"Susan Musgrave's Poems Are Like Diane Arbus Photos

            On the Tuesday evening of November 22^nd, George Elliot Clarke arrived, put his bag down and told us that he’d be right back. On the way out he commented positively about the edition of Beautiful Losers that I had sitting beside me. He returned a couple of minutes later with a large package, opened it and handed out our complimentary copies of Geist magazine.

            He announced that he was withdrawing permission for us to write our essays on poems from outside of the anthology.

            Our first poet of the night was Daphne Marlatt, who was born in Australia, so George said we can connect her to other commonwealth poets such as Michael Ondaatje and Dionne Brand. We can also connect her to the Black Mountain Poets and TISH because of her use of projective verse.

            She’s into proprioception, which George says means she’s kind of mystical and thinks the body sends her messages. Looking this up, I see that she’s into Charles Olson’s poetics of proprioception, which means that poetry must be centred in the unique bodily experience of the individual poet. I guess this ties in also with his idea that poetic meter should match the breath.

            The first of her poems we looked at was “Imagine a Town”. The name of the town is the title of her book, “Steveston”. She writes about it with a documentary sensibility. As in Bowering, the subject matter dictates. The poem is playful and down to earth.

            George asked what other poets this poem reminds us off. I was thinking of Fred Wah. George suggested P. K. Page’s photographic quality as well.

            Each stanza begins in the left-right position where the other one left off. There are unfinished thoughts and a bracket begins early in the poem that is not closed. She use stream of consciousness to write about water.

            George passed around a book of poetry by Derek Belew. I notice that rarely when these books are making the rounds do they ever come to me.

            Her next poem was “This City Shrouded”. George says it reminds him of Walt Whitman.

            Of the reference to waves, George riffs on “Waves of immigrants, waves of axes …”

            George told the story of how during one visit to Victoria he joined a guided tour of the B.C. legislature. He sat at the cabinet table where the premier decides which forest to destroy. Finally he asked, “What tour is this?” Someone answered, “This is the B.C. Forestry Association. We built this province!”

            I commented that the first stanza had a great Beat rhythm with lots of percussive onomatopoeic words. He asked me to read it. I started and stopped and so he asked me to read again, “Wind strum wires Jerry’s cove music standing hulls rock in their lines vivid wave on wave oncoming stands of cedar shreds through fog mimetic wind-rustle thrash or throb endless once to hand at Jerry’s camp”. George said, “That deserves a round of applause!” so people clapped. He said the piece sounded like a folk song, so I started doing it again while imitating Bob Dylan.

            This compelled George to give us a little impromptu lesson on meter, which he referred to as boot camp metrics.

            Spondee is  // for words like “heartbreak”, “childhood” and “love-song”

            Iamb is u / for words like “amuse”, “arise” and “awake”

            Anapest is u u / for words like “understand”, “comprehend” and “contradict”

            Trochee is / u for words like “happy”, “hammer” and “incest”

            Dactyl is / u u for words like “carefully”, “changeable” and “mannequin”.

            He told us that what usually gets stressed in English is the unusual part of a word. For instance, in “Battle”, “Bat” is stressed because “tle” is a common ending for many words. In “Running”, “Run” is stressed because “ing” is common. In “Chairman”, “chair” has the stress. George asked for a word, so I said, “architecture”. Zack said, “Good choice!” In “architect” the stress is on “ar”, but in “architectural” the stress is on “tec”. In “Go to hell” the “go” and the “to” are common.

            In English if you guess iambic pentameter” you will probably be right.

            Our next poet was Susan Musgrave. George says she used to be a witch. Then he punned, that if you’re going to cast spells it’s best to be literate so you can spell the spells properly. 

            Musgrave is a refined poet. She speaks of a good poem “that has made the hair on the back of our necks stand up”. View this like Emily Dickinson and her quote, “If I feel as if the top of my head were taken off, I know it’s poetry”. The anthologist says that Musgrave’s work “depicts the rough and tumble of lives lived on the razor’s edge”. George asked us what poet that phrase reminds us of. I guessed “Layton”. George said “No!” I guessed “Acorn”. George said incredulously, “Acorn? No!” I guessed, “Purdy” but he answered “No!” Finally Zack said, “Who then?” George said that poet that most depicts lives lived on the razors edge is Ondaatje.

            We looked at Musgrave’s poem, “Arctic Poppies”. He said it was a decadent poem and quizzed us for the stress on “decadence”. It’s on the “de” because “cadence” is common.

            George said when we read this poem we can think of Al Purdy’s narrative descriptions and tours of places. It reads like a Thomas Hardy novel. The hunchback teetering into view is Cohenesque. Musgrave depicts grotesquerie like in a Diane Arbus photo in which the grotesque is made beautiful. The weather is described as a pervert. Her mythmaking of her memory of a man’s kisses is like Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Icarus”. The line, “Crouched beside an abandoned grave”. Abandoning a grave is a trick to pull off. The line, “Seeing your perfect body in his” is reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”.

            Musgrave is gothic. Her descriptive qualities add a twist.

            I said that I really like the way she makes a line appear complete but then continues it on the next line, like in “waiting for the fog” which could end right there but the next line begins with “to lift”. George said it was enjambment, which delays the full meaning of the sentence. But I said that’s not all she’s doing there. George didn’t really have an answer as to what type of enjambment this would be.

            We looked at her poem, “The Moment”. A said that the ending is funny because Musgrave is setting us up for the tragic outcome that usually results when a stranger kidnaps a daughter, but the result is that the daughter has not been abducted. She is merely being willingly gangbanged by the boys next door. It’s funny because that last part would have been a horrible thing for a parent to discover if not for the other fears and so it’s funny that a much lesser bad thing is the moment of relief.

            I said that the beginning of the poem, in which the narrator is hearing something through thin motel room walls that sets her memory off to tell the story of her daughter going missing, reminds me of Paul Simon’s “Duncan”, that begins, “Couple in the next room bound to win a prize. They been goin at it all night long” and the narrator feels compelled to tell his life story.

            Our next poet would be John Thompson, but we took our break first. I made an appointment with George for the next Tuesday to discuss my essay. I told him I didn’t really understand the ghazale from the point of view of how to write one. He explained that the lines don’t need to have a relationship to each other except through the mood they share.

John Thompson was another commonwealth poet. He is minimalist and sometimes surrealist like René Char. He was a master of the ghazale (pronounced “guzzle”), which is a Persian form that is sustained by a single emotion, mood or feeling. Remember that Phyllis Webb used the form. In the ghazale a combination of image and statement work together to produce a mood.

John Thompson is one of the most influential English Canadian poets. Like Berryman, he was minimal, surreal and terse. Thompson had a miserable adulthood in which he was constantly harvesting the bottle.

We looked at his poem, “Wife”, which is not a ghazale. It’s like he’s describing a cave painting. René Char did something similar.

George takes a moment to make fun of the province of New Brunswick as being primitive.

Thompson’s ghazales are of earth shattering importance. We looked at one of them, called “VIII”. There is a colon after “I forget: …” The reference to “broken birds” could be literal or they could be unfinished poems. The two lines, “Porcupine are slow, fast in their quills: they’ll come to your iron bar, believing themselves and apples.” George said there’s an old myth about porcupines and apples being pierced by their quills. Later I could find no reference to this at all, other than the fact that porcupines like apples. We know that the quill is an old word for pen and so we can think of the poet as the slow porcupine.

Thompson was refused tenure at Mount Alison University in New Brunswick because he was a poet. His students rebelled and staged a protest to keep him. He got to keep his job but that didn’t mean he was happy.

George began to describe big fire pits where the heathens of New Brunswick burn academic literature.

The poem begins with “I forget” but halfway through he says, “Everything reminds me”. Of the last line, “I bury my face; set it in water.” I suggested that water might be drink. George agreed that was probably what he meant.

The poem is purgatorial.

Our next poet was Don McKay, who is part of the intellectual tradition of English Canadian poetry along with Eli Mandel. There is an emphasis on grammar and syntax. Think of Garcia Lorca’s essay on the “Theory and Play of the Duende”, which is an extreme physical and emotional reaction to art. George added that the backward, primeval New Brunswickers would burn such a theoretical work in their fire pits. He admitted that as poet laureate of Canada he probably shouldn’t be making fun of New Brunswick.

In talking about McKay, the anthologist mentions, “post-structuralist claims that non-linguistic experience may be impossible”. George says, “Every time someone says the word ‘post-structuralist’, like Goebbels said, ‘I want to go for my gun!’” Then he said he wants to see a film depicting a “post-structuralist dance” in which the dancers have razors attached to their sneakers.

We looked at the poem, “Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow”.

George says the line “sparrows burning” is Blakean. Maybe it reminded him of “Tyger, tyger, burning bright”.

The line, “an effortless repudiation of the whole shebang” is reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it uses two types of language in one line.

Of the poem, “Loss Creek”, in the lines, “He went there to hear the rapids curl around / the big basaltic boulders saying / husserl husserl …” George said that Husserl was a syntactical philosopher. He talked about the difference between meaning and object.

Think of this poem as having a post-structuralist engagement with Earle Birney’s “David”.

As I was packing up, Zack was the only one left. George had said to him, “Happy Thanksgiving!” so I asked what part of the States he was from. He said he was from “the good Carolina”, that is North Carolina”, meaning the less redneck of the two. I remember he had also mentioned earlier that night that he was a veteran. I didn’t ask him about that.

As I left University College, in the Soldiers Tower next door, the 51 bell carillon keyboard was playing a piece of music. I don’t know what the occasion was, but it sounded nice coming from the old building after dark.