Knotting-Off the Aughts #4: Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot

Year: 2003
Place of Creation: Pan-Newfoundland
Press: Vehicule/Signal (Montreal)

Mode of Acquisition: A gift. Full disclosure: Mary Dalton teaches a senior creative writing seminar at Memorial University that I took in the winter of 2004 (Go Seahawks!). I came in for a teacher-student conversation one morning and walked out with my own copy of Merrybegot. My book budget at that time hovered around $40 a year, so owning things was something of a novelty. I had read it in one sitting during the preceding exam session, on the top floor of the library, a copy of Vertebrate Biology left abandoned on the floor.

Status of Personal Copy: Alive and well and living somewhere in the magical book-eating sailor’s chest. I plan on coming to its rescue when home for the approaching holidays.

He was the best jillicker in the harbour–
In the long run, they said, he’ll make his mark–
An arm like that on him, and a brain to match–
Now he’s just another drunken uncle–
You can set your clock by him in all weathers,
-from “The Jillicker”

Dictionaries are curious things, especially English dictionaries. As authored texts, they have polyphonic roots, deriving their source material from innumerable old dialects, jargons, and cultures. However, the job of a dictionary is in many ways the homogenization of these disparate voices, using a dry, clear, tone to rephrase pan-cultural material into a simple, if massive, set of interrelations. A chair is a thing you sit on. Here are all the different types of chairs, and here are all the different ways of sitting. Now here’s what we mean by type, ways, and different. Now here’s what we mean by we. To say, as part of this defining process, that a wigwam and a condo are two kinds of the same thing (domiciles), is to choose to highlight their similar utility in lieu of (or at least, as well as) their separate and specific histories. This is the practice of most dictionaries.

Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot is a book of short, whip-fast poems that uses as their inspiration a dictionary that takes a very specific history as its concern. The Dictionary of Newfoundland English (U of T Press, ironically) is an incredible volume, filled with words so grounded in the folklife of its province that one can almost see their etymology growing out of a single off-hand remark or anecdote. Merrybegot is written in an assortment of voices and carried on a varied rhythmical vocabulary that recalls, at various times: dances, prayers, incantations, rants, and insults (contained in those five categories, one can see the entirety of day-to-day Newfoundland speech). It doesn’t sound like a book inspired by a dictionary; it has the ageless quality of a full, floor-to-ceiling attention to the linguistic breadth of a place with such a deep and essential sense of its language that the two are, on the cultural plane, inseparable. If the language of Newfoundland ever homogenizes fully with that of mainland North America, so too will its uniqueness as place. The Gulf of St. Lawrence is large, surely, but not internet large, not satellite TV large, not oil and gas money large. Merrybegot takes a real and difficult stand. It’s the work of a veteran academic, sure, but could easily be mistaken for an ethnographer’s collected field notes. Nothing in it sounds forced or unappreciated.

It’s part of my Standard Interview Bumf (S.I.B.) to say that I decided I wanted to be a poet while living in Newfoundland. But it may be more accurate to say that I made that decision while listening to Newfoundlanders. When us Toronto poets talk about hearing the poetry of everyday speech, we’re usually either masking our inspirations or just being optimistic. But that everyday poetry, the lilt and cadence of natural meter and, as Dalton says of folk vocabulary, “the vast possibilities of the English language”, is so apparent to an observer of Newfoundlanders that claiming to be tuned into it is a bit like bragging of your ability to get wet in a rainstorm. This is why Newfoundland is a great place to drive around with your poetry training wheels safely in place, one doesn’t need a particularly advanced ear to hear something both new and incredible.

An incredible new word carries with it the ability to recast your mental image of the thing it describes. Take the title of Dalton’s book, for instance. A merrybegot is a child born out of wedlock. Compare this to that other word for such children one commonly finds in places as religious and traditional as Newfoundland (bastard). The difference is stark, a complete reversal of intent and connotation. There are other such world-changing words peppered through Merrybegot. A “feed of tongues” is both a local cod delicacy (and one that, God help me, I WILL find somewhere in Toronto) and code for a verbal beat-down. A conkerbill is an icicle, and if you say the word aloud enough, you’ll begin to hear why. This discovery of new and potent words, words that by their very introduction in a person’s vocabulary can change opinions, is enough to warrant mention among the great linguistic treasures this country has ever produced. But this is why the Dictionary of Newfoundland English is brilliant and essential. Merrybegot is brilliant and essential for these reasons, and a couple more.

It’s tempting to overstate the political weight of books like Merrybegot. Newfoundland literary and linguistic culture isn’t dying in quite the same way that other islands (Jamaica, Hawaii) are seeing theirs die. Surely, confederation and Canadian-ness have been the great new themes of post-war literature in the province. But Newfoundland-ness has never, and perhaps will never, fit neatly inside Canadian-ness like two Russian dolls, not in the same way that the provincial and national identities already complement each other in places like Ontario and my own once-distinct province of Nova Scotia. Despite this starting point, it’s not a stretch to say that the over-protective vibe one gets from Newfoundlanders speaking of their culture is an integral part of that culture. Differentness is the opening necessity.

This cultural protectionism is tied to the second reason why Newfoundland was such a great place to decide to be a poet, but often a lonely place to live. When existing as a mainlander on the island, your outsider status is a given. It’s never going away. I know Ontarians and Maritimers who have lived there for thirty years and still have locals use expressions like “Where you to?” with a group of peers, then turn to them and translate that as, “And where are you going?” If you are the kind of poet who can turn outsider status into a keen and perceptive eye, as I aspired both then and now to be, this is a gift. However, this status cuts both ways, and there’s an expatriate feeling among C.F.A.s that no amount of friendly smiles from strangers can erase. This is a people that identify each other through language, and can differentiate amongst themselves through the subtlest differences of accent and vocabulary. The globalized world has no map for them, and there are means of resistance built deep into their culture. A smiling fortress, if you will. A necessary xenophobia, with offers of tea and cookies.

Paraphrasing David Solway on the subject of the English-language Montreal poets, Dalton describes “the temptation to go into what he calls “a defensive huddle” if one feels oneself to be on the edge of things somehow.” In modern Newfoundland, this perimeter existence is expressed through all means: geography, politics, economics, and the narrative of national history. Merrybegot carries a bravery in it, a dutiful, stubborn dedication to the strained linguistic anchors of Newfoundland culture. It’s a celebration too, of course, but a distinctly insular one, a family picnic. Dalton speaks of writing from a “Newfoundland-centred universe”, and it’s important to see how this portrayal is different from those of Newfoundland-born poets, from Pratt to Babstock, who live(d) in Toronto, but could draw upon their birthplaces as one of a number of potential settings. Here in the metropolis, we tend to smile upon this with the expression cultural fusion. But those are the positive words for it. Like with merrybegots, there are other ways of perceiving the thing, other words. Meanwhile, Mary Dalton writes of the Newfoundland vernacular with the heartbreaking focus of someone well aware that if it were to ever float away, so too would her place in the memory of poetry. Her language is her land, the very ground under her feet.

Lorna Crozier once made an intriguing distinction between “place poets”, who spend their careers speaking for and of a specific region, and “poets of place” who can write as travelers and visitors with an adaptable ear for the core sound of each new home. Al Purdy is place poet, though he has some good ones about countries south or west of Belleville, too. So are Richard Hugo and Mary Dalton. Most of the books I really love are written by poets of place, carrying their permanent outsiderness with them everywhere they go. But when a book works against your readerly expectations with such virtuosity and soul, as Dalton does in Merrybegot, it stands out. To declare a home is an incredible act. It takes bravery, wisdom, and a commitment to soak in all you see and hear. Furthermore, when a poet claims a place as the centre of her universe, she is volunteering to be its steward and protector. And the rest of the universe simply carries on without her, shifting boundaries and cultures, wholly disinterested in the courage and the beauty of the stand.

Note: All the Mary Dalton quotes cited herein can be found in the entertaining interview she conducted with Barbara Nickel in 2003, which is now available on the Vehicule Press website.

Bonus Round: A quick contest: the poems of Merrybegot share a certain unique organizational tic with another Knotting-Off choice, Kevin Connolly’s drift. The first person who can tell me what it is at jacob709_902 (at) hotmail.com wins a free copy of the chapbook described in the post previous to this, shipped to any address in the world.

Edit: And we have a winner! Sorry to those of you who got it right, but did so too late. Our winner is none other than the poet, critic, fellow Maritimer, and noted Vox Pop heckler Zach Wells. What do they have in common, you say? Alphabetical order. The poems in both books are arranged alphabetically. In the Connolly book, it’s been said this is to illustrate that poem order doesn’t particularly matter either way. In the Dalton, it’s an homage to the dictionary that expired it. Congratulations to Zach and the others who got it right.

Twenty-Four Pages of Pure Entertainment

I feel weird pimping my own stuff in this space, but a good man once told me that all uninvited advice is self-serving in nature, and whereas this is essentially a blog of uninvited advice, it feels refreshing to just come out with the self-serving stuff.

I’m excited to be moving back into the world of rolled-up sleeves that is the micropress community. My friends and former classmates–the poets, editors, and adorable lovebirds Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner have started a small press in their living room called The Emergency Response Unit. They put out their first batch of little darlings last year and now have resupplied with five more chapbooks of poems. Included among them is one from yours truly, named Vox Populism (Hey wait, isn’t that also the name of this blog. OhnowIgetit!).

A white cover looks awkward on a white background.

The other books are fellow Guelphers Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s long poem Letter on St. Valentine’s Day and David Brock’s comic horseplays in Gasmask Summer. As well, there’s Aaron Tucker’s cerebral apartments and Cameron Anstee’s generous Water Upsets Stone. I know the books have made an appearance at the Small Press Bookfair in Ottawa, and I imagine Toronto and Montreal are next.

My book is full of poems that I loved, picked over, and felt really bad that, when it came down to it, weren’t good thematic fits for the full-length manuscript I’ve been working on. Leigh and Andrew have provided a good home for some wayward poems about things like the birth of this man, a fictional civil war, the bird life that live here, a poem after a lyric from this handsome troubadour, one written on the official tour you can take here, and others. My fellow Responders have taken the opportunity to go thematic with their chapbooks, but as someone who tends to think in terms of book-length themes anyway, it was good to try and move the focus from the book down to the individual poem(s). I learned a lot.

Anyway, these books may be coming to a small press fair, specialty bookstore, or reading series near you. There’s a decent chance you might like them. And they’re cheap, too. You’re all out of excuses.

Cage Match

You should all take 99 minutes out of your workday sometime this week and watch the entirety of this discussion recently posted on Vimeo between Christian Bök and Carmine Starnino. It comes out of the ridiculously titled “Cage Match of Canadian Poetry” hosted by the friendly Calgarians at Mount Royal University, and emceed by one Kit Dobson.

I’m about a third of the way through as I type this, and what’s notable is the body language. Bök is something of a professional public intellectual, so he’s more composed, but Starnino looks visibly embarrassed at being put forward as the single embodiment of an ill-defined, but likely large, element of Canadian poetry. I understand that the title is hyperbole, but “Cage Match”? Really? I just watched some cage matches on Spike TV tonight, and I gotta say, the two experiences really didn’t strike me as that similar. In one, two well-trained men in boxer shorts attempted to decapitate each other and, in the other video, two well-trained men in nice suits took turns beginning sentences with variations on “I think what ___ is trying to say is….”

This is, so far, a pretty exciting conversation, but I don’t for a second buy Bök/Starnino as the major critical dialectic in Canadian poetry. While one, generally, comes from a traditionalist mindset and the other is avant-garde, what matters is that both men are formalists at their core. The fact that Bök wants to write in genomic code and Starnino is into sonnets is secondary to the fact that the great professional theme for both is the use of constraint as a path to artistic freedom. A more representative conversation would be between the constrainers and the free-versers. But maybe the free-versers don’t have a spokesperson who’s talented or persuasive enough to hang with these two at an intellectual level.

That being said, Bök and Starnino still have legitimate points of disagreement. But what, I imagine, is the big take-away from an event like this is that poetry is not something that exists well within borders. It’s nice watching both men give pause to consider other ideas (even other ideals). This is what happens in a conversation, it’s not what happens in a cage match. Again, I understand that the title is just a piece of marketing, but for all the real and imagined rifts we have in Canadian critical culture right now, I can’t think of a better example of what’s wrong than the bleak, essentialist image contained in this poster:

This is what "Not Helping" looks like.

As I watch on, Starnino and Bök both seem genuinely interested in the conversation. Certainly, they are two men who have thought a lot about their poetic preferences and have made an artistic voice out of the series of reactions carved by their critical ones. So they know what they like, and they know how to express themselves. Still, there’s something deeply cringe-inducing about trucking these two dudes out like they’re competing candidates for some municipal councillor job. When you bring something as subjective as poetry into an arena as both practical and definitive as a public debate, you set expectations—answers, winners, losers, the final taking of sides, the banishment of failed ideas, etc. And Bök and Starnino know that’s not really how it works. Which is maybe what I’m seeing on their faces during those intros.

People should watch the video, though. For the conversation, not the battle of paradigms the spectacle suggests. Or, if not this video, they should be familiar with the ideas the video contains. The event was more of a summary of the last 10 years of poetic argument, so if you’ve picked up a familiarity with that argument elsewhere, good for you. But if you’re a new poet and you get through the whole thing without anything at all to take away from either speaker, I’m not sure what to tell you. This stuff should be terrifying and essential to all of us. Maybe you’re so certain of your own poetics that you can go untouched by any of the varied opinions expressed (if so, fine, but remember what I said about borders). Maybe you’ve written off critics as a species, altogether. This could be valid too. A handful of people have written great poems without ever reading anything about great poems. Are you one of those people? If so, why are you wasting your valuable fucking time here?

I’d argue that a love for writing, a love for reading, and a love for talking about writing and reading are essentially the same thing. And if some part of that essential triptych has fallen-off for you, it was likely caused by a bad experience—a botched education, the lack of good book-picking skills, or maybe some false assumption about what criticism should be. The fix for all of these can best be discovered at a sit-down like the one portrayed in the video. For a few minutes, here and there, both speakers transcend the event to not just sound like men paid to represent a movement, or to sell you something. The sound like two people trying to express why what they know to be important is important. As epiphanies go, this is a small one, but I’ll take it.

You Might Enjoy Attending: Launch of “Exploding Into Night” by Sandy Pool

Tomorrow, Sunday the 6th, at Bar Italia (582 College St.) Guernica Editions launches three new books by poets celebrating their first published collections. I’m sure the other two poets are fine and dandy, but I’d like to throw my voice behind Sandy Pool and her new collection, Exploding Into Night.

Sandy is a small-press regular who has been published by most of our top literary magazines, won a selection of nifty prizes, and had the unique pleasure of my company for two years at the University of Guelph MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Guernica, on the other hand, is an odd operation. In the past, I’ve angered certain pitchfork-waving townsfolk (scroll down) by saying on the internet what everyone already says amongst themselves, that their book design and marketing are both a little suspect. However, they tend to find good poets, and if you can ever locate their titles in actual stores, you are often rewarded with surprising new voices.

Case in point, Pool’s book is a long poem that takes as its starting point the infamous 2005 murder of Rose McGroarty, a much-loved member of Vox Pop’s own newly adopted neighbourhood, Parkdale. The manuscript contains many voices: that of victim, killer, neighbourhood, and city. Feminist, humanist, variably mad-as-hell and eerily dead eyed, it should be a good read. So come listen.

Knotting-Off the Aughts #6: Deanna Young’s Drunkard’s Path

Year of Release: 2001
Press: Gaspereau (Kentville, NS)
Place of Creation: King’s County, NS

Mode of Acquisition: I picked this up at some Word on the Street back in Halifax. It was 2003 or so, I believe. It came as a recommendation from WFNS Exec-Director Jane Buss, who was my benevolent god-motherly figure that year (I like to keep one or two of these in my life at all times). I found out today that Jane’s recently retired from the Fed after a lengthy tenure spent slaying all sorts of monsters (writerly squabbles, funding cuts, a Goliath of a personal illness) with grace, charm, and dignity. Whoever takes over for her, I hope they’re talented and thoughtful enough to do half the job as third as well. If you think you’re up to it (Do you really think you’re up for it?), the Quillboard has the ad here.

Status of Personal Copy: Somewhere along the banks of the Delaware River, on the border between Pennsylvania and New York State. You see, in the summer of 2006, I sprained my ankle playing tennis (“That’s it,” said I, “Fuck sports, I’m done.”) The next week, some friends and I planned a day off from our shared summer job. The idea was to grab some inner tubes from the local Walmart SuperCenter, some beverages, and float aimlessly downriver until we found either a town or the Atlantic Ocean. I took Drunkard’s Path and a half-dozen other titles, my cooler, and The Biggest Sunhat in America (TM). Long story short, kids–if you take two of these, like a dozen of these and, five languid hours later, try to stand up in your inner tube on a bad leg, the only logical result is a literature-soaking overturn. Sad, I know. I hope the plankton of the Delaware have a taste for handcrafted books of lyrical poetry. Ashes to ashes, and all that. I ordered a replacement copy from Gaspereau last week upon the realization that I wasn’t going to be able to write the following paragraphs from memory.

Superdad losing control
as the skis splayed, as broad-faced Kurt Russell
and the girl who played the daughter stood by
mouths full of surprise
when I ran smack
into Irony, that stone wall.

Superdad,
I thought to myself.
And the slanted room full of Disney families laughed.
-from “Superdad”

When, in 2004. an interviewer from The Onion AV Club asked the late Robert Altman the stock question, “Which of your movies is your favourite?” He answered with the stock answer, which I’ll paraphrase as “That’s like asking which of my children is my favourite,” before adding the curious amendment, “though you tend to love your least successful child the most.” This is a refreshing and appreciable answer (unless of course you’re Robert Altman’s most successful child), I imagine the same could be true in reverse: one has a special attachment to the less successful (however that word is defined: perhaps in terms of contentment, status, etc) parent. Carrying the metaphor into the literary world, it could also be said when speaking of our equivalent to the parent-child relationship, namely influency.

Deanna Young has published two books of poems. Drunkard’s Path is the second. The first is out of print and apparently extinct. I’m not sure if there’s a third forthcoming, but I hope so. I’m also unsure where Young is living (Ottawa?) or if she’s still writing. We’ve never met in person. In all the shallow ways success is measured among poets, Deanna Young is my least-successful early obsession.

I think that that opening Altman quip applies quite neatly to my relationship with this book. Drunkard’s Path wasn’t the first collection I kept on my person for months, so I could read from at any quiet moment. It was, however, the first one I ever came across written by somebody I shared a province and a decade with. Now, whenever friends and I talk about influences and early favourites, I don’t see the point of talking about Deanna Young’s poems, because no one else knows about them. This intimacy of influence is a special thing. The fact that the poems in the book are so intimate they suggest an almost physical fragility only adds to this intimacy. I’m protective of this book, in a way I’m not of, say, fellow Knottinh-Off Top Ten, Kevin Connolly’s drift. I feel that, with drift, I could walk away from my adoration, from my fandom, and it would continue to be held aloft by many others. With this Young book, though, because it’s obscure, even for poetry, I feel a personal responsibility to be steadfast, even though there’s a handful of poems in the book that 2003 Jake liked a lot more than 2009 Jake. If anything, this strengthens the attachment. Because, how many other people are out there who remember?

As a text,Drunkard’s Path is a vivid, desperate, barely-held-together collection that shifts back and forth between memories of a violent upbringing out west and a domestic life as a wife and mother in Nova Scotia that, though placid and rewarding, is both charged and charred with the after-mage of its author’s childhood. Perhaps Deanna Young’s real life has gotten in the way of Deanna Young, the poet. As someone who fell madly in love with Drunkard’s Path, that’s disappointing, but reading back through poems like “Photo of Myself at Seven”, maybe it’s an acceptable detente with the subject matter. Much of the more recent autobiographical poems in Drunkard’s Path sound like anecdotes for the chaotic childhood rememberings that preceded them. I like to think that somewhere in this reorganization, she stumbled upon a kind of final cure.

I’m aware of the link between Young’s need to express the personal in her work, and my need to explain the book’s importance (to me) through the context of personal necessity. I’m also aware that, in both cases, there’s the danger of sacrificing real epiphany up on the pitiable altar of the self, of the ego. And that’s the obvious concern with a book like Drunkard’s Path. There’s moments here that flirt with purpleness, but never is sentiment allowed the entirety of a poem’s take-away value. Sentiment is quite rightfully the starting point for a poem like “This Year the Leaves”, which closes the book’s third quarter. But that poem has other surprises for an attuned reader–a masterfully elliptical memory structure, to start, as well as humour, rhythm, and a very specific colour palette most readers (including myself) miss in the first five or six readings.

The juxtaposition of Young’s current and past domestic situations is where the book really takes off. Calling this tactic “subversive” seems to miss the point somehow, as Young is using her own life for both elements of the mismatch. As a subject, she’s the subverted, but as a poet, she’s the subverter. The last of the book’s four sections “Moving In” contains a lot of great poems (“Home for Lunch” being my favourite) but it could be easily mistaken for another collection of mid-life normalcies, writ large! if it didn’t come after a section like “The Desert” which uses all the same pristine domestic motifs but takes as its true subject a relentless procession of domestic assaults, bitter cruelties, and taxing, unrelenting stand-offs.

Drunkard’s Path, like everything Gaspereau Press does, is a beautiful object. The cover design is both minimalist and reflective of the text (and the title). The paper is incredible: it feels like an old woman’s hand and is the colour of French vanilla ice cream. To say that these things aren’t a part of one’s enjoyment of the book is to deny the contribution of many other artists beyond the author. However, the final product somehow intensifies the poems’ cult of personality. The book carries with it a homemade feeling, as if a single creator both milled the paper and wrote the lines. It’s a uniquely pastoral impression. The books that come out of our big cities are embossed with the maps of their communities, the interdependence of the local Poetry Cult. Drunkard’s Path, on the other hand feels like a gift to a friend, as secret and personal as handmade soap. You remember such a gift, you feel compelled to.

Richard Hugo, with Cowboy

A poem to share on this overcast Saturday…America’s answer to Al Purdy, Mr. Richard Hugo, and a man in a cowboy hat discuss “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg” before he launches into an illustrated reading of them poem.

Thanks to playwright, blogger, and noted Vox-Pop half-sibling Mike for the find. He saw it on the personal blog of You Look Nice Today cast member Merlin Mann. Apparently this is his favourite poem. Those familiar with both artists can be excused from a display of surprise.

Here’s the text of the poem. Remember: The principle supporting business now is rage.

Knotting-Off the Aughts #5: Adam Dickinson’s Cartography and Walking

Year of Release: 2002
Place of Creation: Alberta, New Brunswick, and beyond
Press: Brick (London)

Mode of Acquisition: I stole it. Yeah, that’s right. And not even from a faceless multinational corporation, but from an academic library (specifically, the Queen Elizabeth II Library on the St. John’s campus of Memorial University). Well, officially I didn’t steal it so much as I borrowed it, and then moved across the country. I discovered the book’s official library sticker and book-detecting chip once I unpacked in Toronto. Now, normally, I don’t steal. And if I did, it wouldn’t be from the QEII, which is a wonderful library that does wonderful things such as maintaining one of the country’s highest per-student collections and employing Patrick Warner. However, a year or so earlier, I got docked the fine for a book I never even heard of, so I felt that, karma-wise, I’d be forgiven for just hanging onto the Dickinson.

Status of Personal Copy: Why, it’s right here, beside me. Stripped of its markings, it looks like any old book legitimately purchased from any old bookstore. If the good people at Memorial would like their book back, I’m more than willing to oblige. All I need would be the following: a handwritten letter from the Dean stating that I’ve never borrowed or even looked at something called “Emerging Practices in Nursing Homes”, a refund of that books replacement cost ($60.00), a postage-paid returned envelope, and full amnesty for any marginal notations I may have made in the book being returned.

“In the living room, the bright skull of Africa
Is pinned to the carpet with a piano stool.”
-from “How We Look At Maps”

Note: I’m skipping over #6 for now. I have a copy coming to me from the publisher—it’s been too long since I last read it that, unlike certain other books in this series, I’m not confident writing from memory alone. So, not wanting to put this thing on hiatus, I’m moving forward to number five, and will get back to six when the replacement copy arrives.

My experience with Adam Dickinson’s Cartography and Walking is steeped in an ascending series of readerly missteps. The book is one of only two debut collections on my list of ten favourites (how’s THAT for foreshadowing?) and, as is the way with new voices, one spends a certain number of poems trying to deduce the ideal approach to the work. If you get it right, you soon achieve the minimum energy needed for take-off, and you and the author become partners. If you don’t, you have what’s come to be known as a mismatch between presumed and actual intent.

Suffice it to say, I experienced this mismatch early and often with Cartography and Walking, the work wanted to be read slower than I was willing to allow, and this resulted in numerous half-reads, botched attempts, and long hard months riding the bench on the bookshelf. While I see the relationship between author and reader as essentially a trumped-up version of the “communication circle” enjoyed by so many mid-century positive psychologists, I understand now that this breakdown in said circle had much more to do with my failures of readership than the inability of the poet to express their intent in workable, outward-facing, poetry.

Much like Knotting-Off #9, Sue Goyette’s Undone, Cartography and Walking is a difficult book, disguised as an easy one. It carries the simplicity of form, the bucolic subjects, and the general Canadian-ness of so many other more unmemorable books. As such, I jumped right in and assumed I’d be fine, like a novice musician playing Brahms in triple-time. I missed the circularity of his images, the breathe-at-the-wrong-time-and-you’ll-miss-it specificity of his music, and the breadth of subject matter that gets lost when you start seeing poems about portraiture and dictators as just occasional variations on the eco-poetry you quickly and incorrectly assumed the book would make its only interest.

Dickinson (at least here, if not as much in his follow-up, Kingdom, Phylum) belongs to a tradition in nature poetry that has come under fire in recent years. His is the appeal of a Don McKay, where there is no harm or fear contained in a metaphor that reframes the wild as something utilitarian or even human (I understand that’s reductive, but give me a break, What Nature Means to Don McKay is a whole other blog post, or twelve). When Dickinson says of bats, “Their modesty confounds us./ They dart in the cover of tree tops/ as though rushing from bathroom to dress” he risks the ire of the new eco-poets who cringe audibly at any anthropomorphic reinterpretation of the animal world. Why I prefer about Dickinson and his compatriots is how their practice allows for the idea of an un-human ideal (call it “the wild”) as well as a borderline between that world and the human one (call it “the animal”), but they seem to understand, as well, that both of these nations are expressed through a tool that is purely human (call it “language” if you will, but understand that the word holds many others as well: rhythm, music, irony, misdirection, etc).

There’s even a domesticity to the title of the collection. Dickinson shares my personal obsession with maps, and the second half of the title nods back to Thoreau or even Kipling, that most-maligned figure in the new enlightenment, with its image of the poet at play in his amateur observations, happily distant from the specifics of the natural word. I know this is something of an ad-hominem, but is it strange to anyone else that this movement towards the un-human in the poetic approach to nature has its Canadian roots in places where the human is most unavoidable (Toronto, Vancouver)? And meanwhile, the newest practitioners in this older school of thought can often see the actual wild from their porches, and live in places like New Brunswick, Northern Alberta, the Arctic, Newfoundland, or Vancouver Island?

Anyway, that’s both a rhetorical question and a generalization, and what I really want to close on is this idea of misreading. It’s here that the challenge of poetry really becomes apparent. When we try and convince a friend that reading poetry isn’t all that bad, we say things like “just give it a try”. With the idea that attention, any attention, is enough to get them hooked for life. Books like Cartography and Walking show us how optimistic that assertion can be. Because with Dickinson’s first collection, you can attend to it, honestly and fully, for as long as you want, but it’s a deceptively tough song to play along with, and if you don’t happen to fall on that pitch-perfect first note, your whole accompaniment will be off key.

I know of some prose authors that make similar demands. My first experiences with both Gogol and Vonnegut earned the same frustration, and in both cases pace was the root of the problem. In the first, I jumped in with too much energy, and in the second, I didn’t let the narrative grab me and force me to keep up. And this is only one dimension. When approaching a new poet, there is a whole minefield of possible misreadings: you could miss the tone (satire v. straightness, elegiac v. bored…), the rhythm (syncopated v. arrhythmic…), and the subject matter (to what degree can the subject of the first few poems predict where the rest is going). There are others, too, of course. I imagine there’s a full Fight Card’s worth of possible “___ v. ___”s for every chapter in any introductory book on the poetic craft. And if we’re going to get it right the first time, we need to guess correctly on all of them. This is why the simple mantra of “give it a try”, while as useful as starting-point as any, only succeeds when we can match a new reader with their perfect poet, the one who requires no adaptation from the novice reader’s usual approach to new entertainments, but who fits perfectly beside their assumptions, like a puzzle piece.

Of course, those of us who read a lot of poetry know that there are precious few, if any, perfect poets for each reader. I haven’t found mine yet, and don’t know if I would even like their work, because I’ve become so thoroughly hooked on the challenge of finding the voice, adapting my own style as a reader to the style presented by the poems. Adam Dickinson’s Cartography and Walking was a major object-lesson in the value of becoming a flexible reader. When it comes to the discovery of surprising new voices, the rewards far outweigh those found in works closer to your personal aesthetic.

Maybe this is why so many poetry reviewers mellow with age, why their tastes become progressively more catholic and broad. After all that stretching to meet book after book half-way in the interest of fairness, one becomes immune to displeasure. The pen begins to fill with AB blood (the Universal Receiver) and everything new is comfortably assimilated. Maybe the challenge of reading poetry isn’t the practice and confidence it takes to dislike something with authority and wit, but to like the widest range of poets, and for the widest variety of reasons.

What I Think I Might Think

Wow. You folks surely do enjoy a good argument. If my stats tracker was a seismograph we’d be sending lifeboats to California…

I feel like apologizing to Chris Banks, who I may have unfairly painted, in that last blog post, as equally prone to pantomime as his peers. Chris has been going out of his way to try and speak about reviewing culture in a legitimate way. I think he made an error when he first breached the subject by including a review of his own book in his examples of poorly-handled reviews, as this invited the personal in right off the bat, but I should not be painting enablers and addicts with the same brush. Sorry, Chris.

This has gotten me thinking about reviewing in general. Paul Vermeersch is hosting an interesting conversation about it over at his blog this morning. And so too is Brain Palmu, though they are unlikely to find all that much to agree on, and it was Palmu’s review that got this whole thing started in the first place.

I am not much of a critic. I believe that, to this point in my life, I’ve written 12 book reviews, “book review” being defined as an essay judging the successfulness of a new work, not something like this Knotting-Off series (which I haven’t forgotten about) which considers older titles already subject to the public reaction. Of those 12 real reviews, I’d say that I successfully described my feelings on the book maybe once or twice. The rest of the time those feelings were too mixed, or maybe too new, to get it right like the book deserved. That being said, I think I’ve read some pretty successful reviews of my work, both positive and less-positive.

I’ll try and put into words what I want from a reviewer:

1. A book reviewer’s primary job outcome should be the promotion of literature. This is not to say that reviewers need to be promoters, but they should follow the logic that A. They are fans of reading and B. Their audience is made up of fans of reading, so these two parties should have an inherently symbiotic relationship, sharing their diet of good books. Sometimes that involves identifying the distractions, the books that aren’t “good”, that aren’t moving literature forward. This should be done with the full arsenal of the reviewer’s vocabulary, but it should also be done without malice or ignorance towards the overall cause. The message should be: this book isn’t helping us, and here’s why.

2. In order to get to that why, you need a series of organizing principles, crafted into some sort of consistent, but permeable, worldview. We can call that worldview an idealism, or a reviewer bias, or whatever, but the truth is it’s an absolute necessity. Otherwise a reviewer is helpless, s/he’s just walking in the dark–and the books, though mostly inert, are innumerable. The responsible reviewer should be aware of this both while reading, and responding, and they should know that a book that breaks their assumptions, that bends their paradigm, is the ultimate gift. Revelations are breakthroughs, they are how a reviewer evolves. And I’d want my reviewer to always be evolving.

3. The whole product of the book should be up for discussion, not just the text. It’s an insult to our industry for authors to lay claim to the full creative output of the book we put our names on. The contributions (or lack thereof) of all of the following are fair game: editors, publishers, marketing strategists, publicists, agents, book designers, cover artists, proofreaders, and copyeditors. That being said, a reviewer shouldn’t confuse blame when they take exception to some element of the final product’s creation. They should be familiar enough with the process to deduce the source of their complain. Also, it’s more than fair to say that a book’s greatest single contributor is almost always its author(s), and they deserve the majority of the critical attention, up to an including all of it, if the reviewer so decides.

4. That being said, it’s a waste of time to reduce every finished product to an island, an object that exists on a plane of negative space. I am disappointed in any review that begins with a close reading of the text, no matter how deep that reading may be, and never pulls back to take in a wider angle. Books happen in context. Not just the context of other books, but the context of every single thing from the big-bang, to the author’s favourite childhood movie, down to what the layout artist had for breakfast that morning. Obviously, a reviewer is unlikely to have been party to any of those three things, but s/he should know history, know anthropology, know psychology and philosophy from the high-branches of abstract thinking to the blood-and-guts ephemera of everyday experience.

If a book review reads like a consumer report on a microwave, the reviewer has failed to take any chances, to have vision, and has let me down. While both books and microwaves are able to change the culture they are introduced into, books do it with much more regularity, and it is expected of them by a greater percentage of their consumers. Surely, the very first microwave changed the world in ways very few books can dream of, but that’s the exception to the rule.

5. Reviewers should note that they are not cultural commentators, in the purest sense. They are cultural instigators. They are not supposed to comment on how much a book has impacted its surroundings, but how much those surroundings would be impacted IF the book got the public attention it deserves. Reviewing is inherently anti-capitalist, even though critics have their voices modulated (as do authors) by capitalist variables. The circulation numbers of their newspapers is one example. I’d want my reviewer to be happily tricked into thinking that everyone who cares about books is reading their every opinion, even if the reality is so very different from that. Only a reviewer who acts in accordance with this hallucination is free to say what they need to say. A reviewer should be humble before the entirety of art, but they should being egotists in the extreme when considering how much what they write matters.

6. Ideally, a reviewer should find review-writing difficult. I believe that a good review is harder to write than a good poem, a good story, or whatever equivalent artistic output. If it’s something you can laugh off without much thought, likely you’ve failed in the task. Because a review, in the end, is an incredible contortion of thought, stretched as it is across three dynamic bodies: the evolving tastes of the critic, the diverse and often untraceable intentions of the author, and the nameless, faceless, hypothetical that both refer to as their “readership”. If you can’t appreciate the likelihood of failure, I’m not interest in watching you stroll casually towards it.

Know your Audience (When Your Audience is Yourself)

I’m staying in tonight, though it is Friday and I am twenty-six years old, because I have to get up early tomorrow and do things. Also, I’m in something of a cranky mood. My novel-in-progress is looking less and less progressive, less new and interesting, every time I look at it.

So, I’m turning my cranky face on this week’s entry in the endless wishy-washy harrumphing that has plagued the relationship between writer and critic since one was born of the other’s loins centuries ago. (Note: I’m unsure which bore which. It’s a chicken-and-the-egg thing. I know that, in times like this, both come across as equally boring).

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about a dust-up between an assortment of mostly intelligent men and women, many of whom are regular readers of this blog, who have been engaged in the trading of monologues on the subject of reviewer responsibility. I started hereand here and then went here and here and here and here and then here and likely a few other places that aren’t on my radar. Before clicking on the links, I need to warn you—they won’t make you live any longer, and quite likely they will make your time on this earth slightly less rewarding and productive. Also, I happen to think that the offended party (Table Music’s Chris Banks) has more than ample reason to be offended by Palmu’s cursory reading, but that’s not quite the topic of this blog post. Okay, consider yourselves briefed on both caveats.

Talking about reviewer responsibility is important. People should be doing it as much as possible, they should be doing it at the expense of other conversations, about things like voice appropriation and spiritualism and post-modernism and other things that might be fun to say, but don’t actually contribute to the production of good books. Having responsible, engaged, and committed critics is as important, if not more important, than having good poets. They’re rarer. Sometimes I think we’ve been gifted with such a critical community in this country, and other times I don’t. I haven’t fully decided either way.

So talking about this stuff is important. Essential, even. This is why following the flow of banal witticisms and counter-witticisms over the past few weeks has been so numbingly disappointing. Because it’s not really a conversation about any of the things it pretends to be about. It’s not about reviewing style, about the satirical vein of literary criticism, or about aesthetic objectivity (which doesn’t exist, for the record, and whenever a critic is asked to write an objective review they should first demand to see an objective poem). It’s about two groups of people with a personal dislike for one another, one that I know only bits and pieces about, but that I understand has been going on for some time. Someone called someone else “mean”, someone got on someone else’s case for tattle-telling. I get it. We are a slightly more evolved sub-set of the species, us poets, I honestly believe that, but in the end we’re only just people.

I am fully aware that these gripes are based on elements of critical practice, and that they may even be merited (see above). But they are no longer professional disagreements, they’re personal. And even after you’ve deleted the most noxious and jejune postings on your blog (if you’re confused, Zach Wells–Yes, I’m talking about you, but I’m betting you’re not confused), that personal component of the disagreement remains obvious to your readers. I sense that, with every sentence I type here, I can feel myself getting pulled into something that doesn’t directly concern me. And if it was really about poetry, then as a poet, I wouldn’t feel that way. What I’m tip-toeing along the edges of is a public argument, a group of people in a restaurant calling each other out on long-held animosities.

I’m getting into it a bit because most everyone involved is doing a massive disservice to the conversation that’s the most important one from where I sit in the world: how to use language in the service of art, and, to that end, the benefit of the world. When you use this topic as a smoke-screen, as an excuse to talk about things that wouldn’t otherwise befit a public venue, you’re demeaning the conversation, making it entirely about you and your insulted heart. And that, at least, I take personally.

So please, and I say this to a group of people that I have read and respect as poets and/or critics (except for the one of you I haven’t read yet, and so have no way of knowing), grow up. It doesn’t matter that you’re good with words and can craft a beautiful argument in favour of your position. We’re all good with words. We’re poets. All you’re doing in the end is crafting flowing, multisyllabic ways of calling someone else a jerk, because they called you a jerk first, in just as many words. And this stuff, this personal-posed-as-the-professional, kills actual criticism, it chokes off its oxygen. And some of us, in small ways, rely on critical discourse to get by, to make our way through the chaotic worlds of sound and ideas, in the hopes that we’ll be able to make something lasting and accurate. To put it another way, I believe in criticism, in much the same way that other people believe in certain gods or professional sports team, I need to know it’s more than just a game people play, that it has a real and honest role in the progression of art. When you play games with such a thing, when you use it as a platform to get back at somebody, you’re letting down that percentage of us who feel the same way.

All I ask is that you be aware of why you’re saying whatever you’re saying, and for you to admit to it. Take me, for instance: I just said all that because A. I believe it and B. Some of the characters in my novel are shallow and uninteresting. But I suppose, so are some of the characters in my life.

Trolling through the CBC’s Purdy pages

Hello all,

Just a quick hit, as I pause momentarily in the Knotting-Off Countdown to order some necessary books off the internet. The Al Purdy Fundraiser has come and gone, and been quite the success in the process. We pulled in over $2000 off the memorabilia sale alone, which included broadsides, ephemera, and one of Al’s very own silk shirts (thanks to auction master Steven Heighton).

This has put me in a very Purdy mood (get it?), and I’m re-reading Sex and Death today as I hop about Toronto making a handful of post-auction follow-up appointments. I thought you’d like to share the love by wasting a productive Friday in the CBC archives on Purdy.

They have a total of 13 TV and radio clips, so there’s lots to choose from. Some highlights:
1. The strange first meeting between Purdy and Atwood.
2. That John Reeves, photo, the anecdote concerning which provided the biggest laughs of the night on Wednesday.
3. Purdy discussing “At the Quinte Hotel” before it became a Tragically Hip video.

Have fun
-Jake