April 30, 2008
MacMillan on history
One of the highlights of my whole life has been an undergraduate history seminar with Margaret MacMillan, but I’d think she was amazing anyway. I’m looking forward to reading her new book Uses and Abuses of History, particularly since reading this interview: ‘I don’t think history teaches us clear lessons. I think it’s very dangerous to say that history demands certain things.’
April 29, 2008
Elizabeth Hay Blogging Tour
I am so excited to announce that over the next few weeks, Pickle Me This will be a stop on Elizabeth Hay’s upcoming blogging tour of the Canadian North. Her award-winning Late Nights on Air was on of my favourite books of 2007 (and read my review here). Other stops will include The Book Mine Set, The Library Ladder and Metro Mama.
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 27, 2008
Snail's pace
Today was a bit ridiculous, in that I woke up, went to brunch, and then came home and had a nap. And after that I prepared a tea-party. The whole weekend similarly low-key, mellow and pleasant with flowers in bloom and brunch on the patio. Last night was just as crazy, as I stayed home to watch Michael Clayton, and what a movie that was. That so much was going on but so little had to be explained was a wonderful for lesson for this apprentice writer.
This weekend my Emily Perkins kick continued, as I read her first novel Leave Before You Go and absolutely loved it. I’m now reading her second book The New Girl, and as I can’t find her 1997 short story collection Not Her Real Name anywhere around here, I’ve ordered it used off the tinternet, because now I’m quite sure that I can’t live without it. I also read Pulpy and Midge by Jessica Westhead, whose receptionist didn’t even have a name but whose disdain at having to cover the desk during cake-occasions was truer than life.
April 26, 2008
Unfinished encounters
On the Descant blog, I’ve written about how to talk about books you haven’t finished.
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
We lay no claim…
Today’s Globe F&A essay “Degrees of Separation” is reaching towards the ideas so deftly explored by Sharon Butala in her brilliant new book The Girl from Saskatoon (read my review here). Writer Bob Levin writes, “This isn’t our tragedy, of course – it’s her family’s, her friends’. We lay no claim to it…” But then, what do we do with these connections?
The Girl in Saskatoon is currently #7 on the Globe & Mail Bestseller list for non-fiction.
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 25, 2008
Currently mad for
I am currently mad for Emily Perkins, whose A Novel About My Wife is soon released (and it comes dovegrey recommended). Very exciting also to announce that I will interviewing Emily Perkins in the very near future. And so I’ll be blasting through her back catalogue in the meantime: I’ve got her previous novels The New Girl and Leave Before You Go, as well as The Picnic Virgin, an anthology she edited of contemporary New Zealand short stories. Stay tuned for news and reviews.
I’m now reading Jennica Harper’s The Octopus for the fourth or fifth time.
