILDHOOD ARE HERE
A worthy submission into the tradition-drenched study on the evanescence of beauty. Its fourteen lines might tempt one to stamp “sonnet” on it, and it’s true that the beginning of stanza three ushers in an effective turn, but it’s quickly shifted towards its dominant subject and mood. Besides, a more surprising turn exists at line seven, and I like that it’s structured as the stanza’s second line, increasing the jolt. No, I thought the poem led to a regular five-five-five line outlay, and the missing last line makes sense after “child’s eyes closed”.
THE STRANGEST THINGS
Preliminary comments on This Way Out’s third and final section, the eleven-poem sequence “The Strangest Things” (the title a phrase from W.C. Williams’ Kora In Hell), before dealing with the poem in a more global sense.
The individual poems in the sequence frame the overriding emotion in their titles -- “Puddle, Corner Jean Talon And Outremont”, “Roadkill, Unidentified, Hwy 401”, i.e. --, and place names serve to show the speaker coming across the object or sense impression accidentally, which then triggers that emotion.
Starnino departs severely from metaphor and image in “The Strangest Things”. “Weeping Willow, Parc Angrignon”, especially, is bogged down in abstractions and interiority. Cliches follow one another (“things taking a turn for the worse./I look myself hard in the eye”). Perhaps this is a knowing strategy to emphasize the similar emotional flatness of the speaker, but elsewhere I’ve stated that aesthetic effectiveness lessens, as well, when the temperature is set at low-and-steady. (Contrast similar moods in Lowell’s “A Severed Head”: “panted with calm inertia”.) That said, there are some tight, defiant surprises among the weeds: “What to make of a diminished thing/is anybody’s guess./I have enough/to be going on with/without needing to put on airs” from “Smell Of Something Bad, Kitchen” jabs Frost once again, this time dismissing “The Oven-Bird” ‘s stance (yes, I realize that canonical sonnet can be read many ways) of simultaneously grieving over, fetishizing, and making a strength of declining poetic powers and/or years. “Get up, stretch, take the air, my friends tell me./No thanks” (“Weeping Willow, Parc Angrignon”) further snuffs the emotional evasion. And particulars increase, with alacrity. Blasts such as “Hotheaded/hair-trigger", from “Loud TV From Next Door, Notre-Dame-de-Grace”, explain (though never apologize for) previous flat funk. I also like the ending of “For Sale Sign, Wilson Street, Notre-Dame-de-Grace”: “There was nothing more to be said/and we didn’t”. A perfect way to end that particular sub-poem. (Frost would have liked that: “Any fool can get into a poem, but it takes a poet to get out of one.”)
Much anguish and ink has been spilled over the confessional poem. I won’t add much to those poetics here except to note the obvious: it’s a dangerous tack, especially now, when the brilliant and seminal efforts of Lowell (misidentified as confessional) have led to a half-century (and still going strong, or weak, as it were) of self-indulgent embroidering. Starnino escapes the “look at me” nausea, but not, completely, the difficulties in emotional and aesthetic transposition necessary for a successful confession. And the sequence’s finale, “Hairline Wall Crack, Study, Parc Ex Flat”, puzzles me. Emotionally static, linguistically unadventurous, narratively unnecessary (after the aforementioned “nothing more to be said”. I interpreted that individually, as well), structurally confusing, it’s a limp ending to an otherwise stellar book.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Starnino’s always been concerned, and effective, with structured sound and emotional accuracy and depth. But in This Way Out, he’s further developed narrative and ideational skills. A force, now, on multiple poetic fronts, I hope for, and expect, further organic integration.
NEXT DOOR CAFÉ
Reading the first five and nine-tenths lines created a feeling identical to that of the speaker’s opener: “We were bored.” The lassitude and caroming plural pronoun confusion, the directionless “dark” finally explodes with the appearance of “bison”. It’s fascinating that light has to be stolen or coerced or bargained for (“cadged”, with a play on “cage”). I see this as a criticism on the sanctity and necessity, the given of Grace (yes, the capitalization has ironic purpose) for epiphany. How is joy, or at least relief, achieved? Who knows? But more to the point, who cares? This reminds me of the joke: “I’m happy, but I don’t know why” (said with honest perplexity). The rest of the poem has the speaker still involved in the lives of the habitués of darkness, but at a self-possessed, creative remove. Here, then, it’s no surprise technically (though a delightful surprise in musical shift) to experience the onrush of concrete nouns: shot glasses, whisky, tables, cellphone, lighter, cigarette, stools. Even adjectives and directives become tactile: lamped, cue. The “uh” disgust of “Sun-up found a few run aground, up shouldered hulls” marks a further distancing between observer and observed, the latter becoming more desultory and piteous not by the line, but by the phrase. There’s a pithy, affecting use of ship/ship passage metaphor in the poem’s last lines: hulls, keels, slewing, with “smashed” (in the second-to-last line) the unfortunate, but inevitable, conclusion to another word (poem’s line two) which then takes on ominous overtones, and which challenges the reader with a missed foreshadowing.
OUR BUTCHER
A funny allegory on critic as gleeful slaughterhouse hack which takes a gentler turn (never divorced from bloodiness) towards the love of assessment and handling. Poetry as a living thing, “risen again”. (I like the “again”, the glory of initial creation.) Also, the butcher as careful practitioner: note the multiple uses of many adjectives, verbs, nouns.
FRONT DOOR
A subtle poem, still easy to confound after multiple readings. The “key”, the two people (probably lovers, but possibly friends at opposite ends of the risk/security spectrum). The door is given anthropomorphic cachet, and it doesn’t much work for me, though the brief lines and suggestiveness of the pair salvages what could have been a dry idea.
VITA BREVIS
I’m familiar with “Early Truffaut”, but not “late Rosselini”, though the previous lament for desired affiliation -- rather, genuine entrenchment -- makes clear the “chasing”. Poems steeped in local detail run the risk of alienating readers unfamiliar with the territory, but Starnino uses landmarks and cultural esotericism to service emotional vividness, movement, and recognition. Reading this poem after anything in the first section of Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking is to make plain the emotionless, plodding transcription of endless historical detail in the latter volume, detail technically mangled and ideologically driven. Long after boring “walkabouts” have worn out their treads, threads, and treatises, poems like “Vita Brevis” will still be around to delight anyone who treasures authorial vulnerability, idiosyncrasy, colour, and mood.
SHAG
A hilarious encapsulation of the cupidita eterna, both canine and human. “Nearly put me off sleep for good”, the opener, takes on additional meaning after the rounded final one and one-half lines. “Dogged” is funny, and I also voiced the two syllable version, also appropriate.
HEAVENOGRAPHY
I usually skip sentence and line beginners that repeat and fill the entire poem, but Starnino’s strategy of run-on typeset prose works to affirm the clouds’ evanescent omniprevalence, “stuck between going and gone”. ”Atmospheric farting around” is a riot, an alternative version to Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory”. There’s a storm hidden in many, however. The insistence of “working-class” perhaps hopes to mimic grim, shoulder-to-wheel feats in certain poetry schools. Or am I wrong in seeing (among other such projects) Christian Bok’s seven year Sisyphean Eunoia behind this? The clouds’ perishability, their self-elevated confusion -- the parallels are many and witty. (“Working-class clouds are above it all, regard the hydraulics that give them their height as a right.”)
THIS WAY OUT
The title poem is a fond neighbourhood reminiscence. Set in nine stanzas, each of seven lines (for God’s Earth adornments? That old futzer makes a few humorous appearances mid-go), “This Way Out” is an amused, mocking moniker for progress and sure-footed direction. “Parc Ex//God said, and up sprang side streets of shoebox/flats (plus rats), chain-link fences, plain-/penny bricks, and paint-splashed garages.” Yes, God created light, four-legged critters, and those endlessly fascinating and mischievous bipeds, but shouldn’t He also take a bow for rats and dilapidated buildings? No? What a grandiose vision, then, of God. And (since we’re made in His image) of us. The H-bomb and four-corner imperialism is related to grandiosity. But perhaps I digress.
Detail is vivid; movement is quickened through compression, and even the sonic repetitions are quick (“sticks: Parc Ex”, “ice. A good price”, “a room, a roof,”, “this. What bliss.”), to amplify the emotion the assonance evokes. A few quibbles. The excellent “where balding towels and pink panties/drip dry together” is weakened with its completion, “like arranged marriages”. The other half of the metaphor was suggestively , absently, powerful before I came to those three words. And for a poem soaked in the everyday, the specific, the awe-fed unique, the generic “my paper”, “plonk/and beer”, “double-/parked cars”, “spice smells” chloroformed the senses a tad. I wanted the paper, the wine, the beer, the car, the spices, named. “The price paid for a new story//of creation” is delightful, a double play on God and the building itself.
NINE FROM ROME
A set of nine variously strung sonnets, each letter to a different friend, the sequence proceeds, with oscillations, from immersion in image and detail to contemplation, and finally, spiritual stocktaking and confident conclusion. Notice how the first in the sequence (to Michael) calls up Nietzsche’s famous “try[ing] to live/always in expectation of some impossible grace”, and how the intelligent-negative approach of the author relaxes into it by sequence end. “[T]ired of antiquities” (to Norm) mirrors the speaker’s having “had enough” of his tiresome past, or perhaps more accurately, his tired rehashing of it. The “gods that fill the hand” and “a thrill too quick for art” further deride the social pressure to mine the past, while counteracting the habit by praising the present, the felt, the non-referential, culminating in the last enty’s “unpoemed emotions”. There are other notable passages. When the lovers, on a walk, come to the proverbial fork in the road, they don’t take the one less traveled, but neither, instead opting for descent into “the uriney gloom”. What a tart, clever, brilliant response to that tired Frostian chestnut, the final lines enshrined, to which thousands of New Age sheep whose experience with poetry consists of anthologies edited by Wayne Dyer, swoon. (I would have thought this letter would have been addressed to David.) "You're next, jaws of wall hiss at me. I shrug.” (this one to David). Yes. And the triple scythe-swipe of the previous sentence inters the very idea. The second-to-last word of the last poem (to Mary) is key to the entire sequence (not given away here). It’s not ambiguous in notion. Only in specific unfolding.
PUGNAX GIVES NOTICE
When was the last time you read a poem set in the Roman Colosseum, a vivid character study by turns humorous and pensive? I love the first line -- “He’s done with it, the tridents and tigers,”-- for several reasons. I’m partial to poems that enter the ring already sticky with emotion. Garcia Lorca’s duende, the ecstatic dance a hair this side of death, often begins with a sense of a story, or movement in full swing, the poem (in this case) being a fragment of something else unable to contain the outsized emotion. The reader (at least this one) is disoriented, but agreeably so. What kind of a poem uses “tridents” in the first line? I love that word. It brings back memories of watching cartoons at seven years of age, some villain (usually Satan, as I recall) prodding the fork onto some beleaguered soul. And there’s a cartoonish association to fights in any ring (video games, anyone?) which the humour (“the chintzy palm branch prizes”) feeds, though, as the poem develops, that two-dimensional cut-out warrior becomes a “rounder’ figure, to borrow Forster’s term. Age brings fatigue, but also an understated wisdom, as Pugnax would rather “dawdle at the baths, tame his nights with tea,/be spellbound by the smell of soap, find a wife”. A play on nights/knights, an internal rhyme that helps the spell. The preceding quote is also a charming irony, a reversal of the heroic staple where the woman stays at home with her safe and dainty pleasures -- tea, soap -- while her man slays dragons or gladiators. Full circle, Mr. Mom, finding his feminine side -- whatever the cliché, the point is that Pugnax has grown. And the shocking juxtaposition of new experiences -- baths, tea, soap, and then wife -- recalls the gorgeous passage in Robert Lowell’s “The Old Flame” (“a new landlord,/a new wife, a new broom!”). I’ve read that passage to quite a few people. Many get the charm, but to them it’s hokey. To me, it’s heartbreaking (in the context of the complete poem). “Pugnax Gives Notice” approaches that great New England reminiscence.
SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO
A sort of vignette next to Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower”, more mellow in mood. Musically resounding and metrically intricate, and I’m guessing most will understand the reason for the monorhymes.
FLEA MARKET ECLOGUE
This felt like an exercise. An interesting one, but not necessary. Even if it’s a “true story”, or based on one, I didn’t feel either of the two had an immediacy, either individually, or between them. I love a good eclogue -- MacNeice’s immediately come to mind -- and perhaps because of past associations, prefer the rhetoric heightened exponentially while not sacrificing believability.
DOGE’S DUNGEON
W/out beeing puhdantik, uh revulooshunairee taik onn uh die eeng topik, w/out yr avredge tweed-n-pype pooh-poohing, lol! Ann leeve thoze Etruskanz alone, Fartists!
DELTA HOTEL, SAINT JOHN
Lots of movement here. Images are deftly merged with psychology, so it’s easy to miss the metaphorical skewering and multiple definitions on a first go-round: “stalls”, “Tip Top suit gone to seed”, “knotted”, “bluffing”, “business cards”.
LUCKY ME
Section Two of This Way Out begins with a reverie on father, and like the prize in either hand, the outcome of the choice is a formative joy as well as a later warning (“shutting illusions off”). This is fearlessly intelligent family reminiscence, and the metaphysical gold that results is worth the hard excavation and pressure-washing. I’m also impressed that “Trident” makes another appearance (line three); I’m hoping I’ll hit the trifecta on a submarine poem in the last half of the book.
TALE OF THE WEDDING RING
Precious, the fantasy conjures Irving Layton’s “A Song about Woman”. The latter’s “ ‘she is perfect, my lovely daughter!’ “ is a tone-strong contrast to “Tale Of The Wedding Ring” ‘s last-line Billy Joel cliché.
FILM NOIR
Atmosphere without particulars lacks bite. I wanted more of the mysterious “we” to be fleshed out, a la Len Gasparini’s similarly placed “Empire Theatre”. “Film Noir” has many dramatic, even charming, possibilities which were missed.
WHISTLING
The Wordsworth epigram leads to a symbolic whistling lesson -- the hard beginnings of transposed listening to voice and composition. You don’t need a pedantic explanation of onomatopoeia to appreciate “My whistling’s more like whiffling”.
MORNING AFTER
A sensually linked revelry, the symbolism of the title making the substitutions obvious. Some nicely turned phrases touching one another, and combining in unusual ways, like sampling small portions of a gourmet smorgasbord. I won’t quote here since the pleasures are diminished by separation.
FOUR MONTHS PREGNANT
Ha! The defenselessness of a napper, especially so in the presence of a ruthlessly, unsentimentally observant poet. Deployed in (more or less) non-traditional hexameter, the end rhymes mimic the tonal shifts nicely. Note the assonantal chiming of the separated first and eighth line “mind” and “sky” which act as a lovely pause before the surprising (humorously in the first/second lines; darkly in the eighth/ninth lines) unfolding. Really, a wonderful contrast between pregnancy and moribund fate. Unflinching, marrying sex and death. Bravissimo!
LAST THOUGHTS
There is simply too much going on here for a mini-review. How’s that for a cop-out? Actually, I don’t want to give much away here, even by suggestion. A tour de force, compressed with consummate skill, actions calling to painfully parallelled thoughts, images crisp with overtones. This is the best in the book. I hope it’s repeatedly anthologized.
TO THE COUPLE IN APARTMENT 949
“It’s no laughing matter”, but the poem is. A bracing exploration of that common experience of the noisy neighbours. Some funny references -- folkloric, plaque-inscribed, superstitious -- in the last stanza.
DEATHS OF THE SAINTS
Strong rhythms. This is a joy to read aloud, the rollicking peaks-and-valleys trade acting as counterpoint to the horrific historical record.
SQUASH RACKETS
Reverberating motion from line one to line sixty-two, a fiesta of sound and sense and imagination. Even more impressive to me since I hate squash (but love racquetball -- though I now have a new appreciation for that dead-ass squash ball: “small, hot, beating in bird-panic”). Game and match to Starnino on this one.
DUCKS ASLEEP ON GRASS
Can’t say too much or else this review will self-dest --
The rolling “b”s act as foreboding pulse. Another joy to read out loud.
VIRGINIA
A subtle, clever analogy on the conceiving, gestation, marketing, and ultimate discovery -- “the wind drags everything to pick up its scent” -- of a book of poems, disguised as an appropriate “making hay” experience. Wryly humorous and wistful.
PIMPINELLA
The death-bed scene is usually the kiss of death as a subject for poetry, inviting mawkish soldering by the poet/bedside sitter to his or her fading beloved. Starnino, wisely, as is frequently the case in This Way Out, opts instead for concrete substitution. The last recognition is painful (in experience, not poetic crafting), a psychic tattoo.
THE BUTTERFLIES I DREAMT IN CHILDHOOD ARE HERE
A worthy submission into the tradition-drenched study on the evanescence of beauty. Its fourteen lines might tempt one to stamp “sonnet” on it, and it’s true that the beginning of stanza three ushers in an effective turn, but it’s quickly shifted towards its dominant subject and mood. Besides, a more surprising turn exists at line seven, and I like that it’s structured as the stanza’s second line, increasing the jolt. No, I thought the poem led to a regular five-five-five line outlay, and the missing last line makes sense after “child’s eyes closed”.
THE STRANGEST THINGS
Preliminary comments on This Way Out’s third and final section, the eleven-poem sequence “The Strangest Things” (the title a phrase from W.C. Williams’ Kora In Hell), before dealing with the poem in a more global sense.
The individual poems in the sequence frame the overriding emotion in their titles -- “Puddle, Corner Jean Talon And Outremont”, “Roadkill, Unidentified, Hwy 401”, i.e. --, and place names serve to show the speaker coming across the object or sense impression accidentally, which then triggers that emotion.
Starnino departs severely from metaphor and image in “The Strangest Things”. “Weeping Willow, Parc Angrignon”, especially, is bogged down in abstractions and interiority. Cliches follow one another (“things taking a turn for the worse./I look myself hard in the eye”). Perhaps this is a knowing strategy to emphasize the similar emotional flatness of the speaker, but elsewhere I’ve stated that aesthetic effectiveness lessens, as well, when the temperature is set at low-and-steady. (Contrast similar moods in Lowell’s “A Severed Head”: “panted with calm inertia”.) That said, there are some tight, defiant surprises among the weeds: “What to make of a diminished thing/is anybody’s guess./I have enough/to be going on with/without needing to put on airs” from “Smell Of Something Bad, Kitchen” jabs Frost once again, this time dismissing “The Oven-Bird” ‘s stance (yes, I realize that canonical sonnet can be read many ways) of simultaneously grieving over, fetishizing, and making a strength of declining poetic powers and/or years. “Get up, stretch, take the air, my friends tell me./No thanks” (“Weeping Willow, Parc Angrignon”) further snuffs the emotional evasion. And particulars increase, with alacrity. Blasts such as “Hotheaded/hair-trigger", from “Loud TV From Next Door, Notre-Dame-de-Grace”, explain (though never apologize for) previous flat funk. I also like the ending of “For Sale Sign, Wilson Street, Notre-Dame-de-Grace”: “There was nothing more to be said/and we didn’t”. A perfect way to end that particular sub-poem. (Frost would have liked that: “Any fool can get into a poem, but it takes a poet to get out of one.”)
Much anguish and ink has been spilled over the confessional poem. I won’t add much to those poetics here except to note the obvious: it’s a dangerous tack, especially now, when the brilliant and seminal efforts of Lowell (misidentified as confessional) have led to a half-century (and still going strong, or weak, as it were) of self-indulgent embroidering. Starnino escapes the “look at me” nausea, but not, completely, the difficulties in emotional and aesthetic transposition necessary for a successful confession. And the sequence’s finale, “Hairline Wall Crack, Study, Parc Ex Flat”, puzzles me. Emotionally static, linguistically unadventurous, narratively unnecessary (after the aforementioned “nothing more to be said”. I interpreted that individually, as well), structurally confusing, it’s a limp ending to an otherwise stellar book.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Starnino’s always been concerned, and effective, with structured sound and emotional accuracy and depth. But in This Way Out, he’s further developed narrative and ideational skills. A force, now, on multiple poetic fronts, I hope for, and expect, further organic integration.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
On The Deck With Anne
Spent the day in the Big Smoke, back at twilight. My gal's out musicifying. Garbage out, then locked up in the shed, till takeaway. It's about that time the bears do their midnight smorgasbord raids. Cashew butter (for me) on toasted olive bread. On the deck with a tall-can of Tuborg, a Cuban Guantanamera Christales (tired of waiting for some couple's baby to be born), Anne Sexton, and my pink mini-whale iPod stuffed with Rory Gallagher, Eddie Hinton, Chan Marshall and co.
"Dead of a dark thing, John Holmes, you've been lost/"*
The white-haired semi-retired chap across the street is watering a plant. Four vehicles in the driveway, and it's quiet. Tupperware party, Baptist meeting, or three-generational in-dwelling? Across from him, two of the Catawampus Kids out the front door. The three-quarters blind teen held, caressed by her boyfriend, then both away on his double skateboard.
"If this is death and God is necessary let him be hidden/from the missionary, the well-wisher and the glad hand."
The strawberry leaves, a score of green cupped hands. The basil and japonica, from their separate pots, arch and touch like shy lovers. A mosquito, grey mote, draws vanishing hieroglyphics in the dusk. The last ground robin forges a multiple hop-and-stop on the side lawn, and Chrissie Hynde falls out my ear as I alert the bird, our behemoth cat Sabrina making a dash for the nature-toy. The black-letter outline is almost a uniform shadow on the page. A front porch light, beacon through the massive four-poster-boled fir branches, shines.
"John Holmes, cut from a single tree, lie heavy in her hold/and go down that river with the ivory, the copra and the gold."
*All quotations from Anne Sexton's "Somewhere In Africa".
"Dead of a dark thing, John Holmes, you've been lost/"*
The white-haired semi-retired chap across the street is watering a plant. Four vehicles in the driveway, and it's quiet. Tupperware party, Baptist meeting, or three-generational in-dwelling? Across from him, two of the Catawampus Kids out the front door. The three-quarters blind teen held, caressed by her boyfriend, then both away on his double skateboard.
"If this is death and God is necessary let him be hidden/from the missionary, the well-wisher and the glad hand."
The strawberry leaves, a score of green cupped hands. The basil and japonica, from their separate pots, arch and touch like shy lovers. A mosquito, grey mote, draws vanishing hieroglyphics in the dusk. The last ground robin forges a multiple hop-and-stop on the side lawn, and Chrissie Hynde falls out my ear as I alert the bird, our behemoth cat Sabrina making a dash for the nature-toy. The black-letter outline is almost a uniform shadow on the page. A front porch light, beacon through the massive four-poster-boled fir branches, shines.
"John Holmes, cut from a single tree, lie heavy in her hold/and go down that river with the ivory, the copra and the gold."
*All quotations from Anne Sexton's "Somewhere In Africa".
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