When the Saints Go Marching

            Tuesday, September 20^th was warmer than the week before. Riding up Brock Avenue on my way to Canadian Poetry class, I crossed Gordon Street and heard an ice cream truck that had just turned onto it playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” to lure child soldiers out for treats.

            There was a long line of busses on College Street. I finally got ahead of them, but so did the young woman with the short skirt and the skull tattoos. I was faster, but she kept cheating by going through red lights, so she stayed ahead until she turned right on Spadina.

            Zack, who I’ve been thinking is our TA, arrived. He gave me either a shy or indifferent nod as he walked past. As the night went on, it began to seem that he is just another student and not actually a TA. I think George is just handling the whole course by himself.       

            While I was waiting I edited E. J. Pratt’s “The Shark”, because I find that it’s two verses too long and I didn’t like his use of the word “tubular”. It seemed to me that too much description robbed the poem of atmosphere and the shark of mystery. Here’s how I think it should go –

           

It was tapered

            and smoke blue

            and as he passed the wharf

            He turned

            to snap at a flatfish

            that was dead and floating

            and I saw the flash of a white throat

            and a double row of white teeth

            and eyes of metallic grey

            hard and narrow and slit

            I also tried to write a modern urban version, based on my own experience_

            A rat ran across Bathurst

            on its nightly rounds

            nose like a dull dagger

            spotted like a heifer

            belly low to the ground

Its back was so much higher

than its scavenger’s beak

            hence that rat-slant forward

            but it was much bigger

            than any rat I’d seen

            So I started to wonder

            if it was really a rat

            and on my computer

            searched “Large rat shaped creature”

            and it wasn’t what I’d thought

            It was a southerner

            perhaps escaping politics

            when it crossed the border

            playing possum up here

            to avoid the rednecks

           

            George Elliot Clarke arrived, full of energy, exclaiming, “Days are getting shorter! Holy smokes!”

            Zack told him about a gallery show on September 24, made up of portraits of poets.

            George moved away from the podium on the far right to a table in the middle of the front of the room. On top of that he placed a portable podium.

            When he took roll call he said, “Thank you! Welcome!” after each response. When he called out “Christian Christian”, he told me, “Cool name!”

            Of all the Canadian poets we would be covering in the course, he told us to think about ways of putting poets together.

            He said that the full poem “The Titanic” was not done justice by the excerpt in our anthology.

            E. J. Pratt was born in what was then not part of Canada, the separate British colony of Newfoundland. He was 22 when Alberta and Saskatchewan were created.

            In 1905 the Canadian government gave big chunks of the north to both Ontario and Quebec.

            Pratt was one of the chief modernists coming to the craft as Canada was coalescing.

            It’s in the Canadian constitution to continue to create provinces. Our constitution is still not complete because we have no signature from Quebec.

            George asked us rhetorically if we would be happy with Canada having a King Charles and a Queen Camilla. He mentioned Harry’s Nazi armband joke and asked if we’d be happy with a King Harry.

            Pratt was a minister in Newfoundland and so in having to bury drowned fishermen, he was well aware of the risks of the sea and the toll of storms.

Beginning with E. J. Pratt, the University of Toronto became and continues to be the epicentre of English Canadian poetry. George stressed that he was not just bragging because this is just the truth.

Pratt had a BA in Philosophy and a PHD in Theology.

English Canadian poets have a history of knowledge, so you could put them in the Cash Cab and they would walk away with all the money.

Pratt wanted to use epic poems to tell the story of our nation.

His poem, “Brébeuf and His Brethren” was a WWII propaganda poem that used the problematic casting of equating the Jesuits with the Allied army and indigenous people with the Nazis.

His poem, “The Last Spike” leaves out the people that actually built the railroad: the Chinese.

            An Epyllian is a mini epic.

            George says that “Titanic” is a very successful poem that addresses the dilemma of humanity. The iceberg is a response to hubris.

            T. S. Eliot said that poetry must be reasoned and anchored in fact. He found Tennyson to be preachy and gooey with sentiment. George said, “He wanted to replace sugar with acid and honey with LSD! Just kidding! A prizefighter of test tubes! Just kidding!” A poet needed to be seen as modern and not sentimental. Pratt brought scientific vocabulary to Canadian poetry.

            “The Shark” is an Imagist poem. Imagism is about clarity of the description of the image. It has to be concrete. It needs concentration. It was a rebellion against the 19^th Century use of grandiose terminology about qualities such as love and faith. They got rid of steady meter, which allowed them to write in the rhythm of speech, move away from abstract nouns and to experiment with free verse. They moved away from Victorian metaphors such as guns being projectiles of love. They denied the oppression of war. Repetition is also a feature of Imagist poetry. Haiku became an important part of the Imagist movement.

            Pratt’s “The Shark” uses an economy of description and industrial imagery, such as describing it as metallic grey. This made me think of the shark he was describing as a robot.

            George said that the shark sounded like Spielberg’s shark in the movie, “Jaws”. “It knows the harbour!” he exclaimed dramatically.

            He said, “Who has not been to the Ship Inn in St John’s has got to go, but it has very steep stairs. St Johns is a hilly town and Telegraph Hill would be an easy place to commit suicide from.

The word “base line” in Pratt’s poem is architectural. Pratt shows that he can take on Eliotic principles.

The description of the shark as “tubular” reminded George of Tubular Bells, but he though that was by Deodato. I had to correct him that it was Mike Oldfield.

The phrase “smoke blue” calls to mind factories.

Of Pratt’s poem, “Sea-Gulls”, I commented that called seagulls the “wild orchids of the sea” was beautiful way to describe them. But Patrick disagreed, saying that was making something beautiful out of an ugly bird. I think he’s not being objective in referring to seagulls as ugly. If there were a hundred thousand pink flamingos or white doves that lived on the streets of Toronto, we would begin to think of them as ugly as well.

George agreed with Patrick that there are disgusting things about seagulls, especially how they destroy shorelines with their guano. I’d always thought that guano was bat shit, but it turns out that it’s also bird feces.

The poem has an abba ccdd rhyme scheme.

With the word “frieze”, abstraction enters the poem

“within green hollows” is between the waves.

George told us that he considers Pratt’s poem “Erosion” to be successful. Just as storms have over the centuries eroded the landscape, in killing her loved one, a storm has eroded a woman’s face in an hour.

Pratt’s poem “The Titanic”, from line 40 to the end, is very tight, well informed and put to good use. Because he was a minister, Pratt probably found rhyme to be a good way to comfort people.

The decasyllabic lines, though not quite iambic, are a nod to classical poetry.

Dorothy Livesay was another U of T graduate. Her poetry was influenced by Symbolists such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine.

Symbolism is the idea that an object may stand for other things. Baudelaire would say that we do not need gods. A woman’s hair can be the ocean and her perfume can be transcendence in a secular divinity. For Rimbaud, vowels were colours.

Livesay was a contradiction in that she was both a symbolist and a socialist.

She founded Contemporary Verse II. George encouraged us to submit verse to CVII. He said they are currently taking poems on the subject of hair. Whenever I hear that magazines are accepting poems on a given theme, it’s never a theme on which I’ve ever written a single poem.

Socialists want to pinpoint the enemy of the people, so Livesay doesn’t want to be obscure. She uses an epyllion or documentary poem to point to the social facts and not art for art’s sake. George said, “She’s Occupy! Own the means of production, for cryin out loud! Tear up the seats in the lecture theatre and throw them at the professor!”

In her poem, “Spain” she begins to talk romantic and obscure. It may be inspired by McRae’s Flanders Fields. George says she revels in abstraction and it could be a cleaner poem. He was trying to work with her inaccurate imagery.

George told us that on the weekend he was in Eden Mills where they have “dandelion ice cream!” He said it’s known as a “police village” and wondered if that means that it’s a self-policing village.

She pioneered the documentary poem when she wrote “First Fisherman” based on interviews. It is a narrative lyric suite, which captures the reportage of reality. It is an example of vers libéré, which is liberated verse like blank verse, though not iambic but rather in quatrains, like Paradise Lost. She uses vers libéré to indict the government for a federal crime.

Besides mistrust based on the war with Japan, white fishermen wanted to destroy the Japanese fishing industry.

He recommended “Obasan” by Joy Kogawa and “Hooked” by Caroline Smart

George then called a break and shouted, “Whoo!”

I showed him my translation of Lajoie’s “Un Canadien Erant”. He said, “This is great! I should get you to read it to the class!”

When the break was over, George told the class that I’d brought a French Canadian poem, but before he had a chance to ask me to read it, I told him, “Let’s wait till a time when we’re not behind schedule.”

He thanked me for being sensitive to our needs and then we moved on to Dorothy Livesay’s “The Unquiet Bed”. It’s a nice poem. George asked for a volunteer to read it and so Patrick raised his hand and then read it with mock drama.

George’s reaction to the poem was to start singing the spelled out part of Otis Redding’s song, “Respect” as sung by Aretha Franklin. Then he said, “It’s not Barbie and Ken!” but added, “Though Barbie is a feminist icon.”

We next looked at Livesay’s “Bartok and the Geranium”.

            George told us that verbs are the most important part of a poem, especially when they are used in the present tense. “Stories breed in the north.” Using a noun as a verb makes a poemerful impression of imagery.

The next poet was Ralph Gustafson. He was an Anglo Quebecois. Some of Gustafson’s poetry was war propaganda. Patriotic rhetoric. His syntax was tortured, sometimes convoluted and messed up.

The date at the end of “S.S.R., Lost at Sea.” The Times was September 3, 1939, which was the date of Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

In the poem “Wednesday at North Hatley” there is a line, “The garden fills with white”. George wanted us to offer suggestions as to the significance of “fills”. I suggested that it might imply completion.

George says there is less strain in this poem. It’s a good example of sensitivity to place. Gustafson is moving towards a more philosophical approach here. Not striving for effect or skewing speaker’s world. It’s an uncomplicated slice of life poem.

George recommended that we read Gustafson’s “Rivers Among Rocks”.

Stéphane Mallarmé argued that sound is more important than words in poetry. He says that Mallarmé’s poetry is a kind of sonic surrealism. Gustafson was influenced by Mallarmé, but starting around 1960 he began to write about himself.

George challenged us to interpret the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

We looked at Gustafson’s “The Newspaper”. George says it’s inconsistent. The reproduction of the speaker’s consciousness throws us out of the poem. It’s too focused on the speaker. There was lots of discussion about this poem until I finally intervened and declared that Gustafson’s “State of Affairs” deals with the same idea of public complacency much better. George agreed, because of it’s shock effect it drives the point home much more clearly.

As we got to A. M. Klein, it was clear that we were way behind schedule.

Klein was a multilingual poet from Montreal, which in his day was Canada’s most diverse city. Cosmopolitanism infuses his verse. He was Canada’s first multicultural English poet. He catalogued and deciphered like Dionne Brand or Gwendolyn MacEwen. He was a socialist and he experimented with Joycian playfulness.

A yahrzeit in Jewish tradition is the anniversary of a relative’s death.

The Bel Shem Tov was a mystical rabbi.

Heirlooms are books inherited from the father.

Read the lines the lines of “Heirloom” in connection to the Anglo French rivalry. The poem pushes back against ethnocentrism.

George recommended John Porter’s “The Vertical Mosaic”, which paints a portrait mid-20^th Century Canada in terms of wealth and power and the lack of it.

Klein’s poem “Autobiographical”. This poem draws on all the language and energy of Montreal. “The jargoning city …” The audible cinema of the streets of this working class part of Montreal. It’s Keatsian because of its sensuality.

George said the loonie is a sweaty coin and the loon is a psychological viper, so we need a different animal on our dollar coin.

As George was reading parts of the poem out loud and was getting into the rhythm, he suddenly started singing, “When The Saints Go Marching In”. He said, “Music draws us back!” The poem has Beat elements.

Then George shared a “Factoid: By the age of 21, you will have already heard all the music you will be nostalgic for, for the rest of your life.” I think he’s wrong about that one. There are songs that I’ve heard since I turned 21 that I have nostalgia for.

He told us that there is a video on YouTube of Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown singing “It’s A Man’s World” together. “Holy smokes!” He also mentioned being nostalgic for James Brown’s “Lost Someone”.

We finished by looking at Klein’s poem “Sisters”. George commented that crossing cultures is a very Canadian thing to do.

            As we were packing up, I told George that I’d heard an ice cream truck playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the way there. He thought that was an interesting coincidence.