Brief Reviews, excerpts from Feature Reviews, Essays and Interviews sampled from the printed edition of Arc Poetry Magazine, which hits magazine stands in June and December each year, and the Arc Annual which appears in August.and other prose
Excerpt from Feature Review
Carmine Starnino. This Way Out. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2009.
I’m sceptical of the word “progress” when talking about poets and their careers. Progress implies too strong a value judgement, as though, by some objective measure, we can say that practice and the wisdom of age necessarily make for better poetry. There are too many contrary examples of canonical poets whose best work came in their early- or mid-careers to accept the proposition (Wordsworth and Lowell come immediately to mind). I like “career” much better as a verb—swift, uncontrolled action—and, even better, I like “career narrative” as the record of those twists and swerves. This Way Out is definitely a swerve in Carmine Starnino’s narrative, one that draws out a basic conflict that has been playing through Starnino’s poetry for some time. To be more precise, it’s a conflict in the poetics more than the poems: a conceptual tension between “writing about x” and “writing poetry.”
See how many ends this stick has …
—Montaigne
Essay in excerpt
To come to the end. To stop. Not necessarily the same thing, as far as poems are concerned. In fact, a frequent criticism of a poem is that its stopping place creates a “weak”ending or one that “doesn’t work.” I stumbled into this muddy field recently in asking poet-editors to read and comment on a book I was working on. Critiques of endings dotted the pages, rarely the same view, occasionally even contradicting each other.
How to go about “fixing” a poem when the ending doesn’t “work?” Whose advice to follow, and how does that advice sit with the impulse that wants to express something true and real?
The reader-critic seems to say, I want the satisfaction of knowing the dimensions of this piece, that it isn’t partial, not a draft, and that the writer hasn’t walked away before sufficiently attending to the birth. Conversely, the reader may find that the poem ends too abruptly, or is too neatly tied up, a package with no openings to enter into.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stephanie Bolster (ed.), Molly Peacock (series ed.). Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008. Toronto: Tightrope Books, 2008.
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