I have a professional interest in poems about children: Brian Bartlett and I will be editing an anthology of Canadian poets writing about their kids, and I indulge in the subject regularly, marvelling and doting on the predilections of daughter and son. I memorialize them, transmogrify them, I make them known unto me so that, when they are adults, they may be known unto themselves. I am trying to make a poem, sure, and never lose sight of that; but there is a secondary purpose, and it is to show them that, once upon a time, they were loved. Zach eschews this route; he writes a love poem about his reluctance to resort to the doting, proud papa role. Just as stoic poems can be paradoxically all the more emotional for their stoicism, this poem goes to the other side of withholding and makes the best kind of gift.

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posted by Arc on March 14, 2010 permalink | comments
tags: Shane Neilson | Zach Wells | poetry | poets

There is an apocalyptic streak in the poetry of A.F. Moritz, one composed of moments when he adopts the raiment of a prophet and comments upon our course in the world. This habit is welcome, as one of the functions of the poet is to interrogate our personal and collective means of being. But in this case, Moritz writes an interlocking poem that asks “What way should we proceed?” and, here, answers in terms of the cyclical.

This is a poem of opposites, of counterings, and it begins with an opposite: the table, where people eat and talk and enjoy their lives, and the grave, where people do their grieving. Moritz commingles the two words: the “they” of the poem do not know “whether to grieve or celebrate”, suggesting that both practices happen in both locales, table and grave, borrowing a trick of the elegy to mix the potent ingredients and create an effect that is complicated catharsis. The next pairing comes with “noon” and “dusk”; again, Moritz says that the two are sequential, or cyclical. The worth of either option is not rated; like seasons, these opposites turn into one another. Moritz then comments literally upon our century’s militarism and industrialism with the vowel-rich “locked stockade of heavy machines” but contrasts this dull and “heavy” line with an airborne blue heron—the poet, perhaps, surveying all?—which finds its own way and goes “farther on.” Thus the dead, deadening, grounded aspects of our society are contrasted to a coloured, living, aloft being. At this point, there are two things that are finding their way: the pronoun “they”, which the poem suggests is “us”, and the heron. But where are they headed?

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posted by Arc on January 26, 2010 permalink | comments (1)
tags: A.F. Moritz | Shane Neilson | poetry | poets

We are often told that poetry is “what is lost in translation.” But if that is true, why has my greatest pleasure so often been the discovery of poems in translation, poems I can’t understand in the original which nonetheless I experience as “original”: that is, as authentic voices unlike any of the other voices I love?

“A Precise Woman” by Yehuda Amichai is ostensibly a portrait, in 17 unrhymed lines, of someone whose tightly cinched waist signals the separation of her worldly concerns into the upper and lower spheres. The poem itself imitates this division, its first eight lines describing the imposition of order and the last nine representing its dissolution. The woman’s short hair and penchant for tidying drawers emphasize her orderliness but her sensuality is revealed in “cries of passion” that evoke bird-calls.

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posted by Arc on August 07, 2009 permalink | comments
tags: Chana Bloch | Susan Glickman | Yehuda Amichai | poetry | poets

Julie Bruck is that increasingly rare poet who insists upon using the poem, first and foremost, as a vehicle for communication and upon using it well. I love the compassion she feels for the people in her poems – again, a rare quality, and rarer still for being authentic. All of it is grounded by careful attention to how a poem can be made to communicate so that emotion no longer belongs exclusively to the poet but is transpersonal, evoking compassion in the reader, too.

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posted by Arc on June 22, 2009 permalink | comments
tags: David Kosub | Julie Bruck | poetry | poets

“Winter here” (p. 92) is one of my favourite poems in Alice Burdick’s second book, Flutter, and stands as a kind of key piece for understanding Burdick’s unadorned, yet complex and conflicted, aesthetic.

The first lines, uncharacteristically, are wordy and romantic. Very un-Burdick, very ornamental. A lofty eye names the natural world with high literary sweep. We’re pinned back to the ground with “Snow crunch and the pickup over there/ creeps up the lengthy hill.” A narrator is not identified but “here” in the title and “over there” connect the action with a narrator in motion. She/he does not name self by pronoun yet but becomes implicit to the scene. Four lines in, the poem offers a hint that it knows what it is about in shifting registers: “The voice is a definite problem.” The impulse to make an image out of a perception is tricky. And out in quiet, eavesdroppable rural life, where you might need “hillbilly training”, you’re going to be heard and judged if you get too grand about your proclamations of beauty. Keep it simple. Keep it real. Your desire to turn the concrete into the sentimental will be scrutinized. The displaced self-teasing of “Do you have hillbilly training?” questions whether this voice belongs in this place, and the poem asks the narrator, and perhaps the reader too, whether authentic voice itself is considered problematic. The narrator pushes on to claim that, whether it’s a problem or not, the self undeniably exists: “Intrinsic voice in the hot air.” Here, “hot air” is both the romantic language of the first lines and winter’s balloon of breath coming out of the walker’s mouth, connecting the poem back to a speaking body. The poem’s next several lines move around poetry’s many questions: how do we record and document, as with a photograph, the real world and somehow capture the subjective garnishments we apply to any image, making it into “art”? The economy of the natural world—where the crow (ah, now we know for sure what that ululating creature was, and why there were spots in the narrator’s gaze) eats all surplus, stripping nature back to stasis—is a tough charge for a writer. We adorn the world by seeing it as more than it is, by fluttering our words over it. The crow, though, eats whatever it can, removing the flutter. As it flies, it is the flutter, “and that is the offering.”

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posted by Arc on May 24, 2009 permalink | comments (1)
tags: Alice Burdick | Margaret Christakos | poetry | poets

In great poems, chosen words combine in ways which confer unique meaning memorably with resonance and power. The scent they produce infiltrates the mind, like body chemistry. I have good chemistry with this poem.

This poem starts with a blow which jolts the reader urgently from peace to panic. It is delivered by a narrator who says ominously ‘hush, this lion sleeps tonight.’ The wind no longer blows. A sombre, yet tense, insistent tone is set. The reader’s attention is dramatically gained; the opening is intriguing. Why the frozen stillness?

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posted by Arc on March 03, 2009 permalink | comments
tags: George Murray | Nigel Beale | poetry | poets

Choosing to live a life on land instead of on or near the sea is a common theme in several poems from Charles Bruce’s 1952 Governor General’s Award winner The Mulgrave Road. Bruce is never entirely clear about why a life on terra firma should be privileged over one lived on water, but what is masterful about his treatment of the subject here are the ways in which he establishes, then modulates, the binary opposition of the two elements. It’s an achievement in sound and structure that younger or even more established poets might pay attention to or perhaps even emulate.

Bruce begins by sharing his bias towards a farmer’s life in language which underscores the reliability and predictable strength of the land—established first in the internal rhyme of the opening lines, i.e. built/hills/will—then later in the description of hills as containing “certain strength” and the solidity of “native stone”. The sea, by contrast is “blowing salt…flung to sting/The trusting flesh,” in a rocking iambic pentameter that reinforces the uncertain vagaries of wind and rain and ocean storm.

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posted by Arc on January 23, 2009 permalink | comments
tags: Charles Bruce | David Kosub | poetry | poets