April 13, 2010
The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley
Does poetry have the same male/female divide that fiction may or may not have (and how you feel about this depends how you feel about ghettos)? Can I also confess here that I’ve not approached any male poets to take part in Poetic April because I’m afraid of male poets? In the blogosphere at least, male poets always seem to be having public feuds whose origins I can never decipher, but it’s usually something theoretical. And maybe it’s just the poets I gravitate to who, like most writers I gravitate to, are usually female, but their work is largely accessible in a way that Kyle Buckley’s (or Michael Lista’s too) is not. This is all just a sweeping generalization based upon a tiny sample group, but I will be expanding the sample group over the next few weeks and I’ll see how it goes. (I’m also going to be reading Erín Moure soon, which I expect will change my mind about everything).
Anyway, my way of access into Kyle Buckley’s The Laundromat Essay was by having heard him read last year as part of the Pivot series, and his work was so fresh, jarring, funny and absurd that I bought the book. Reading the book, however, did not come with the same ease that listening to it had. The work is still fresh, jarring, funny and absurd, but it’s hard. The key, I think, is to read as you would listen– pay attention to the sounds of the words, let the poems float over you, to let the atoms fall where they may. Like any poet, Buckley paints a picture, but his is abstract, its meaning subject to interpretation, and neither meaning nor interpretation is really quite the point (so perhaps I should stop trying to wrap my head around the idea of a book as “a blindfolded staircase”).
But in a way, wrapping my head aroud that idea is the point, that Buckley uses imagery and language in ways that challenge expectations. That the imagery and language aren’t more than the sum of their parts, or rather than they needn’t be. Here is a surface worth skimming for a long while before contemplating what’s going on underneath it, and in places (I think?) the surface might just be impenetrable. It put me in mind of John Ashbery meets Samuel Beckett.
The work itself is not impenetrable though. Buckley’s book is built around a narrative essay about a young man arguing for after-hours access to the laundromat to fetch his clothes. The laundromat owner is more interested in the whereabouts of his son, who is called Hoopy. Their conversation goes in circles, and the young man is recounting all of this to the person he is waiting for, the person he requires clothes for. His narrative is footnoted by references to poetic fragments that go some way toward illuminating his situation. “By this point, I very nearly love you. Which means that I love you with, I don’t know, all of the intensity of a thousand brilliant suburban porch lights.” And some times the fragmants don’t illuminate much at all, but the recurring words and ideas serve to drive the work forward, and I’m fasinated, however baffled.
And just writing all this here has been somewhat terrifying, because I don’t really understand what Buckley is up to, and I probably don’t understand many of the references that would explain it. It is intimidating to write about something that seems so beyond me, but I’ve written anyway (ever careful to profess no authority) because this is a book worth writing about (as it’s worth reading, and worthy of discussion). Poetry really does need to be brought into the wider world, which is from where (the reading) I found this book in the first place, and now that I’ve read it, I am very glad I did.
April 13, 2010
Lists
1) The New Quarterly 114 has a stunningly gorgeous cover
2) Issue is guest-edited by Diane Schoemperlan
3) On the theme of lists
4) (like Amy Jones’ blog!)
5) TNQ Blog The Literary Type has been doing list-inspired blogging lately
6) The issue has overflowed out of its covers into some “online exclusives”
7) Including my short story “Anna Lambert Lived and Died” which will go online next week
8) I’ll keep you posted.
April 13, 2010
Mini-Break fun.
Harriet was extremely wary of her first Muskoka Chair
Because we’re a family that thrives on extravagance, we’ve started a tradition wherein we book one single night at a very nice resort during the off-season and live it up for about twenty-four hours. (Check out the photo from last year’s mini-break to see what was sitting on the chair then instead of a baby). It was a little different this year with Harriet in tow– she couldn’t get enough of the swimming pool (because she is our child, after all), but dinner was take-out on the floor in our room rather than hours spent lingering over delicious food on plates with elaborate coulis designs. Once Harriet was stowed away asleep in the pack n’ play, however, Stuart and I were able to indulge in copious episodes of Mad Men season two (and have I mentioned here how much I love that show? Season One took a while to win me over to the show’s intelligence, though maybe the LRB review had made me prejudiced, but now I’m totally enthralled and intrigued…) And then reading in bed. Could a night be any more perfect? Capped off the next morning by brunch with a chocolate fountain– the stuff of dreams. It was a beautiful drive back to the city the next day, and it felt like we’d been gone for three weeks. .
April 12, 2010
Joan Bodger's The Crack in the Teacup
Oh, wow– I just finished reading The Crack in the Teacup, such a tremendous book. As I read it over the last four days or so, I kept clutching its bulk and thinking what an amazing device this is with such transporting properties. Joan Bodger’s life was never, ever boring, from the grandmother who was killed in a shipwreck, to her unconventional girlhood as the daughter of a sailor, her stint in the army working as in decoding, the terrible sadness of her family life, what she learned about story and its power to transform children’s lives (and what I learned about Where the Wild Things Are in reading about this), her fascinating work in early childhood education, the loveliness of her second marriage, her shamelessness (which is learned, and earned with age), her honestly, her passion, that she placed her husband’s ashes in the foundations of the Lillian H. Smith Library which was then under construction.
Anyway, it makes me wonder what came first. Does she tell stories this way because of the stories she’s lived through, or do they only seem to be stories because she tells them as such? Regardless, the rest of us are lucky for them.
Bodger wrote How the Heather Looks which I read last month, and I’m pleased to say that this memoir behind the memoir didn’t run the former for me. If anything, I’m so grateful for the paperback release of How the Heather… because I might not have encountered Joan Bodger otherwise.
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”.
