Tongues of Fire

"You rat bastard, you’re ruining it
for everybody..."

Congratulations once again to David Zieroth, this year’s Governor General’s award winner for poetry. Zieroth responded with a very nice note yesterday recounting the nervous moments just prior to the announcement. Stay tuned for my upcoming interview with him (to be posted once the dust settles).

Yup. A great week, made even better by my first National Poetry Slam, and getting the chance to sit as one of five judges, volunteers from a nearly packed audience at the Alex Goolden Hall in Victoria. To get an idea of what it’s like judging one of these affairs, imagine your partner, your kids, your next door neighbour and your boss all yelling at you at the same time. I’m seated smack in the middle of a bunch of rabid supporters of the Vancouver team, who display all the grace and understanding of Mike Tyson fresh from a root canal.

But a great night, starting with the amazing Andrea Thompson, whose take on relationships was funny...and unnervingly accurate. Thompson took time during her 20 minute set to acknowledge Canada’s Mama of Dada herself Sheri-D Wilson, seated in the balcony, before a string of spoken word poets took to the stage, kibitzing on everything from personal hygiene to erotic love, from family dysfunction to war.

The highlights remain the wonderful performances of the four teams vying for the title of Canada’s national poetry slam champs, i.e. Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver and the Slaughter House Four, a wild card of spoken word poets pulled from the remaining teams. Ottawa ultimately prevailed based on performances by four young men who gave us delicious rifts on memories of a beloved sister, quiet soliloquies on gaining acceptance, and rapid fire indictments on modern society and the travesty of African war. The result all around: laughter and tears.

Every bit as striking as the performances was the sheer inventiveness of the performers’ writing (something that has historically marked the very best poetry and which, dare I say it, many page poets seem to have lost). The other star of the evening: the audience itself, singing the traditional time penalty chant whenever a performer exceeds the three-minute limit: “You rat bastard, you’re ruining it for everybody! But it was soooohh worth it!”

They were right. It was well worth it.

Governor General's Award for Poetry Announced

The Governor General's Award for Poetry has been won by David Zieroth, North Vancouver, for The Fly in Autumn (Harbour Publishing; distributed by the publisher). Here's the testimonial:

"In The Fly in Autumn, David Zieroth addresses our common and defining human fate – the loneliness that is a rehearsal for death – with a tenderness and buoyancy that shows the reader “how to walk in the dark with flowers.” The intricacy and exuberance of rhyme and the breadth of vision are stunning."

From my perspective, David Zieroth's ambitions are broader than most poets, casting a net over the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas, Marcus Aurelius and others to arrive at conclusions of his own about the nature of reality and about death. From the poetic standpoint his exploration of the unreliability of reality plays into our love of ambiguity and a desire to see ordinary things from extraordinary angles. His strength is his ability to make thought not just interesting, but aesthetically compelling, too.

Among the very best poems in Zieroth’s collection is “How to Walk in the Dark with Flowers", which employs a central image to underscore his commitment to the imagination and to present a view of death that is not only stoic, but beautiful and deeply reassuring. His explorations are artistically adept and intriguing.

It’s because of this that Zieroth’s current collection should appeal to a broader audience than most, including readers more accustomed to confessional or sensory based poetry.

For a fuller assessment of David Zieroth's The Fly in Autumn see my review in the upcoming winter issue of The Malahat Review.

Offerings for the black dog...

"For many poets the End of Statement has become an article of faith that has quietly mutated into codified postures of demoralization and faithlessness..."

Most of us are familiar with the 20th century literary concept, the Biographical Fallacy, a notion Auden scholar John R. Boly says frees the meaning contained in an author's poems “from being determined by a particular set of events in that author’s life”. It’s a simple idea that has enormous implications for poets and writers, whose resistance to the suggestion that they might have written autobiographically in a poem or novel is equally familiar. (A case in point: that slightly defensive reaction whenever CBC’s Eleanor Wachtel asks a writer how much of their personal life has gone into a novel or poem.)

For me the Biographical Fallacy took on extra meaning this week when I asked the obvious question: If the events that have formed my life can have no bearing upon the meaning contained in my poems, if I lack the freedom to truly create, how then can meaning occur? The answer would seem to rest in that magical combination of the fiercely independent author working in tandem with the endless variety and freedom contained within language itself. Unfortunately, this answer to the question of meaning in poems is not always readily apparent in poems themselves, particularly in their tone, and in something related to tone, the poet’s sense of power and place in the world.

Two poems helped crystallize this for me, one a familiar poem in the modernist tradition; the other a very old poem from 12th century AD:

To me there is much comfort in the thought
That all our agonies can alter nought,
Our lives are written to their latest word,
We but repeat a lesson He hath taught.

- From The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Is it solely for metaphorical purposes that Richard Le Gallienne’s translation casts the argument against freedom in terms of the written word? Perhaps. It might suggest something else, though: that our words, like our actions, are themselves pre-determined, shaped by forces outside their control and powerless to affect direct change themselves. That suggestion gains added force when you consider how singularly helpless words have been during the last century at intercepting and stopping the very worst that human beings can do to one another.

It may also account for that low-grade depression readers encounter in so many contemporary poets. When so much of the world is galvanized by Olympic Torch Relays, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the simple desire to find a job, poets are consigned to the sidelines, immobilized by the meaninglessness and paucity of human activity - and worse, the inability of words to change anything.

Is it any wonder, then, that we are simultaneously confronted by the diminishment in importance of statement in poetic art? Evidence abounds that the preoccupation with “saying something significant” as an outcome of art has been replaced by our preoccupation with process and a fixation upon the materials of art (e.g. typography in poetry; shape and surface texture in painting; space in sculpture). More significantly, for many poets the End of Statement has become an article of faith that has quietly mutated into codified postures of demoralization and faithlessness, reflected not just in the tone of balefulness that infects so much bad poetry, but in the underlying tone of resignation that effects even very good poetry:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Williams' famous poem helps us understand what we turn to when philosophic statement and the discursive deployment of words no longer work for us; "So much depends/upon" all that we have left: clear, hard images, captured in a way that acknowledges the distance between ourselves and the world (hence that space between stanzas 1 and 2) and our incapacity to shape our destinies. All of it subsumed within the sheer delight of the images themselves.

Is that sufficient answer to the question of meaning in poetry? For now, it seems to be.
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Clarification: In my last blog I said the federal government proposes cutting funding to Canadian magazines with a circulation of fewer than 5,000. While the effect may be the same, it requires some clarification. To that end, here is Malahat Review editor John Barton:

“It’s not that the government is cutting funding (they are merging the Publications Assistance Program and Canada Magazine Fund into a single entity called the Canada Periodical Fund), but are setting minimum circulation at 5000 paid copies per year, a mark most literary and arts magazines are below---often well below. Also, at the other end of the spectrum, they are capping grants at $1.5 million. Currently, MacLean’s and Chatelaine, for example, receive about $2 million plus through PAP, so they will lose a substantial amount of money that they formerly received to underwrite part of their postal costs in Canada. What the exact programs the CPF will offer are not known yet.

Magazines like the Malahat will lose 10-12% of our budget next year. Along with the cuts to our BC Arts Council grant---if we were to lose 90% of it, we’d be down to $700----we will be down 15% to 17%.

I don’t see either government changing its approach, so my feeling is that those who love the arts in this country---both practitioners (artists, writers, etc) and clientele (readers, audience, etc)---have to find it in themselves to support us materially by subscribing (magazines, theatre, memberships in art galleries). The message from government, especially in the case of the Harper government, is: before we fund you, prove you have an audience.

Note that our Canada Council funding is unaffected. It’s an independent body, and not part of Canadian Heritage (where PAP and CMF reside), though it reports to Parliament through the Minister of Canadian Heritage.”

Hear us roar...

"Ottawa has, in a single stroke, re-ignited questions about poetry’s lack of broad appeal, while raising, subliminally, the equally recalcitrant question about its legitimacy as art."

Okay, I know I've been putting it off and that most people are likely sick of the subject by now. Like many of you I sent off a letter to the Honourable James Moore, Minister Responsible for Blah Blah Blah, expressing concern about his threat to end funding under the Publications Assistance and Canada Magazine Fund. Six weeks later I get a form letter expressing his government’s “pleasure” in supporting Canadian reading choices and its admiration for the important role that “specialized” publications play in meeting those choices. Never mind that by definition “specialized” excludes the broader mainstream, the redoubtable Mr. Moore then proposes cutting funding to magazines with a circulation of fewer than 5,000.

In his wisdom the Minister proposes instead something called a "Business Innovation component" to help, he says “smaller magazines pursue innovative business ideas (read `sink or swim'), build their audiences (`Okay, we really were just kidding about specialized publications') and explore digital opportunities (`How about Twitter? surely you can squeeze a simple Haiku into 140 characters')”. Sure, a new program, then. But will this new program, I asked, help fund the publication and distribution of these specialized (read smaller) magazines you so cherish. I’ve yet to receive a second response.

Again, you’ve heard the arguments. An enormous disservice is about to be done to Canadian culture by stripping away our capacity to publicize and ingest the best that our writers and poets have to offer. But nearly as worse is the disservice being done to the discourse about poetry in Canada: at a time when we’d almost put to rest those ancient concerns about broadening the readership of poetry, Ottawa has, in a single stroke, re-ignited questions about poetry’s lack of broad appeal, while raising, subliminally, the equally recalcitrant question about its legitimacy as art.

My hope is that we will resist the temptation to turn back the clock; that instead of worrying about how few people are reading poetry, instead of launching quaint programs tying poetry to Valentine’s Day or the Winter Solstice to get more people thinking about reading poetry, we content ourselves with providing the best product for the people who already read poetry, small in number though we may be. That includes the poems poets write and the publications designed to draw our attention to the poems that poets write. And yes, it includes demanding of Ottawa that it actively support the reading choices we make – not as an individual right, but as the right of a country to grow and sustain its own rich, diverse culture.

I can do no better than give W.H. Auden the last word:

After all, it’s rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background noise for study
or hung as a status-trophy for rising executives,
cannot be `done’ like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored: our handful
of clients at least can rune.

- From “The Cave of Making”

Our stone

"If Imagism taught its practitioners anything, it was the enormous difficulty writing a new poetry to compete with the force and subtly of the poetic tradition it was attempting to replace."

We all have one, right? A favourite used bookstore that always seems to have the book that fits our mood perfectly. For me it’s a little place here in Victoria called James Bay Coffee and Books. A single shelf devoted to poetry, with a surprising capacity for the arcane and the useful. For months I’d been looking for something that would capture the flavour of those years between 1910 and 1920 loosely referred to as the "Imagist Period". Two weeks ago it practically leapt into my hands: a slim volume entitled, auspiciously enough, The Imagist Poem (ed. William Pratt).

A touch of cold in the Autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over the hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded;
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

The poem is “Autumn” by T.E. Hulme, the person generally credited with having assembled in 1912 a small group of poets anxious to answer the new century with a new way of writing poetry (e.g. Ezra Pound, Edward Storer, F.S. Flint), a way of making poems that revolved around three principles: 1/write directly about the thing, subjective or objective 2/ use only those words that contribute to its presentation 3/wrap it in new musical rhythms; avoid the feel of the metronome.

Poetry has never been the same since. Others like Williams and Olson may have re-phrased the first principle a bit (No or Not in "ideas but in things”), but the intent, if not always the result, was the same: an absolute determination to use contemporary and exquisitely precise language to capture hard, clear images, and to displace traditional iambic pentameter with fresh rhythms suited to fresh meanings.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

I leave it to the reader to judge how closely Hulme achieved the modernist intention in the first poem above (“white faces like town children” strikes me as less convincing than the rest of the poem), but preoccupation with the image for the those who followed became a near pathological obsession reminiscent of Van Gogh’s “Sun” painting. Occasionally this resulted in masterpieces like the second poem by Pound, two lines which more than any other came to define the temper of the 20th century. But even this poem, as clean and hard edged as its images are, seems oddly disconnected from Pound’s original intent: to capture, he later wrote, “a beautiful child’s face” and the faces of beautiful women; for me, “apparition” and “wet, black bough”, conjure up something far more ominous in that Parisian crowd than Pound allowed or perhaps even understood.

If Imagism taught its practitioners anything, it was the enormous difficulty writing a new poetry to compete with the force and subtly of the poetic tradition it was attempting to replace.

So...what are your sources?

"What is really demanded, what readers truly hunger for, is engagement with the full contemplative power of the poet’s mind and heart."

Lately, I’ve taken a real interest in the history and theory of both metrical and “open form” poetry. I recognize this is not every one's cup of tea. Perhaps it's just a tick of mine left over from my foray into academe. Because like most people my real learning derives from my experience of poems themselves, read by myself at home, often aloud to my wife, or by poets themselves at readings. That, most of us agree, is how it should be.

The underlying assumption here is that good writing, or good reading for that matter, is not a purely technical or theoretical matter, but relational: whatever a poet’s technical mastery of metaphor and line or the reader's capacity for metaphysics, what is really demanded, what readers truly hunger for, is engagement with the full contemplative power of the poet’s mind and heart.

That presupposes, of course, delivery of same by the poet. It also introduces a conundrum about human nature revealed over a century and a half ago by the great American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Men," he said (I'm guessing when Margaret Fuller was out of the room), "imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.” The same, it seems to me, might be said about the writing of poetry. As a poet, your mind and heart will be discovered in spite of whatever else you may intend or wish to reveal, and that in as much as the practice of writing poems is thought to confer an aura of sophistication upon the writers of poems, true character, thought and feeling – or lack of same - will out.

Still, we are not pawns even to ourselves. To use a term I acknowledge has been somewhat overused lately, poets, like most people, have the capacity for “mindfulness”, for creating something above their patterns and habitual ways of creating, i.e. increasing consciousness of what they’re doing, thinking and feeling as poets, and then seizing control. It can't be an easy task, undoing ways of thinking and working that have become essential to our being. Still, if it could be done and the results found to be exciting for both the poet and the reader, then it might be worth incorporating into the poet's method.

These things, it seems to me, are not simply a function of talent or even of personality, but of education, philosophical direction and commitment.

Auden's Example

"(Auden) simply reminds us that poets and writers of any significant talent should husband it carefully and that, stay or leave, interesting places can be found just by crossing the street into a different neighbourhood."

I’ve always thought the argument for or against a more nationalist stance in Canadian poetry a little odd. For me, it conjures up an image of some ghostly pater familias looming over the shoulder of poets in Vancouver or St. John’s working feverishly away at their verses with injunctions about the “spirit of place” and other such overworked nonsense whispering in their ears. The truth is the nationalist credo may form a critical backdrop against which some poets have worked, but the principal considerations for most remain, inescapably, the creation of decidedly personal poetic arguments clothed in fitting forms.

Those who feel resistance to cultural colonialism remains the sine qua non and distinguishing feature of Canadian letters, but are anxious to break free, might take comfort from W. H Auden. Auden famously turned his back on his native England on the eve of the Second World War to live in the U.S. Roundly pilloried by younger English poets who once venerated the complex "comintern" of English poetry, Auden later offered his deep-seated fears about his poetic powers atrophying to explain what drove him into the arms of America. England, despite a rich legacy, he said, had become “dead” for him.

England to me is my own tongue,
And what I did when I was young.

Auden settled into a house in Brooklyn, New York in 1940 where he lived for about five years and assumed American citizenship. His housemates included the wonderful Irish poet Louis MacNeice, composer Benjamin Britten, novelist Carson McCullers, the stripper Gipsy Rose Lee and Golo Mann, brother to Erika (who'd married Auden in the early 30's and so escaped Nazi Germany using a British passport). Their father was the acclaimed German author, Thomas Mann (see Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, two great novels). More importantly, Auden's poetry entered a new and arguably more interesting phase that ultimately prolonged broad interest in his career.

Am I suggesting that Canadian poets emulate Auden by abandoning Canada for other shores? Not really. His example simply reminds us that poets and writers of any significant talent should husband it carefully and that, stay or leave, interesting places can be found just by crossing the street into a different neighbourhood. Wander. Ponder. Puzzle out the different ways human beings choose to live. Consider if the landscapes you've been nurtured in might not be too familiar, too much filled with old and debilitating ghosts.

Several excellent essays in Stan Smith’s The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden provide detailed descriptions of Auden’s life and his development as poet in America, Italy and the U.K. If you don’t mind his great rant on how Eliot and Pound killed poetry for the 20th century and tricked Auden into following their lead, Karl Shapiro’s In Defense of Ignorance also provides some interesting insights into Auden’s work.

The real place to discover the man many believe was the principal trailblazer in 20th century poetics is in Auden's poetry, in particular W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, edited by Auden biographer Edward Mendelson (First Vintage International, 1991). A tremendous body of work, with only minor elisions by the master. Or for just a taste, see a wonderful love poem in the "Great Poems" link at the right of this page.