Seeing Cats That Aren't There

            Sometimes I hear cats that are not there, or out of the corner of my eye, I think I see one of my cats. It has also become evident, now that the cats are gone, how so many of my daily habits, which, though they had nothing directly to do with the cats, were bent by the routine of taking care of them during the nineteen years that I was their caregiver.

            On Tuesday, October 4^th, in the early afternoon, I worked again for David Scopick’s photography class. Somehow I got him mixed up with David La Chapelle, but I wasn’t sure and so I asked him if he’d taken a photograph called “Death by Hamburger”. He looked at me strangely and said no, but then jokingly asked, “Does that mean you want to buy me a hamburger?”

            He told his students that the tripod is their best friend because it teaches them to slow down and compose. He added that another valuable compositional learning tool is a 4x5 camera, which shows the image upside down.

            I got off more than an hour early, so I had time to go home to eat before taking a siesta in a bed that I no longer have to flip on its edge to keep the cats and their itchy hair off of it. I was decadent and went to bed with my boots on, then slept for ten minutes longer than my usual half an hour.

            When I got to the lecture theatre I had more than a half an hour to wait, so I worked on ideas for an essay that draws connections between Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje and Susan Musgrave and the style that originated with the Decadence movement. I can certainly see a commonality of darkness between the three poets. Musgrave seems to live in darkness, Cohen keeps a summer home there while Ondaatje seems to watch the darkness with binoculars from an ivory tower. I really don’t know a lot about the Decadence movement itself though.

            George arrived on time with his usual enthusiasm, “Good evening! How is everyone? Excellent! We will try to get through sixty pages tonight!”

            When he took roll call and called “Christian” and after I responded he said, “Welcome back! Good to see both of you again!” I assume he was also talking to the person whose name he’d just called before mine, but if he wasn’t, it would be pretty interesting.

            Whenever George takes attendance he sounds like he’s reading a Beat poem.

            He still hasn’t put the course up on Blackboard, but he suggested he might.

            He handed out some copies of one of his own poems that was produced for the Mayor’s Poetry City Challenge this last April. It was entitled “The University of Timbuktu: Prospectus (1327): “Knowledge can’t thrive in dungeons … This university isn’t fearful of commons, but of crass, bungling elites … Wise rulers know even grass has brains, as invisible as Consciousness … One must have a bit of Chinese to sharpen our Arabic. (Judicious appraisal of our tongue, in dialogue with alien thought and expression serves a spielraum, that prevents, in our minds, the collapse of Clarity into prose, cluttered, the disease of Beaurocracy.)”

            He also passed around copies from his private collection to show us of an old edition of Leonard Cohen’s “Flowers for Hitler” in Spanish and another old Milton Acorn book.

            He announced that we would not take a fifteen minute break at halftime but rather finish fifteen minutes early because he had to go directly to the airport to catch a plane for Scotland. He was going to Edinburgh, where he hoped the audience would throw Scotch at him rather than tomatoes.

            We started by continuing with Irving Layton. The introduction for his book “A Red Carpet For The Sun” was written by William Carlos Williams.

            This led George to talk briefly about two of Williams’s classic imagist poems, “The Red Wheelbarrow”: “So much depends/upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water/beside the white/chickens” and “This Is Just To Say”: “I have eaten/the plums/ that were in/ the ice box/and which/your were probably/saving/for breakfast/Forgive me/they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold.”

            Williams also wrote the introduction to Ginsberg’s “Howl” and so it was a feather in Layton’s cap to have received the same benediction.

            Layton was more like Lord Byron than Walt Whitman. They wanted to die fighting. They wanted to swagger up to you with macho gusto and wave their cajones in your face.

            Layton was a cavalier, a he-man that suffered Holocaust survivor’s guilt. In the 60s and 70s he tried to reverse pacifism.

            Layton’s poem, “The Cold Green Element” proves he can’t be taken as Whitmanic.

            George implied that Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” are leaves of marijuana.

            George said, “Ginsberg can afford to be dense.” Though he meant Layton. He does that sometimes.

            The cold green element is symbolic of poetry itself. One dives into it. The poem is reminiscent of Klein’s “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape”. Layton sees the poet as both daredevil and seer.

            “My murdered selves” the poet’s other guises; “the furies clear a path for me to the worm” the furies are like muses.

            George told us a story about driving towards Montreal after “godforsaken Cornwall, which should be wiped off the map!” when he saw a sign that read “Vers Libre”. He quizzed us as to what it meant. I should have known, but my French was not awake at that moment. I think someone the back must have done a search on her phone and then called out “Free worms!” He said that was right, but it also means “Free verse”. He said he almost drove off the highway when he saw it.

            Layton was a symbolist with a manic use of imagery.

            “Fornalutx” is a book of Layton’s nastiest male chauvinist pig poems: “Women give birth to lice and maggots”. I had brought a sample of a nasty sexist poem from Layton’s “Of Lovers and Lesser Men” to show and to get George’s slant on it, but since he’d just given that sample, there was no point. This is "Teufelsdrôckh Concerning Women": “Women are stupid/ They're cunning but they're stupid / Life with a capital L wants it that way/ They're cunning with their clefts / Where nothing can dislodge it / Not even Phil 301 at Queen's or Varsity / Women will never give the world a Spinoza / A Wagner or a Marx / Some lab technicians and second-rate poets, yes / But never an Einstein or a Goethe / Vision is strictly a man's prerogative / So's creativity / Except for a handful of female freaks / With hair on their chins and enlarged glands.”

            His poem, “Keine Lazarovitch 1870-1959” is an elegy to his mother in quatrains with imperfect slant rhymes. Rhymes are an appeal to classicism. “The inescapable lousiness of growing old.” George lingered on the word lousy and began with, “She was a lousy …” I finished his sentence. I didn’t want to say, “lay”, so I said “mother”, to which George responded, “It’s almost Thanksgiving, Christian, for cryin out loud!”

            Canadian poets came to Modernism with one foot in the Victorian age. Layton was beatnik Byron.

            We moved on to P. K. Page. Her husband was a diplomat. Her poetry put an emphasis on detail and stylization. She was an optic poet with precise imagery. Where Layton might want to make us search for his point, she was precise, like F. R. Scott. They were pointillists.

            Her poem, “Landlady” is in quatrains. Canadian Modernists are slumming classicists.

            I volunteered to read the poem.

            It’s a poem about being suspicious of others. George said, “Communist spies!” or “I always knew he was a mass murderer!”

            I suggested that maybe her tenants are really her own thoughts.

            In her poem, “Photos of a Salt Mine”, she skilfully develops the scene. It is exquisitely clear.

            Canadian poets doing socialism were different from US socialists. We are more positive about beauty.

            George said that Elizabeth Bishop was also very painterly and precise.

            Our next poet was Ray Souster. George said, “Whoo! Back to Toronto! I was supposed to meet him, but never did, for cryin out loud! I was instrumental in putting up a plaque in his honour in Lollipop Park at Mayfield and Willard in west end Toronto.

            He worked for the “Canadian Imperialist Bank of Commerce that sticks its trident in those that are delinquent in their mortgages. But he wasn’t like that.”

            He was also very exact in his imagery. His poem “Somalia” is an Imagist poem.

            In his poem, “Study: the Bath” he doesn’t waste words, but rather gets to the point. He moves from Romanticism to Decadence. The Decadents were influenced by Poe, who wrote about the unattractive aspects of life. Souster is dripping with Decadence here. Reminiscent of Carl Sandburg of Chicago, who like Souster was also a populist imagist, except that he was kind of a Socialist. Scott as well had similarities.

            Of Souster’s poem, “The Six-Quart Basket”, think back to Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow”.

            His poem “Downtown Corner News Stand” has a bit of King Lear. Souster also writes about the Ex and other well-known Toronto events. He wrote about the Blue Jays big win. George stopped to tell us that his personal prayer is that the Toronto maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup again before he dies.

            Souster would have been the guy to write a Rob Ford poem.

            Of the plaque that George dedicated, he told us that he picked Soutser’s poem, “Flight of the Roller Coaster” that describes a roller coaster from the former Sunnyside Beach Amusement Park flying over Lake Ontario.

            Souster is empathetic. He sees the better side.

            I mentioned that I thought “Downtown Corner News Stand” had similarities to Page’s “The Landlady”, with their descriptions of people engaged in lonely professions.

            George said that Page’s work is more ”prittay” as Muhammad Ali would say. She always uses “le mot juste”. Souster is more down to earth. Page, the socialist, preaches more, while Souster just says, “Look!”

            George reminded us that newspapers in Toronto used to have more than one edition.

            Our next poet was Phyllis Webb, who wrote naked poems. Her eroticism is as minimalist as the clothing on her characters.

            She made use of the ghazal (pronounced “guzzle”). It’s a Persian verse form that was brought to English Canadian poetry by John Thompson.

            Guzzle mauve Listerine now! Beautiful colour, but same awful taste!

            The ghazal was popular because what joins the stanzas is mood rather than form. You can bring in anything so long as it fits the mood. You have to find energy to keep the mood going. Its looseness makes it both attractive and challenging.

            Webb had connections with the CBC and the proto NDP.

            Her poem, “Treblinka Gas Chamber”, with the falling words, is not a ghazal. Her poem, “Prison Report” is something like a ghazal, but her poem, “Peacock Blue: An Anti Ghazal” really is a ghazal.

            In “Treblinka Gas Chamber”, who is David, besides David from the Bible? One could align the poem with Decadence.

            For Edgar Allen Poe, the death of a beautiful woman was the most beautiful thing in literature, but he was a drunk.

            Her poem is reflective of the projective verse of Charles Olson, who said the new measure and meter for poetry is breath. The poem insists on making us fall.

            I suggested that the breaking up of sentences makes the poem sound angry.

            Her poem, “Peacock Blue: An Anti Ghazal” uses a nonce word, which is one that is made up to use briefly: “Fishstar.”

            Essex was the lover of Queen Elizabeth I. He was executed.

            The poem is not as clear because it is a ghazal.

            As U of T students, we want to ignore intention.

            Her poem, “Prison Report” is very clear.

            Our next poet was Leonard Cohen. He had a fascination with Catholicism and its medieval mysteries. He is both romantic and decadent. His decadence is a self-critical romanticism. He is intellectual, conversant in English and French literature and in popular culture. He is much more literary than Bob Dylan. There is an embarrassment of riches in looking at his work.

            In his poem, “You Have the Lovers”, one thinks of Siva; mass death. It is maybe a collision between the memory of generational love and the Holocaust. Eroticism is joined here with death. Connect this to decadence.

            George wanted someone to sing Cohen’s poem, “As the Mist Leaves No Scar”. I said I would recite it but not sing it because I didn’t like the melody. George didn’t even know it was a song. It just felt like a song so he thought it should be sung. I had actually forgotten the melody but what I heard in my head was not very good. When I checked it online later though it actually doesn’t have a bad tune.

            His poem, “Style” is both absurdist and Beat. It’s a report on what is going on in 1962. It should remind us of Ginsberg’s Howl, then George slightly misquoted it, though probably on purpose, “Big bad Russia wants to take our cars!” The poem is almost stand-up. The news is coming at Cohen through the radio.