Reactions to Frederick Ward’s ‘Blind Man’s Blues’

Powerful. Original. Pared down to the bone. Straight at you. No pretense. Reminded me, with its unusual, arresting voice and imagery, of how lazy and banal day-to-day language is. I loved “Put you in mind of a lone bird at dawn / standing without panic in the dew.” Startlingly perfect—you know EXACTLY what the poet means.
—Moira Farr

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posted by Arc on August 07, 2009 permalink
cats: Reviews | Arc Annual 2010

The most undeservedly unsung poet in all of English-Canadian literature is Frederick Ward. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1937, he is African-American in heritage, and an expert partisan of many arts. Ward studied art at the University of Kansas and music at the University of Missouri. He learned jazz piano under the tutelage of Oscar Peterson. After slinging words as a Hollywood songwriter, Ward removed to New Mexico where he published, in 1964, his first book, a collection of poems, and then, in Detroit, in 1966, his edited anthology of nine Baha’i poets, including himself—and his great influence and inspiration, the masterful African- American, Afro-modernist Robert Hayden (1913-80). In 1970, en route to Sweden by ship, Ward was waylaid in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by a dock worker’s strike. Abandoning the vessel, Ward soon met dispossessed exiles from the recently assassinated-by-bulldozer community of Africville. His close listening to their stories helped to fuel his first novel, Riverlisp (1974), a Joycean and Jean Toomereque jazz-feast of Black English and psychedelic surrealism. Two more novels followed in 1977 and 1981, but then, save for occasional anthologizations of his scattered bits of new work, along with his arresting script for the National Film Board feature, Train of Dreams (1987), silence. Silence. A crisis of silence.

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posted by Arc on August 07, 2009 permalink
cats: Reviews | Arc Annual 2010

Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet is a haunting piece of music that, once you’ve heard it, stays with you. The melodies are exquisite and they evoke a late romantic languor, a ghostly longing, a melancholy in the old sense of the word. It is music, obviously, that comes at the end of an era of expansive 19th-Century sentiment, a music soon to be supplanted by modernism’s endless ironies and aggressions—in Vienna the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Brahms’ music in particular was swept aside, to be preserved only in the museum of the symphony concert hall for the sentimental delectation of the upper middle classes.

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posted by Arc on August 07, 2009 permalink
cats: Reviews | Arc Annual 2010

Here is a man of “words, words, words” quite lost in the game of action. Not a hockey player adept at stick handling, he remains shut out. And the rules of the game he does command—language and its grammar—imbue the poem with multiple texts: what the lines say, what is said between them, and what the loins say.

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posted by Arc on August 07, 2009 permalink
cats: Reviews | Arc Annual 2010

It seems like such a simple, mechanical metaphor, like the kind of thing we say about small appliances before we let them go at yard sales, like the kind of thing you might hear from a muppet or maybe one of the telegenic engineers on Discovery channel. We take for granted that some things work, and occasionally turn to someone with a little expertise to tell us how. The metaphor has legs. Both poets and mechanics discuss schematics. They tweak and experiment and fine tune the factory model. Both machines and poems are fuelled; they require an external source of energy to perform. The title “How Poems Work” is also an inheritance and, like many inheritances, it’s a bit boring at first glance. Think old mushy landscape paintings in gilt frames, like the ones that collect dust for years in your uncle Martin’s basement before he passes them on to you. If you’re smart, you take a good look at what’s under the layer of dust. Uncle Marty might have made some remarkable aesthetic choices. Readers of poetry know the rewards of second glances.

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posted by Arc on August 05, 2009 permalink
cats: Reviews | Arc Annual 2010

Why should this be so thrilling? I asked myself this question while reading an email from Kisa Macdonald, a law student whose comments on the poem “KoKo,” by David McGimpsey, appear in this issue. When Kisa read the poem, which deals with a particularly fractious workplace encounter, she laughed out loud. She also found a direct correlation between its subject matter and the legal issues she was wrestling with in her studies: “In analyzing the employment case law, I have been thinking about the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee. The defective circus clown, trying not to say what he really feels, provides an excellent metaphor.” Kisa was happy because the poem seemed to peel away the trappings of her universe to uncover, at its centre, a glimmer of clarity, of truth, made-up like a clown. I was happy because we had brought a poem and (perhaps) an unlikely reader together, and something had happened—something along the lines of what I had scarcely dared hope: recognition, solace, movement, delight. The reader placing the order; the poem delivering the goods.

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posted by Arc on August 05, 2009 permalink
cats: Reviews | Arc Annual 2010

The Celebrated National Journal of Canadian Poetry Publishes a New Issue that Explores How Poems Work and asks 44 Canadians from all Walks of Life to Weigh in on Canadian Poetry

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posted by Arc on August 04, 2009 permalink
cats: Press Releases