Soraya Peerbaye Interview @ The Torontoist

Continuing with this series of interviews I’ve been doing with local poets for The Torontoist’s Book Page, here’s one with my friend and fellow author Soraya Peerbaye. Soraya is the author of Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names, out in Fall 2009 from Goose Lane Editions. More about language than about “poetry”, the interview also contains the full text of her sublime little poem, “Pomme”. Here’s a link to the full interview. And here’s a selection for those with attention issues:

****

Jacob: Thanks for doing this. I thought we could spend our time talking about language (and languages). The complex identity politics of mixed-history languages (specifically Mauritian Creole) weigh heavily on the book’s first section. And of course, the poems themselves add another layer to that complexity, because they’re all written in English. I imagine this was something you considered while writing the book. Can you walk me through your concerns regarding language and identity, and how those concerns might be manifest in the final product?

Soraya: My first concern with language was less immediately connected to cultural identity, and more so to familial identity. I think this is one of the oddities about being from a tiny, far-flung island, which had no indigenous population before colonization, and where many have lost a connection to languages of origin (Urdu in my family’s case). Moving to Toronto, my family was somewhat adrift – though there is a Mauritian community here, and my father’s practice as a doctor was one of the things that kept us connected to that. Nonetheless, I can’t say there was a sense of belonging to a diaspora through language.

I read a beautiful essay on growing up in a French-language family in America by Belgian writer Luc Santé, in which he says: “For me the French language very nearly became detached from its base, like so many of our household customs, which had lost their connection to any wider world and hovered in a vacuum….” That – with the added dimension of race – was very much my experience. Even when we are with French speakers from France or Quebec, each one of us in my family loses the island accent and subconsciously adopts a more “cosmopolitan” (i.e. Parisian) accent. Speaking in my own accent in that context is a physical impossibility – I cannot will it. So my mother tongue – in the deepest sense, the language and its natural inflection – hardly existed outside my family.

****

Read the rest right here.

Remember Your Ephemera

My review of Moez Surani’s excellent first collection, Reticent Bodies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2009) is now up at The Mansfield Revue. Read the review, if you like. But mostly, read the book. Here are some selections from the former:

Returning to the dusty traditions of love and loss, of abstractions made real by the force of his descriptions, Surani stands out amid the microscope-wielding fetishists of the quantifiable world that have dominated his generation of Canadian poets. This uniqueness of worldview is carried on a talent robust enough to move, in the course of a single line, from the specific to the global, and from the personal to the political, without ever losing sight of his target or forgetting to employ his ferocious and adaptable wit.

And

To return to the text, there are three kinds of poems in Reticent Bodies. These are the Great Canadian Anecdotal Riff (see “Yardsaling with Robin”), the intertextual call-out to a classic of fiction or poetry (“The Missing Exchange”) and the metapoetic experiment (“Several Idiomatic Demonstrations of ‘Carbunkle’”). These cycling concerns (life, literature and language) are shared, to varying degrees, by most of our young lyricists. What sets Surani apart is that he is willing to affix each of these three concerns to any level of emotionality or subjectivity. This creates surprises when his expected unemotive poems like “Carbunkle” find themselves suddenly charged with both a great wit and a great passion, as in “you get angry for no particular reason and shut everybody out—‘Carbunkle,’ he muttered, leaving the room.”

And

If this formula sounds familiar, it should. It is poetic home base to both Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, the two great romantic obituarists of mid-century Canada, whose love songs impacted future generations of young male poets in a paradoxical way. Venerating them both as the grand old masters of the nation’s lovelorn youth, decades of young men promptly wrote away from them, turning to the woods, to low culture, to popular ephemera and the full shit and plastic of corporeal life, unconcerned with notions like reticence or love. In Reticent Bodies, there’s a real invitation to turn back and approach the brief glimmering spark of Canadian neo-Romanticism directly.

Not wanting co-opt Mansfield’s generosity in letting me do the review, I’ll end the pullquoting for now. If you want to read the whole thing, you’ll have to read it on their website.

My only qualm with Reticent Bodies (the review is an absolute rave) is the lack of a Notes section that details the many and various allusions, quotations, and borrowed sources in the book. Surani names his sources and everything, he’s in no danger of plagiarism, but I expected a lovingly collected list of original sources, archived with all the care and efficiency of a museum curator. The book is notable for the long and diverse list of heroes (and antiheroes) that make appearances in its pages. To borrow from the review, this includes “Austen, Steinbeck, Othello, Quixote. But coupled with this is a second set of allusions to the heroes of the literary iconoclast, to the shadow cabinet of contemporary book learning; they include Neruda, W. C. Williams, Cohen (more on him later), Hikmet and Maupassant.”

Am I being paranoid, or has something happened to the Notes sections of poetry collections? I feel like I’m seeing them less and less, and I’m worried that dominant early theme in my generation’s contribution to Canadian poetry (let’s call it “removing embellishments”) has taken out as many wonderful elements as unnecessary ones. In our denials, both private and public, of things like the epigraph, the 100+ page collection, and the tangential personal narrative, we’re losing some of the beautiful ephemera of the poetry book. I’m not saying Notes sections are on that list of victims (lots of people use them), but the “anti-ephemera” meme in poetic discourse could just as easily line up against this decoration as it has on any others.

And that would make me kinda sad. As I’m a big fan of detailed Notes sections. By “detailed”, I mean more than a list of source texts and publication dates, but instead a whole string of loosely connected micronarratives that speak to the lives of the quoted authors, the historical context of a given poem’s setting, or that admits that the poet kidnapped the intentions of a given passage by quoting it out of context. At their best, Notes sections hint at a sort of pre-creative map, a list of interests, icons, and starting points from which the author first jumped off. Maybe this is the root of the young artist’s fear, that such a concentrated list of borrowed (or at least bordered) ideas suggests a lack of creativity, a breach of authorial uniqueness. Whereas authorial uniqueness, as expressed in un-ideas like “the singular voice”, is something of a lie anyway, I don’t worry about it much. But we don’t always know this when we start out, do we?

One of the many joys in Damian Rogers’ new first collection Paper Radio is a Notes section that is both gloriously long (3 pages!) and written in a tone that is at once formal and coyly playful, and that speaks to the poet’s real excitement when recounting the various musicians, poets, and thinkers that informed the poems. There’s even a sort of boozy eloquence to the text, as if each paragraph began with an unwritten, “Oh, and that reminds me. The thing about ___ is….” It’s so nice to see poets get excited over things that aren’t just themselves. The poems, at least, in Reticent Bodies carry the same sort of intellectual joyfulness and unashamed ownership of one’s predecessors. I would have loved to have them all written out in one place.

I know there’s a lot of readers out there who just stop reading when they get to the Notes section of a book, and I know why. But my advice to my fellow poets is this: own your interests, own your heroes, and own the stuffing out of your quotations and allusions. Those who don’t care won’t read it. But those who do will read it, Google the unfamiliar elements, kill a couple hours on Wikipedia, and love you all the more.

Nadir

Oh boy, oh boy. This is a tough week for blog credibility. First there was that last post about angry-blooded Victorian (pun intended) Poets Laureate, and now there’s going to be a review of upcoming readings and other public events. I’m very sorry for the latter. As for the former, I stand behind it. These things need to be said aloud, said by a whole atonal chorus of disparate voices with variegated preferences. But said in unison. As many people as possible should be saying, “This is not okay” and I understand it may be tricky for current or former British Columbians to do this, so I think I did the right thing by joining in.

But it hurts the heart a little, saying these things. It makes the hands dirty and leaves a decidedly unpoetic taste in the mouth. Gosh, this blogging is hard work. Methinks I shall award myself with a three course meal of self promotion.

1. PIVOT at The Press Club on Wednesday Feb. 10th.
w/ Martha Baillie and Damian Rogers. Hosted by Carey Toane

PIVOT, being the Toronto reading series most frequented by practicing poets, is always a good audience, and I’m excited to finally get to read there after a string of scheduling snafus. It’s also exciting to read with two women whose books I’ve read, enjoyed, and am quite honestly looking forward to hearing from. The Press Club, for the record, is at 850 Dundas W, that’s three blocks west of Bathurst. Show starts at 8. My intentions are to come, do my thing, and then drink the night away.

***

2. The Book Lover’s Ball at the Fairmount Royal York on Thursday, February 11th

I was surprised to be invited to this super-swanky black tie shindig. I’m listed on the guest list as one of the fifty “Celebrity Authors” in attendance, which is charming and all but, c’mon people, we really do egregious things to the word “celebrity” in this country, don’t we? This is for a great cause (Toronto Public Libraries) and if you can swing the ticket price, you’ll have a blast. My intentions are to come in my best blue and tan and not be thrown out of the hotel for ruining the black-and-white men’s dress code. I mean, I’m a “Celebrity”, I can wear what I want, can’t I?

***

3. The Launch of “Vox Populism” and other TERU Chapbooks at The Magpie on Monday, February 22nd
w/ David Brock, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, and Aaron Tucker. Hosted by Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner

I’ve been looking forward to this launch (and to holding my pretty new chapbooks in my hands) for some time. It’s a nice group of people to be reading/launching with, too. Tons of fun. The Magpie, for the record, is just across from The Press Club at 831 Dundas. Show starts at 7:30. My intentions are to sit in Dave Brock’s line of sight when he reads and try to make him burst into laughter.

What Bullies Do

Zach at C.L.M. posted a link to the very strange response from Victoria poet laureate Linda Rogers to her reviewer, Candace Fertile. If you want the context, here is the review of the book (called Muscle Memory, from Ekstasis Editions), and then here is the poet’s response and when you’re done with those, come back because here’s what I have to say: I posted a very anger-inducing piece on this blog a couple months ago about poets hiding personal disagreements in the guise of discussions about craft. The first few sentences in Roger’s letter to the editor make me think that this is another example (“I considered the source and decided to ignore it” she writes). I googled Ms. Fertile and didn’t find a massive depository of snarky book reviews, or any snarky book reviews, for that matter. If they’re out there, let me know. Otherwise, I imagine that whatever made Rogers deem Fertile to be below her standing happened in private somewhere. Where it should stay.

I’m not going to re-make the points I made in that old blog post, as I just recently finished re-making the friends. And more importantly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Fertile’s review. It’s engaged, interested in authorial intent, balanced, and so polite is sounds like someone trying to awkwardly decline a dinner invitation. Rogers calls it “hate mail” and claims that, by publishing it, the Victoria Times-Colonist “insulted the city that has chosen me to be poet laureate.” This is such a hyperbolic and self-righteous response that it makes for entertaining reading even if you don’t know or care about poetry. It has all the auto-embarrassing momentum of a viral video classic. Rogers even claims that publishing a negative poetry review in the wake of the Haiti earthquake is an act of (Dear God I wish I was making this up) “appalling taste.” Methinks she underestimates slightly the impact a volume of poetry that will sell maybe 1,000 copies in a far-away country will have on the international aid mission to Port-au-Prince.

Let’s hope that Fertile can stand her ground, and recognize the fact that A. There’s nothing wrong with her review and B. She’s being bullied by someone who thinks she can use her standing as poet laureate to abuse a lesser-known reviewer. Let’s see if the Colonist has the courage to give her another assignment. If not, it’s the job of the rest of the critical community (and the broader poetry community) to stand up for this reviewer and give her space in other markets and magazines to make up for it (no novice by any means, Fertile’s reviews have been published already in the Globe and Mail, among others). We need to be telling this author that, while she might be a wonderful person and a dutiful poet laureate, she stepped several feet over the line in this response, and she’s a bully. Linda Rogers, you’re a bully. And you’re embarrassing yourself. So you should stop it. But I bet you already know all that.

***

PS: On a completely unrelated note, The Toronto New School of Writing is opening for business on College St (linking from The Torontoist). Ran by BookThuggers Jenny Samprisi and Jay MillAr, the courses are being marketed as interactive and non-academic. Here’s their opening course list. What I like about this project is that it’s located in an address that hopes to eventually also hold a bookstore, a series of artist studios, and generally serve as an art/lit community hub in the city. Exciting, right? For all our incestuous cross-pollinating and our massive chain-link fences of drinking buddies, the youthful element in the Toronto book scene could really use a clubhouse. There should be a centre. Wildly optimistic though it might be, 283 College has a shot at becoming such a place.

Retail 2010: Insomniac Press and Palimpsest Press

The good times keep on rolling as we pay visits to two Ontario poetry publishers that do good things with the modest patches of cultural ground their berths in our little poetry community allows them. This morning, it’s time for Insomniac Press (London) and Palimpsest Press (Essex County). Alphabetical order says we start with the former.

Author: David McFadden
Title: Why Are You So Long and Sweet?, Collected Long Poems of David W. McFadden
Date: May
Collection Number: Twenty-Second (Editors Note: OMFG!)
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “Why Are You So Long and Sweet? finally brings together all of McFadden’s masterful long poems. For some poets, the long poem is an occasion to stretch one’s lyrical legs, try on different stylistic hats, or work out ideas too complex for shorter poems. For David McFadden, the long poem is much more: here is McFadden’s prodigious imagination in overdrive, his language and imagery always mischievous and mesmerizing, spinning yarns both comic and cosmic. “
Other Notes: It’s hard not to be excited by this volume of collected long poems. McFadded is on a bit of a roll of yet, his last book of new work, Be Calm, Honey, got shortlisted for the G-G, while his recent selected poems called Why Are You So Sad? (for which this new compendium is a wittily titled, companion) found itself on the Griffin shortlist. McFadden is an exciting poet who is able to work in a variety of styles, speeds, and voices. It’ll be neat to watch him work his way through them in the longer form. Whereas Why Are You So Sad? was my McFadden introduction, I’m eager to learn about his approach to the long ones. Stuart Ross edits, as he did for So Sad, which was also an Insomniac title.

Author: Jeff Latosik
Title: Tiny, Frantic, Stronger
Date: May
Collection Number: Le Debut
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “Probing the pressure points where notions of physical, psychological, and technological strength continually threaten to erupt into their opposites, these poems ask which aspects of our daily lives might actually last beyond the here and now, beyond their own inherent limitations of time, person, and place.”
Other Notes: This first collection appears on the horizon after its author spent a couple years traipsing through the country, greedily scooping up wins and shortlistings for most of our top poetry prizes. His bouche now sufficiently amused by these wins, Latosik moves on to the main course of his career. It’s been fun watching Jeff (a close friend) grow into a more and more confident poet in the years I’ve known him. Here’s the poem of his The Malahat Review thought was the best they saw of the year. And here’s one from The Walrus. This book is an awesome accomplishment, and gets the full Vox Pop recommendation. Jeff is one of the two people I share an address with who is putting out a book of kick-ass new poems this year. Sigh. I’ll get the pom-poms and bullhorn out, and start practicing my cheers…

***

The other half of this double bill is brought to us by Palimpsest Press, a tiny little press with a big heart. They’re based in Kingsville, Ontario (Essex Co, pop: 20k). Two books on the slate this year for Palimpsest. Do the right thing, readers, and look into picking up one or both. Shake the little guy’s hand and let him know he’s your friend.

Author: Ariel Gordon
Title: Hump
Date: April
Collection Number: Le Debut!
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “Hump is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to represent adequately the wonder and devilment of being with child. Hump is a love poem written to a father and child, to a lover with a glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty and
faded but still greener than most.”
Other Notes: If you’re paying attention, this’ll be the third love-poems-to-a-city collection in the last two previews (after robinson’s Halifax and Bowness’s Ottawa). We seem to be moving West, manifesting some sort of destiny, as it were. Is there a Calgary or Vancouver writer out there with a love song of their own? Here’s her blog. And, of course, if writing about mothering seems like your kind of thing, your online home should always be Marita Daschel’s blog on the subject.

Author: Alessandro Porco, ed.
Title: Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey
Date: April
Collection Number: Umm…it’s essays, by multiple authors (I seem to have asked myself an impossible question)
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey gathers together, for the first time, a collection of essays that serve to highlight and explicate the scope and complexity of McGimpsey’s poetic practices. They examine McGimpsey’s positions on literary history, class, nationalism, humour, love, and aesthetics, all of which are celebrated in McGimpsey’s work.”
Other Notes: I know this isn’t a book of poems, per se, but I believe it’ll still be noteworthy to people who read this blog. The essayists are: poets Porco, jason Camlot, Elizabeth Bachinsky, and academics from U of T, UNLV, Texas Christian, U. Sask, and others. The whole thing closes with what I imagine is a fairly involved interview between Porco, Camlot, and McGimspey. As one of the great “nice guys” of Canadian poetry, McGimpsey can include among his many admirers people with only casual interests in contemporary verse. We need more people with that kind of audience. I’m glad the poet and blogger Alessandro Porco has stepped up to solidify the McGimpsey impact.

Retail 2010: ECW Press and Tightrope Books

We’re moving into shorter lists now, so I’m going to start doubling up. It’s a finite world we live in, kids, and it’s important to save on paper. ECW Press is based here in Toronto and runs the oddly original business model of Books about Pro Wrestling + Poetry + the occasional novel = Skyrocketing Profits and Market Domination. Or something. Anyway, they’re in that minority of poetry publishers who like to put stuff out in the fall too, so be on the lookout for new titles round about October or November. And these two, coming out in April.

Author: David Donnell
Title: Watermelon Kindness
Date: April
Collection Number: Eighth (give or take the odd poetry/fiction hybrid)
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “Detailing a point of view that is both contentious and genial—somewhere between the outlooks of Archie Bunker and Dale Peck—the wide-ranging poems in this honest collection ponder questions concerning art, history, and psychology while reveling in the sensory experiences of everyday life. Whether exploring the modus operandi of other writers or paralleling the trajectory of a satellite with a badly ended love affair, these conversational and intellectual poems present a unique voice with a comprehensive worldview.”
Other Notes: It’s been six years since Donnell’s last collection (Sometimes a Great Notion) and a full 27 since the career-high accolades of his Governor General’s Award wining Settlements. I have never read a book by David Donnell. Does anyone have a specific recommendation? (UPDATE: Apparently Donnell’s last book was edited by someone who lives in my house. So I’ll read that. I am so horrifically embarassed when I come across an author with an impressive CV that I’ve simply never read before. For me, philistine’s remorse feels like heartburn, except in the brain.)

Author: matt robinson
Title: Against the Hard Angle
Date: April
Collection Number: Fourth
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “Against the Hard Angle uses some of Halifax’s most and least famous places as jumping off points for a stop-and-start lyrical tour of eastern Canada’s largest urban centre, a sometimes fraught journey that leaves us “all tendon-tensed, / against impact, near white-knuckled to / breakage.”
Other Notes: This is a book in two sections, the first being the full text of Robinson’s 2009 Malahat Review Long Poem Contest winner, and the second being a collection of mostly Haligonian place-poems. Several years back, robinson wrote a book called how we play at it that I enjoyed for its text, though said text was defeated handily by perhaps the single greatest cover image in the history of Canadian poetry. I know I gave shit to the last guy with no capital letters in his name, but robinson’s been around for a little while now, and has begun to earn his affectations.

***

We’ll move on now to Tightrope Books and their trio of new releases. Tightrope’s major contribution to Canadian letters is always going to be their Best Canadian Poetry series, edited this past year by A.F. Moritz (though the series editor is Molly Peacock, who also edited my first book. Oh, Canadian poetry, you remind me of this). As a publisher of individual titles, I’ve found their work a little hit and miss. Though I guess if half of your titles are any good, you’re doing well in this poetry stuff. Anyway, here’s what’s new.

Author: Suzanne Bowness
Title: The Days You’ve Spent
Date: May
Collection Number: Le Debut!
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “Part private reflection, part love letter to the metropolis, The Days You’ve Spent pulls back the curtain on city life, finding beauty in neon signs and profundity in laundromats. In these poems, the individual and the city interweave, and urban immersion becomes an essential element in personal growth.”
Other Notes: Bowness works by day as a journalist and tech writer, so surely she’s earned her reward in poetry. It’s strange that, across two separate Toronto publishers, we’ve now seen a love letter to Halifax in the robinson book, and now a second urbanist manifesto from an author based in Ottawa.

Author: Ian Burgham
Title: The Grammar of Distance
Date: May
Collection Number: Second
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “His imagery is, by turns, sensuous and rough-hewn, soft and hard. The poems crackle with sonic energy; they whinny and stamp. They whistle in the dark. His poetic landscapes frequent the windswept coasts of Scotland; but in this collection, we also find him doing terribly Canadian things like snowshoeing, surveying, chopping wood. Sometimes Al Purdy can be heard in Burgham’s voice and, occasionally, Patrick Lane.”
Other Notes: Burgham’s debut full-length collection, Skipping Stones, scored a ReLit nomination and the appreciation of literary figures both in this country (Di Brandt) and beyond (Alexander McCall Smith).If you’d like more information, you can consult his suspiciously well-researched Wikipedia entry, if you catch my drift.

Author: Anna Swanson
Title: The Nights, Also
Date: May
Collection Number: Le Debut!
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “Her writing is as honest as it is complex, and it attempts to reconcile an identity that has been distorted by illness through a profound analysis of memory and individual meaning. With poems that run the gamut from fearful to the absurd, that are at once deep and pithy, Anna Swanson proves in The Nights Also that she is a brave new voice in Canadian poetry.”
Other Notes: I was pretty excited to hear about this book. Anna Swanson was in the room during my first creative writing class back in the earlier half of the last decade, and I quickly identified her as the person who I should steal the opinions of until I got practiced enough to have my own. Most of these poems will be pre-published on the magazine circuit. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for her debut to be published, but am hopeful that this long a wait will pay off in the final product. Here’s a poem of Swanson’s about the weather which, unlike most poems about the weather, is fun to read.

Canadian writers are not assholes to each other…

…like those Americans or Brits are.

****

All respect to Martin, and everyone else fighting the impossible fight to keep book coverage alive in our newspapers. But, really? I’m glad that the online comments section has jumped in with corrections.

From the paper that brought you “The War in Afghanistan will be over quickly” and “Paul Martin Jr. will be Prime Minister for 10 years”, another classic. Not to be an Old Media is Dead! doom junkie but, stories like this go a long way towards assuring me that honest, engaged, and responsible blogging is an absolute necessity. Because we can’t expect people who get paid to get things right.

Retail 2010: House of Anansi Press

Anansi is forty-some years into the game at this point and now, more than ever, seems well-anchored to their occasional status as Canada’s pre-eminent poetry publisher. It’s hard to identify a house style, except that Anansi’s titles tend to work against generalizations. Their experimental stuff tends to be emotive, human, and not shy about epiphany, while their more lyrical or personal work is rich and intensely musical. The yellow A for Anansi is the closest thing Canadian poetry has to a sure-fire mark of quality, a distinctive and reliable brand.

This Spring brings us four new titles. As well, A.F. Moritz is editing the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology this year. If the trends of recent history continue, the editor of next year’s anthology may be selecting poems from one or more of these titles:

Author: Erin Moure
Title: O Resplandor
Date: February
Collection Number: Thirteenth (written alone, not including selecteds or translations)
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “In unexpected ways — through impossible translation, anachronistic journeys, and a fictional mystery that involves a search for a translator who exists only in the future beyond the book itself — O Resplandor confounds notions of authorship and translation, all while conveying the clamour over love and loss.”
Other Notes: This would appear to be part three in the series that began with O Cididan and continued with O Codoiro. Funfact: If you Google the query O Resplandor (no quotes), the first page that comes up is the IMDb listing for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I have no idea why this is and, I’m guessing, neither do you. It’s just the kind of thing you find out when you’re a hack blogger using Google and Wikipedia as research tools. The kind of hack blogger who couldn’t be bothered to insert the proper accents this entry has demanded, and thus risks being seen as somehow culturally insensitive. Anyway, searching the page’s text for the same query reveals no further clues. A pat on the back for anyone who can solve this mystery.

Author: Suzanne Buffam
Title: The Irrationalist
Date: April
Collection Number: Second
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “The Irrationalist brilliantly blends the innocent’s egalitarian dispensation of value and attention with fleeting slipstreams of wisdom. Buffam once again proves she’s a poet of considerable range, formal rigour, and imaginative force.”
Other Notes: This is Buffam’s follow-up to the Lampert-winning Past Imperfect (also Anansi, 2006). Here she is jumping through ROB MCLENNAN’s various hoops and detours on his blog. Here’s Anita Lahey’s short appreciation of Imperfect on the Arc poetry site. Buffam, incidentally, is one of the scattering of Iowa Writers Workshop grads that pepper the literary landscape in this country.

Author: Steven Heighton
Title: Patient Frame
Date: April
Collection Number: Fifth
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “From the court of Medici to the My Lai massacre; from love for a daughter and mother to moments of painful acceptance; from erotic passion to situations of deep moral failure, these poems are part of an ongoing search, a scanning of our human horizons for moments of lasting value.”
Other Notes: If you’re counting, it’s been six years since Heighton’s last collection, The Address Book. We’re going from famine to feast this Spring though, as he is also releasing a new novel with another publisher called Every Lost Country. I hope he does what more poet/novelists should do, which is sneak in readings and mentions of the collection when on tour with the better-marketed novel. I can almost hear the fiction writers’ eyes roll into the backs of their heads as they read the words “marketed” and “novel” so close together in the same sentence….Anyway, let’s all gather round and read this tasty little poem on the Poetry Foundation website.

Author: Michael Lista
Title: Bloom
Date: April
Collection Number: Le Debut!
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “On May 21, 1946, the day of a lunar eclipse, a Canadian physicist named Louis Slotin was training his replacement on the Manhattan Project, preparing the bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Slotin decided to forego the standard safety procedures, and there was an accident: the plutonium went critical, a phenomenon scientists call a “bloom.” Nine days later Slotin died. Michael Lista, a thrilling and wildly engaging new voice in poetry, reimagines this fateful day in a long poem that draws upon the still-mysterious events of May 21, 1946; the connection to Slotin’s ancient predecessor Odysseus, creator of the Trojan Horse, the first weapon of mass destruction; and the link to Slotin’s literary mirror, the cuckolded Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses.”
Other Notes: It’s such a many-tentacled beast, this book, with demands placed on it that aren’t even mentioned in those paragraphs (for example, many if not all of the poems are going to be rewrites, or covers, of works by other poets). I think this collection has so many people excited because of the audacity of its conceits, and the risks they present to their author. With all those balanced elements, the book will either stand on its own two feet, or fail. Most books don’t contain such a great breadth of possible results. Most books are written to be mostly enjoyed by most people. But Lista seems to have constricted himself into a binary state, a Pass/Fail grading system for the book that would launch his literary career. People get excited over gutsiness. Myself included, for the record.

Susan Holbrook Interview @ The Torontoist

An interview I conducted with the poet Susan Holbrook about her new book Joy is So Exhausting is now up on The Torontoist’s book page. A selection:

***

Mooney: I really like that idea of “interrogation.” I wonder, in the Harper Sudoku or the found-text stuff like “Insert”, the tampon application poem, what’s doing the interrogating? Is it the form and structure of the poem or the words that make it up? Part of what made those pieces so interesting for me was how they felt like conceptual art, like the ideas behind them were as important as the specific texts those ideas generated. Maybe that’s just a fun way of reading them, but of no value when it comes to having to write them, I don’t know. Anyway, were you ever aware, while doing this book, of the tension between the big ideas behind some of the poems and the pressure those ideas might put on the actual texts? I guess what I’m asking is, were you ever afraid of being perceived as writing gimmickry?

Holbrook: I do worry about poems coming off as easy, cheap, gimmicky, but that’s a concern no matter what the formal choice. The epiphanic or overly poignant cadence of some standard lyric poems seems to me very “gimmicky.” We might see the sonnet form as a gimmick – oh, there’s that rhyming couplet again! No matter what the initial concept, or the various compositional strategies contributing to a final work, it’s important to be thoughtful, to make meaningful, challenging choices. I think when I feel a procedure might lead to one-dimensionality, I switch course a bit; the tampon poem was originally an Oulipean S + 7 (replacing all nouns in the source text with nouns 7 entries down in the dictionary), but I wanted to exert a little more influence there, so I decided to select nouns close by in the dictionary. The fun, absurd effect is still there, but I’m able to choose and develop a couple of thematic threads. I have been described as “wearing my compositional methods on my sleeve.” I don’t want the reader to spend undue effort figuring out my methods (that would feel gimmicky); the reader can usually see how I’ve proceeded, and can (I hope) enjoy all the dynamics of form/content that procedure allows.

***

The interview also includes the full text of Susan’s poem, “Editing the Erotica Issue”.

Howl at Sundance

Marking, for 20th Century poetry, a rare foray into the more legitimate echelons of popular culture, the new film Howl, about the 1957 Allen Ginsberg obscenity trial, opened the Sundance Film Festival last week. For context, that’s the film festival in Utah. And Utah, for the geographically challenged, is the one with the Mormons.

The movie stars James Franco, who maybe looks a little too much like the Grecian God of Handsomeness to play a poet, but comes across as reasonably similar to his character and, most importantly, seems to have some literary ambitions of his own.

Fact: Any black-haired actor + giant glasses = Allen Ginberg

The structure of this thing has me excited, both as a lover of poetry and a hater of biopic formula and excess. Made by a filmmaking team (Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman) who have worked solely in documentary before this, it pulls all its dialogue from three sources: a reading of the poem in its entirety, the transcript of the trial, and a contemporary interview given by the young Ginsberg. The minimalism is intriguing, and moreover, I’m all for experimentation in authorial biopics. The sub-genre has, with maybe one exception, become a parade of unexceptional stories about the lives of exceptional people.

Beyond Franco as Uncle Overalls, the cast includes character acting’s two most mid-century personas, namely David Straitharn (Ed Murrow in Goodnight and Good Luck, as well as Pierce Patchett in Vox Pop’s all-time favourite movie) as the prosecution and Don Draper himself, John Hamm, as the defense. The list of characters also includes a Cassady, an Orlovsky, a Ferlinghetti, and a Kerouac, all played by people I’ve never seen. Alessandro Nivola plays the critic Luther Nichols, Mary-Louise Parker is a conservative talkradio lady, Jeff Daniels is a Columbia professor though apparently not Mark Van Doren, and Bob Balaban is the judge presiding over the obscenity trial.

Here’s a selection of the early reviews:
…the great film blog Cinematical likes Franco but is unsure if the structure works.
…those crazy kids at MTV give it two thumbs up, or whatever the youthful term is nowadays
…IFC thought it was powerful, but too ambigious. Obviously they’re new to poetry.
…and it’s the local SLC paper that seemed to like it the best.

I remain optimistic. No word yet on a distributor, but I imagine the combination of Franco and the buzz means we’ll see it at TIFF at least, and quite possibly in regular release.