Glutton for Punishment: Hardcore Glosas

Glosas are the most conversational form we know in poetry, a Spanish invention re-popularized in Canada by P.K Page’s Hologram (1994), which featured 14 examples of the forty-line in four stanzas poem. Working with any one form as a full-length book is a challenge in terms of texture and variety, energy and resonance but Christopher Doda attempts this feat relatively admirably (if to excess; his collection contains over 40 glosas!) in Glutton for Punishment (Mansfield Press, 2017), a challenge heightened by the fact that Doda has selected only four lines of metal or hard rock lyrics to riff off for each glosa, lyrics that can, at times, be poetically questionable. As a long-term hardcore fan myself, I know all the bands Doda quotes from and some lyrics do, indeed, stand-up as words alone, minus their groin-crushing musical accompaniment. Say Megadeth: “Great nations built from the bones of the dead/With mud and straw, blood and sweat,/You know your worth when your enemies/Praise your architecture of aggression” though many don’t and some are even cringingly icky, as is anything written in adolescence. To wit, Overkill with their ultra-basic imperatives: “Bargaining with gasoline/Take a ride on this machine/Gonna get me some/When it comes.” Hence one of the key distinctions between poetry and song lyrics; in a poem, the music must be contained within and hold its own solo ground, minus further compositional embellishments.

It is all too easy to sink into monotony when one form dominates a collection and Doda doesn’t entirely avoid this droning pitfall, especially in the pieces stuffed with repetitions of “I” lines: “I am my happiness,/the democratic imperative. I am the infinite/space between recto and verso,” nor in the sense that many poems tend to inhabit abstract, wordy spaces, perhaps potent in front of a double kick and screamed out, but on the page lying flat as a crushed mosher: “the gift of solemn obligation could not/Abide with me. The means of purity hurt/more than it did. Let me, O word, disembark.” Um, snooze? Fortunately, the sequence is rich with other glosas that not only play off the original four strings of the impetus song’s bass line but vivify, enlarge, move. My favorite is “By Order of Management, Uppal is Banned from the Stereo,” which sketches a wonderfully silly and fully alive scene between husband and wife as they dance to Ministry before nursing “caesars at brunch” where “Lunacy has a shape, my love, a genre.” Knowing Priscilla has died since makes this recollection even more poignant. Another vivid elegy is for a man called Wayne in “Caledon Field Party, 1987” a “starved Shaman,” while the most powerful of the “I” pieces, to my mind is the Blakean-visioned “Portrait of the Poet as Psychopath”: “I am a beauty queen in second place…I am an organic farm built in a wasteland.” Sell your Dreams, Azazel (which draws from Rammstein’s German), a tribute to Metallica’s dead bassist Cliff Burton (d. 1986), the anaphoric repetitions of “let my life be” in Atheist’s Grace, the fusion of Phyllis Webb and Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine’s sentiments in Coincidence and the piece that should have ended the book, Flat Obelisk, with its meditative ice, are some of the strongest, horns-up poems in the collection.

But O I grow weary of the standard book length in this country! Let there be more tiny, pocket-size, punchy texts! 15-20 of these glosas, carefully selected and presented in a well-crafted design (I love the black and red skull cover but it would have looked even better writ small) could have made for a much more glorious headbang. And yet, regardless, I applaud Doda for his willingness to take formal risks in such disparate comminglings. A most metal nod your way sir!

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On the Count of None

The reader indubitably knows what they are getting in a Stuart Ross Feed Dog imprint from Anvil Press – choppy pieces, usually brief, that veer in their surreal varietals and frequently end abruptly like sausage links of jello hacked with an angelic chainsaw. Form resists pattern; what something means, or even sounds like, seems a moot point in the face of the imagination’s slackened chorus of willy-nilly leapings. Now I’m an Ashbery aficionado as everyone knows but that doesn’t mean I don’t think he composed some utter toss-away bits, particularly in his later volumes, and Chisholm’s book certainly contains a few of these WTF and WHY snippets. Frankly, I have NO idea what the criteria would be for the inclusion of a piece like “Your New Home,” a teensy ditty in six short lines: “You, invaded./As wise as rust,/as red as Confucius./Lessons in articulation,/Outfits,/designer infants.” Such sketches aren’t even surreal, they merely exclude the reader entirely from any connection (except presumably the Christine it is dedicated to), all referentiality personal and essentially uninteresting. No hooks here; just a shrug of stuff. This blah instance is however countered by an even shorter piece, “Yours,” in which the surreal actually melds with its ally, feeling, to produce a simple paean to another poet’s somatic cadences. Without an echo of emotion, as found say in much of Jason Heroux’s work, the surrealist poem often just lies there, yawning “so what?” in neon banana pants.

Although Chisholm’s book didn’t stir the heart-ducts much, it does contain a perfectly satisfying sequence of horoscope poems, the known format providing a striking container for a host of odd prognostications or advice, such as, “Cling tightly to your old-fashioned mahogany values” (Leo) or “The key to your happiness is in the mouth of the zoologist” (Scorpio), and there are other compelling poems: particularly the ending of “Heist” (the stillness that overtook us/was borrowed from a book), the anaphoric two-pager “The Delicate Thing,” the energetic onomatopoeia of “Bleat,” the edging-on revelation “The Thing About Me,” the repetitions of perfect in “The Precise Order of Things,” and the random list of “Rendered.” These are, indeed, as the back blurb proclaims, “flabbergasting” poems. But what else would you expect to emerge from the pen of a glockenspiel player in a Hawaiian dream pop band?

Trauma Head (Anvil Press, 2018)

Kin to Sylvia Legris’s amazing collection, Nerve Squall (2005), a long poem whose jagged animal-madnesses mimic the discordant symptoms of migraine, but taken, as required, to a deeper extreme, Elee Kraljii Gardner’s Trauma Head truly fuses form and content. At times inversions, backslashes, mirrored words, quirky typographies, blank spaces and even neologisms can seem but tricks in other texts, but in this book they are essential ruptures of the flow and lucidity of language, or re-makings, afresh or of necessity, from at least partial somatic devastation. Best read in one sitting to receive the full effect or impact of the passages from attack and diagnosis to gradual healing over the course of a year, this poem draws on clinical discourse, charts, technical utterances, spurts of Greek and the auralities of such poets as angela rawlings to reconstruct the mind’s senses under the wreckage of an arterial tear. The defamiliarizations of syntax and diction reflects the discombobulations of the body as it seeks to make sense of its alterations in access, routine, feeling.

There is no real need to yank out parts here to identify them as more or less potent or crafted because this agonized saga is one difficult channel with its constituent and required limbs of sludge and flooding. Though I must say I felt most moved by the “enter the disruption/” segments with their lengthy lines in prose-esque paragraphs, announcing such surreal/real instances as “petals of the many-sided tree and inside corners arise from tears,” was compelled by the numerical gauges at the bottom of pages that accord (for instance) a level of 3 to Body and a marker of 2 to Bed, and appreciated the dialogue that erupts between actual reports from Gardner’s file and her own poetic interpretations. The book closes with a brief but beautiful meditation-essay on the return to the world after injury and illness, a soothing, stirring gorgeousness of “the seal’s whiteless eyes” as the healed and yet now changed narrator tastes “the river, the salt, clouds, all the recipes of blood.”

Some of us and most of you are dead

US critic Brian Henry writes about the terminal form, one invented in the 20th century by Australian poet John Tranter. He notes that “the terminal as a poetic form is vastly open to possibility. But because the existence of a terminal depends on a prior poem, it has the ultimate limit: the single poem. Thus, the terminal raises various issues about poetic form, conservation, usurpation, influence, and composition that no other form can raise” (https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-poetic-form/terminals). Interesting. And a challenge. A form that raises questions NO other form can raise? What about the glosa? Or the cento? One drawing from four direct lines of another poet and the other ENTIRELY composed of lines from other poems. Wouldn’t those forms equally (if not more so) allow such queries to rear their influenced heads than this form that ONLY takes its end words from the end words of another’s poem?

I must admit, being the form junkie I am, that I had never before attempted a terminal poem, even though my always-to-remain-unpublished MS “A Crackhead’s Book of Forms” claims to contain ALL the forms known to humanity. And so, when I first sat down to read Peter Norman’s collection (A Buckrider Book, 2018), I was a bit perplexed about the form: why anyone would write it, what it could reveal content or cadence-wise. So, of course, I had to write my own terminal poem as the only way to learn is to do. I based mine on the exact end words of John Ashbery’s piece Homeless Heart (apart from altering the word “cir/cumstances” to “cirrus” to keep the word on one line – a perfectly valid alteration as Norman himself points out in his useful NOTES section that not only names each “starter” poem but shows the changes in words or sounds on occasion.) And thus, I present you with my own process, the piece:

Terminal Poem on Ashbery’s Homeless Heart

Everyday she accomplishes her work,
whether the clouds are cumulus or cirrus.
It is no use to chastise her, a
failure of successes, a woman caught
between her gender and her task, her predecessors
the rich who cut down trees to build boats, a situation
she is not to blame for, her guilt covered
by her own errors, the way, each morning, stumbling
towards routine, she re-inscribes her life on an inner blackboard.

Now what did I learn about the terminal form by writing just one poem? I learned it is a form that requires one to re-read the “starter” poem a number of times during the composition, thereby sinking the work in at a deeper level, that, of course, as with any limitation, I was guided towards writing content that likely wouldn’t have otherwise emerged, and also, that a terminal poem, for me anyway, is very easy to write. You don’t have to remember metre, the number or sequence of word repetitions or any other kind of stricture than just “use the end word” (or a variation thereof). I wonder how Peter Norman feels about the form after composing an ENTIRE book of terminal poems?

Ugh, I must say it bothers me when the standardization of texts means that pieces often don’t get printed in their original forms. So that, for instance, the first poem that really “got me” in this book, “I know I am (or, Think Basic),” which was supposed to feature couplet stanzas, has to be broken randomly and messily in places, due to the format, leaving bits of unintended triplets and quartets on the page. And ESPECIALLY when the form is END WORDS, the shifts throw the whole pursuit off. Regardless, there are some true zingers in this collection. Namely the neatly-rhymed sonnet, “Excavation of the Pointless,” the wonderful eco-piece “Scoured Shore” whose segments begin with the alluring line, “Waves lick rock and turn it dark,” “Through a Portal Darkly,” which successfully mingles an archaic scene with modern diction: “But knowing’s always virtual./We knew fuck all, my dearest. Word. That’s life,” the brilliant “Cannibal,” a terminal poem composed using end words from one of Norman’s own prior pieces: “This feast is base. No way to make it noble:/me the cannibal, exhuming victim me,” “Chairman in Crisis,” “The Luxury to Which you are Entitled,” and the stirringly melancholic, “Lost Beyond the Reach of GPS” where the narrator turns “into a cul-de-sac, uncertain where I’ve come,/or even where it is that I came from./The only certainty is eyes and windows.” Yes, sometimes I was bored and just plain disbelieved the material; it felt like an exercise, not an entrance. But that is inevitable in any exploration of form. Kudos to Norman for extending the entree into an entire oeuvre of sorts, his words always reaching towards the words of others, as a real poet’s should.

We like Feelings. We are Serious.

by Julie McIssac (A Buckrider Book, 2018) is possibly destined, at least in part, to become one of the essential poetically feminist texts, though in style it is actually more prosaic (despite its form-experimentations) than say Diane di Prima’s memoir Recollections of my Life as a Woman or Jowita Bydlowska’s sordidly insightful novel, Guy. Sometimes I wish we could say to hell with generic categories because to call some of this collection poetry makes me question a certain laxness in craft at times while to name it nothing but itself allows me to attend more to the valid shock of its contents. As an avid poetry reader for many many years, I continually realize that I am hungry for forms of many kinds and not just “saying things in words on a page.” Why I was perhaps most drawn, poetically-speaking, to McIssac’s “Haibun Dribs & Drabs/Scars & Scabs” section as it innovates Basho’s ancient form, filling it with contemporary content in the manner of Thom Gunn in The Man with the Night Sweats, sonnets rich with tragic details of the AIDS era. “White Smudges,” for one, turns a boyfriend’s masturbation (our jerking off “culture” being one textual preoccupation) into a symbol for the absence of gender-connection in a relationship: “there is no shame in masturbating, but why should I clean it up,” concluding with the form’s haiku: “In a cramped one-bedroom apartment/white smudges become/a blame machine.” The first piece in the collection plunges us fast and hard into the personal bond women are likely to feel with the author: “every loss I have ever felt has registered in my brain, marked my body, and influenced all my relationships.” Pow! I am in. Repeated drawings of a woman inserting a tampon, visual evidence of feminist archives, as well as the resulting forms of interview, notation, speeches, and harangues, then meddlings with the sonnet as grocery list, a long dramatic monologue on an obsessive masturbator (his fascination with his co-worker’s shoes – or “steppie sharks” – reminding me of Bonnie Bowman’s brilliant novel, SPAZ) and pieces of First World Context, all called “It Could be Worse,” provide incessant shifts in perspective, voice and focus, most of them shuddering with underlying infuriation, such as we all should feel over how so much of who we truly are, as woman, has been quashed by the patriarchy. Along the way, McIssac’s book made me question my resistances and pruderies, as has been the case with memoir writers like Trisha Cull and Lynn Crosbie. It is a book of unabashed brute protest, irreverently sticking its cunt in your face.  I did wish, as with the powerful long protest poem, Inventory, by Dionne Brand, that the language had been sharpened a bit more by metaphor and aurality so that the author is not just doing, as she orders in one poem, occupying “this form with your content,” but, at the same time, I was utterly jolted and thus held less tightly to the reins of my genre-hopes. McIssac’s father’s death by fire, as chronicled in parts of the final Fire Poems and especially the elegiac essay, “The First Poem: Destruction” is full of rage against always-unjust loss, a tragedy that extends beyond the death, to someone else inheriting his journals, to the stupid things that people say after someone’s passing. Although a seeming departure from prior material, it’s not. Grief often leads to the uncovering of other required ires and it is as if the annulment of the Father tore open wounds of being Woman in the World, enabling spillage, these compositions in menstrual blood that ensued. The collection ends with a sequence of scenes that all conclude with one word: blackout. “…knowing that this/writing came from the body/ Blackout.” Yes. It’s true. As Penelope Spheris yawped, “Good rock & roll breaks all the rules.”

Beyond Forgetting: Celebrating 100 Years of Al Purdy (Harbour Publishing, 2018)

Note: The poem scanned above is from my 2002 collection The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak & Wynn, Toronto).

First off, I must say that I have NO idea how I missed the call for THIS anthology of tribute poems to Purdy but I did. Not that Purdy is, per se, on my Top 20 list of Canadian poets, influence-wise, but I did meet him several times, the first at the the legendary Railway Club when he signed a book to me “if we were devils, if we were angels,” we later debated Auden and the value of revising old poems, I ate a pot roast cooked by a purple-silk clad Eurithe in Sydney, helped host him at both the Corner Pocket Cafe series and the Myles of Beans events I ran with my ex husband, Chad Norman (also not included), we corresponded on a few occasions, and I brought him and Eurithe to my parents’ home in Burnaby where, after consuming a meal at the Confederation table, my father took Al’s specs for a solid podium and built him one, 22 years ago, to his height, foot and beer requirements, a lectern that has traveled with me to every performance series I have managed since. I also, with another ex, created a photographic/poetic Vancouver Poets’ Calendar for 2011-12 called Hot Sonnet, whose part-proceeds went to the A-frame preservation, though I’ve yet to apply for a retreat there. In sum, I had something to do with Al.

As have many of the poets in this well-designed anthology, divided into five tidy sections: Encounters, Wildness, Inspiration, Legacy and Elegies, of which the first and last make the cleanest sense in terms of selection and focus. Purdy’s poems, a range of them, remain memorable (from Cariboo Horses to Say the Names), but the rangy poet, with his brews and bitchings, more so. The pieces that most readily evoke the man, such as Rodney deCroo’s “Al and Eurithe,” Howard White’s channeling of his curmudgeonly voice in “A Word from Al,” Sid Marty’s “The Statue of Al Purdy,” Lorna Crozier’s “A Cat Named Purdy,” and Patrick Lane’s meandering prose poem, “For Al Purdy,” are some of the most potent in this collection, retrieving the lumbering bard from the grave and undertaking what we all hope will happen after we die: a remembering that channels us back to our loved ones.

Other compelling pieces include recountings of the discombobulating experience of undertaking writer’s retreats in the A-frame, for instance, James Arthur speaking of Al’s mother’s good china “asleep inside the hutch,” or Rob Taylor’s sonnet thinking about Purdy “in his A-frame, midwinter/low on firewood, a row of Echoes fading…,” poems on seeing the statue of Purdy in Toronto (particularly the piece by deceased-today David Helwig), poems that critique Purdy’s popularity – Phil Hall’s pithy “Most days Al Purdy/wrote poems as good as Alden Nowlan…they both wrote  a lot of friendly crap that sounds the same,” or poems that draw on the mark Purdy made in quirky, even essentially irreverent ways, like Jeanette Lynes’ English assignment, which seeks categories for the poet’s oeuvre in various weird traditions: “sick poems/impermanent husband poems/jackhammer poems” or Susan Musgrave’s audaciously perfect “Thirty-Two Uses for Al Purdy’s Ashes,” with its sharp, verb-led stanzas that turn grief into necessary action. The pieces that resonated the least for this reader were those that aimed to evoke some “essence d’Al” from the landscape, such as Magie Dominic’s “Standing on a Newfoundland Cliff” or Kath MacLean’s “Too Tall for Antiquity,” or, quite frankly, seem to have as much to do with Al as a toaster oven, as with Ken Babstock’s “Cromwell’s Head Under the AnteChapel.” But mostly, this anthology, concluding with bios and some author notes on how they knew or read Al, was a satisfying read, a worthy tribute (despite, alas, lacking a contribution from yours truly 🙂 and yes, I can hear him harrumphing contentedly over it from whatever pub in the afterlife he now graces with his presence.

 

 

 

 

Metaphysics of Existence: Cadsby & Thornton

In 1985, Alice Munro wrote of John Metcalf, apropos his reviewing style that, “Praise from him you feel is real gold…he won’t tell you he likes your writing if he doesn’t…he is one person who can tell where the soft spots are…what’s fake, what’s shoddy…it won’t matter what compliments you’ve been getting from other quarters.” Not that I’m comparing myself to the masterful Metcalf, only that I’m hoping to eventually be so well understood as a reviewer, as someone who is never aiming to do harm, but only to be such an intelligently critical assessor of the art form that what I write is not taken personally, but professionally, in relation to the growth of the poetic genre, not to the diminishment of the poet’s self. At the very least, for readers to trust me to be as honest as possible in my delving into a work.

And so honestly, I didn’t know what, initially, to make of Heather Cadsby’s Standing in the Flock of Connections (Brick Books, 2018), as the poems, mainly lyrics in varying configurations, are disorienting to say the least. As a reader, it feels we don’t get to know, through the poems, any particular individual, nor any substantial scenario, but are dipped into the subtle acid baths of words, in media res, and scarred a bit as we are asked to swim brief, discombobulating laps, then yanked out and thrust in again moments later. This is not because the content of the pieces, per se, is terrifying, but due to the emptiness one senses amid the firing synapses of this smart and chilly poet. Perhaps this line from “Mentionables” comes closest to summing up Cadsby’s modus operandi: “A frozen freedom to be this uninvolved and continually inventing.” Hey, I’m an Ashbery aficionado; I can handle the abstract pronouncement, the shifting through psychic space at vertiginous speed. And Cadsby, in her strongest pieces, draws us into a world where the vague word, “thing,” is sometimes the most accurate approach to the randomized happenings that befall us: “the thing about getting back together/is what was removed and then lost/when the door closed. That time/when singular things happened/and we didn’t know we were waiting.” One could fault such writing for telling rather than showing, but that is possibly the very point, that the earth is apocalypsing into its internal signifieds as the external signifiers dissolve, thinginess is replaced by thing, touch by a touchscreen. And pow, are the linebreaks bang on! “8th Floor Lookout” is an even more powerful evocation of essential isolation, parrying as it does between the fearsomely tangible, “hawk…thrashing squirrel…pecked at its head….some boys played grabnuts,” and the abstract terrors of “compromise…context…parallel observations” with the close pointing at the eternal and Biblically-rooted human activity of “casting first stones.”

Cadsby is a fatalist. She unflinchingly hammers in what we sense about our end times, that, “There’s just this: sleep and hurry,” that one can’t rest anymore with an image of pastoral birds because there’s also “birds hitting windows,” our pursuits are “small and selfish” and our mothers are “dead with their mouths open” (terrific titles for the latter two pieces by the way, namely, “The whole play consists of stage directions” and “At the hospital window I saw a dove. It was a gull.”) However, she can also utter gorgeously apropos dicta such as: “The language of grief is that language of hope” or a compelling statement of poesis like, “Prose poem is a genre worth some failing.” Cadsby’s potencies definitely lie more in the lyric than the prose poem, these personal/ambivalent tweaky tunes that often trail off as if an ending would be a redundant further and final blow. Cadsby herself admits to overtly fighting with the non-lyric, stating in “the cause of my rosacea” that: “There are times when even the thought of a prose poem makes my face/ raging red.” Being the elegy-addict I am “My Michael (1996-2009)” moved me immensely in a way the others mostly didn’t, cracking me out of mind and into tear ducts with the contrast between the “careful boy” and the recklessness of the accident that killed him, leaving “silence as the missing link.” As with almost anything I initially recoil from, not in a somatic fashion, but in an intellectual resistance to the less-emotive, not-especially-luscious, even anti-rococo of it all, I eventually, by steeping myself in the universe of the text, comprehend the latent potency of this particular style. It’s necessary, Cadsby’s dry, weird, de-composing, saying it like it is now.

I’ve been reading and admiring Russell Thornton’s work for ages now, since we were both briefly workshoppers in the same odd band of poets in the mid 90s, a collocation including Tim Bowling and my ex-husband Chad Norman, this quick collision of minds intent on at least aspiring towards a poetry of intensity, meaning, feeling, in which moving your audience to emotion wasn’t considered a crime, an imbecility, an offence against academic fashion. Before I address myself to the mostly reverent, gentle, feral poems in this tight collection, I have to note the absence of a vital nod to Robinson Jeffers in The Broken Face (Harbour Publishing, 2018), both in the title’s echo but more explicitly in the titular piece where Thornton paraphrases Jeffers’ 1924 poem, “Roan Stallion,” without giving credit. Jeffers’ lines: “Tragedy that breaks man’s face and a white fire flies out of it.” Thornton’s: “There are blows that break a man’s face, and a white fire flames out.” Now I’ve written poems, songs and a Masters’ thesis based on Jeffers’ work, and so I don’t want to see this liminal master neglected further than he has been already in the past few decades. An oversight? There are, after all, MANY other poets mentioned as influences in the Notes section. I’m hoping that’s all it was but, to my mind, the omission is a significant and lamentable one.

Ok, we know what we’re going to get with Thornton and that’s not a bad thing. He stands for classicism, sonority, homage and language singing its most transparent, fierce desires for connection. His poetry tells stories but the emphasis is on the image (the “surprise of snow,” “the basket of the stars,” the “cold iron rain”), simile/metaphor (blackberries like “prayers that grow in empty spaces” or shoppers at a checkout as “wedding guests awaiting a bride”), the description of small but key moments in his relationship with his children, as when they dance at the mall or wake in the night with bad dreams, and repetition, which lends many of these poems an aural, even spiritual, resonance, a hieratic energy, a sense that, like Jeffers, Thornton wishes to speak of the eternal things only, not those that are temporal, context-bound, that pass away. The pieces that rang out most in my heart were, in fact, those that uttered pedantic words like “Open” or the stunning chant of “When the Rain Comes” with its recurring refrain of “I will tell it, and tell it, and tell it, and tell it.” Like Patrick Lane in certain respects, Thornton is engaged, in part, with how the patriarchy has damaged men, as boys, and as fathers, though, for Thornton’s part, he seems much more intent than Lane was on rectifying errors with his own children by spending time with them and paying his usual close poetic attention to their worlds. Although he sometimes strains too painfully to effect a parallel as in “Tiny Crabs” when his urge to connect a beach scene with the wordy notion that: “It was as when someone dies and you/spend your life pretending to be him/or a person you have imagined” trails off into a sensation of “say what??” mostly Thornton is incredibly adept at writing poems that appear essential and stirring as the “creek gliding clear green and rippling white against rocks.”