April 17, 2010

Short Cuts: Poetry by Dani Couture and Laisha Rosnau

If book design was the best thing about Dani Couture’s first collection Good Meat, this would still be a collection worth reading, and happily, the poetry is even better than it looks. Couture’s collection has an unabashedly carnivorous theme– butchers, hunters, pumping hearts, frying bacon, fleshy girls, beef on a platter, and an exploding whale. Gaping wounds, gutted fish, Taiwanese mystery meat and the powers of e. coli. Couture is working with concrete, fundamental matter that refers back to home, to nostalgia, to childhood and stories from the past, “lessons learned from the country”. Her work is not raw (which I use here not as a pun, but raw is a reflex when discussing gutsy work like this) as much as medium rare– these poems are sculpted, worked-on, crafted. The imagery is as sharp as the knives that flash through them. “my ordinary words fall/ around my feet like tired poets/ tumbling from open windows.” “she says good meat comes/ from the sky– pulled down with lead/ shot aimed just right”

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Laisha Rosnau’s wonderful second collection Lousy Explorers takes as its epigraph the final stanza of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Dark Pines Under Water”: “But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper/ And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper/In an elementary world;/There is something down there and you want it told.” Her poems are about women who are sinking, who have left one place for another, who have embarked upon new journeys and new lives in ways that are subtle or otherwise. The 1970s suburban mother who “sent a few things flying in the kitchen”; the girl who leaves at eighteen, “foam mattress tied with rope, box of books”; girls on the frontiers of suburban childhood– creeks, the clotheslines, and hedgerows; the woman who loses her husband after sixty-years of marriage; women turning into wives, going from one place to another, and the things they take with them. Turning into mothers too, burgeoning life beneath the surface, and this is connected to nature as well in ways that are affirming and alarming (“Winter Driving, Third Trimester”). The places these women go to in their minds: “Lousy explorers, we make a mess/ of things, strip and exploit, squint blindly at stars”. And the amazing ways that they move forward all the same.

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Dani Couture reads from her new collection Sweet at Seen Reading.

Laisha Rosnau’s Lousy Explorers shortlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

April 17, 2010

Poetic April Newsflash

Due to so much poetry, and the amazing constraints of April, Pickle Me This’ Poetic April Celebrations will be extending into May. Hooray!

April 11, 2010

Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This: Kerry Ryan

This is the way the world works: I met Kerry Ryan last fall when her sister married my husband’s friend, and we were introduced at the wedding reception as two Kerrys who like books. As I enjoyed meeting her, I borrowed her book The Sleeping Life from the library, and absolutely loved it. These days, I have my own copy and was very happy to reread it in preparation for this interview, which was conducted over three days last week, with Kerry answering my questions by email from her home in Winnipeg.

I: Hi Kerry. I started rereading your book this morning– the first section “Winter Itch” sure seems more foreign and exotic here in April than it did back in December, which is a relief. The first thing I want to ask you about is your collection’s narrative “I”. When I’m talking to fiction writers, I make a real point of avoiding conflation of the writer’s and the narrator’s voices, but this seems harder to do with poetry (unless we’re reading something like Gwendolyn MacEwen’s TE Lawrence poems, but even then…). Do you agree? And the following is not a veiled question as to your work’s autobiographical content, because frankly, I don’t care about that, but I would like to know how you talk about the “I” of these poems without referring to yourself. Can you?

KR: Great question! I DO find it difficult to separate the poet from the poem — both as a reader and a writer. I’m not sure why we, as readers, make these assumptions with poetry and not fiction. Is it because there’s not (generally) the same attention to character development in a poem as a story, and thus less distance between the writer and the voice? Or because there’s a tradition of poetry being confessional and soul-baring, a kind of mystique around poems coming from a deeper, more intimate place within the writer? I don’t know. But, as much as I hate stereotypes, I do think we’re usually right to deduce a poem’s “I” is the author, at least at some level.

As a poet, it’s important to me that my work be grounded in genuine experience. But that’s very different than historical accuracy. (How freeing to discover that a poem doesn’t have to be about “what actually happened,” that I could use a poem to imagine a new scenario, a new ending, a better one!) So, while the “I” in my poems shares many things in common with my actual self, especially in terms of experiences, “I” is a character. My friends and family might recognize me in certain elements, but the “I” in my poems is often smarter, more articulate and more graceful than I actually am (though sometimes she’s more lonely, sad or shy than I am). I might look at this differently if I were a more experienced, or scholarly writer, but when I talk about my poems or read them, I proudly claim my “I.” (more…)

April 11, 2010

the british museum

that first day in london,
we were so drenched
with exhaustion
we fell asleep
at st. martins-in-the-fields –
bellowing organ,
hard wooden pews,
congregation of office workers
at a lunch hour concert
and the two of us:
eyes rusted shut,
heads flapping forward
as if we were being rear-ended,
over and over,
by our own dreams

i think of that now
as you cover my ears,
my eyes to baffle light

i try to imagine
ever sleeping again,
let alone on a double-decker bus,
under creaking stairs
of a youth hostel
with no curfew

but in our bed,
late night or early morning,
scratch of eyelashes
on pillowcase,
constant movement
of my own chest,
half degree of heat
and i wake you
just to say i can’t sleep

you ask if i remember
the courtyard of the british museum:

we were weightless,
would have floated
if it weren’t for backpacks

room soft as a cocoon,
white as meringue
on a bone china plate

sunlight filtered
through a thousand trillium petals,
which we counted
before falling asleep
on a marble bench

-by Kerry Ryan

April 9, 2010

Poetry, poetry

Poetry, poetry. That Michael Lista is all over the place this week– he reads the full text of Bloom over at Seen Reading. He’s Guest Editor at The Afterword this week. The Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist is stacked with women. Pickle Me This pal Laisha Rosnau has been shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. We’re getting poetry vending machines here in the city. And then there’s Dani Couture’s Poetry Fortune Tellers, which have been described as “the coolest thing ever”.

April 6, 2010

Bloom by Michael Lista

“Something that has bothered me enormously as a reader of poetry is the failure of poets—especially the so-called avant-garde—to pick up on the formal complexity of the world as revealed by the various scientific disciplines. Biologists have shown us the double-helix, the root not only of physiology but also of behaviour, cognition; chemistry gives us Bach and personality; and physicists are proving we’re more math than matter. And yet so many poets give us a world that looks profoundly out-dated; disordered, solipsistic, self-made, random, positively 20th century. I think a more honest book is one in which the spontaneity of personality is set within the strict—and ancient— clockwork of the world.” –Michael Lista, from “Not Every Gesture Is a Manifesto: An Interview…” by Jacob McArthur Mooney

Say I’m making it
for making’s sake, as humans must
when put before an erector set
whose pieces spell out
Please for the love of Jesus
do not dare assemble us
–from “Do. But Do.”

how when an atom’s centre smashes and cracks
new light explodes from the matter’s collapse
–from “Lotus Eaters”

Michael Lista’s collection Bloom comes with a guide map as an appendix, which might suggest its a book that takes us into unventured territory. And while I’m not sure that Lista’s book is necessarily more “honest” than those of the “so many poets” he mentioned in his interview, this is a fascinating collection nonetheless, in its premise and its execution.

Los Alamos, New Mexico is the guide map, and Bloom tells the story of Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist working on the Manhattan Project. Exactly nine months after Slotin’s predecessor, Harry Diaghlian, was killed in an accident while “bring[ing] a core of nuclear fissile material as close to criticality as possible”, Slotin himself has an accident, and though he manages to shield the other scientists in the lab from radiation, he dies nine days later. An essential twist in the story is that Slotin died training his replacement, Alvin Graves, who was having an affair with Slotin’s wife.

I don’t know what “close to criticality” means, and neither have I read Ulysses, but even still, I was able to be captivated by Bloom. Each poem in the collection takes another poem as its source material (by poets as various as Ted Hughes, the Pearl Poet, and the Velvet Underground, by poets as cotemporary as Karen Solie, Robyn Sarah and Nick Laird, and plenty of [undoubtedly famous] other poets to whom a reference might bely that I’ve actually heard of them), and Lista refers to his work with the original poems as “English to English translations”. By which he means that his source materials are building blocks, modified to suit Lista’s poetic purposes and the purposes of the story.

Not a thing is original here– just as Slotin’s experience is a copy of Diaghlian’s, and Graves’ was the stand-in in Slotin’s marriage, each poem is a variation on something that has been written before, each of these poems refers to allusions and other texts (as well as a pivotal part of a 1989 movie projected onto John Cusack’s shoulder). And while the product of such an experiment is a little confusing and overwhelming, it’s also navigable and pretty fabulous to contemplate as a whole– the cacophony, so many voices, and such variation is entirely readable.

I am not this book’s intended audience, presuming it was only ever meant to have just one. But I am pleased to now understand how literary remixing could be an art onto itself and not simply plagiarism ala Opal Mehta. The incredibly illuminating Torontoist interview I refer to above (and yes, I was unafraid of cutting and pasting for this review) notes that Bloom is controversial, that readers could resent Lista’s rearrangement of beloved or iconic works (and I wonder too, if his variations might look paltry in comparison?). Interestingly, however, because my knowlege of the source material was so incredibly minimal (indeed, the only poem I’d read was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight back in Major British Writers, and I’m not sure whether to blame the University of Toronto or myself for this) none of these problems existed.

Lista’s poems refer me not to something that’s old, but something that’s entirely new, which was the opposite of his intentions, but it’s a distinctly original result.

April 4, 2010

Poetry Primer Number One: by Susan Telfer

Susan Telfer’s poems have been published in literary journals from coast to coast in Canada. She teaches high school and lives in Gibsons, BC with her husband and three children. Susan is the recipient of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council Gillian Lowndes Award, which is for a community artist who has demonstrated long-standing achievement and growth.

I first encountered Susan through her wonderful collection House Beneath (Hagios Press, 2009) and I’m so pleased that she was willing to share some thoughts here about poetry.

How do I need poetry? Let me count the ways.

As a child, I needed poetry without knowing I needed it, because it was provided in abundance through nursery rhymes, A Child’s Garden of Verses, When We Were Very Young, Alligator Pie and the Psalms. Starting in late high school and university, I began to understand how the poetry of the English canon sustained me. Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” The right poem, I have found, is like the right homeopathic medicine: a tiny ‘like cures like’ tear to heal some deep hurt inside me. Here is a small sampling of my most potent remedies.

When I was in my twenties, with my first baby, and my mom was diagnosed with cancer and the hardest years of my life began, I found a poem in The Atlantic by Marie Howe called “What the Living Do.” I immediately cut it out, glued it in my journal and read it over and over. I didn’t know then that Marie was writing of her brother who had died of AIDS, or that my young mother would soon be dead, but I knew I needed that poem. Perhaps the most healing message from it for me was that in the midst of death you might catch a tender glimpse of yourself: “and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep.” A snatch of the poem with a photo appeared in Oprah last year, and I realized then what powerful medicine that poem contains.

About four years ago I read “Our Lady of the Snows” by Robert Hass, and put a copy on my fridge. It was Christmas, and as usual, the ghost of my drunken father at Christmases past haunted me. That poem on the fridge was like garlic on the door. Again, Robert was writing about himself as a little boy dealing with his drunken mother; I was remembering myself as a helpless girl dealing with my drunken father, but our stories were similar. He had been where I had been: “And the days churned by, /navigable sorrow.” He told it in a way I could not articulate and that was how he provided medicine for me. I get it out every Christmas, and many other times during the year.

Only recently have I discovered Gwendolyn MacEwen’s poems, which strike me with the clarity and depth of one of those bell bowls at yoga class. “A Breakfast for Barbarians” and “Dark Pines Under Water” are two poems written in my nursery rhyme years, which, for reasons as yet unknown to me, speak directly to the inner layer of who I am. Some healing is going on in my unconscious. “There is something down there and you want it told.”

George Elliott Clarke, himself a writer of many healing poems, told me, “Writing is not healing for the writer, but for the reader.” Dear Reader, read with your hungry heart until you find the poetic voice speaking the nourishment you need. And especially if you’re from a small town, and even if you aren’t, read Louise Glück’s new book A Village Life.

Marie Howe’s book is What the Living Do, and Robert Hass’ is Sun Under Wood. “A Breakfast for Barbarians” was published in the book by the same title (Ryerson, 1966) and is out of print but old copies are around. “Dark Pines Under Water” was published in The Shadow-Maker (MacMillan, 1969.) They are both in the new edition: The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen (Exile Classics, 2007).

April 1, 2010

Good things come in gorgeous packages

Poetry collections are some of the most beautiful books in my library. They have gorgeous cover designs, seductive embossments, such carefully chosen fonts, wonderfully fibrous paper that sets off the white space,  cut with such crisp edges. A lot of this, I think, is because so many of these books come from independent presses and reflect the care that these presses put into each detail of their books.

My all-time favourite cover design is from Alison Smith’s Six Mats and One Year (from Gaspereau Press), whose cover is is divided into rectangles like a six mat tatami room. I’ve got a thing for running my fingers along the octopus legs on Jennica Harper’s first collection The Octopus and Other Poems (from Signature Editions). I love the bird on Kerry Ryan’s The Sleeping Life (The Muses Company), the girl on Laurel Snyder’s The Myth of the Simple Machines (No Tell Books), I love how The Essential PK Page is like a bouquet of pressed flowers (from Porcupine’s Quill), and that tree from Susan Telfer’s House Beneath (Hagios Press), sprawling, gnarled and rooted.

It’s shallow, I know, to love poetry for its packaging, to covet books as objects, but I can’t help it if I do. It’s only the beginning of the story, of course, but it’s an important part, and it’s fortunate that so many poets and publishers think seem to feel the same.

Honestly, e-books will never hold a candle.

April 1, 2010

Poetic April Begins

We’re going to be celebrating April here at Pickle Me This in a most poetic fashion, and brilliant plans are afoot– poets have been generous enough to contibute “Poetry Primers”, to allow some of their work to be posted, and stay tuned also for a poetic interview, for lots of book reviews and discussions. I’m going to be reading collections by Michael Lista, Kyle Buckley, Laisha Rosnau, and others. Laisha will also be one of our featured poets, along with Susan Telfer, Jennica Harper, Kerry Ryan and Rebecca Rosenblum (yes! she contains multitudes).

If any other poets or poetry fans are up for taking part in any way (writing primers, posting poems, and whatnot), do get in touch. Unless you’re the teenage version of me, in which case *nobody* wants to read about that pain that “cuts life a knife”, okay?

Truth be told, I do read poetry year around, but I welcome April and the chance to allow it a little bit of extra attention. Because appreciating poetry demands plenty of attention, and often less than I tend to grant it, modern life being what it is (ie rubbish). Poetry is slow, poetry is precision, poetry demands you to note every syllable, every sound, senses attuned. Poetry is demanding, which is not the same as difficult, and any poem worth its weight in demands will be infinitely rewarding. The way a few words can open worlds wide and wide.

What I want to make clear over the next month is that poetry has popular appeal. If you’re not into poetry, it’s only because you’re not looking in the right places, and note that not being into poetry is sort of like not being into novels (and we all know those people are perfect idiots).

If you do love poetry, then I am glad we’ll be able to celebrate together, and for the rest of you, I hope you’ll be won over by the time May’s flowers are in bloom.