Monday Mailbag #7

Dear Tribal Hack:

Occasional poems seem to have fallen off a cliff in contemporary CanPo ever since the project book -- whether unified narrative thread or linked sequence -- became popular. Could you display one of your favourite occasional pieces?

-- Ivan Illitch



Dear Ivan:

You're right. And the reason occasional poems -- composition and estimation -- have been neglected has to do with the faulty conception that they're only occasionally warranted, or (worse) that they're slight (in effort and importance). This is snobbish (not to be confused with "elitism", which is an identifying badge of honour), and I herewith present an example, one of many such forays into the public art, by Rat Boone:



FOR FRANK BUMMERSMELT AND HIS NEW LAWN MOWER

In troubled times, Frank, when we're on our own,
when rats knock on the front door instead
of making furtive darts under the bed
to down dropped downers, dessicated dog bones,

it's good to know you're barbering the lawn
with a shiny red Deere, sitting like a Pope
on the plastic seat, singing in hope
that you'll knock over a startled rural fawn

then baptize its carcass with a wet wrench,
the soldered tool an envoy wand to announce
the end of Bambi idealism, that flounce-
fixture celluloid cartoon whose stench

of false innocence we smeared on on Sundays
on the go and whose image we discarded
when outdoor service reigned. We lorded
it over the dead and deathly. Frank, let us pray.

Monday Mailbag #6

Dear Tribal Hack:

What are some of your favourite slush pile similes?

-- Asa Signifier



Dear Asa:

"His disappointment was palpable as a wet egg foo yung entree slipping off the fork half an inch from his pie hole and landing on the cold and curled linoleum."

"The light permeated the meadow like a cobalt rainbow arc populated by sliding cherubim emitting diaphanous clues."

"The light permeated the meadow like an abandoned bride in the lobby of a Motel 6 showing her Pepsodent ivories to the fat, sleepy night clerk."



Dear Tribal Hack:

I work in an incredibly boring subset of the boring financial sector and unfortunately have to travel to a week-long conference where my head will be filled with abstractions, both numerical and human. I'm looking for intellectual diversion. Can you recommend a book of light-hearted, even zany, poetry as a necessary corrective?

-- Ida B. Free




Dear Ida:

Always a Reckoning, and other Poems, by Jimmy Carter.

Robin Skelton's IN THIS POEM I AM: SELECTED POETRY

Robin Skelton wrote more than one hundred books, including about thirty collections of poetry. Many people don't read that much in a lifetime. Many of those volumes were self-published as chapbooks or limited-edition releases, and other poems were distributed as broadsides, so much of his work must have been difficult to obtain and survey.

I found myself agreeing with many of Skelton's views in Memoirs Of A Literary Blockhead: the importance of lively poetry readings; anti-provincialism; imaginative administration ( oxymoron?). But I strongly disagree with his (and others') assertion that future critics and editors can, and should be able to, sort out the nuggets from the dirt. Even if that were possible (who has the time?), it's rather rude to expect someone or many someones to ingest a whale and spit back a few minnows (or in the case of a great poet, a freezer full of sockeye salmon). And of course, there are a lot of other thirty-plus-book authors on the go, so whale is frequently on the menu. So a tip of the hat to Harold Rhenisch for providing a remarkable postprandial buffet burp in editing from Skelton's bloated corpus.

I confess to previously dipping into the Vancouver Islander's verse in sporadic dabs, so it was fruitful to have a condensed collection spanning forty-one years. To note that Skelton is a poet of the interior (the soul, not the Chilcotin) is an understatement. He has depths to plumb when art meets experience: "We almost touch/but, swimmers pulled apart/by arbitrary tides,/are swept out on the night" (from "Night Poem, Vancouver Island"). Unfortunately, subtle movements of a soul are notoriously difficult to translate to a stranger via squiggly type. Many of the poems fade into the substratosphere when the inevitable abstract "someone", "solitude", "light", "time", "destiny", "death", "words", "thoughts", "world", "poems" or commonplace "stone", "tree", "sky", "cloud", "door" make some of their frequent visitations. And it's too bad. Because Skelton, when he wants to, can create, or recreate, a sharp and mesmerising tactile experience. Check out "Land Without Customs" and "A Ballad of Billy Barker". Still, and despite having influenced a run of West Coast poetry of aura over flora, fog over smog, I'd rather have those interior moods, however vague they may often be, than the pretentious, emotion-starved lines from those of the Vancouver academic set.

Robin Skelton's MEMOIRS OF A LITERARY BLOCKHEAD

This memoir was published in 1988, nine years before Robin Skelton's death. It's always a pleasure to read a worthy personal retrospective when the author has the patience and lack of ego to delay a self-starring script long enough to have something to say over a wide life arc. And Memoirs Of A Literary Blockhead is fascinated with others as much as, or more than, the author. Skelton was a natural raconteur, his casual anecdotes reminiscent of a good-natured ear-bender at a pub who's just as concerned and successful at being interesting -- at garnering various reactions -- as he is in entertaining himself. His comic timing is superb, his British wit biting and dry. Meetings with Robert Graves and Ezra Pound punctuate the memories, but there are also delightful excursions into the lunacy of poetry readings where assorted "puddings" (Skelton's favourite word for academic dullards or prole dilletantes) congregate, full portraits of those close to him (with warts but also love), and just enough gossip to reveal surprising peculiarities of well-regarded artists while not so much as to turn those stories into cheap exposition. Skelton wore many hats -- art critic, poetry reviewer, poet, translator, teacher, editor, publisher, scholar -- but he wanted to be remembered primarily for his poetry. More on that in my next post.

Monday Mailbag #5

Dear Tribal Hack:

The Olympic Games have been a bloated production for decades. Shouldn't there be alternative, small-scale fun games with peculiar-to-the-region contests hosted at the same time? Surely there'd be interest in organizing and attending them. And for a tie-in to poetry, why not a puncturing award-bestower for quirky or non-promoted poems/books?

-- Shirley Puzzled



Dear Shirley:

Great ideas! Actually, the former just completed its inaugural tungsten-clusters-in-a-brooch festooned medal ceremonies. Not many knew of the full slate of events since NBC didn't score us any multiple-sawbucks for advertising. But competitors were fierce, and this is my roundabout way to apologize for the late mailbag posting -- I just returned from Vancouver where I collected my top-porch tungsten for indoors elbow-bending. This will be a staple of the summer and winter Soul Limbics, the latter season a last-minute add-on with ice cubes complicating the athletic machinations.

As for a poetry parallel, I'll be organizing an award frenzy once a year, in October, as soon as sponsorship from Staples, Guinness, and Tylenol come through. Criteria for making it onto the short list will include incorporating, seamlessly, the words "marsupial" and "flaming" into the deathless text. More info at a later date.

Katia Grubisic's WHAT IF RED RAN OUT

Katia Grubisic's initial collection, What if red ran out, reminds me of the work of Karen Solie, Ken Babstock (image, allusion, overview), and several other contemporary Canadian poets. Heady comparisons, but it can work against one, as well. The Banff Centre -- amongst other people and organizations -- is thanked in the postscript, and a derivative feel, if not an outright workshop-fretted editing process, prevails. It's to Grubisic's credit that invention frequently overcomes the well-worn path, if we can posit an anxiety of influence towards writers only a decade into their art: "[T]his one hewed out a burr,/between a reed and a bittern,/the rasping of wheat and the wear/of a rubber belt in the heart/of a machine" ("Raven on the Watertower") is a finely worked rhythm. But invention without control is like a dream -- sometimes vivid, but also disconnected, and in danger of evaporating. And even the inventive images can be blinded by preciosity, as in this from the closing "To take away, or be slowly taken": "I revert/to that night, closer to its ancient glittering eye, when I tried/to resuscitate the dark's ancestral smell." This is synesthesia on performance-dulling drugs. As one honouring concrete detail, Grubisic shines. In this vein, check out "Strawberry Jam" and "Prelude to Jumping in the River". The best poem in the book is "Paradise, Dam, North Shore", where action is marvelously tied to thought in a surprisingly deft late metaphor.

Monday Mailbag #4

Dear Tribal Hack:

I hear poets constantly praised for nuance of meaning. But is it just a covering virtue for not knowing what the behaysooz they're talking about?

-- Frieda Illusion

Dear Frieda:

Frieda, the audacity! Don't you know that those deeper meanings, anti-meanings, no-meanings, multiple meanings, relative meanings, purposely confused and confusing meanings are only opened up when you've tiptoed through the minefield of French theory? Failing that, every poet has his or her own mythological geometry. There's more to the world than is contained in your philosophy, etc .... Except when it's the poet's.



Dear Tribal Hack:

I'm an established Canadian poet who's been reading on the circuit for decades. Lately I've noted a disturbing trend taking root from Victoria to St. John's, so it's not just a local fad. Hecklers are more frequent, but rather than direct engagement, the agitator will cough loudly and then hold up impeccably crafted calligraphy of popular retro bumper sticker and button fare: "Vote For Nixon!"; "Arms Are For Hugging"; "Free Willy". What's their real message? And what can I do about it?

-- Frank Lee Miffed

Dear Frank Lee:

Who cares about the intent? Don't let them mess with your head. Just like rock stars responding to audience suggestions, treat them like sincere requests spontaneously answered. Before your next gig, construct a few hundred poems, each bearing the title of the most popular slogans you've encountered. Honour the attitudes behind the several words. Should be fun. Here's one example to give you a feel for it.



MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR

Love, the clear and splendrous thing,
or so it goes, a wedding ring
or musical bed the seal
to the cynic's "let's make a deal".

But love is a deal, too, my friend,
more complex than a battlefield end.
In fact, that field can fester
with sly, self-conscious gestures.

Better to leave love to the brave,
those who rout short circuits, and rave
about your ideals to the pews
populated by new age crews.