I understand that Quill & Quire is in the business of germinating rubles, though it's fascinating to watch the constant heavy-footed hopscotch hops to both sides of the line bifurcating the boxes marked "art" and "commerce".
In the critical section, there've been many thoughtful book reviews over the years, more impressive for their coherence and intelligence within a space not much larger than a Christmas Seal.
Then we have the other side of the ruble (or to be fair to struggling book resources in Canada, the other side of the kopeck) where the philosophy of Texas prevails ("big is best"). In their Quillcast section, readers and listeners were beneficiaries of a well-done interview with Clarke Blaise upon the author's release of The Meagre Tarmac in which a thoughtful career retrospective backgrounded talk of this latest volume. Two podcasts later, and it's Steve Rubin, prominent publisher of several "too big to fail" conglomerates since 1984 (unavoidable symbolic overtones, though Aldous Huxley made a much better prognosticator than did Orwell) gushing in self-love over his power-point primer in how he's shepherded success, success measured only by the cash register's ring and the amazonian cart-bar.
Look, I get it. Every business wants to do well. And I define business here in much broader terms than Quill & Quire or Bantam Doubleday Dell International Incorporated LLC MegaResource Cloud Tablet MultiFocus Emporium. A single person -- an author -- is a business, as well, at times. But can anyone other than a Rubin-sympatico focus on money, exclusively, at the expense of creative excitement? Why, yes, many can. Look up a few of the wildly popular personal blogs that have popped up like bad mushrooms the past year in the wake of the spike in self-publishing sales juiced by Kindle and author-friendly terms from Amazon. I won't name them since I don't want to bolster any traffic to those sites, but they of course get a lot of traffic (including comment stream chatter) because books hold more interest for those in the writing biz as truncated silver than as art, more interest not just for the blockbuster Rubins and enabling Quill & Quires, but, more importantly and more ominously, for authors themselves.
Maybe some rag should do a story on that. Oh, wait. Sponsors. Which brings us back across the line to creative content. Pleasing two masters, extra birds in the bush .... I'm sure you can think of your own symbols.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
Sachiko Murakami's Rebuild
(Warning to the reader: this review skips over many of the poems, burrows into a few, veers off course towards the end, and departs with a poorly-lived-in feeling. But it's all about matching form to content. It's all good. Did Martha Stewart, that hero of the homesteader, with or without iron leggings, coin that?).
Having enjoyed (if that's the right word) Sachiko Murakami's first book of poetry, The Invisibility Exhibit, I looked forward to her follow-up, 2011's Rebuild. The relentlessness, the grim and gathering fury and depression of the former work was understandable given the horrific subject matter. And the author juxtaposed the historical nightmare with a fictional mother and daughter narrative which took themes from both spheres and added layers to both. The curious and ironic problem with Rebuild, however, is that the poems remain as excavations, no matter how much they're driven by social rage. This might be the point, but it's a dangerous ploy to evoke the moods and tones of alienation, confusion, rootlessness, erasure as a form-and-content union since it leaves behind the same feelings one gets after passing a construction site on a busy street: annoyance and distraction.
Distraction, especially. I had a hard time concentrating on quite a few of the poems. And I'm a careful reader. The postmodern deletions in variations of first efforts were poor: the idea is obvious, and though a few puns and some acerbic tweaking of tone emerged from the rewrites, after one has read them once -- and the "a ha" moment has sunk in -- it's hard to imagine returning to them again. It's like buying CDs of comedy acts. What's the point? And the Vancouver Special poems: blocklike prose settings, yes. That makes visual sense. But why the three-quarters blank page? The poems should have been stuffed against, or even across, the margins, top and bottom and sides.
I have a feeling this may otherwise become an even lengthier review, so I want to move to the content because there's a lot to talk about here. In my review (elsewhere) of Murakami's The Invisibility Exhibit, I praised much in the book, but had problems with political stances that left much out, and misrepresented much of what was included. Rebuild is no different, and the problems run deeper since the themes -- spiritless speculation; conformity to social rootlessness; aesthetic disregard; ownership vs stewardship; historical amnesia; motion as meaning; building corporations as spiritual weathervanes and dispensers -- are more endemic, tangled, inclusive, and nuanced. Murakami's views, however, don't add anything to what we've heard by a thousand-and-one previous city planners with a conscience. This could have been a terrific opportunity because, yes, the contemporary mania and chicanery in the real estate bubble that is Vancouver cries out for poetic blast and blasphemy. But the poems are uninhabited (again, this could be the point, but I disagree with it -- more on that in a bit) and idea-driven to convince by bald assertion. James Howard Kunstler, in one of his diatribes against architects in some city in the U.S., showed to an audience a slide pic of a mammoth block-long stone slab aggressively pushing against the sidewalk, and imagined how it came about. His conclusion was that a last-minute brainstorming session ended up with a who-cares: "Fuck it! Let's just throw this at them." What I wanted was more in that line: specific examples, carefully drawn, involving specific people; a narrative that implicates by historical and financial nuance and drama. (Many blast reviewers when they castigate a book for what it's not about, rather than what's there, but if that line of thought is followed to its natural conclusion, we'd have to dismiss sins of omission, faulty tone, and hasty conclusions, amongst other issues.) But we are encountered instead, page after page, with ideological predictability based on narrow reportage from a disembodied voice.
It's that narrowness that irks. If Hamlet lived another four hundred twenty years, and crossed an ocean and continent, he may have declared, "there are more things in Vancouver than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Murakami's Vancouver is a constricted blip in time. She rarely gets out of downtown/Yaletown, save for a few excursions to the East Side to opine on Vancouver Specials (that peculiar blocky, lot-hogging design). "A piece of grass, a peak, a peek" (from "Tower")? Sure, if you live in a particularly crapulous shoehorn special in the outskirts of Yaletown. Most, though, even in that neighbourhood, enjoy, if not oceanic vistas, at least a decent partial panorama of False Creek, street life, and/or the North Shore Mountains. I know. I lived there for twelve years (and all over Vancouver for half a century). "A piece of grass", though, suggests more than just a debased living space. Nature is denuded, shrunk, tamed, and eventually erased. It's hard to get too enthused over Murakami's directions, though, because there is zero counterbalancing throughout the collection. This is understandable in her first book of poems, when a shift to a lighter tone would have been not only impertinent but egregiously insensitive. Here, though, the destruction/rebuilding calls for quick shifts, and it also allows greater space, made possible by all that levelled ground, for longer reverie, humorous mockery, and different perspectives. But the tone is just as bleak.
So let's focus on her focus of geography: Yaletown. For the past decade plus, it's undergone the most dramatic facelift (or faceplant, if you're in the Murakami camp) of any city section in North America. The third stanza of "Ocean Views" begins, "If we are to be ruined by development,/let the rubble at least be tidy". First off, who's "we"? The general populace? The macro (worldwide) community? The narrator's friends? This indefinite pronoun is meant to be inclusive, or ambiguous, or an obvious assumption disguised as matter-of-fact. The "rubble" is a fact of any building torn down to make another. Is this rubble lasting? Of course not. Is it unseemly? Sure, for those gawping at ocean vistas, though I detect nothing but scorn for those who'd pay a premium for such an opportunity. Is the rubble symbolic of the destruction of traditional ways of life in which the new is automatically insipid or evil? Perhaps we're getting close. Ah, why be coy. The volume proceeds thusly and anon. Whites displaced First Nations who are in turn being displaced by Chinese and Hong Kong residents who in turn will be displaced by an as yet unknown race from another part of the world. C'est la vie. But if we're gonna stroll down that long and serpentine boulevard, we'd better be prepared to describe what we see. A further "Tower" variation includes, "Empty suites never inhabited/held safe for future profits". Well, yes and no. Yes, speculation is rampant as it is in any bubble economy and precinct. But "future profit" isn't the only reason. A major incentive for rich Far East buyers comes from their plan to move here when the shit hits the fan in their own countries and/or retirement beckons. In other words, not a vacant community, but a delayed one. And of course, the streets (and buildings) are choc-a-bloc with people, anyway ("bustling" is the usual term), so once again appearances bump up against facts and get bruised. And we have this notion of "traditional" being automatically sacrosanct. But Murakami was born in Vancouver, and should know what was on the long Seymour corridor before the condos went up. I used to walk that street often (still do, occasionally). Torn down were quite a few smelly, low tech autobody shops (you know, relatives of the rubble family), an ancient, run down pool hall notable for pot distribution (not a hardware store offshoot) and crappy tables, and used office furniture stores. But if people have the impertinence to want to move downtown, I suppose we have to bulldoze these heritage buildings and make way for the rabble (I mean rubble). Speaking of people wanting to move downtown, this should be encouraged, and thanks to the progressive planners and alderpersons (from the right and left), it's become a reality. Think of the reverse. And that's a reality in many U.S, cities. Hollowed-out Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago, where even the cops don't brave going into the downtown core. What precipitated that? Suburban build-out based on commercialized dreams and fantasies, incentivized, of course, and bulldozing heritage buildings (not declining businesses) to replace them with nothing but boarded-up facades and graffiti.
But now the boulevard gets even wider. Because now all those people -- all rootless, all amnesiac, no doubt, and superficial -- have to cohabit and "communalize", "bond", and congregate in what could have been .... well, again, we're not enlightened as to a positive alternative, so let's just look at the bigger, specific picture. "To develop; to encroach; to choke", from "Work In Progress" once again points the finger at the developers and the people who buy or rent their products. The next line is "To be a connoisseur of pebble and branch and sushi". Ah, you see, it's not just people with poor taste in architecture, it's those with money. Imagine, those with money wanting to buy or rent an apartment! And the former are always the latter. The moneyed riff-raff. In another poem, it's a given that the realtor's dream of the perfect lifestyle is synonymous with that of the prospective buyer. What the specifics of this dream are is not delineated, possibly because that would involve an actual character based on nuance and idiosyncrasy. A living person, then. But we're given, repeatedly, this benign and crass class warfare. The low-cost renters are being squeezed out, it's true. To some extent, anyway. There are still quite a few halfway house shelters and rentals, community house buildings, and small low-end bachelor pads for the working poor. But if there's a new denizen ("inhabitants", "tenants", "citizens" to use Murakami's derisive terms) inside the condo, it's, I suppose, at the expense of a homeless man outside the swept, circular condo piazza. Why else the rage?
And the boulevard goes down a side street where it enters upon a world apparently unknown or at least unconsidered by our guide. I'm talking of the slightly more important theme of the twin horrors of overpopulation and fossil fuel depletion. Because there are lotsa people about, and because lots of them want to live in Vancouver (all of them superficial, lotus-eatering, art-hating, sushi-scarfing, consumer-crazy athletic troglodytes), it does no good to simply say "full up, no entry". Alas, we live in a democracy, a soft one, no doubt, but a democracy all the same, and so we must allow for the free transport of people within our country. It's wonderful that the billionaire Li-Ka Shing had the care and vision, and that the councillors and planners had the desire, to fashion and complete the post-Expo North False Creek redevelopment. Because living in a condo or apartment in a community with other condo dwellers in a relatively small space, among other benefits too numerous to mention without going into many more essays, leaves a much smaller energy deficit than does living in a detached dwelling that some of the thumbs-up reviewers of this book inhabit (not that there's anything wrong with that choice, and I'm sure they're not all ostentatious spenders -- I'm just sayin'). Water usage, electricity, garbage disposal, transportation: these are some of the issues that can be fairly stacked up against carefree sushi-eating and vista-gaping, while still holding their own.
But we leave the confining philistinism (bookstores disappear downtown, too, Murakami laments, though there are more good bookstores downtown than in any other concentrated community in the lower mainland), the rubble, and the small patches of grass for the Vancouver Specials of the East End. "Are you compatible with the other homes on the street?" begins "The Agreement Agreement". It's a satire on the conformist drones of the urban home owner, a kind of reverse welcome wagon. But the owners of Vancouver Specials are also pummelled for their poor taste in most every other poem in this section, and the irony is apparently missed. (Vancouver Specials have become more prominent, but they would still be the receiving party in the "behave, and present your home in accordance with our wishes" exchange.) And there are so many other houses on that block, or on many other blocks. We don't get to travel on those streets. So take my hand, gentle reader, and let me guide you through some other areas of town that don't get noted because they don't afford the easy ideological buzz so beloved in circles of the Kootenay School of Writing, where every private enterprising home owner is a capitalist stooge. (For the record, I was a dependent, then a renter, in Vancouver, so I'm certainly not protecting any front yard turf behind kitschy lions.)
I, son of a truck driver and steel worker, walked to high school in 1969, and met, on the way, my friend, the son of a TV repairman (O! quaint career), then to another friend (son of a corner grocer), then to another friend (son of a mechanic), then to another friend (can't remember the dad's occupation), where we eventually hit the halls. Killarney is a big school, encompassing a large district, and we collided with other kids from the Fraserview area, sons of dentists, accountants, teachers, and lawyers. I liked some of those fellow students, but I felt more comfortable with Boris, Kelvin, Frank and others. Nothing to do with racial preferences. The three aforementioned friends were Russian, Chinese, and Italian, respectively, and the middle-class kids to our working-class crew were all Whiter than fridges, long-necked Brits with manners and goals. Boring kids, mostly. Stay-at-homes. Bereft of girl friends and girlfriends. Unfunny. (Except for Geoff.) During elementary school and high school, close friends included Fijians (dad was a barber) and Sikhs (widowed mother), Japanese (dad was a fisherman) and Portuguese (dad was a cabbie, I believe), and uncouth Scots pugs (not the dog, and dad worked in a meat-packing plant). I've detoured to this racial and class-infested forest because ... well, 'cuz I'm the guide and I like exploring. But there's a broader point. Eventually, I made peace with those from a different economic sphere. Often, our differences in personality and aspirations either dovetailed or at least lessened. Some working-class acquaintances became shitheads, or maybe they always were, only now personalities didn't hinge on cultural quirks, but went much deeper. Initially idealistic in the Murakami fashion, I set out simplistic sides. And those on the other side of the street were those who not only had money but who obsessed about and desired it. But for every one of those greedy or undeserving rich kids turned insensitive rich adults, there were and are many more rich or moderately well-off adults who have the same problems -- the important ones, spiritual and physical and emotional -- that afflict us all and that aren't ameliorated by exclusive bribes and secret deals. Travelling to the rich West Side, we come to the gates of a Shaughnessy mansion where old money is still propped up in the form of an 80 year-old woman living off a rapidly draining nest egg, and who short-changes the cabbie for a six buck ride. That doesn't infiltrate the consciences of readers of The Province "news"paper. Neither does the alcoholic whose money's been squandered on whiskey in even older moneyed Dunbar, community of silent rectitude, or so its thought (if anyone other than its residents even thinks about it). Conversely, we re-enter the East Side where a man getting out of his pick-up on Sophia Street ascends his dilapidated steps in his homely neighbourhood, plumber of thirty years, wealthy and sane.
Rebuild should have been rebuilt from the ground up. It's simplistic and often false, more so than the creek it makes facile wordplay with. And its tone is needlessly depressing. If The Invisibility Exhibit's colours were red and black, Rebuild's are brown and grey. Those tones are duly noted. But -- and you wouldn't know it from the book -- Vancouver is a colourful city. And I'm not talking about the trees, the mountains, and the ocean.
Having enjoyed (if that's the right word) Sachiko Murakami's first book of poetry, The Invisibility Exhibit, I looked forward to her follow-up, 2011's Rebuild. The relentlessness, the grim and gathering fury and depression of the former work was understandable given the horrific subject matter. And the author juxtaposed the historical nightmare with a fictional mother and daughter narrative which took themes from both spheres and added layers to both. The curious and ironic problem with Rebuild, however, is that the poems remain as excavations, no matter how much they're driven by social rage. This might be the point, but it's a dangerous ploy to evoke the moods and tones of alienation, confusion, rootlessness, erasure as a form-and-content union since it leaves behind the same feelings one gets after passing a construction site on a busy street: annoyance and distraction.
Distraction, especially. I had a hard time concentrating on quite a few of the poems. And I'm a careful reader. The postmodern deletions in variations of first efforts were poor: the idea is obvious, and though a few puns and some acerbic tweaking of tone emerged from the rewrites, after one has read them once -- and the "a ha" moment has sunk in -- it's hard to imagine returning to them again. It's like buying CDs of comedy acts. What's the point? And the Vancouver Special poems: blocklike prose settings, yes. That makes visual sense. But why the three-quarters blank page? The poems should have been stuffed against, or even across, the margins, top and bottom and sides.
I have a feeling this may otherwise become an even lengthier review, so I want to move to the content because there's a lot to talk about here. In my review (elsewhere) of Murakami's The Invisibility Exhibit, I praised much in the book, but had problems with political stances that left much out, and misrepresented much of what was included. Rebuild is no different, and the problems run deeper since the themes -- spiritless speculation; conformity to social rootlessness; aesthetic disregard; ownership vs stewardship; historical amnesia; motion as meaning; building corporations as spiritual weathervanes and dispensers -- are more endemic, tangled, inclusive, and nuanced. Murakami's views, however, don't add anything to what we've heard by a thousand-and-one previous city planners with a conscience. This could have been a terrific opportunity because, yes, the contemporary mania and chicanery in the real estate bubble that is Vancouver cries out for poetic blast and blasphemy. But the poems are uninhabited (again, this could be the point, but I disagree with it -- more on that in a bit) and idea-driven to convince by bald assertion. James Howard Kunstler, in one of his diatribes against architects in some city in the U.S., showed to an audience a slide pic of a mammoth block-long stone slab aggressively pushing against the sidewalk, and imagined how it came about. His conclusion was that a last-minute brainstorming session ended up with a who-cares: "Fuck it! Let's just throw this at them." What I wanted was more in that line: specific examples, carefully drawn, involving specific people; a narrative that implicates by historical and financial nuance and drama. (Many blast reviewers when they castigate a book for what it's not about, rather than what's there, but if that line of thought is followed to its natural conclusion, we'd have to dismiss sins of omission, faulty tone, and hasty conclusions, amongst other issues.) But we are encountered instead, page after page, with ideological predictability based on narrow reportage from a disembodied voice.
It's that narrowness that irks. If Hamlet lived another four hundred twenty years, and crossed an ocean and continent, he may have declared, "there are more things in Vancouver than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Murakami's Vancouver is a constricted blip in time. She rarely gets out of downtown/Yaletown, save for a few excursions to the East Side to opine on Vancouver Specials (that peculiar blocky, lot-hogging design). "A piece of grass, a peak, a peek" (from "Tower")? Sure, if you live in a particularly crapulous shoehorn special in the outskirts of Yaletown. Most, though, even in that neighbourhood, enjoy, if not oceanic vistas, at least a decent partial panorama of False Creek, street life, and/or the North Shore Mountains. I know. I lived there for twelve years (and all over Vancouver for half a century). "A piece of grass", though, suggests more than just a debased living space. Nature is denuded, shrunk, tamed, and eventually erased. It's hard to get too enthused over Murakami's directions, though, because there is zero counterbalancing throughout the collection. This is understandable in her first book of poems, when a shift to a lighter tone would have been not only impertinent but egregiously insensitive. Here, though, the destruction/rebuilding calls for quick shifts, and it also allows greater space, made possible by all that levelled ground, for longer reverie, humorous mockery, and different perspectives. But the tone is just as bleak.
So let's focus on her focus of geography: Yaletown. For the past decade plus, it's undergone the most dramatic facelift (or faceplant, if you're in the Murakami camp) of any city section in North America. The third stanza of "Ocean Views" begins, "If we are to be ruined by development,/let the rubble at least be tidy". First off, who's "we"? The general populace? The macro (worldwide) community? The narrator's friends? This indefinite pronoun is meant to be inclusive, or ambiguous, or an obvious assumption disguised as matter-of-fact. The "rubble" is a fact of any building torn down to make another. Is this rubble lasting? Of course not. Is it unseemly? Sure, for those gawping at ocean vistas, though I detect nothing but scorn for those who'd pay a premium for such an opportunity. Is the rubble symbolic of the destruction of traditional ways of life in which the new is automatically insipid or evil? Perhaps we're getting close. Ah, why be coy. The volume proceeds thusly and anon. Whites displaced First Nations who are in turn being displaced by Chinese and Hong Kong residents who in turn will be displaced by an as yet unknown race from another part of the world. C'est la vie. But if we're gonna stroll down that long and serpentine boulevard, we'd better be prepared to describe what we see. A further "Tower" variation includes, "Empty suites never inhabited/held safe for future profits". Well, yes and no. Yes, speculation is rampant as it is in any bubble economy and precinct. But "future profit" isn't the only reason. A major incentive for rich Far East buyers comes from their plan to move here when the shit hits the fan in their own countries and/or retirement beckons. In other words, not a vacant community, but a delayed one. And of course, the streets (and buildings) are choc-a-bloc with people, anyway ("bustling" is the usual term), so once again appearances bump up against facts and get bruised. And we have this notion of "traditional" being automatically sacrosanct. But Murakami was born in Vancouver, and should know what was on the long Seymour corridor before the condos went up. I used to walk that street often (still do, occasionally). Torn down were quite a few smelly, low tech autobody shops (you know, relatives of the rubble family), an ancient, run down pool hall notable for pot distribution (not a hardware store offshoot) and crappy tables, and used office furniture stores. But if people have the impertinence to want to move downtown, I suppose we have to bulldoze these heritage buildings and make way for the rabble (I mean rubble). Speaking of people wanting to move downtown, this should be encouraged, and thanks to the progressive planners and alderpersons (from the right and left), it's become a reality. Think of the reverse. And that's a reality in many U.S, cities. Hollowed-out Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago, where even the cops don't brave going into the downtown core. What precipitated that? Suburban build-out based on commercialized dreams and fantasies, incentivized, of course, and bulldozing heritage buildings (not declining businesses) to replace them with nothing but boarded-up facades and graffiti.
But now the boulevard gets even wider. Because now all those people -- all rootless, all amnesiac, no doubt, and superficial -- have to cohabit and "communalize", "bond", and congregate in what could have been .... well, again, we're not enlightened as to a positive alternative, so let's just look at the bigger, specific picture. "To develop; to encroach; to choke", from "Work In Progress" once again points the finger at the developers and the people who buy or rent their products. The next line is "To be a connoisseur of pebble and branch and sushi". Ah, you see, it's not just people with poor taste in architecture, it's those with money. Imagine, those with money wanting to buy or rent an apartment! And the former are always the latter. The moneyed riff-raff. In another poem, it's a given that the realtor's dream of the perfect lifestyle is synonymous with that of the prospective buyer. What the specifics of this dream are is not delineated, possibly because that would involve an actual character based on nuance and idiosyncrasy. A living person, then. But we're given, repeatedly, this benign and crass class warfare. The low-cost renters are being squeezed out, it's true. To some extent, anyway. There are still quite a few halfway house shelters and rentals, community house buildings, and small low-end bachelor pads for the working poor. But if there's a new denizen ("inhabitants", "tenants", "citizens" to use Murakami's derisive terms) inside the condo, it's, I suppose, at the expense of a homeless man outside the swept, circular condo piazza. Why else the rage?
And the boulevard goes down a side street where it enters upon a world apparently unknown or at least unconsidered by our guide. I'm talking of the slightly more important theme of the twin horrors of overpopulation and fossil fuel depletion. Because there are lotsa people about, and because lots of them want to live in Vancouver (all of them superficial, lotus-eatering, art-hating, sushi-scarfing, consumer-crazy athletic troglodytes), it does no good to simply say "full up, no entry". Alas, we live in a democracy, a soft one, no doubt, but a democracy all the same, and so we must allow for the free transport of people within our country. It's wonderful that the billionaire Li-Ka Shing had the care and vision, and that the councillors and planners had the desire, to fashion and complete the post-Expo North False Creek redevelopment. Because living in a condo or apartment in a community with other condo dwellers in a relatively small space, among other benefits too numerous to mention without going into many more essays, leaves a much smaller energy deficit than does living in a detached dwelling that some of the thumbs-up reviewers of this book inhabit (not that there's anything wrong with that choice, and I'm sure they're not all ostentatious spenders -- I'm just sayin'). Water usage, electricity, garbage disposal, transportation: these are some of the issues that can be fairly stacked up against carefree sushi-eating and vista-gaping, while still holding their own.
But we leave the confining philistinism (bookstores disappear downtown, too, Murakami laments, though there are more good bookstores downtown than in any other concentrated community in the lower mainland), the rubble, and the small patches of grass for the Vancouver Specials of the East End. "Are you compatible with the other homes on the street?" begins "The Agreement Agreement". It's a satire on the conformist drones of the urban home owner, a kind of reverse welcome wagon. But the owners of Vancouver Specials are also pummelled for their poor taste in most every other poem in this section, and the irony is apparently missed. (Vancouver Specials have become more prominent, but they would still be the receiving party in the "behave, and present your home in accordance with our wishes" exchange.) And there are so many other houses on that block, or on many other blocks. We don't get to travel on those streets. So take my hand, gentle reader, and let me guide you through some other areas of town that don't get noted because they don't afford the easy ideological buzz so beloved in circles of the Kootenay School of Writing, where every private enterprising home owner is a capitalist stooge. (For the record, I was a dependent, then a renter, in Vancouver, so I'm certainly not protecting any front yard turf behind kitschy lions.)
I, son of a truck driver and steel worker, walked to high school in 1969, and met, on the way, my friend, the son of a TV repairman (O! quaint career), then to another friend (son of a corner grocer), then to another friend (son of a mechanic), then to another friend (can't remember the dad's occupation), where we eventually hit the halls. Killarney is a big school, encompassing a large district, and we collided with other kids from the Fraserview area, sons of dentists, accountants, teachers, and lawyers. I liked some of those fellow students, but I felt more comfortable with Boris, Kelvin, Frank and others. Nothing to do with racial preferences. The three aforementioned friends were Russian, Chinese, and Italian, respectively, and the middle-class kids to our working-class crew were all Whiter than fridges, long-necked Brits with manners and goals. Boring kids, mostly. Stay-at-homes. Bereft of girl friends and girlfriends. Unfunny. (Except for Geoff.) During elementary school and high school, close friends included Fijians (dad was a barber) and Sikhs (widowed mother), Japanese (dad was a fisherman) and Portuguese (dad was a cabbie, I believe), and uncouth Scots pugs (not the dog, and dad worked in a meat-packing plant). I've detoured to this racial and class-infested forest because ... well, 'cuz I'm the guide and I like exploring. But there's a broader point. Eventually, I made peace with those from a different economic sphere. Often, our differences in personality and aspirations either dovetailed or at least lessened. Some working-class acquaintances became shitheads, or maybe they always were, only now personalities didn't hinge on cultural quirks, but went much deeper. Initially idealistic in the Murakami fashion, I set out simplistic sides. And those on the other side of the street were those who not only had money but who obsessed about and desired it. But for every one of those greedy or undeserving rich kids turned insensitive rich adults, there were and are many more rich or moderately well-off adults who have the same problems -- the important ones, spiritual and physical and emotional -- that afflict us all and that aren't ameliorated by exclusive bribes and secret deals. Travelling to the rich West Side, we come to the gates of a Shaughnessy mansion where old money is still propped up in the form of an 80 year-old woman living off a rapidly draining nest egg, and who short-changes the cabbie for a six buck ride. That doesn't infiltrate the consciences of readers of The Province "news"paper. Neither does the alcoholic whose money's been squandered on whiskey in even older moneyed Dunbar, community of silent rectitude, or so its thought (if anyone other than its residents even thinks about it). Conversely, we re-enter the East Side where a man getting out of his pick-up on Sophia Street ascends his dilapidated steps in his homely neighbourhood, plumber of thirty years, wealthy and sane.
Rebuild should have been rebuilt from the ground up. It's simplistic and often false, more so than the creek it makes facile wordplay with. And its tone is needlessly depressing. If The Invisibility Exhibit's colours were red and black, Rebuild's are brown and grey. Those tones are duly noted. But -- and you wouldn't know it from the book -- Vancouver is a colourful city. And I'm not talking about the trees, the mountains, and the ocean.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
My Favourite Books of 2011
Sticking with last year's approach, these are my favourite five books in any genre from 2011.
1) Grant Buday, White Lung (1999). The title derives from the occupational hazards inherent in working at a mass-production bakery. Buday is a severely underplugged veteran novelist, short story writer, travel essayist, and (most recently) memoirist, and here, in the former capacity, he penned an honest, emotionally versatile, complex tale of class necessity, subterfuge, and plans both thwarted and promising. Notice I didn't frame it "working class". Buday is observant, intellectually honest, and enlightening in turning the searchlight on characters from the bottom "up": the mentally challenged friend and foil of the protagonist who can't get off graveyard shift even after acquiring decades of seniority; the "outsider" who takes the job for quick cash but who splurges on inessentials through credit cards; the main character who dreams of starting his own bakery but whose inertia diminishes his future, both emotionally and financially; the floor boss whose comically "romantic" episodes weave between an equally impotent job-related revenge; the supervisor whose plodding professionalism and career cautiousness is sympathetic to the reader yet overlooked and derided by workers both under and over his level, as well as his wife; the site manager who's caught between the dictates of the owners and Central Canadian bosses, and the workers set to strike; a director whose oily cynicism is part of his spiritual make-up, and not a job description. But as page-turning a story as Buday can tell, the beauty is in the details. The characters are humourously and dramatically idiosyncratic, but in addition, the description of local detail is gritty and aesthetically creative, and the set pieces are unforgettable in tone and execution (the graveyard shift foreman calmly looking up to a passing neighbour while trapped under his carport door is terrifically dry in its humour, yet simultaneously sad in its transformative suggestion). The ending of the novel is superb, and widens the contrast between the two friends at the story's heart.
2) Martin Amis, Money (1984). This was the fifth (and best) Amis novel I've read. Extravagantly creative and consistently vibrant, it's tighter than The Information, more mature than Success, more realized than the (at times) apocalyptic London Fields, and more coherent than the clever yet problematically structured Time's Arrow. Plenty of philosophical digressions, which in a novel I love, and here they're tied to the first-person obsessions, and make sense in the back-and-forth with the narrative. Too many hilarious characters to outline in a short review, and too many imaginative set pieces, but one stand out episode was the tennis match between the physically catastrophic John Self and the athletically efficient Fielding Goodney. Money is humour at its best: it works on its base entertainment level while also driving huge non-comedic daggers into the soft dough of hard-assed greed.
3) Grant Buday, Monday Night Man (1995). A collection of loosely-linked short stories, Buday created three unforgettable characters in the financially and socially challenged friends who gamble, whore, and drink their way through existential exasperation. This is courageous humour, wild and low, but there're also moments of heartbreaking pathos (the story set in the Patricia Hotel) and dramatic, even quiet, counterpoint. Buday never forces a laugh at the expense of the characters. Actions, no matter how bizarre and entertainment-oriented, have consequences, and it's a grim reminder that we can sympathize with those we initially dismiss or make fun of.
4) D. G. Jones, The Stream Exposed With All Its Stones (2010). This is a poetry Collected, though some poems from Jones' lengthy opus have been excised, either through editorial choice or authorial pruning. It doesn't surprise me that several Canadian postmodernists have applauded the poetry of Jones since one of his poetic obsessions is with the creative act itself. His concern for a wide-ranging aesthetic for and to nature, art, and thought is generous, and not solipsistic. A delightful contrast exists throughout Jones' career score in his unironic handling of heavyweight themes (sex, death) with a stylistically light touch. Though I often have a distaste for recurring tropes in a poet's particular volume, I actually thrill to repetitions in variations when adroitly handled. "Sun" and "snow" are two of those unassuming emblems. And, in "Little Night Journey", they're joined by other elements in a smorgasbord of suggestion. The poem has a curious propulsion, both reverie and kinesthetic awe, and is nuanced enough to reward multiple efforts and delights of unpacking and stratification. If that sounds a tad highfalutin', how 'bout: it'll haunt one with its dark fathoms. Poets, unfortunately, even the best, are often remembered, if at all, for several poems, perhaps just one. If fate favours Jones with that small but unchippable corner of granite, I hope "Little Night Journey" is the reason.
5) Thomas More, Utopia (1516). Beheaded because of his integrity, Thomas More's life reminds us, five Cs later, that power mixed with integrity is a dangerous brew. The consensus on his philosophical tract the past hundred years has swung to a supposed satirical meaning, yet influential views, still strong, side with a belief that More was sympathetic to the ideal society while knowing it could never happen (thus explaining the narrator's inconsistencies, once thought a defect in More's thought). It's wonderful that the work is still debated. My enjoyment increased when I noted those inconsistencies gathering: the "moral" strictures, e.g., on infidelity, divorce, and sloth were illuminating as a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" match with certain politically-entrenched religious codes this particular year of our lord(s).
1) Grant Buday, White Lung (1999). The title derives from the occupational hazards inherent in working at a mass-production bakery. Buday is a severely underplugged veteran novelist, short story writer, travel essayist, and (most recently) memoirist, and here, in the former capacity, he penned an honest, emotionally versatile, complex tale of class necessity, subterfuge, and plans both thwarted and promising. Notice I didn't frame it "working class". Buday is observant, intellectually honest, and enlightening in turning the searchlight on characters from the bottom "up": the mentally challenged friend and foil of the protagonist who can't get off graveyard shift even after acquiring decades of seniority; the "outsider" who takes the job for quick cash but who splurges on inessentials through credit cards; the main character who dreams of starting his own bakery but whose inertia diminishes his future, both emotionally and financially; the floor boss whose comically "romantic" episodes weave between an equally impotent job-related revenge; the supervisor whose plodding professionalism and career cautiousness is sympathetic to the reader yet overlooked and derided by workers both under and over his level, as well as his wife; the site manager who's caught between the dictates of the owners and Central Canadian bosses, and the workers set to strike; a director whose oily cynicism is part of his spiritual make-up, and not a job description. But as page-turning a story as Buday can tell, the beauty is in the details. The characters are humourously and dramatically idiosyncratic, but in addition, the description of local detail is gritty and aesthetically creative, and the set pieces are unforgettable in tone and execution (the graveyard shift foreman calmly looking up to a passing neighbour while trapped under his carport door is terrifically dry in its humour, yet simultaneously sad in its transformative suggestion). The ending of the novel is superb, and widens the contrast between the two friends at the story's heart.
2) Martin Amis, Money (1984). This was the fifth (and best) Amis novel I've read. Extravagantly creative and consistently vibrant, it's tighter than The Information, more mature than Success, more realized than the (at times) apocalyptic London Fields, and more coherent than the clever yet problematically structured Time's Arrow. Plenty of philosophical digressions, which in a novel I love, and here they're tied to the first-person obsessions, and make sense in the back-and-forth with the narrative. Too many hilarious characters to outline in a short review, and too many imaginative set pieces, but one stand out episode was the tennis match between the physically catastrophic John Self and the athletically efficient Fielding Goodney. Money is humour at its best: it works on its base entertainment level while also driving huge non-comedic daggers into the soft dough of hard-assed greed.
3) Grant Buday, Monday Night Man (1995). A collection of loosely-linked short stories, Buday created three unforgettable characters in the financially and socially challenged friends who gamble, whore, and drink their way through existential exasperation. This is courageous humour, wild and low, but there're also moments of heartbreaking pathos (the story set in the Patricia Hotel) and dramatic, even quiet, counterpoint. Buday never forces a laugh at the expense of the characters. Actions, no matter how bizarre and entertainment-oriented, have consequences, and it's a grim reminder that we can sympathize with those we initially dismiss or make fun of.
4) D. G. Jones, The Stream Exposed With All Its Stones (2010). This is a poetry Collected, though some poems from Jones' lengthy opus have been excised, either through editorial choice or authorial pruning. It doesn't surprise me that several Canadian postmodernists have applauded the poetry of Jones since one of his poetic obsessions is with the creative act itself. His concern for a wide-ranging aesthetic for and to nature, art, and thought is generous, and not solipsistic. A delightful contrast exists throughout Jones' career score in his unironic handling of heavyweight themes (sex, death) with a stylistically light touch. Though I often have a distaste for recurring tropes in a poet's particular volume, I actually thrill to repetitions in variations when adroitly handled. "Sun" and "snow" are two of those unassuming emblems. And, in "Little Night Journey", they're joined by other elements in a smorgasbord of suggestion. The poem has a curious propulsion, both reverie and kinesthetic awe, and is nuanced enough to reward multiple efforts and delights of unpacking and stratification. If that sounds a tad highfalutin', how 'bout: it'll haunt one with its dark fathoms. Poets, unfortunately, even the best, are often remembered, if at all, for several poems, perhaps just one. If fate favours Jones with that small but unchippable corner of granite, I hope "Little Night Journey" is the reason.
5) Thomas More, Utopia (1516). Beheaded because of his integrity, Thomas More's life reminds us, five Cs later, that power mixed with integrity is a dangerous brew. The consensus on his philosophical tract the past hundred years has swung to a supposed satirical meaning, yet influential views, still strong, side with a belief that More was sympathetic to the ideal society while knowing it could never happen (thus explaining the narrator's inconsistencies, once thought a defect in More's thought). It's wonderful that the work is still debated. My enjoyment increased when I noted those inconsistencies gathering: the "moral" strictures, e.g., on infidelity, divorce, and sloth were illuminating as a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" match with certain politically-entrenched religious codes this particular year of our lord(s).
Monday, November 21, 2011
Susan Musgrave's Origami Dove
Never a fan of Susan Musgrave's thirty year ditch-and-witch imagery, I was pleasantly surprised by her first new book of poetry in eleven years, 2011's Origami Dove.
The emotional alarm systems still go off in all five firehouses, at times ("and then I start weeping/I can't help it I can't/stop" from "Conjugal Visit"), but a maturity based partly, it seems, on the reading of detachment spirituality has given her poems more proportional resonance: "Small flocks of twitchy sandpipers/scoot out on the tide; a pheasant/stutters from the ditch into the trees" and "There's just enough light left/on the river tonight to turn/the water black. You see it flare up/behind my eyes: the obituary of light." The latter quotation is from the very good section two, and it represents a heartfelt merging of unadorned natural movement with personal mood, fate, and conclusion.
Advocacy overruns aesthetics in section four, the last, but I'm grateful for the many fine poems here as a stronger counterbalance.
The emotional alarm systems still go off in all five firehouses, at times ("and then I start weeping/I can't help it I can't/stop" from "Conjugal Visit"), but a maturity based partly, it seems, on the reading of detachment spirituality has given her poems more proportional resonance: "Small flocks of twitchy sandpipers/scoot out on the tide; a pheasant/stutters from the ditch into the trees" and "There's just enough light left/on the river tonight to turn/the water black. You see it flare up/behind my eyes: the obituary of light." The latter quotation is from the very good section two, and it represents a heartfelt merging of unadorned natural movement with personal mood, fate, and conclusion.
Advocacy overruns aesthetics in section four, the last, but I'm grateful for the many fine poems here as a stronger counterbalance.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Phil Hall's Killdeer
"Department of Critical Thought No. 4". Winston Smith would have been terrified of this back cover tag. And when you combine it with the publisher's own appellative aggression -- BookThug -- who would blame him for following Phil Hall's example regarding the latter's own earlier poems, where they were "hidden ... in stumps -- under floorboards -- behind pseudonyms ... in bus station lockers -- under bridges" ?(p.99). Leave the book in its closed state, that is. I'm not sure Hall wants to be identified with "departments", and mindful of two of his main anti-themes -- the awful intrusion of the personal onto the observation, in poetry; the awful declarations of aggressors in politics, personal relationships, chance incidents, poetics -- I'm not sure he wants to be identified on the side of the "Thug" as he or she (literally) presses against the "Book". But then, metaphors are too convenient.
Or are they? The chief metaphor -- with various spinoffs -- in Phil Hall's 2011 Killdeer is the titular victim. The nod to a lyrical trope here is indeed curious since, absent that occasional vulnerable walk-on, the book is much better classified as memoir, poetics apagoge, and cultural retrospective than as poetry. What's funny is that saying this immediately marks one now as narrow-minded. Note, I'm not saying the book is a hybrid -- prose poetry, say, or lyrical travelogue -- but that it could be shelved under poetry, and be eligible for awards in that category, without so much as a shake of the retreating tail. So I'll dispense with a critique based on verse lexicon, as such, and focus instead on the rambling assertions and anecdotes.
"I also handed her poems -- far too many -- a crumpled bundle -- I knew she didn't write poems -- I didn't care
She said that she didn't write poems but that she would read them & write me a letter about them" (p. 21)
This is the language and rhythm of telephone conversations, and rushed and distracted, at that. Hall would likely concur. Poetry as language doesn't seem to hold much merit for him: "these have healed me -- not cleverness or career or language" (p. 101).
I'll get to the defensive self-promotion later, but for now, note the italics. Elsewhere, and in a second hypocritical parade not covered by postmodern ambiguity, Hall relates as to how he doesn't like to talk about writing. Right. Just stuff it all in a book, and then don't ever discuss it, reader or writer. Makes sense. But that would prompt a third hypocrisy, that I'm being rational. Of course, one can't find any rational inflections and conclusions amongst Hall's mishmash, despite the furlongs of literary references and personal exegesis. Uh huh.
The suffocating tone and mood of Hall, the recorder in Killdeer, is so persistent, one wonders if he's progressed much beyond his first published chapbook at 20, of which George Amabile remarks to Hall: "Far from giving me any pleasure this book almost made me puke -- if I were you I wouldn't write another book for 10 years" (p. 28). Immediately on this quote's heels comes, "I was 20 -- that letter broke my stupid heart" (p. 29). As alluded to in the preceding paragraph, it's hypocritical for him to focus here on his emotional excesses (that it happened in his callow past doesn't alter the incongruities -- this book is chock full of Poet suffering the slings and arrows of derision and neglect) while in another section/poem/essayistic context criticize Irving Layton for the latter's reactive closer -- "I turned away and wept" -- to his "The Bull Calf". Hall references his own parallel summation elsewhere -- "I should have shot my father" -- as an absurd reaction, in his words, "the false politics of honesty" (p. 85), but emotional ham-handed tack-ons aren't any worse than the reverse pride Hall assumes in his own flashbacks and poetics statements. Your unhumble correspondent actually prefers the cruder calls: at least I don't have to negotiate contradictory and deadening theoretical ruminations at every turn.
More of the same here: "someone rescued me from years of ass-kissing
I longed to be a writer before I felt driven to write
I got a degree in writing -- & I published a first book -- way before writing became my compulsive practice" (p. 27).
In all seriousness, who, other than he and some of his friends, cares? This is what's given confessional writing a bad name for the past thirty years. Nothing transcends the hermetic particulars. Not the language, not the sentiments, not the commonplace revelation. The pun in the following line's, "Since then I have always learned to put the art before the course" doesn't cover up the solipsism.
Hall drops more names in Killdeer than periods. "See The Captive Mind (1953) -- in which Czeslaw Milosz chronicles the gradual corruption of the minds of artists by totalitarianism in central Europe" (p. 79).
Milosz makes it clear in indefatigable character studies that those minds weren't corrupted as much as they were ensnared, and necessarily two- or three-faced by opposing forces of political opportunism and ideological tenacity. To compare postmodern parlour games in Canadian learneries with the world of Poles drenched in blood and hazardous message-code is obscene.
The only parts of this book of poetry I enjoyed were those parts where poetry was actually on tap, and allowed to breathe. Unfortunately, the deer only popped up every ten pages or so. "The fawn nuzzled the doe -- wiping grass-flecked slobber along her withers" (p. 69) sure beats "Hope becomes the expectation of finding next an intricately imperfect process that might prove all of one's own imperfections worthy & irrelevant" (p. 49).
And after reading, "The bad sequence's mother is the Canada Council for the Arts -- she sings to the child in the womb a song of research & travel grants -- prospectuses -- itineraries" (p. 89), I'll note, with interest, Hall's obvious refusal of the 25 Gs, should he get tapped for the win.
Or are they? The chief metaphor -- with various spinoffs -- in Phil Hall's 2011 Killdeer is the titular victim. The nod to a lyrical trope here is indeed curious since, absent that occasional vulnerable walk-on, the book is much better classified as memoir, poetics apagoge, and cultural retrospective than as poetry. What's funny is that saying this immediately marks one now as narrow-minded. Note, I'm not saying the book is a hybrid -- prose poetry, say, or lyrical travelogue -- but that it could be shelved under poetry, and be eligible for awards in that category, without so much as a shake of the retreating tail. So I'll dispense with a critique based on verse lexicon, as such, and focus instead on the rambling assertions and anecdotes.
"I also handed her poems -- far too many -- a crumpled bundle -- I knew she didn't write poems -- I didn't care
She said that she didn't write poems but that she would read them & write me a letter about them" (p. 21)
This is the language and rhythm of telephone conversations, and rushed and distracted, at that. Hall would likely concur. Poetry as language doesn't seem to hold much merit for him: "these have healed me -- not cleverness or career or language" (p. 101).
I'll get to the defensive self-promotion later, but for now, note the italics. Elsewhere, and in a second hypocritical parade not covered by postmodern ambiguity, Hall relates as to how he doesn't like to talk about writing. Right. Just stuff it all in a book, and then don't ever discuss it, reader or writer. Makes sense. But that would prompt a third hypocrisy, that I'm being rational. Of course, one can't find any rational inflections and conclusions amongst Hall's mishmash, despite the furlongs of literary references and personal exegesis. Uh huh.
The suffocating tone and mood of Hall, the recorder in Killdeer, is so persistent, one wonders if he's progressed much beyond his first published chapbook at 20, of which George Amabile remarks to Hall: "Far from giving me any pleasure this book almost made me puke -- if I were you I wouldn't write another book for 10 years" (p. 28). Immediately on this quote's heels comes, "I was 20 -- that letter broke my stupid heart" (p. 29). As alluded to in the preceding paragraph, it's hypocritical for him to focus here on his emotional excesses (that it happened in his callow past doesn't alter the incongruities -- this book is chock full of Poet suffering the slings and arrows of derision and neglect) while in another section/poem/essayistic context criticize Irving Layton for the latter's reactive closer -- "I turned away and wept" -- to his "The Bull Calf". Hall references his own parallel summation elsewhere -- "I should have shot my father" -- as an absurd reaction, in his words, "the false politics of honesty" (p. 85), but emotional ham-handed tack-ons aren't any worse than the reverse pride Hall assumes in his own flashbacks and poetics statements. Your unhumble correspondent actually prefers the cruder calls: at least I don't have to negotiate contradictory and deadening theoretical ruminations at every turn.
More of the same here: "someone rescued me from years of ass-kissing
I longed to be a writer before I felt driven to write
I got a degree in writing -- & I published a first book -- way before writing became my compulsive practice" (p. 27).
In all seriousness, who, other than he and some of his friends, cares? This is what's given confessional writing a bad name for the past thirty years. Nothing transcends the hermetic particulars. Not the language, not the sentiments, not the commonplace revelation. The pun in the following line's, "Since then I have always learned to put the art before the course" doesn't cover up the solipsism.
Hall drops more names in Killdeer than periods. "See The Captive Mind (1953) -- in which Czeslaw Milosz chronicles the gradual corruption of the minds of artists by totalitarianism in central Europe" (p. 79).
Milosz makes it clear in indefatigable character studies that those minds weren't corrupted as much as they were ensnared, and necessarily two- or three-faced by opposing forces of political opportunism and ideological tenacity. To compare postmodern parlour games in Canadian learneries with the world of Poles drenched in blood and hazardous message-code is obscene.
The only parts of this book of poetry I enjoyed were those parts where poetry was actually on tap, and allowed to breathe. Unfortunately, the deer only popped up every ten pages or so. "The fawn nuzzled the doe -- wiping grass-flecked slobber along her withers" (p. 69) sure beats "Hope becomes the expectation of finding next an intricately imperfect process that might prove all of one's own imperfections worthy & irrelevant" (p. 49).
And after reading, "The bad sequence's mother is the Canada Council for the Arts -- she sings to the child in the womb a song of research & travel grants -- prospectuses -- itineraries" (p. 89), I'll note, with interest, Hall's obvious refusal of the 25 Gs, should he get tapped for the win.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Anne Simpson's Is
The back cover of Anne Simpson's 2011 Is informs us that the author "illuminates what it means to be alive". Heady stuff. The book is also "[r]ich with muscular craft". If jacket photos weren't de rigueur, one could almost imagine a poets' union of middle linebackers or hod carriers. It's past time this hoary adjective was deprived of its steroidal cachet. There. Now on to the poems.
"before blue before blue deepening and unwinding inside blue before bluegrey before the envelope of morning before opening the crisp envelope of morning ..." (p.2)
Shouldn't this note-stretching proceed in reverse chronology? I'm probably missing the significance of the syntax, but if amazement is the feeling of the recorder (and the wish for the receiver), it seems a peek through a microscope would do the trick more effectively. I can't get a deep view of all this "blue deepening".
"sounds not yet sounds darkens before darkness and light before light beginning and ending ending and beginning." (p. 3)
I guess this is the illumination of "what it means to be alive". Or maybe it's just abstraction multiplying like Nut's fart in a chromosphere.
"You are day divided from night, night from day, minute from minute, hour from hour. Time begins, sliced into now" (p. 5)
Goddammit, can we get on with infanthood, already? The first chapter of Genesis and the beginning of The Iliad are boring, too, but at least they recorded basic elements and specific people, respectively.
"You are dark inside dark, and within this dark, intricate contraptions of darker darkness" (p.6)
Any smartypants outdark that?
"Before tinkering. Before the ululation of a siren. Before scarlet. Before latches. Before eyes. Before ... " (p. 7)
Ah! The world. The little fucker is finally with us.
"You are spaciousness." (p. 8)
Whoops.
"You are depth and more depth, earthing and earthed." (p. 9)
And never forget you are a child of the universe which is unfolding as it should. (Apologies to the lyricists of that gawdawful song.)
"a woman untucking a cotton shirt a man undoing a belt" (p. 13)
Wait a sec. What happened to Deep Blue? Are we having flashbacks, or is this number two already? Pp 14 and 15 shrinks the same poem (15 set tinier than 14), with two and four columns respectively. I don't think we're supposed to read this, and in any event if I wanted to read it again, the original p. 13 is the right option: I don't have a magnifying glass at hand.
"Break into break up break down break out break off break ... " (p. 16)
At least Quartermain's cliched variations had some wit.
"Aftershocks of noise -- a gas main, propane tank." (p. 17)
I'm lost. Is that the point? Is there one? Perhaps I've been in this mitotic funk and fug too long.
"syllables of spun light" (p. 18)
Here we go. The linguistic nature tropes. Soon we'll encounter "glottals of mud bubbles". And if our little lump of protoplasm was real, wouldn't the latter image be more accurate that the former preciosity? Or have we moved from the placental stew to the gas main to yet another universe?
(p. 19) : the paratactic list. Hurrah! A "poetic" rendering of a Titanic-like drama. In 13 ragged lines. My blood pressure: unchanged. E. J. Pratt is spinning in his grave like the Tasmanian devil.
"You imagine all that lies below: dank palaces under the ground." (p. 25)
She might imagine it, but I can't. But being "poetic" means taking it on good faith. Things are mysterious on page 25, and no lie. But it's a mystery, alas, not worth wondering about. As for imagining: imagine what Gwendolyn MacEwen could have done with this passage. Or Patrick Anderson. You could've seen the flux and dazzle of partially obscured, vivid shapes under the surface. That murk wouldn't have been announced with stock vagaries. Instead, strange word combos colliding. Awe or danger invading the mind that reads it.
"Crocuses, murmuring secrets to earth." (p 28)
If vegetables and flowers are going to be anthropomorphic studs and soothsayers, I suppose this is better than Lorna Crozier's carrots fucking the earth.
(p. 30): Bees are back. I sense a dramatic arc. "Broken necklace of bees in curled, damp grass." Not bad. And the rhythm of the pentameter makes sense.
"Is" (p. 33) is anaphoric five-and-dime rhetoric gone mad. I can't imagine this read aloud. Hushed? Excited? Solemn? The "is" of "Is" in Is is repeated as line and phrase starter 26 times. None of them are illuminating. Grandeur is not realized, not broached, not in the same solar system with these words just because we're supposed to be lulled into cheap awe by the "gathering force" of the repetitions.
(p. 37): Possible explosions on ship. Sentences cut like fingernails. In fact, "Cut-glass water. The ting of a fingernail against it." (p. 37). Terror as Morse Code. Easier to handle. Not important, anyway. Set up for poetic image. The world is dangerous. But there is always beauty.
(p 41): The plot, of a kind, thickens. Courtroom drama. The bad guys act cool under questioning. Serviceable journal reporting, albeit in court reporter shorthand, a la Heather Spears' Required Reading. Wonderful possibility for psychological complexity, inductive rage, physical detail. But we're left with that frequent three-quarters blank page. Of course, poetry is distillation. Distillation is so successful the distillery is bottling nothing but air.
The fisherman is "settling into his dreams. Into all he's given, dazzled with sea gleam." (p. 42)
(p. 43): a list of marine birds. Simpson wants us to know she's studied the library's pelagic thrust. Undoubtedly carved some walks on sand and pier.
(p. 46): "Sun shot through leaves, leaves, leaves."
I know of no other phrase as precious as "shot through" unless it's "shot through with light". The triple exit makes for a nice unintended irony, though. Oops! Two lines later: "Sun shot through trees." The sun is dangerous enough. Do we have to duck it from its assault behind natural hiding places?
(p. 48): "Someone's hand, a sweeping gesture in a window."
Suspense. Suggestion as importance. Letting the reader fill in ... what?
"The woman doesn't think herself old until the girl moves through her."
The paranormal is apparently one of the hottest selling sub-genres, lately. Robert J. Wiersema would be envious. It takes him over 300 pages to have the sympathetic dead enter the sympathetic living.
The poem "Life Magazine" (p 50) is, so far, the book's most pukeworthy effort. "Two monks doused Thich Quang Duc with gasoline, set him on fire." Why doesn't she just insert the news headline? Wrapped up seven clipped sentences later. Pain as idea. As opportunity for ... "Afterwards, his heart. Untouched plum." It takes a peculiar talent to not only suffocate a poem with a final line, but to take a dull meat-cleaver to it.
(p. 52): "Stink of gas and burning flesh." I believe "stink" is slightly redundant, and takes the immediacy and shock out of "burning flesh". But maybe that's just me. I just finished a YA novel written at a level of effectively-transmitted sophistication far above the faith Simpson shows for her reader. This, and the next five poems, takes another six disposable snapshots for that fifteen-years running overcrowded album: the poetry photo album. Sensitive (yet Olympian-cool, Olympian-frosty, even) poet scans war/family/art photo (sometimes painting), puts herself in place of tortured/sad subject, and concentrates on the traded chiaroscuro. The dead get a quick sigh (never a shudder), are put away, and we're left with horror-as-aesthetic, just another game to play between (in this case) cellular gobbledegook and placemats for the Titanic. Ralph Gustafson's "The Newspaper" (from the poem sequence "Phases of the Present") has a narrator looking at a war photo, too. The genius of the poem -- in artistic fashioning too detailed to describe here -- is that it implicates the narrator, transparently the author, and that the "face/Down" is both historically accurate and a blistering denunciation of Western complacency. In one of the six "photo" poems, Simpson includes the picture taker, but it's thrown into the remove unconvincingly, a tacked-on idea that isn't integrated with anything else in the wandering study in how-to-look-at-a-photo. John Berger's novel G has a similar style, in places, but you feel you've been there, or at least could be there, even if he hasn't.
I could go on -- there's another 36 pages, and I've read them -- but this has become unwieldy.
It would be funny if it weren't tragic how the forces of "write only what you know" have scared off much serious speculative work in poetry -- political, historical, religious, sexual -- yet it's A OK to give an authoritative inside-out biography of a cell. I suppose the takeaway here is "regression rules".
"before blue before blue deepening and unwinding inside blue before bluegrey before the envelope of morning before opening the crisp envelope of morning ..." (p.2)
Shouldn't this note-stretching proceed in reverse chronology? I'm probably missing the significance of the syntax, but if amazement is the feeling of the recorder (and the wish for the receiver), it seems a peek through a microscope would do the trick more effectively. I can't get a deep view of all this "blue deepening".
"sounds not yet sounds darkens before darkness and light before light beginning and ending ending and beginning." (p. 3)
I guess this is the illumination of "what it means to be alive". Or maybe it's just abstraction multiplying like Nut's fart in a chromosphere.
"You are day divided from night, night from day, minute from minute, hour from hour. Time begins, sliced into now" (p. 5)
Goddammit, can we get on with infanthood, already? The first chapter of Genesis and the beginning of The Iliad are boring, too, but at least they recorded basic elements and specific people, respectively.
"You are dark inside dark, and within this dark, intricate contraptions of darker darkness" (p.6)
Any smartypants outdark that?
"Before tinkering. Before the ululation of a siren. Before scarlet. Before latches. Before eyes. Before ... " (p. 7)
Ah! The world. The little fucker is finally with us.
"You are spaciousness." (p. 8)
Whoops.
"You are depth and more depth, earthing and earthed." (p. 9)
And never forget you are a child of the universe which is unfolding as it should. (Apologies to the lyricists of that gawdawful song.)
"a woman untucking a cotton shirt a man undoing a belt" (p. 13)
Wait a sec. What happened to Deep Blue? Are we having flashbacks, or is this number two already? Pp 14 and 15 shrinks the same poem (15 set tinier than 14), with two and four columns respectively. I don't think we're supposed to read this, and in any event if I wanted to read it again, the original p. 13 is the right option: I don't have a magnifying glass at hand.
"Break into break up break down break out break off break ... " (p. 16)
At least Quartermain's cliched variations had some wit.
"Aftershocks of noise -- a gas main, propane tank." (p. 17)
I'm lost. Is that the point? Is there one? Perhaps I've been in this mitotic funk and fug too long.
"syllables of spun light" (p. 18)
Here we go. The linguistic nature tropes. Soon we'll encounter "glottals of mud bubbles". And if our little lump of protoplasm was real, wouldn't the latter image be more accurate that the former preciosity? Or have we moved from the placental stew to the gas main to yet another universe?
(p. 19) : the paratactic list. Hurrah! A "poetic" rendering of a Titanic-like drama. In 13 ragged lines. My blood pressure: unchanged. E. J. Pratt is spinning in his grave like the Tasmanian devil.
"You imagine all that lies below: dank palaces under the ground." (p. 25)
She might imagine it, but I can't. But being "poetic" means taking it on good faith. Things are mysterious on page 25, and no lie. But it's a mystery, alas, not worth wondering about. As for imagining: imagine what Gwendolyn MacEwen could have done with this passage. Or Patrick Anderson. You could've seen the flux and dazzle of partially obscured, vivid shapes under the surface. That murk wouldn't have been announced with stock vagaries. Instead, strange word combos colliding. Awe or danger invading the mind that reads it.
"Crocuses, murmuring secrets to earth." (p 28)
If vegetables and flowers are going to be anthropomorphic studs and soothsayers, I suppose this is better than Lorna Crozier's carrots fucking the earth.
(p. 30): Bees are back. I sense a dramatic arc. "Broken necklace of bees in curled, damp grass." Not bad. And the rhythm of the pentameter makes sense.
"Is" (p. 33) is anaphoric five-and-dime rhetoric gone mad. I can't imagine this read aloud. Hushed? Excited? Solemn? The "is" of "Is" in Is is repeated as line and phrase starter 26 times. None of them are illuminating. Grandeur is not realized, not broached, not in the same solar system with these words just because we're supposed to be lulled into cheap awe by the "gathering force" of the repetitions.
(p. 37): Possible explosions on ship. Sentences cut like fingernails. In fact, "Cut-glass water. The ting of a fingernail against it." (p. 37). Terror as Morse Code. Easier to handle. Not important, anyway. Set up for poetic image. The world is dangerous. But there is always beauty.
(p 41): The plot, of a kind, thickens. Courtroom drama. The bad guys act cool under questioning. Serviceable journal reporting, albeit in court reporter shorthand, a la Heather Spears' Required Reading. Wonderful possibility for psychological complexity, inductive rage, physical detail. But we're left with that frequent three-quarters blank page. Of course, poetry is distillation. Distillation is so successful the distillery is bottling nothing but air.
The fisherman is "settling into his dreams. Into all he's given, dazzled with sea gleam." (p. 42)
(p. 43): a list of marine birds. Simpson wants us to know she's studied the library's pelagic thrust. Undoubtedly carved some walks on sand and pier.
(p. 46): "Sun shot through leaves, leaves, leaves."
I know of no other phrase as precious as "shot through" unless it's "shot through with light". The triple exit makes for a nice unintended irony, though. Oops! Two lines later: "Sun shot through trees." The sun is dangerous enough. Do we have to duck it from its assault behind natural hiding places?
(p. 48): "Someone's hand, a sweeping gesture in a window."
Suspense. Suggestion as importance. Letting the reader fill in ... what?
"The woman doesn't think herself old until the girl moves through her."
The paranormal is apparently one of the hottest selling sub-genres, lately. Robert J. Wiersema would be envious. It takes him over 300 pages to have the sympathetic dead enter the sympathetic living.
The poem "Life Magazine" (p 50) is, so far, the book's most pukeworthy effort. "Two monks doused Thich Quang Duc with gasoline, set him on fire." Why doesn't she just insert the news headline? Wrapped up seven clipped sentences later. Pain as idea. As opportunity for ... "Afterwards, his heart. Untouched plum." It takes a peculiar talent to not only suffocate a poem with a final line, but to take a dull meat-cleaver to it.
(p. 52): "Stink of gas and burning flesh." I believe "stink" is slightly redundant, and takes the immediacy and shock out of "burning flesh". But maybe that's just me. I just finished a YA novel written at a level of effectively-transmitted sophistication far above the faith Simpson shows for her reader. This, and the next five poems, takes another six disposable snapshots for that fifteen-years running overcrowded album: the poetry photo album. Sensitive (yet Olympian-cool, Olympian-frosty, even) poet scans war/family/art photo (sometimes painting), puts herself in place of tortured/sad subject, and concentrates on the traded chiaroscuro. The dead get a quick sigh (never a shudder), are put away, and we're left with horror-as-aesthetic, just another game to play between (in this case) cellular gobbledegook and placemats for the Titanic. Ralph Gustafson's "The Newspaper" (from the poem sequence "Phases of the Present") has a narrator looking at a war photo, too. The genius of the poem -- in artistic fashioning too detailed to describe here -- is that it implicates the narrator, transparently the author, and that the "face/Down" is both historically accurate and a blistering denunciation of Western complacency. In one of the six "photo" poems, Simpson includes the picture taker, but it's thrown into the remove unconvincingly, a tacked-on idea that isn't integrated with anything else in the wandering study in how-to-look-at-a-photo. John Berger's novel G has a similar style, in places, but you feel you've been there, or at least could be there, even if he hasn't.
I could go on -- there's another 36 pages, and I've read them -- but this has become unwieldy.
It would be funny if it weren't tragic how the forces of "write only what you know" have scared off much serious speculative work in poetry -- political, historical, religious, sexual -- yet it's A OK to give an authoritative inside-out biography of a cell. I suppose the takeaway here is "regression rules".
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Meredith Quartermain's Recipes from the Red Planet
Meredith Quartermain's 2010 Recipes from the Red Planet, published by BookThug, didn't make it to this year's Governor General's poetry award shortlist, which must be somewhat equivalent to being repeatedly passed over in a shorthanded pick 'em pick-up indoor soccer game. Most other potential players, at least, never had a chance, locked out and deaf to the proceedings. The funniest part of that story? Recipes from the Red Planet is clearly a better book than its more celebrated home team competitors, so the McCaffery-led cabal couldn't even get that right.
I'd read one previous book of poetry by this author -- Vancouver Walking -- and though footnotes on local history also appear in this latest collection, they're far fewer, and have passion (in drips if not surges) filtering through their veins, as in "On my way to the overpass".
Gone, too, are the boring walkabouts and schoolroom lessons. These are replaced in Recipes from the Red Planet by language and rhythm that churns and declaims. The tone is relatively narrow, but is convincing and confident ("winding around me its magnetic flux of elastic vibrations -- until I threw off Bellerophon and kicked in the Helicon which they now call the horse fountain" from "She would"). I don't like "magnetic flux", but I'm not an overbearing stickler for detail when the voice and its sounds are this much fun.
The lessons, though mixed with sweeter medicine, keep a comin', however. Quartermain, through her narrators, has a big problem with authority of many kinds. And those authority figures -- whether bosses, politicians, mythic beings, or local heroes -- are invariably male. The ladies are persistent, tough, clever, or (to reach back into a more tilted patriarchal past) forgiveably winsome. And when a specific brute isn't handy, a generalized one will do, in the guise of unthinking (by creator and receiver) advice. "Directors Change Directions" is just one example of the latter tendency: "Don't touch. Don't skateboard. Don't talk with your mouth full." (Ah, to make a poem completely out of cliche and homily. To alter another popular phrase: "try this at home, kids, because anyone can do it!").
But "Directors Change Directions" and "Maximal" aren't just about guy-knows-best (or brainwashed woman-knows-best), they are list poems. Credit Quartermain for sticking to her belief in the poetics of her male masters. The so-called patriarchal dominant and subjective clauses must be powered over by the matriarchal, all-inclusive steamroller. Samuel Beckett wrote apparently levelling sentences, but there are exquisite shifts and ironical shenanigans going on within those units in Molloy, for example. Most other mortals haven't approached that kind of sophistication, though, which just goes to prove that theory which promotes "only one way" is both narrow-minded and exclusive of nuanced (ironically so) vertical evaluation, whether paratactic or (the form of most speech and thought) hypotactic. The anti-authoritarians don't or won't see their own attempts to dominate. The paratactical straightjacket limits syntax, rhythmical range, dynamics, mood, reverie, thought, and time signatures in all sorts of ways, and what results from the Oulipian, supposedly democratic arrangement is a temptation to flatline. Hence, the list.
A list, by nature, has no coherent beginning or ending, no arc, no reference within the structure. (All language has some kind of structure, even in brain-damaged individuals.) So all endings are arbitrary. Many of these poems could be fifteen lines shorter or fifteen thousand lines longer without helping or harming the finished product stylistically or structurally. After you've click-clicked through a few, the lists -- and the paratactical hopscotching -- start(s) to run away from the voice like the engine of a train separating from the other rolling cars.
At 119 pages, Recipes from the Red Planet feels like too much ice cream after too little protein, but since the diction and playfulness are an improvement over her previous starvation diet in Vancouver Walking, the meal is often enjoyable if not filling.
I'd read one previous book of poetry by this author -- Vancouver Walking -- and though footnotes on local history also appear in this latest collection, they're far fewer, and have passion (in drips if not surges) filtering through their veins, as in "On my way to the overpass".
Gone, too, are the boring walkabouts and schoolroom lessons. These are replaced in Recipes from the Red Planet by language and rhythm that churns and declaims. The tone is relatively narrow, but is convincing and confident ("winding around me its magnetic flux of elastic vibrations -- until I threw off Bellerophon and kicked in the Helicon which they now call the horse fountain" from "She would"). I don't like "magnetic flux", but I'm not an overbearing stickler for detail when the voice and its sounds are this much fun.
The lessons, though mixed with sweeter medicine, keep a comin', however. Quartermain, through her narrators, has a big problem with authority of many kinds. And those authority figures -- whether bosses, politicians, mythic beings, or local heroes -- are invariably male. The ladies are persistent, tough, clever, or (to reach back into a more tilted patriarchal past) forgiveably winsome. And when a specific brute isn't handy, a generalized one will do, in the guise of unthinking (by creator and receiver) advice. "Directors Change Directions" is just one example of the latter tendency: "Don't touch. Don't skateboard. Don't talk with your mouth full." (Ah, to make a poem completely out of cliche and homily. To alter another popular phrase: "try this at home, kids, because anyone can do it!").
But "Directors Change Directions" and "Maximal" aren't just about guy-knows-best (or brainwashed woman-knows-best), they are list poems. Credit Quartermain for sticking to her belief in the poetics of her male masters. The so-called patriarchal dominant and subjective clauses must be powered over by the matriarchal, all-inclusive steamroller. Samuel Beckett wrote apparently levelling sentences, but there are exquisite shifts and ironical shenanigans going on within those units in Molloy, for example. Most other mortals haven't approached that kind of sophistication, though, which just goes to prove that theory which promotes "only one way" is both narrow-minded and exclusive of nuanced (ironically so) vertical evaluation, whether paratactic or (the form of most speech and thought) hypotactic. The anti-authoritarians don't or won't see their own attempts to dominate. The paratactical straightjacket limits syntax, rhythmical range, dynamics, mood, reverie, thought, and time signatures in all sorts of ways, and what results from the Oulipian, supposedly democratic arrangement is a temptation to flatline. Hence, the list.
A list, by nature, has no coherent beginning or ending, no arc, no reference within the structure. (All language has some kind of structure, even in brain-damaged individuals.) So all endings are arbitrary. Many of these poems could be fifteen lines shorter or fifteen thousand lines longer without helping or harming the finished product stylistically or structurally. After you've click-clicked through a few, the lists -- and the paratactical hopscotching -- start(s) to run away from the voice like the engine of a train separating from the other rolling cars.
At 119 pages, Recipes from the Red Planet feels like too much ice cream after too little protein, but since the diction and playfulness are an improvement over her previous starvation diet in Vancouver Walking, the meal is often enjoyable if not filling.
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