Of Oil Spills and Left Wing Simplification

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell

The author of this Guardian piece makes an important point as the base for his essay: we focus on the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but aren't even aware of greater environmental disasters of faulty oil infrastructure. Unfortunately, proportion gets thrown out the door, as do several facts in his otherwise speculative exposition, predictable in a topic where misinformation and ideological tunnel-driving are the norm.

Shell Oil aren't saints. They should be held accountable in many ways for the disgusting situation in Nigeria. But the lion's share of the blame goes to the Nigerian government. The country is no longer a colonial beggar but a sovereign state (if one can ignore the porous borders where volatile and enormous crosscrossing migration is necessary due to gangs -- some employed by the government, some by backroom oil company deals, some by the looting class -- and due to a search for the barest necessities caused by environmental devastation, oil and otherwise).

The Niger Delta, says John Vidal, "supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports". This is the Guardian's environmental writer? The correct figure is 12%. He also states that the quality of Nigerian light crude is the world's best. How so? It's no better or worse than any other highly saleable crude from the OPEC bloc, from Russia, from Canada, from Mexico.

But it's the speculative drive of the essay which is most innacurate. "Rebels" attack the pipelines of Nigeria, but the economic strong-arming behind these attacks, which have been ongoing for years, and which have been reported extensively in the media (contra Vidal's assertion), are skirted. In a country where wholesale government corruption forces poor families to tap and siphon oil for individual use and/or sale, and where government workers, already compromised by protecting the rulers' Swiss-bank accounts, also puncture the black goo treasury for personal profit, and where gangs -- both unaffiliated and government-controlled -- also line up at the trough, Shell Oil is just one component in a corruption of staggering complexity.

Despite some feints at objectivity by way of lumping the Nigerian government in with the evil oil conglomerate, the thrust of the essay follows the usual simplification I hear almost every day amongst friends, strangers, and on-line pundits: corporations are the cause of all the world's problems. People want a convenient bogeyman; life is easier that way. We can take a little pill (albeit a bitter one) and go back to sleep.

The fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico happened because of cheap, insensitive safety shortcuts on the oil tanker. I'd also love to see British Petroleum fined, flogged, and festooned with invective. But even in this international media excoriation, there's plenty of blame to go around.

Richard Sanger's CALLING HOME

Richard Sanger's second collection is more assured than Shadow Cabinet, the voice frequently declarative and reveling in its own irony or waywardness. The shaping and unfolding of the various narratives repeats the historical-personal juxtaposition and transposition of his opening volume, but Calling Home is scored with greater depth in a number of fine poems which (I'd wager) become impatient with using social anecdotes as personal parallel, instead creating a closer identification between character(s), speaker, and reader: "Fashion Notes From Paris", "Dispatch", "High Park". The backside contains a few negligible reminiscences, much slighter set pieces that were perhaps inserted as a filling coda or as a tentative desire to unmask multiple personae.

Richard Sanger's SHADOW CABINET

I enjoyed Richard Sanger's first collection of poems, Shadow Cabinet, for several reasons. Many one- or two-pagers concentrate on people -- their feelings, thoughts, reactions -- without using them as background props to (said in a hushed, reverent tone) nature, and, indeed, without feeling the need to bring in environmental imagery at all. (There's one remarkable exception, and for an intelligent purpose, but I'll let readers not familiar with the book discover the surprise themselves.) This is a refreshing departure in a contemporary po-world where nature has barged its way into the cathedral again (minus the Romantic counterbalance and metaphorical shading of human complexity) and the priest(ess) is paid a resurgent respect or, at the very least, allowed a benign acceptance. I also enjoyed Sanger's affecting trick of juxtaposing personal experience with historical snapshots in humorous structuring, as in "Travels With My Aunt". And, last but not least, I enjoyed how Sanger was able to bring that historical detail into the readerly living room with fresh diction and lively characterization. There's plenty of room for mixed sympathy; the figures speak, or are spoken for, but the reader is left to form his or her own conclusions.

James Langer's GUN DOGS

Gun Dogs is Maritimer James Langer's first collection of poems. More seasoned than many millwright authors of seven productions, the volume (not in a malnourished sense) is slim and tight. "Bushcraft" is a dangerous journey with a surprising conclusion; "Home Suite" is a richly observed meditation on mutability and solidity, then and now, and avoids mawkish sentiment, no easy task on this overcrowded thematic path. Pleasant, tumbling sounds proliferate: from "Treble Hook", "A brazen fowl sets the third claw of its call/in the sun's jaws and hoists dawn/up over the gunwale." So far, so good. But after closely reading and rereading half the book, a nagging question formulated itself against the chiming morphemes. Where's the voice? I don't mean an original voice, a distinctive one, but just a recognizable vocal stamp. Without that -- and I couldn't hear it -- all the work, however technically efficient or musically adroit, couldn't make up for an idiosyncratic style, an off-the-rails slant, a vision (voice and vision are intimately connected) which goes beyond tied-off summation of quotidian observation, however truthfully it's rendered. Admittedly, questions of voice in poetry become highly subjective, often matters of taste and historical or emotional association. But no matter the subject or narrative heat, the tone in Gun Dogs is uniformly subdued, even where surface dynamics are altered. It's been stated by many veteran poets that a personal voice -- powerful yet flexible -- is the most difficult hurdle to clear. The late centenarian Stanley Kunitz said that crafts(wo)men were a dime a dozen. That's unfairly extreme, but it reminds me of afficionados, both lyric and post-postmodern, who go to an allied extreme in seeing every praised effect as indicative of a specific ideology or school. There are many very good, lasting poets who lack the je ne sais quoi of individual thrill and felicity. The more poetry I read, the more I see it in a vertical pulse, rather than in an associative nod.

I thoroughly enjoyed Gun Dogs, and highly recommend it. I just don't know if I'll be as happy to pick it up for a fifth reading two years hence.

Contest Results

I would have liked to have sent out the prize of a purchase, but the only entry was from a Chinese character spammer, and I feel no compunction in spoiling that attempt. I warned you about that enviro-diet book review, but, on second and third thought, feel in tune with switching course and laying down a whack of mini-reviews I've had in the hopper the past two months. But first ....

Here're the answers, for anyone curious about matches (from the last post):

a) 19. From "Another visit to the Oracle"

b) 24. From "Cain"

c) 6. From "The Faerie Queene"

d) 15. From one of his poems, ha!

e) 22. From "Dead lakes"

f) 2. From The Hobbit

g) 21. From King John

h) 14. From Playboy Of The Western World

i) 11. From A Handful Of Dust

j) 23. From The Tree Of Yoga

k) 12. From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

l) 3. From "Grey Eyes"

m) 17. From "[37]"

n) 13. From "Untitled" from The Energy Of Slaves

0) 5. From "XIII" from Trilce

p) 4. From "Spring"

q) 18. From "Nevertheless"

r) 25. From "Skunk Hour"

s) 8. From "45" from "Caelica"

t) 16. From G.

u) 7. From "Spring" (Not an alternate version of Moore's poem.)

v) 1. From "Nocturne"

w) 10. From "July Man"

x) 26. From "Down, Wanton, Down!"

y) 20. From "Lady Lazarus"

z) 9. From "Reality"

Monday Mailbag #15

Dear Tribal Hack:

How come you never give out prizes on your blog? No one cares about opinions, we just want the comp.

-- Okra Winfree



Dear Okra:

True. True. The first person to match all 26 authors with the correct quotes (number to letter is easiest to transmit as an answer) wins a sale of one of his or her books, to me, which I'd (eventually) blog-review (oh joy!). Contest closes next Monday at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time. If no one hits all 26 matches correctly, purchase-prize goes to the highest total. Anyone can enter. If the winner hasn't written a book, I'll post (and link, if applicable) to a poem of his or her choice, written by either that person or any other. No skill-testing questions necessary regarding what components make up kryptonite or who (other than Jimmy Hoffa) got swallowed up in the Bermuda Triangle. Multiple entries not allowed. Nor are hints entertained. Submit responses either in the comments section, or by back-channel mail. Winners not eligible for any additional prizes, e.g. subsidies, grants, job blurbs, book blurbs, character assessment, pre-burial beatification, or testimonials of any kind. No additonal prizes or perks to be granted. Bribing encouraged, though the site manager reserves the right to snigger uncontrollably at the presumption. In the event that the correct answer is submitted through private correspondence, and a later correct answer shows up on my unmoderated blog comment stream, the Ashton Kutcher (sp?) type readership numbers agree to accept my honesty in the early, unrevealed-by-verified-time revelation. This contest is open to all and sundry, and in no way discriminates between poetic schools, rivalries, utopian halls, seminar groups, or personality quirks and deficits.



a) Margaret Atwood

b) Irving Layton

c) Edmund Spenser

d) Raymond Souster

e) Miriam Waddington

f) J R R Tolkien

g) William Skakespeare

h) J M Synge

i) Evelyn Waugh

j) B K S Iyengar

k) Tennessee Williams

l) Sara Teasdale

m) Catullus

n) Leonard Cohen

0) Cesar Vallejo

p) Edna St Vincent Millay

q) Marianne Moore

r) Robert Lowell

s) Fulke Greville

t) John Berger

u) Gerardo Diego

v) Georg Trakl

w) Margaret Avison

x) Robert Graves

y) Sylvia Plath

z) Dorothy Livesay

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

1) "The murderer drinks his wine wide-eyed"

2) "Well, are you alive or are you dead?"

3) "It was April when you came/the first time to me"

4) "To what purpose, April, do you return again?"

5) "Rednuhtetum!"

6) "Then woe, and woe, and everlasting woe"

7) "My life is a lemon/but my song is not yellow"

8) "Absence, the noble truce/Of Cupid's war,"

9) "Encased in the hard, bright shell of my dream"

10) "Old, rain-wrinkled, time-soiled, city-wise, morning man"

11) "Tony's as happy as a sandboy, isn't he?"

12) "Both of us married into society, Big Daddy"

13) "I walk through the old yellow sunlight"

14) "You'd do it handy, maybe, if I'd gold to steal"

15) " 'Mac went for a shit"

16) "You use the future to console yourself for the youth you never had"

17) "Your numbers, a hundred or so,/leave me undaunted"

18) "As carrots form mandrakes"

19) "Of course there's hope"

20) "Ash, ash -- /You poke and stir"

21) "Put a little water in a spoon"

22) "The dead lakes"

23) "If a person goes into a swoon, is that samadhi?"

24) "Taking the air rifle from my son's hand,"

25) "Thirsting for/the hierarchic privacy"

26) "Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame"

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

edit: Silly me. Of course, in the interest of transparency, all answers must be submitted through the comments stream. In the event of a tie, first response wins. In the event that no answers are submitted, I'll instead buy and review a copy of "The Ectoplasm Diet For The Post-Green Revolution" by Rance & Sid Pistil.

Monday Mailbag #14

Dear Tribal Hack:

Looking at all the poems I've composed over the last three years, I see a loose-jointed lawn dart tournament theme running through it, needing an injection of corticosteroids to reduce the hyperbolic swelling of intense competitiveness and bizarre pageantry. I'm thinking of sending most of them out to beleaguered editors, but is there a need for yet another poem about the spiritual benefits of fresh air and the beauty of the arcing steel arrow?

-- Mark Dotty



Dear Mark:

There are many ways you can present this to your editors without them gently placing your efforts in the circular file. Think of the obvious arrow metaphor. (Do you play in a league? And is it co-ed?) These days, there seem to be a renewed interest in poems which show a technical expertise in the subject they're relating, similar to what novelists have often concerned themselves with. Are you up on the particulars of lawn dart composition, the history of lawn dart champions and championship matches, the scandals and back room shenanigans? But most of all, can you write a poignant line such as the following, contained in the immortal lawn dart poem by Randy Shakespeare?: "the quiver plunge breasts the sparse dew". Good luck!