Arc 61, a.k.a. the Headless issue, hits newsstands December 2008. In the spirit of anonymous, the sample poems below appear without attribution as in the print issue. Later you can discover the authors of these poems from their bios tucked away at the back of the Anonymous Issue.
The Anonymous Issue
Peruse the Table of Contents of the print issue and glimpse the roster of Contributors.
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“In a way, I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have their own life, like animals, by which I mean they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them.”
—Ted Hughes, from the essay “Capturing Animals,” Poetry in the Making
Editor’s Note
Last winter I sat on a literary grant jury. I spent the months of January and February reading 157 50-page excerpts from manuscripts-in-progress in four genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young adult fiction. The manuscripts were sent to me without their authors’ names. In principal, I was impressed by this system, which aims to judge work purely on merit, thereby avoiding bias related to track records, reputations, histories with jurors, and so on. Nor was I new to blind reading: Being part of the Arc crew means spending part of each summer reading nameless entries to our Poem of the Year contest (the results of which appear in this issue). But eight weeks immersed in work written by unknown hands proved unsettling. The growing sensation, each time I grabbed a new manuscript from the seemingly bottomless box on the floor of my office, was of pawing through darkness. While at first I found it exciting, I increasingly longed for something to see or to hold. The contours in the letters of a name. Real people to whom to attach these homeless words.
Here at Arc, we pride ourselves on what we hope is our openness to work written by anyone, previously heard of or not, published or not, lauded or not. We strive to disregard a poet’s “name” while assessing his or her poems. In this light, my reaction to the grant applications gave me pause, for I realized how much, by nature or instinct or learning—or all of the above—I rely on what I know of an author to ground my reading. I realized, too, that one of the things I love about reading is the relationship one builds—privately, amid lamps and shadows and bookshelves—with one’s favourite authors. The habit, for me, reaches far back into childhood, when I methodically made my way through the entire oeuvre of Dr. Seuss available at the Appleby Branch of the Burlington Public Library before venturing on to other authors, such as L.M. Montgomery. In Montgomery’s case, my unabashed love of Anne of Green Gables allowed me to forgive failings in its sequels. For the benefits I accrue by returning to certain authors like old friends, in effect going home, this is a trade-off I’m willing to make. If the alchemy that takes place during an act of reading is pinned in that space between the mind and the page—where reader, writer and imagination meet—is this a problem? Is there any such thing as pure objective judgment of a literary work anyway?
Now there’s a question we thought worth passing on to our readers—in, quite literally, a hands-on fashion. Thus, there is something missing in this issue of Arc. I should say, something will appear to be missing when you flip to the poetry. You will of course find lines and stanzas. You’ll find verb, metaphor, enjambment and variations on metre. What you won’t find is any evidence of the poets responsible for these compositions, save the words they have pieced together. Atop each poem, in the space usually reserved for the author’s name, we offer only white space.
We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.
—Walter Pater
Essay
I first heard the poem “Donal Og” in a cottage by the sea. I was visiting an Irish poet at a time when I would probably have boasted that I knew something of Irish poetry. He asked me if I knew “Donal Og.” I said no. He asked if I had Heaney’s Rattle Bag anthology and, again, the answer was no. Out came the book. It was late, quiet out and dark; the kind of blackness that settles along the northwest edge of the country, away from other houses, busy roads. There was a fire, coal I think, we’d been drinking and there was an ease in the room. The talk was mostly poetry, a bit of history. I was young in writing terms, and eager to learn. My host read the poem. He read it the way it is meant to be read—as a kind of spell. The first line—“It is late last night the dog was speaking of you”—is immediately unsettling, the “you” making the listener complicit. The alliterative sounds, loping rhythm and the repetition of “you” as the poem progresses pull you, the listener, in, as if you were at the end of a rope and being reeled steadily closer. On first reading the poem seems like a plain-spoken questioning of what went wrong between two lovers. But there is magic in it: dogs “speak,” cries are numbered, ships are made of gold and silver, impossible gifts are conjured. There is enchantment (in multiple senses of the word). But this poem is also an inventory of loss. Hearing it for the first time was like looking into a wound. But not a wound that could be ascribed to any one person, not like Raymond Carver’s work where we can say, “Oh well, Carver, he knew loss, there was the drink, the first marriage…” Rather, this wound sounded out of the past, and went on and on, unresolved and unclaimed.
Excerpt from Feature Review
Daryl Hine. Recollected Poems: 1951-2004. Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2007.
“Criticism,” writes Helen Vendler, is “the revenge of the student who once, perforce, sat silent while things that seemed untrue were said unrebuked, and poets who loomed large in the mind were ignored in the classroom.” So many untrue things have been said for so many years about Canadian poetry, and not just in classrooms, that it is hard to know where to begin to take one’s revenge, if that is the right word. But fortunately the recent publication of Daryl Hine’s Recollected Poems: 1951-2004 gives us a chance to reassess our most unjustly ignored poet, and to fill in—or begin to fill in—one of the most forlorn and gaping holes in our literary history.
There are, as far as I can tell, five reasons for Hine’s neglect. First, our poetry’s puritanical devotion to sincerity and authenticity. At a time when many poets are loyal to the facts of their own perception and experience—even, or especially, when such facts conflict with the claims of art—Hine has been a shameless, even ruthless, artist. For Hine, the purpose of poetry is not self-expression, or even self-fashioning, but pleasure. As he puts it in the introduction to this career-spanning selection of poems, with its characteristically punning title, “For me a poem is a verbal object capable of giving a specific kind of aesthetic pleasure in itself. As such it is like a painting or a sculpture.” This aestheticism has manifested itself in Hine’s work in a variety of ways—each of them, alas, another brick in the wall obscuring Hine from critical view in this country.
an Arc Rave
Steven Venright. Floors of Enduring Beauty. Toronto:
Mansfield Press, 2007.
Arc Dozens
After a reading in Ottawa a year or two back, George Bowering said something worth remembering: your poetic influences can’t be charted with categories because we all make our own traditions, big messy ancestries that leap from period to period, form to form, nation to nation. Charting these jumps autobiographically would mean a naming of Keats’ Odes, Ginsberg’s Howl, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Whitman’s Leaves, but it would also be like examining a fossil, even if those books might be the ones that first showed me what poems ought to be. Instead, I’ve tried to think about the books that have most often been active for me during the last few years of my writing life. Some represent a discovery of new writers; some are new books by familiar writers; and, some are die-hard standards in my poetic life, still finding their ways into empty evenings years after I first found them. Whatever the case may be, every one of the following has broadened my ideas of what a poem can do, even if one is really a collection of tiny stories, another is a translated travel anthology, and the best metaphor in another is its sketch of a double-tailed dog.
Brand, Dionne. Land to Light On. Toronto: M&S, 1997.
Kawabata, Yasunari. Palm-of-the-Hand Stories (1923-1972). Trans. Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman. New York: North Point Press, 1988.
Miner, Earl, Trans. and Ed. Japanese Poetic Diaries. (Ki no Tsurayuki’s The Tosa Diary (935), Izumi Shikibu’s The Diary of Izumi Shikibu (1003), Matsuo Bashô’s The narrow road through the provinces (1689), Masaoka Shiki’s The Verse Record of my Peonies (1899)). Berkley/LA, U California Press: 1969.
Neruda, Pablo. Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon (1950-1962). Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
bpNichol. You Too, Nicky. Fissure/Press Gang, 1986.
Ondaatje, Michael. The collected works of Billy the Kid: left-handed poems. Toronto:
Anansi, 1970.
Purdy, Al. North of Summer: Poems from Baffin Island. Toronto: M&S, 1967.
Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck. New York: Norton, 1973.
Silverstein, Shel. Where the Sidewalk Ends. Harper & Row, 1974.
Thompson, John. Stilt Jack. Toronto: Anansi, 1978.
Tsu, Lao. Tao Te Ching. (Stephen Mitchell translation, 1988). 6th Century BCE.
Webb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Vancouver: Periwinkle, 1965.
Williams, William Carlos. Selected Poems (1917-1962). Ed. Charles Tomlinson. New York: New Directions, 1985.
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