Don Coles' FORESTS OF THE MEDIEVAL WORLD

I'd previously wondered aloud what happens to a poet's work which is already nostalgic at a less-than-advanced age. 8-18 years after that defining Selected volume, Don Coles' Forests Of The Medieval World answers that. Nostalgia, to no surprise, still permeates. But it's informed with greater complexity, with a much more interesting ambiguous play between memory and reality, illusion and truth, impression and worth. The extended "Night Game" is a fearlessly honest experience/reminiscence on past action and interpretation. The original dismissal of his father's seemingly idiotic concentration "to the /Death" with the hockey game morphs into his observation of a baseball coach at a kids' softball game, and the realization that the coach did him a huge favour when they were schoolkids. Further complicating the remembrance is the speaker's wise perception that the coach might conclude, after reading the former's thoughts, that "no, this isn't how it is".

"Remembering Henty" is similar in that it both revels in and doubts the remembered absorption of a boy reading adventure yarns. Perhaps the joys are increased by nostalgia (they were never that intense), perhaps our concept of joy itself is inevitably debased, but those joys led to today's reality, however bemusing they may now appear. The final dark parallel is also profound.

"Untitled" is a rarity, and there should be many more poems (from other poets) of tentative enlightenment, dwarfing the plethora of mild "epiphany" anecdotes.

The Olympic Games Multiple Orgasms Have Begun

I just finished listening to a sports talk radio station, that media bastion of reasoned, subdued, articulate public discussion and debate. (I wanted an update on the Burrows-Auger hockey scandal.) Team 1040 close by in Vancouver was the choice. I believe it's 24 hour sports comment and talk, its market-driven necessity only going to prove that the world -- reminiscent of what a comic once said about the "Earnest Goes To .... " movie series -- is going to h e double-hockey sticks in a zamboni. Dave Pratt and Don Taylor were/are the frenzied pom-pom wavers. (Don Taylor had a good, funny sports shtick 30 years ago, but unfortunately he repeated himself early, and every sportscast he's been on in every TV market the past 29 + years has been a sleepwalking copycat production.)

These are editorials, not voiced to any specific call-in listener:

Dave Pratt: "Take your politics and stow it. Whether you're extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing, you have one responsibility and that's to get behind the Olympic games."

Don Taylor: " Whatever your cause, do you think whining about your special interests is going to make people sympathetic to your cause? Grow up."


To host #1: As a citizen with the same rights as any other citizen, I thought my one responsibility was to be true to my beliefs, and from there, to publicly (if I so chose) voice my feelings about whatever the hell I want, including the overfed, nauseatingly hyped, cynically lied-about overbudgeting of the Olympics. It seems your one wish (sorry, "responsibility") is to tell everyone with a different opinion than yours to shut up.

To host #2: It doesn't matter. Not many are sympathetic to causes anyway that aren't part of the majority's cultural desires. Not many like the squeaky wheel, but if there's going to be any change in the conversational paradigm, the one-sided, mindless Olympic boosting ("look at the state of the media consoles, and how much money they're putting into it! Everything's going high-definition and the technology .. everything's digital! People are coming here to have fun!", to replay just a few of the comments from these two), other voices need to be heard. And, hey! what's the problem, a few disenfranchised souls will get minimum wage jobs for a month! Go, Canucks!

Does This Need Further Comment?

From Ron Silliman's pen, today:

"I can remember the days when newspapers had if not great writers, at least good ones with some clue as to style."

OK, I'll go against the header with a brief note: I suppose the defense here would be that he's simply jotting down "text" in a hurry. He's a busy blogger, obviously. But so are newspaper writers. In fact, they have deadlines more fraught with tension than is the norm with Silliman's project.

Need more?


"Even when a single writer could dominate a single market – the way Herb Caen did San Francisco in the 1950s & ‘60s – costs were kept down by the knowledge that Herb Caen’s three-dot style might fly in SF, but it would be too esoteric even in nearby Modesto, while he would come across as pure country bumpkin – the Sacamenna Kid, as he would have put it – in a burg like New York."

I still can't attribute the quote to the right source, but "a poet should be able to write prose at least as well as a professional prose stylist" (paraphrasing) comes to mind.

David O'Meara's STORM STILL

Wonderful! And a first book (1999). I'm eager to read his follow-ups.

(From "December, 6 A.M."): "floats/inside this airy hour like smoke inside/a bottle." I submit that only a major talent could have composed those words. Roll "airy hour" around, out loud, very slowly, then note how perfect and transforming "smoke inside/a bottle" becomes. This is when that pedantic ruler-wrapping insistence on "meaning" becomes a stale mantra. Yeah, there's meaning there, but poetry is a sensuous art. The chief meaning is in its sound and rhythm, or, to put it more forcefully, meaning, if any, and if lasting, can only come out of its sound.

I previously mentioned my admiration for O'Meara's "Postcard From Camus" sonnet. Rereading it in this collection increased my pleasure. Camus as Meursault. Yes, stay inside, the pen IS mightier than the sword. Certainly healthier. It's not often I encounter a highly intellectual laugh-out-loud poem.

There are many other strong poems here. I don't have time to do them justice by a longer review right now, and many other people are a decade ahead of me in discovering his worth, anyway. But more on O"Meara when I catch up with his latest works.

Don Coles' LANDSLIDES; SELECTED POEMS 1975-1985

Some Coles' notes. There, I said it. So sue me. Coles, here, is a poet of nostalgia. Interior concern, even obsession, drives the lyrics. In the best poems, the reader's treated to loving suggestion, as in "you moved warily/Inside your clothes, as in woods" (from "What I So Cherish"); in the worst poems, the reader has to contend with vague quasi-profundities pretending to mysterious depth, as in "Half-remembered shapes of/Former things" (from "Landslides") and "busy at night at some adult thing I do/like walking about my house/or sitting with mingled thoughts" (from "Busy At Night At Some Adult Thing"). I haven't read any later Coles, but, in the intervening quarter-century, where does nostalgia lead? Or at least in the following eight years? I have his 1993 GG-winning Forests Of The Medieval World on hand, and'll put in a few words on that volume down the pike.

Kevin Connolly's HAPPYLAND

"Lake, Ocean" is a terrific poem, a contemporary Stevensian weave on perception. "An Ecology" is another gem, and the title sequence which ends the book is an effective departure. Are there out-of-control flourishes in Happyland, indulgences that don't always translate to the reader? Yes, but don't be quick to give up after a first read or two. A lot of those seemingly jumbled, haphazard narratives make more sense -- in fact, in "Lake, Ocean" and others, achieving an autotelic authority -- than many other efforts by flat, linear, anecdotal poets.

Karen Solie's MODERN AND NORMAL

There's been a plethora, a veritable potpourri, of pronouncements lately on Solie's second, including James Pollock's excellent take on all three of her releases, so I'll just leave a few footnotes. "Determinism" is my favourite: the ambiguity slides into a universal problem. Something to do with abiding human nature. And "Bomb Threat Checklist" is good. (I can see where Patricia Young's "Tormenta" came from, unless it's just a coincidence.) Solie's repeated phrase-sentences can at times be irritating in their summary authority, not because of the tough tone, but from either an unearned conclusion or a filling-in-the-blank cement-load on top of fine, floating suggestion. Substantive. Inventive. More bullseyes than in Short Haul Engine.