January 20, 2009
"Because We Want To" by Alison Smith
The few words that I learn
make reality. No, reality exists.
Words push me
into the moving water.
In the morning
I learn words for Lu Ling
while she brushes her teeth.
She’s said that she laughs
because she is pregnant
and wants to be happy.
Me too, I’ve realised, I do
want to be happy.
Today, I say, are you busy?
She says my Japanese
is good, is good!
I say tonight? dinner? together?
She says pizza?
and I say hai.
This is our common language:
eat dinner tonight yes.
And because we’ve wanted to
we’ve learned how to say next—
these have become feast days
and we will not stop
until we are satisfied.
–from Alison Smith’s gorgeous collection Six Mats and One Year, published by Gaspereau Press, which TSR has informed us recently entered the blogosphere.
August 17, 2008
Haiku Baby
My favourite thing of late is Haiku Baby by Betsy Snyder, the board book I recently gave to my expectant friend (who informed me she’d read it to her belly just as soon as the fetus had ears). The illustrations are gorgeous, suggesting all variety of textiles and collage, and the haiku are lovely, and as true to the haiku tradition as ones in English can be. “Rain: Splish splash, puddle bath!/ raindrops march in spring parade–/ wake up sleepy earth.”
July 24, 2008
Of poetry and war crimes
What I’ve found fascinating about recently-captured Serbian war-criminal Radovan Karadžić was not his hair (which, incidentally, is quite remarkable both before and after) but rather the fact that, in addition to being guilty of crimes of genocide, he is a poet. That he is a poet surprised me, because I’d always supposed that literature in general and poetry in most particular would act as some sort of inoculating force against the decisiveness, the arrogance, narrow vision, and lack of empathy necessary for such a crime.
But perhaps I am naive, and you-know-who was a painter, etc., and surely there have been plenty of evil writers. Yes, definitely there have been some evil writers, by which I mean writers who thought, said, wrote some evil things, but unlike the poet/war-criminal, this doesn’t surprise me at all. For surely it is the writer’s role to think himself into places others can’t even fathom, and it’s natural that some might choose to stay there. But I do see a mild distinction between thinking and doing, the former abhorrent and the latter inexcusable.
It still surprises me that poet could do, a poet. Poets, I’d supposed, knowing better than the rest of us the careful constructs upon which ideas are built, of “just words” after all, and how those words and those ideas can’t be bent and twisted into anything, and that anything is everything, and that nothing can be sure. The difference of a line break, a comma; how fragile is simply everything, including life itself.
But perhaps I’ve overestimating this man, and all evidence suggests as much– the poems are terrible. I read the excerpts and reasoned that they must have been put through an online translator, or translated by a drunk illiterate baboon, but they are said to be as “bad in the original as they sound in the English version.” The lesson being that bad poets are prone to war crimes? But then I’m not so sure, because that kind of assumption is bound to tarnish the reputations of a lot of us.
June 26, 2008
Poem in the Post
Kawaii. Today in the post was a “Hello Kitty Everywhere! Haiku Postcard” from my sister. Haiku as follows:
Peeking through the soil,
The flowers shyly emerge.
I am their first friend.
April 30, 2008
On Poetry, and Carol Ann Duffy's Mean Time
So thank you to Poetic April, for I believe you had a firm hand in the leaves on the trees. Thank you for the books I’ve read, the books I’ve bought, authors discovered, poems devoured, the little ditties I wrote myself, and for the spirit of it all. Thank you for giving me the confidence to take on poetry, and come away not defeated. For the fun with words you inspired, and for providing a vehicle with which to convey avocado love.
The final book of poetry I’ve read this month is Carol Ann Duffy’s Mean Time. I’d read her before, much enjoying her collection Rapture which came out a couple of years back. Mean Time was a bit of a departure from the other books I’d read this month– not being new, being British, Duffy a more established poet. Her poems also tending to be less personal narratives or confessionals. Their purpose to tell whole stories, to fill whole rooms and entire scenes with meaning.
I love “Litany” and “Before You Were Mine”, but the whole book read itself. Such a pleasure. A great place to leave you, I think, Poetic April. I’ll be back in a year, and of course will drop by from time to time before then.
April 29, 2008
Paint Chip Poems
1. Cover up the names
for they sway me;
colour blind. To be happy
in a white room called
man on the moon.
Give me monterey white,
balboa mist. I want niveous.
Cream froth, sugar cookie.
Butter milk, summer solstice.
Vichysoisse, straw hat;
elephant tusk,
bare and windswept.
2. Future children’s names:
Audubon Russet
Powell Buff
Livingston Gold
Putnam Ivory
Jackson Tan
Winthrop Peach
3. At eighteen years
I painted my room.
Citrus orange.
April 27, 2008
The Octopus by Jennica Harper
I used to have this sticker with a picture of a boy and a bear standing on the top of Planet Earth, set against a black starry sky and the bear was pointing up. The words coming out of his mouth said, “Look up there.” The image to me is the definition of “wonder”, and it kept occurring to me as I reread Jennica Harper’s book The Octopus yet again.
Wondrous things dominate this collection: prairie skies, cinema, rocket ships, spacemen, music, snowstorm, beaches, breasts, mothers, and extraterrestrial life. Some of these things ordinary but made new through widened eyes. From “Cinema Paradiso”: “Only a true believer/ sits on the edge of her seat at the movies/ like they do in the movies./ I am such a believer.”
In the long poem “The Octopus”, this wonder is questioned, as two former lovers have the same conversations they’ve always had. “Something we could not let go:/ all the time spent, the conversations/ run and rerun, we didn’t think we would/ have the strength to have them/ with another person.” The other love who sees such wonder as self-indulgent, who “can’t condone the reckless hope/ of finding some other life out there.” He points elsewhere instead: “If Sagan and his crew really wanted an alien,/ you say, they would look to the octopus…” He is “afraid all this probing/ will have been a waste.”
But to our narrator, the wonder has been enough, and so too the wondering: “the girl on the beach… but is it a waste that I got to dream her?” Pointing up, and wondering what is out there in the universe, asking where did we come from and where are we going. Questions that apply just as much to outer space as to our own histories; the secret to our origins might lie in the stars, but we seek the same answers in our mothers, our families, in the world all around us. In this context everything is worth examining; indeed a praying mantis is a “tiny robot”, we are made up of our elements. And then we can dare to “admit we’re not the only subject/ and can sometimes be the searcher, the verb”.
Harper writes, “All of this talk is just talk./ The truth is, we will never know/ our own future, not even/our own past”. The talk, however, and all the wondering, and the poetry– all this stand as evidence, as an arsenal against empty claims of nothingness. Making it certain: “We Are Here.”
April 25, 2008
Alligator Pear
I want
scrumping.
To eat your ugly,
Avocado.
Lumpy isn’t
lumpen after all.
Just to dig
that perfect pit,
unbreakable ovum.
Your malleable
flesh. To taste
the savoury sweet;
hideous beauty.
April 25, 2008
Be kinder to animals
As I have been dilettanting my way through Poetic April, I was particularly interested to read Russell Smith’s piece in the Globe & Mail today: “The best verse is worth a wade through the dross.” In which Smith strikes an unashamedly elitist stance, decrying the teaching of poetry as a form of self-expression primarily. Something is lost. “[Contemporary poetry] doesn’t seem difficult at all; in fact, it seems like an exercise to encourage children to be kinder to animals.”
Smith writes, “Poetry is historically the basis of all literature, and understanding what poetry teaches us– that language can be used as flexible material, that aural and aesthetic effects can be as communicative as mere definitions can be, that words can have many meanings and that ambiguity can be powerful, indeed that lack of clarity can evoke multiple meanings– understanding all this is crucial to understanding all language and to being a better writer in any genre.”
That went on too long, I realize, but I wasn’t about to cut Smith off. Sometimes I thank goodness for the unashamedly elite, for though I am not altogether convinced by his argument– I think any sentence beginning with “Poetry is…” is inherently fallible– it makes sense to me. It’s a perspective I want to keep in mind as I approach poems through their Full House references.
I agree that a lot of contemporary poetry is bad, and admit that I’ve certainly played my role in contributing to the travesty– guilty of finishing “Poetry is…” with “line breaks.” It takes some stupid nerve to create something whose whole history you’re ignorant of, to be a writer but not a reader, to express and never listen. But this is the very worst of it, and even here, I am sure, somebody is still doing it well. I am sure that poetry gets redefined every day, and is even richer for it.
And certainly this month I have found the very best of it. There has been no shortage of contemporary poets whose work fits Smith’s criteria, poets fully aware of what “Poetry is…” or at least trying to solve the problem with innovation.
In “the dross” of which Smith speaks, still “the best verse” rises, and you can find these easily– these are the verses somebody bothered to publish books of. And even within those books, if the poetic criteria is not quite met, well then it gets us talking, and it gets us thinking, about poetry of all things, and poetry is born again.
April 24, 2008
Dear Joan Didion
Dear Joan Didion,
For though you are small
your look is fierce,
as blunt as your haircut,
the bare facts
to which you are
amanuensis.
Your stories write
your stories.
Pieces falling,
with rigid ease
you let them.
You will point
to the places.
They will land.
