Poetry Review

As anyone who’s ever taken a course in literature knows, the two basic elements of any narrative are plot and character. Without these bare-bones elements a narrative loses its legs and collapses. Yet the hard part every writer struggles with is how to make their choices about plot and character com-pelling. Put bluntly, readers want to read about interesting beings doing interesting things. In a sense all literary works are measured against our own internal sense of whether and how well that happens.

Some narratives are heavily descriptive and become interesting simply through what their authors show us. These people are usually close observers—eschewing jargon and convention, they find a way to really get into the person, place, or thing they are describing. In the vein of great describers I think of Pablo Neruda and his odes. Reading Neruda’s poem “Ode to the Watermelon,” for exam-ple, you get the sense that he really understood watermelons; we who would deride watermelons now had to look at them in a different way. Other writers are more plot people. Even as the characters they invent are lightly sketched, what those characters do makes them endlessly fascinating. I think here of Stevens—a great plot poet—who, for example, in “The Idea of Order at Key West” has his nameless heroine create an entire world by singing along the seashore. In the end, whether a writer chooses to emphasize plot or description, it’s the interplay, achieving the difficult balance between these two, that makes for compelling verbal art.

I was recently reminded of the push and pull of description and plot reading the first poetry books of two energetic Canadian writers: Asa Boxer and Nick Thran. Though they approach the elements of narrative from seemingly opposite emphases on plot and character, their different takes end up demonstrating the powers and limitations of narrative itself. One way this happens for these writers is through a particularly poetic concern for insufficiency, for the ways that, though language is our best connection to other minds and hearts, a gap remains between direct experience and the reproduction of life writing makes in our minds.

Boxer (despite the pugilistic last name) is the describer here. Like Neruda, Boxer feels very much at home in the ode—a concentrated meditation on a particular subject. In his book The Mechanical Bird (Signal Editions) Boxer gives us poetic studies of the ordinary objects that surround us: maps, polar bears, a young man called Amad, a gear train, hammers, and the mechanical bird of the title. Though his choice of subjects at times seems random, one of Boxer’s main interests here is correcting just this sort of assumption. His poems, across their different subjects, argue that there is a deep similar-ity in the apparently random differences between say, a damselfly and a tool box. This similarity is a poetic one grounded in the central idea of an ode—that we should attend to who and what we too often forget. Even in his rare ode about a person, such as the poem “Amad,” Boxer wants us to re-member the overlooked. “Where, in God’s name, will Amad find love?” Boxer’s lines ask, because clearly finding someone to love is as important for us as it is difficult.

One of the most effective instances of this is a poem simply titled “The Lobster”:

Sunk behind its dingy window
in a supermarket aquarium,
the lobster turns a muzzy eye
on the great élan of air.

Boxer’s skill shows itself in the unexpected use of the French word “élan,” which though it trans-lates strictly as momentum, also has connotations of balance, of speed, and of flight. By turning a “muzzy,” (blurred or confused) eye on the majesties of air Boxer gives the lowly lobster a truly noble height.  Where Eliot, in the “Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” enlarged on his malaise by declaring “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” Boxer gives the bottom-feeding lobster a stoic courage:

You will never hear the lobster cry,
“What crime could be so great it moved the sea
to single out a bloated shrimp like me.”

Boxer here plays with the evident contradiction that the lobster cannot speak, much less intone the elegant iambic pentameter couplet he gives as its unspoken speech. Yet the moment works—like a kind of anti-Prufrock, the versifying lobster eloquently accepts its fate. We might say that what Neruda did for the watermelon, Boxer tries to do here for the lobster. Their focused attention on what we otherwise pass over works as a kind of verbal lovemaking for which the poetic ode is peculiarly suited.

Some of the romantic sensibility possible with the ode is shown in the title poem of the collection “The Mechanical Bird.” Birds have long been a common poetic subject. Few, for example, can read Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and not be moved. But most machines are poetically dead to us, and odes to them are rare. Boxer knows this, and in his better poems like this one, he creates a synthesis between the living and the dead that helps bring to life an otherwise lifeless thing:

And she engages the heart
in her suit of dead feathers…
forgotten during God’s dispensation of grace;
and overlooked during the allotment of will.

Though one might object to the preaching—telling the reader that “she engages the heart” instead of showing it—(a classic error), the “suit of dead feathers” is nevertheless a powerful image of life conquering death, a way of vitalizing the machine-bird by clothing it in living substance.

In contrast to Boxer’s thoughtful ruminations on the lowly, Nick Thran, in Every Inadequate Name (Insomniac Press) is a poet who records the unexpected actions of human life. Of course there are states of mind here; equally there are moments without movement and poems about dead objects. But far more than Boxer, Thran often seems to take pleasure in the way actions drive a thought. One can imagine him enjoying the lines of Robert Creely’s haiku-like poem “I Know a Man”:  “…shall we &/why not, buy a goddamn big car,” simply because the car will take you somewhere, anywhere, over the next hill to a new experience. Like Creely, Thran versifies like a man who enjoys journeys and collecting the knick-knacks of personal history he finds along the way.

Although their books occasionally have similar poem titles, Thran’s results are very different from Boxer’s. Take for example the ode-like poem “The Coin O’rama Laundromat, A Dedication”

This is for the Coin O’Rama
after it empties. The last one there –
the Korean woman with slender fingers
picking lint and old dryer sheets deep
from the bowels –
how the final moment must feel
when she closes the lid
of the trash can
filled with clouds.

Despite its title, this poem is not so much about the Laundromat as the people who go there. Like Boxer, Thran is asking us to attend to something overlooked—in this case the Korean woman doing laundry, but Thran’s history is a resolutely human one; he links how the woman feels with what she does. Unlike Boxer’s lobster poetically describing its miserable state, Thran’s human subject speaks solely through her actions. If Boxer’s lobster remains largely still, with only its eye in motion, Thran’s washer-woman moves her hands against a silent and unchanging background.

The glory Thran takes in motion is shown in his poem “Bloor Street,” Toronto’s main east-west thoroughfare.

Once in a Bloor moon the joke goes, and mother
rubs his hair. Then she and her husband head
to bed to make love. That’s “B” for the bed,
“l” for love, and the “o!” and the “o!”
a string upon which they wish
they could balance forever…

Knowing the poem is called “Bloor Street” we eagerly wait for the “r” that never comes. Instead Thran hides it in the words “string,” and “forever,” and in his final coda of Bloor as “the most ro-mantic street in the world.” The unexpected linking of the ugly word “Bloor” with the sexual ecstasy of the two parents is a powerful sign of how language is both essential and yet insufficient to express the depths of what we feel. Names, as Thran says, are often inadequate. Poetry tries, but only rarely reaches the wordless pleasures of an orgasm.

Another moment of the interplay between language, thought, and action occurs in the poem “Azucar.” The title seems to promise an ode, but like “The Coin O’rama,” it ends up being a lyric about the power of simple human actions to alter circumstances. In this narrative the writer’s mother has been learning Spanish. She lives below a Hispanic couple who constantly argue.

…Mother,
who tries hard to good in this world,
marched upstairs,
banged on their door till it opened
enough for her to ask
in a friendly, foreign voice
for azucar,
the Spanish word for sugar
she’d made a point to learn before bastard,
prison, abuse
and asshole, you leave her alone.

The sugar the mother borrows is used to make banana bread that she then carries upstairs. The woman’s courage and humility—not accusing, not calling the husband an asshole, and intervening with the ancient neighborly tradition of borrowing a cup of sugar, shows an unusual sensitivity to the power of ritual. The first ritual of sugar borrowing leads to a second—that of the sharing of food. And this second is a ritual that heals.

Thran ends the poem observing the cooling of the slices: they are okay now…(and after a stanza break) to eat. The double reference of the “they” as both the slices and the angry couple neatly links the readying of the treat to the promise that it has already brought some soothing sweetness to their dis-cord. The Mother’s faith that there is sugar to be found in this household symbolizes her belief that despite the distrust here, there is also goodness. That all this word-action is happening in Spanish—a foreign language for the mother—only adds to the power of her gesture. Thran’s poem makes an aesthetically appealing and narratively convincing argument that sweetness is a sure recipe for happiness in any language.

Inevitably, writers make different choices about how to move their readers. This is as it should be. But for poetry the emphasis on plot or description can make a big difference in whether its words matters to us. Ever since Wordsworth wrote The Prelude, many English-speaking writers have been privileging feeling and thought over action; they have insisted that how we feel drives what we do. Boxer’s The Mechanical Bird works largely within that tradition. Thran, on the other hand, in Every Inadequate Name comes from another place, one conceptually but not linguistically closer to the novel, where action is the mainspring of our feelings and thoughts.

published at Vehicule Press Blog

C. Durning Carroll

Two Or Three Guitars: Selected Poems

by John Terpstra

Two or Three Guitars is John Terpstra’s seventh book of poems. The Governor-General nominated writer has moved far along enough in his career for this latest book to be a “selected poems” that lets his readers look back on a twenty-five year career that began with Scrabbling for Repose back in 1982. These poems show an abiding interest in certain themes: travel, religion, history, and nature.Travels, both of the ordinary sort and of the kind driven by the need for emigration are featured here.

In Terpstra’s poems journeying often appears as a sign of dislocation. “If we were at Niagara now/we could see where this business begins,” he proclaims in the opening poem “Blondin on a Tightrope.” Much of the difficulty and interest in these poems lies in the fact that we are never quite at Niagara. In the separation between what the physical body can do and what the imagination can experience comes the source of much of Terpstra’s versifying.

Endings in Terpstra’s poems arrive with much the same sentiment as beginnings. In the last poem of the collection, “How It All Goes Around” Terpstra dreams that “I would ride the single drop on the windshield, in the/downspout,/jump the last few inches/and slip between the particles of earth.” Though in both works Terpstra is driving along a road, he would prefer “the highway blasted through,” as a way to get to authentic existence. Travel, like existence itself, is endlessly cyclical; one goes somewhere only to return to one’s starting point.

Immigration too is a form of travel, but one driven by powerful economic circumstances. Even as this kind of journeying remains consciously chosen, its dislocations are far more powerful than those made by ordinary travel. In “Forty Days and Forty Nights” Terpstra assumes the voice of a Dutch immigrant coming to Quebec and he narrates that character’s frustrations upon discovering that Canada is not the promised land he had hoped for: “…two days later I drove/the coal truck from my second job, and dumped/a one-ton load down the basement chute/of the wrong house/and the next week/wasn’t paid, but shovelled those lumps of black/back through the window, until I couldn’t breathe.” Terpstra finds rich veins of material in the gritty realities of physical work and the ways backbreaking labor shows up the gap between real life and the world of dreams.

God and the angels are forces that for Terpstra constitute holiness not only because of the miracles they do, but because they can witness multiple events simultaneously, something we limited humans cannot hope to achieve. In “The Little Towns of Bethlehem” the poet imagines a nativity scene un-folding in dozens of little towns across northern Canada. The poem, with its crazy quilt of place names like Aklavik, Tignish, Esther, Picture Butte, and Pickle Lake becomes a mental travelogue of those small and usually forgotten places where people still live and miracles, like the birth of chil-dren, can still happen. One lovely thing about all these works is that Terptstra’s sentiments always seem authentic; his are poems of genuine feeling and real tenderness.

In the poem “Hypotheses” Terpstra moves in a potentially rich direction by connecting his observations about nature with a grander idea about how we think and see the world. “The location and number of stars is determined by/the trajectory of individual branch tips, each of which bears/responsibility for a single pin-prick of light.” A few lines later he admits: “These are, of course, preposterous hypotheses, and it is/likely that only those willing to admit to an uncommon/empathy with trees would ever admit them.” Perhaps so, but in giving an intentionality to na-ture Terpstra puts forward the very powerful idea that feeling the natural world as beautiful proves something. Terpstra’s point here is that maybe spirit and science are not as different as we tend to believe. Poetry, despite its poor current reputation in popular culture, can provide us with a way of synthesizing two of the most powerful forces of contemporary society—religion and science. In “Hypotheses” Terpstra’s language comes tantalizingly close to achieving this.

Lest we take this idea of the connected universe too far, however, Terpstra reminds us that risk is everywhere, both from people and from the forces of the natural world. In a fashion typical for him, “The Devil’s Punch Bowl” combines these physical and emotional dangers as a way of trying to keep us alive to the idea that a feeling of total connection also opens us to threats from everywhere. “How cold the wind feels/on all our open wounds,” he reminds us. “I know what rocks awake/and men can do, now/There is no true protection./Forgive me.” In this awareness of the harm we do and have done to us, Terpstra performs one the basic jobs of the good writer—promoting sympathy for the world, whether that world is natural or of human. His final wish for forgiveness shows a poignant sense that we humans are inevitably responsible both for the pain we can’t seem to help causing others, and the ways in which we harm nature by not seeing the harm we do. If being human means having the power both to love and to hurt, then asking for forgiveness is the clearest testament of our humanity, for it externalizes the fact that we have hurt and been hurt by causing pain.

Two or Three Guitars provides a rich selection of the poetry of a peculiarly Canadian writer—one who takes what is best in this country: tolerance, sympathy, a powerful sense of humanity, and combines these qualities with a deep appreciation for the natural world to make a music that seems to rise from a hidden place, but that we nonetheless recognize as a tune we have long known and understood.

C. Durning Carroll

Published in The Northern Poetry Review

Primer on the Hereafter

by Steve McOrmond

Steve McOrmond opens his second collection Primer on the Hereafter with an epigraph from John Ashbery’s poem “Posture of Unease.” Ashbery says: “For all you I/Have neglected, ignored,/Left to stew in your own juices,/Not been like a friend that is approaching,/I ask forgiveness, a song like new rain./Please sing it to me.” Ashbery has made a career out of unease, from the early psychic distances of poems like “The Instruction Manual,” to the reflective masterpiece “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” to the enigmatically-titled “Your Name Here,” with its clever play on presence and absence, order and discontinuity.Though Ashbery has retained the status of éminence grise in American letters, his poetic legacy has been at best a mixed one. He has taught us a great deal about psychology and the unfettered thoughts of a moving mind, but has also, especially in recent years, surrendered logic and communication in favor of a hermetically opaque private language.

Fortunately, Mr. McOrmond does not do the same. Though McOrmond takes from Ashbery an interest in outsider status—they are both observers—McOrmond, unlike the Ashbery of recent years, prefers to observe others. If Ashbery is a psychologist, McOrmond could plausibly be called a journalist. Though the psychologist may look at others, he does so in an intimately private way—the confines of an office. The journalist, on the other hand, lives of necessity out in the world. She or he is forced to find a language that others can relate to; to use, as Wordsworth once declared, “a selection of language really used by men.”The promise of Primer on the Hereafter lies in the simple and unaffected narrative voice in which McOrmond recounts his best poems. In pulling away from himself into that posture of unease that characterizes so many good writers, McOrmond finds in this collection, occasional moments of sublimity.

Poetry, like its sister arts of drama and the novel, is fundamentally about humanity: its sole interest, despite the frequent distraction of birds and flowers is an analysis of who and why we are. When McOrmond sticks to this simple aim the results can be striking, as in the quasi-historical poem “Lolly.” In this work about an imaginary survivor of an actual 1855 shipwreck off the coast of Nova-Scotia, McOrmond gathers the details and the mood of men made helpless by the elements. “Mr. Haszard had a little spaniel./On the morning of the third day,/I held it down and Smith/slit its throat with my bone-handled knife./We drank its blood, consumed/the flesh before it could freeze.” Though the line-breaks at moments display the carelessness of a prose writer, this same narrative impulse conveys the terse diction of a wounded man dictating a letter to a wife he loves. While McOrmond may not listen as closely as one might like to the music of the words, he still understands how the limits of the poetic line can be used to strong effect. McOrmond’s impassioned restraint gives “Lolly” a power to move that a looser narrative flow would have lost.

He accomplishes something similar in “Ötzi,” a verse response to the exhibit of the prehistoric man found frozen in the Alps a dozen or so years ago. Instead of assuming the voice of a character, here McOrmond places himself in the position of a viewer watching yet also turning away from the act of being seen: “I would be your pallbearer, escort you/back to the glacier and bury you deeply/and properly under the ice. For now–/which is not so long–I’ll pay my respects/by not coming during visiting hours.” The final claim seems typical of McOrmond’s style, as it raises the obvious question: if not during visiting hours, then when? Will McOrmond sneak in after dark but look all the same? How is the poet’s language changed if his or her presence is not observed? McOrmond doesn’t address this question directly, but the best poems of Primer struggle with the idea of poetic presence and how that presence affects how poets as writers see the world. The question may seem merely academic, but it has an important effect on what and how poets write, and therefore what audiences are asked to read.

When McOrmond veers away, either from precise human observation or occasionally into the too-treacherous world of the prose poem, the results rarely reach the heights of what one might call his “unease” poems. Both forms seem to seduce McOrmond into abandoning two central tenets of the successful poem—the poetic line, and the logic of narrative. When McOrmond is anchored (nautical metaphors abound in this book) to a real human situation he writes beautifully. Unfortunately his freer and more naturalistic work is often incoherent. In the first stanza of a poem called “Flittermouse” McOrmond writes: “High frequency peeps and pops,/telemetry from the twilight zone,/and a soft thwup, thwup, thwup,/part pterodactyl, part Bela/Lugosi in a playful mood,/snapping a wet dishtowel.” Presumably this is supposed to describe a flittermouse, (an archaic term for a bat) and none of what McOrmond writes is factually wrong, but this description without narrative, without a concrete sense of motion or of recounted action prompts this poet into presenting a series of random images that are left for the reader to integrate.The two examples of prose poems also show this tendency towards illogic. Here is the second stanza (paragraph?) from “Haulage”: “At times you feel like freight. Someone’s lost the waybill, you’re waiting to be delivered. Oh, there are drugs. A leather armchair that fits exactly the slouch of your spine. And there are The Goldberg Variations, succinct, austere, in the half-light. The hammer when it strikes the string is not in contact with anything touching the finger.” Aside from the comma-splice in the second sentence ( ! ) how is the reader to make sense of a paragraph that jumps from freight, to drugs, to The Goldberg Variations? Is it unfair to ask just what this moment of prose really means?

When McOrmond sticks to the telling details of narrative history, and his (and perhaps our culture’s) posture of unease he shows himself to be a poet of real and memorable ability. When he drops his refreshing tendency to look at the world askance, and conceeds to what is fasionable, he merely rides with the masses. At such moments one wishes, that like so many others, he hadn’t fallen so far under the long shadow of Ashbery, whose status atop the pyramid of contemporary English-language poets has made his work largely immune to criticism. As McOrmond has shown clearly in Primer on the Hereafter he is quite able to shine by his own light.

Published in The Northern Poetry Review

The Human Cannonball

by Halli Villegas

At its best the despair of others reminds us of the persistence of happiness. When we watch or hear of suffering we may be lucky enough to recognize that for most of us life isn’t so bad. If it’s successful, the sadness artists express soothes our nerves by reminding us that pain is universal. As Elton John put it so succinctly: “Sad songs say so much.” Halli Villegas, in her latest book (believe your own press, 2005) The Human Cannonball, uses this phenomenon to build a short but affecting collection told in the voice of some of our greatest sufferers—circus performers.

Villegas’ collection recalls the once great but now mostly forgotten poetic masterpiece, Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology. Like that work Villegas’ book creates a microcosmic society (for Masters’ the imaginary Spoon River, Illinois) and through the interplay of poetic voices shows the foibles and falsities we all participate in. The power of such writing, whether by Masters or Villegas, is that it doesn’t take long for us to recognize in these poetic voices some aspect of ourselves. When Villegas writes: “I saw the hesitation./He held the pose for a heartbeat longer than usual/his arm went a little higher/his hand trembled a bit,” in the poem “The Knife Thrower’s Wife,” she subtly evokes the double-edge of true passion, the terrible proximity of love and hate.

Villegas calls these “narrative poems,” and she is right to do so; they tell intimate and affecting stories. However, while Villegas gains from her narratives much of the power of fiction to make complete worlds for us, her poems correspondingly suffer from the curse of prosodists—indifference to the poetic line. Since the disappearance of rhyme and/or meter as essential structures of verse, the question of what constitutes a vital poetic line has been thrown wide open. Being a prescriptivist about this is consequently a good way of displeasing all the people all of the time. Still, in several places: “with misdirection while passing a juicy bit,” from “The Shell Game” or “uncontrollable” and “The trick is,” from “The Lion Tamer,” one wishes Villegas had wrestled a little more with that unruly beast of poetry—the line.

C. Durning Carroll

Word Magazine–March/April 2006