ADD Becomes Surf 'n' Turf

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/06/09/smackdown-between-scribes-todd-zuniga-talks-literary-death-match/

I invoke Godwin on myself right away. The poetic Godwin concerning this note is cultural, and so is more seductive than its hysterical ad hominem one-on-one discussion stopper. To steal -- then amplify -- from the same insidious psycho-history, a lie told repeatedly is even stronger when told by many.

"No one wants to attend poetry readings, so keep them to seven minutes max, then intersperse with clowns."

That's the way to bullhorn and shoehorn the distracted and wayward into your threadbare tent on the midway. Notice that the plan for this (now) international poetry carnivalesque is entirely predicated on enticing the poetically clueless and indifferent: "audience attention starts to wander at 6 minutes." But surely if the audience is mounting in restive revolt -- silent or otherwise -- at that (no doubt) scientifically replicated 6 minute mark (how can some people survive the boredom of time's egg-boiling and bowel-voiding?), why not up the ante and have the ostentatious hook hanging from the outset, using it as a side-splitting (audience and performer) ambuscade after the first passage with no punch line or sentimental catch at minute one?

Yes, at the back of the blog, I know: it's entertainment, a light-hearted escape, a one-off confection. But it's still selling poetry, isn't it? And worse, the underlying assumption is that poetry needs this to survive as a communal event.

I mentioned that this was a cultural lie. The link at the outset was only the most splashy I could find as a representative for this shift, but many other sources, on-line and off- , ape the same conclusion. Poetry is good for you but insufferable in its live limitations. Therefore, edit, be cool, and above all, drink. I'm all for brevity, irony, and creative quaffing, but (to take these three points in order) why is something so important to the people reading and listening also so puny as to be rendered soporific after 6 (or 16) minutes; why is seriousness uncool or annoying; and why is the experience so painful that it can only be conducted in an altered state? (I'd thought poetry was the essential altered state of the reading -- I can drink at home, but I can't hear and see a poet reading there most nights.)

But the voice persists. "But most readings are boring!" So the answer is then to ridicule the notion of putting them on altogether? The organizer-founder in the linked article says that one in three performers in the bad ole boring days would be "race-to-the-bookstore excellent". If that were true of every reading I'd been to, and if I knew that to be a fact of all future readings, I would have been and will be excited.

There's actually nothing at all wrong with sitting through ten or twenty minutes of indifferent verse voicings in order to get to the surprise of that blowing-one-away third reader. That's life. I happily listen to long symphonies, watch two hour movies, and spend ten or fifteen hours reading novels that have (sometimes) long stretches of waste and turgidity. But unless your way is the greatest hits package -- IPods further changing our neurotransmitters and psychology -- it won't kill the audience patron to endure (gack!) a run of bad verse, or good verse badly delivered.

If the 6 minute rule became standard -- (the fifteen minute rule seems to be the norm already) -- I would have never experienced three of the most transformative poetry readings of my life, those given by George Faludy, Irving Layton, and Len Gasparini. All were one to one-and-a-half hours long, and involved only shortish intros and, in Layton's case only, a short Q and A post-reading.

If a poet is good, I want him or her to be on that stage for a long time because .... well, it's enjoyable, and when enjoying anything, I (and, yes, we) happily lose track of time. And if the audience isn't expecting pies in faces of readers or Little Bo Peep's curved arm in the shadows, the poets usually don't mind spending the extra time with their listeners, as well. And if they do mind, they shouldn't be reading at all.

Of Boredom and Definitions

http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=33021

Nathan Ihara relates weighty philosophical speculation from David Foster Wallace and others, but then botches things in the translation and self-narrated conclusion.

First off, I agree completely with the Lee Rourke and Joseph Brodsky quotes. Fine stuff. Wallace, however, is another matter. The biggest problem I have is with thinking that something as subjective as personal boredom can be universalized into a one-size-fits-all assumption. Wallace states that "Bliss -- a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious -- lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom." But it's been my experience that the opposite of boredom is curiosity. Boredom equals incuriosity, and equals stagnation. Curiosity doesn't relate to bliss, though it can lead there, even in difficult and labyrinthine ways. The opposite of bliss, for me, has been fear and the prevalence of frustrating conflict.

And this brings up another problem I had with Wallace's later quotes (in the link) from his commencement speech to Kenyon College in 2005: that boredom has to do exclusively with circumstances in one's life. Again, one can only speak individually. I'd rather have heard what each of those college kids had to say about boredom than to listen to a single "expert" "warn" them.

My longest bout of boredom arrived with the least pressure from home or work life. It was existential, mysterious, and lasted for several years. Like Brodsky and Rourke, I let it be without manipulation. Conversely, in traditionally boring circumstances (and Wallace and others, of course, are right, these are unavoidable) -- repetitive job duties, suffocating social settings, attendance to bureaucratic necessity -- I've often found a refreshing and perversely contrasting counter to it: impish internal or external challenge, or in the latter case, avoidance (death is the victory for all procrastinators).

The boredom that Wallace talks about seems to me quite superficial: circumstance? Bah! Boredom may be stagnation, but inertia is not always self-perpetuating, and certainly not a necessary life sentence. Ihara's stupid reduction, "Life is unquestionably boring", isn't given gravitas by John Berryman's similarly famous line in one of his Dream Songs. Boredom is a passing state, even on a deeper plane, the same as all other states.

I would reverse Ihara's statement that "The desire to escape boredom lets only to endless craving and insatiable desire". Insatiable desire is inherently frustrating, and can only lead to boredom. But this repeats in all of us, and in every day to some extent, and most importantly, is again part of the lesser see-saw playing out of boredom. This form of boredom could be more accurately called distraction or restlessness, not at all the kind of boredom that I think Wallace and Ihara are talking about.

Don Cherry

Heard five minutes ago on Coach's Corner:

Ron McLean: "[Horton's] moving all his extremities."

Don Cherry: "He's moving all his arms and legs, too."

Joyous News

Even though Canada has typically lagged behind the seminal literary movements the past centenary, the following linked article reveals a ray of actual light in a too-long theoretical tunnel. Just as retro May Parisian runway fashions juice the clothing industry, anachronistic elements -- people, physical objects, emotions -- may be a boon and a grace for literature this side of the Atlantic, too. (The hyperbole arrow's only at 90 degress.)


-----------------------------



"The French are aware of their waning influence in world literature. For the most part this is attributed to the way critical theory has dominated literature from the 1980s on; put simply, French readers, brought up on the diamond-hard prose of Flaubert or Zola, or the musicality of Baudelaire or Hugo, were sick of theory and theorists, and the stodgy, indigestible and incomprehensible literature they inspired."

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"a distinct resistance movement to theory has recently been gaining ground with French authors. The present crop of young writers are rediscovering the pleasure of writing to be read rather than studied."

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The entire article below:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/04/modern-french-literature-suicide-leve-jean-rolin-hose/

Marilyn Bowering's green

green (2007) is, by my count, Marilyn Bowering's fifteenth book of poetry, two of which were nominated for the Governor General's Award.

Bowering has stated in the header to her blog, "Slow Books", that "It's become rare, though, for me to find books I haven't read that I want to read all the way through from beginning to end. Most books dissapoint [sic] after 80 or so pages."

The patience!

Here are some curious citations from her latest sure to make any contemporary poet green with envy.



"I listen to the trees:

what do they say
but green green?

At last I understand Lorca!" (p. 6)



"Remove this dress
and beneath that

the underdress
and beneath it

whatever you find --
I don't need it.

Then the skin,
layer by layer,

all bands of muscle,
and tissue -- whatever it contains --

lay it aside --
I need no protection:" (p. 12)



"The moon is round, like a lover's nipples --" (p. 35)



"What remains of the night?
Dark." (p. 36)



"It's better when I don't think" (p. 42)



"I'm wired end to end -- a flock of migrating birds

has found a short cut -- me -- to the other birds:
or maybe I'm empty space, a rare non-habitant,

the world's easement? Hello, hello -- do I know
any of you?" (p. 48)



"when I die, the day I lie down,
it will be with the poetry of night
layering the grass, swamping the lamplit windows

and beginning to come alive again,
like a stopped train
lifting its head
to contemplate a miracle." (p. 59)



"Ouch! everything hurts:

especially my eyes, near evening,
when the world is roaring pointlessly." (p. 62)



"Everything is as important as everything else:" (p. 64)



"I've taken off my clothes.
I want this to be natural. Put away your
camcorder.
Before I feel you sizzling in me,
I have to know your absence. Its presence
by absence, if you know what I mean." (p. 67)



"I'm naked: I'm full of ideas: I'm about to swim
out the window, graze in the grass
and sky,
move contrary to Nature. I don't know
what to do
with this passage of my soul through the night." (p. 67)



"My family -- mostly dead --
my lovers -- what can I say?" (p. 69)



"to live is to
think about the mysticism of cars" (p. 72)

Jim Johnstone's Patternicity

A cavil to start, and a strong one: the title. Patternicity (2010), Jim Johnstone's second book of poetry, is pegged, according to Michael Shermer, as "meaningful patterns in meaningless noise". As themes go, this is an immediately arresting one. The problem is that serendipity, joyful chance and union, and creative diagramming are often, in the book, given the lyrical equivalent of plot-spoilers by the constant trumpeting of the title in the remembered background of the reader. Noise is a funny thing: the aural sense is our oldest one, the most primitive but also the most honest. Johnstone exploits this tragicomedy very well in places, violence vying with in-your-face beauty in a number of fine poems (more details in a bit). But the inherent thematic subversion of many images means pattern wins over wonder, which is a shame since I was on the edge of my seat for much of the book, but didn't need the metal safety bar after all. It's as if the author took a grant application outline to heart, and decided he needed to foreground the entire enterprise, as one often does in an essay with a strong stance.

Also, a contrarian could even say, by way of an ars poetica, that poems delight in making beautiful chaos out of humdrum order.

"Tithonus" is a good mythical critter in which to explore a desperation for meaning. All that time to figure out an incomprehensible fate. The rhetoric here is fine, controlled yet passionate ("I've watched/clouds tear" .... "I've steered/the unexpected"); a casual yet blunt, difficult statement comes unexpectedly though believably ("Love lasts a decade if you're lucky"); and the phrasing is tragically successful ("grind of roots").

One could do worse than seeing the two shortish prose poems, back-to-back mid-book, as polar responses to the problem of physical inertia and/or danger: action and escape ("Cliff Diving") and retirement ("Passing Through"). The former is the better poem since the anecdotal tension is matched by some excellent clauses ("the logic of our path is forsaken for clean speed" and "Depths reserved for leaded weights and worms"), whereas the latter reaches for a disquieting mood and ends up with preciosity ("The afternoon spreads out in fractals", and "the heat is a wasp's kiss, stitched octaves of venom").

"Rat Fink" is a terrific poem, and breaks out of its thematic box with some interesting shifts as well as some gorgeous and purposeful imagery ("an alterpiece of splintered milk bottles"). The relationship here, the "we" and "you", isn't delineated, and it works in adding to the menace. In other poems, though, the second-person and first-person plural voice creates an aura of vagueness when what is wanted is anchored and strengthened intimacy. Again, the poems could have achieved this, because Johnstone has the requisite talent to bring it off, but technical issues frustrate the vision. A few examples will have to suffice: ("where your finger's hints/line each pocket" from "Provenance"; "when you hold feathers in your teeth,/when you find the breath to laugh.//We were doing well before Saint/Thomas Aquinas named five new ways//to sin" from "Disgraceland".)

A few words about typos. Usually, I don't comment on them, but Nightwood Editions often takes great care in editing and presentation, so it may make the Romantic composer try to find a more pleasing pattern in the perverse "Where Schubart glimpsed madness", unless the line is taken as a literal posthumous reaction. Likewise, "stagger back into it's former prints" must have made the author understandably irritated, even if the formulation originally issued from his pen or computer. Writers sometimes spend a day or more on a choice between leaving out or including one punctuation mark; a few extra minutes of edits should've made this a non-issue.

An uneven book, but a recommended one. I hope Johnstone's next collection is "spread out in fractals" or various unified but wildly unpatterned singularities.

Margo Button's Heron Cliff

Margo Button's Heron Cliff (2007) was published by Signature Editions in Winnipeg. The author thanks the [Vancouver] Island poets (acknowledgement section), as well as her three main or sole editors, Marlene Cookshaw, Brian Bartlett (cousin), and John Barton. The 32 page sequence which concludes the book, "Blue Dahlias", in an edited version (for contest parameters) co-won The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize for 2005. The Malahat Review is, of course, one of Canada's most respected literary journals. Other poems in this collection were accepted (in slightly different forms) in other leading CanPo publications.

I go the introductory, seemingly surroud-sound, route for a reason which I'll elaborate on later. But first, another set-up before moving to the poems. On Dec 31, 2009 at this forum, I said I'd be providing fewer negative reviews since I'd come to my senses by saying "no" to reading entire books of bad poetry. When the first three bites of an apple are rotten, there's no point in being a masochist by devouring the rest and adding to an already flowering gut-churn. And if I haven't read a book at least once front-to-back, I don't think it fair to offer even a mini-review of it. Also, life is short, and there're a lot of them thar other words still waiting to be courted and fawned over. But as I turned the pages of Heron Cliff, my exasperation increased with my incredulity, and morbid curiosity and disbelief propelled me to the end.

As soon as page two in the book (the first and title poem) appears this sequence or stanza:



"Friends wonder why I remain in a house
tainted by suicide. The long dance
I perform: allemande left, allemande right,
dos-a-dos with the dead."


Button's first book, The Unhinging of Wings, dealt (supposedly) exclusively with her son's death by suicide. I haven't read the book, so won't say any more about it. But a mother's understandable obsession with such a horrific event, and the compassion it should generate among anyone, reader or acquaintance, doesn't cancel the fact that the same reader is not affected in the same way, and (unless the poems are outstanding in ways beyond their emotional impact) that reader also holds the understandable position that other subjects and metaphorical directions -- if not outright obsessions -- would be warmly received. And as the page-matter accumulates like dead wreathes, the same graveside visitation is made again, and again, and again.

As the repetition grows, the circle of grief closes tightly, and the reader (certainly this one) is excluded. Personal grief needs a colurful array of lyrical feathers and/or a jackhammer powerhouse of rhetoric to surmount the perils inherent in trying to bridge the secret journal with the international journey.

But what's even worse than this is that Button not only flips to the suicide segue from natural indicators in autumn's moribund images, but -- like Evelyn Lau's latest poetry collection, reviewed here a half-year ago -- uses other shocking human events as a set-up for the main meal, which is ..... you don't need me to finish the sentence.


The following is taken from "One Cry":


"From the cliff house, I hear a siren,
watch a rescue team scurry across the sand
to a cluster of people
out of their element"




Eight lines later, we have:


"I cosy up to/someone else's death."




But we're not finished. Same poem, different event:


"One day in Mexico I saw a yacht explode
-- swirling flames in the bay"




and in another five lines:


"a cry keens around the cove,
vibrates in me like a tuning fork."




Now it may first be pertinent to point out that these are dead lines, and are representative of much of the book. This is journalistic jotting combined with diary anguish. But however cathartic this may be for the poet, the reader is again mislead and manipulated (though all art is manipulation, there're good and bad ways to formulate that). The reader realizes that the drownings and explosions aren't there for their own dramatic autonomy or poetic possibility, but are simply plot devices in allowing the higher waves and flames to catch and (the author's hope) overwhelm.


But there are still greater transgressions. Amplifying the same procedure is "Gardener Teapots". The subtitle marker? "Sept. 12, 2001".

Well, nothing like telegraphing the subject, especially when the bland anecdote successfully disguises the parallel for sixteen lines. So much for suspense.


"Gardener teapots ....
.... made in Russia
under Peter the Great,
lugged by camel caravans
over the Silk Road to Pakistan."


Oh, the proud beneficient trade corriders! But it's almost time for the money shot and the Hallmark denouement:


"-- birds in the air, fish in the sea,
and the world did not end
yesterday in New York.

When the pots broke,
menders salvaged the jagged bits,
bound them with copper lugs
and sealed the cracks with tar
so they could again brew tea."


3,000 murdered and transatlantic turmoil, but hey, the sun will rise again! I'm only surprised that the suicide wasn't directly introduced at some point in the poem.


The blithe arrogance of writing this the day after (even if it were written years later, the date stamped makes it plain the emotions and conclusion were born Sept 12) is mind-boggling.


On to the book's final poem, "Blue Dahlias", which, again, co-won a prestigious CanPo prize. "Blue Dahlias" is supposedly "ghazal-like", according to the back cover. But this is mistaking form for emotional creativity and integrity within difficult subject and tonal shifts. The poem fails miserably at this, and the failure is magnified because Button hasn't learned how to write an adequate floating, quasi-free verse poem, so why should a quality ghazal-like poem be a reasonable goal?


"The big bruiser orders me to move my car
parked in front of his house. Says he's a cop.

So? I'm a poet. A raging granny too.
It beats depression or medication."


Oh, the insouciance! Unfortunately, I don't believe either of her self-identities.



"According to Zen, one must learn the spirit -- kokoro --
of each plant and rock before placing it in the garden."

According to poetry, one must learn to choose the right word
and then surround it with flavourful words in just the right places
so the garden sustains both planter and picker.

And according to Zen, those who speak, know not, especially when it's third-hand.



"Poets should be poor and lead simple lives."

.............

There's the cleaning and polishing, the insurance,
the alarm system, the misgivings. All that weight."

This is the cringe-worthy spectacle (not uncommon in literature) of Oak Bay-touring retiree gaining Romantic frissons by imaginary slumming. Thomas Merton is often admired, seldom emulated. "All that weight", indeed.



"I yearn for landscapes reduced to essentials.
The Arctic. The desert. The soul."

When people speak of getting back to "essentials", it usually means they wish to shrink from the world's confusion and complexity. We're all guilty of it to varying degrees, so in a strange twist, I'm grateful for the reminder, unintentional though it may have been.


Why bother to kick a book like this, goes the usual argument. Surely, if it's as lousy as you depict, oblivion will do its just work. Because the sheer weight of the stuff these days makes it truly difficult -- even for one on the lookout -- to discover much of the good stuff. And just as problematic, reputations do sail along for quite a while on the unearned boost from friends, family, and event community pointed out in this review's preamble. The teeter-totter analogy, introduced in a different context in Heron Cliff, comes to mind.

Margo Button has produced a book that seems to have exorcized a lot of personal demons. I'm very happy about that. But an appropriate close may be to quote her herself, again from "Blue Dahlias":

"I treasure the copy of Moliere's Comedies, published in 1760.
Doesn't mean it's valuable, said the antiquarian."