Deep Image

            On Tuesday November 29^th I went to University College an hour and a half early for my meeting with George Elliot Clarke, to talk about my essay. We were supposed to meet in the Senior Common Room, but when I got there the room was full of people because some kind of event was going on. I heard George calling my name and I saw him next door, all by himself at a table in the Croft Chapter House. I walked in and saw that he was at an enormous oval table beneath a domed ceiling. George was eating his dinner and as I approached he said he had to go get a fork from the senior common room. I offered to do that for him, so I went there and at first glance, saw a plastic fork in the dish rack. I grabbed that and brought it back to George, asking if that was okay. He laughed and said it was fine. I wondered though if there was real cutlery available and if that was what he’d been expecting me to bring.

            Since he was busy eating I didn’t hand him my beginning of a first draft to read. I just described it to him while he ate. He had quite a feast in front of him. I don’t know what was in the takeout container that contained his main course, but he also had blackberries, a tub of what looked like ricotta cheese and he was putting them together on thin circles of flatbread.

            My essay is supposed to be on Confessionalism, but that form of poetry is a lot harder to pin down than I thought. One has to be pretty much aware of the life story of a poet in order to be sure whether or not what they’ve written is fiction or confession. If they are speaking through a character then they are not fully confessing.

            Once George got his after dinner cleanup done, he read my paper. He told me again that I was a good writer. We both agreed that none of the three poets that he listed for this essay topic are very confessional, and so he thinks that I should go with writing about the avoidance of confession, which was basically what I’d started to do anyway.

            I told him my opinion that poets that write from personal experience have a better grip on imagery than those that try to write about issues and events that are not a tactile part of their lives. He seemed to agree. I gave him the example of Soraya Peerbaye, one of the poets that we would be studying in the new year. I told her that I’d heard her read from “Tell”, the book partially about the Reena Virk murder, and also from the manuscript about her trip to Antarctica. I had found that her poems about Antarctica were much better because she was writing from experience and had a handle on the imagery.

            George asked me if I was going to Shab-e She’r that night. I was surprised by the question, since I was going to his class. I suggested though that some night in the second term, he could maybe take the class to Banoo Zan’s event. He thought that was a good idea, but wondered about the logistics. He couldn’t actually require everyone to go. I suggested that perhaps when our fourth paper is approaching, if a lot of us are choosing to submit a manuscript of poems in lieu of an essay, we could all go and read on the Shab-e She’r open stage. Again, he thought it was a good idea.

            We discussed the recent scandal over Justin Trudeau’s short tribute to Fidel Castro upon his death. I told George that I really didn’t get why people were up in arms about it. This was a man who came all the way to Montreal from Cuba to be an honourary pallbearer at Justin’s father’s funeral. Why would people be upset about him saying something nice about the man? George said, “Well why doesn’t he say that? Why doesn’t he show some of his father’s backbone?”

            George wanted to read an article in the New Yorker before class but he said I was welcome to stick around. I took him up on that and sat there making notes on my essay for a while. At about half an hour to class time I took my leave and headed for the lecture hall.

            When Zack arrived I sang, “In my mind I’m goin to Carolina …” I couldn’t tell if he was amused or not.

            George arrived on time. He gave up his last copy of Geist to a student that hadn’t gotten one the week before.

            After roll call, George showed us his new book again, “Because I still like it very much!”

            He had told me about this earlier, but he announced at this point to the class that a poet and songwriter named Joseph Maviglia would be coming to entertain us for fifteen minutes just before we’d be taking our halftime break.

            This was our last class of reading from the anthology, since the next Tuesday would be the night that our essay was due and so he’d just be showing films.

The first poet we looked at was Robert Kroetsch, who George said was a prairie poet and therefore a poet of the dust, gophers and guys with guns. He said he’d worked as a, “specialist for the United States Army, for cryin out loud!” He pushed notions of experimental writing and was upset by the puritanical streak in Canadian culture, as was Cohen.

There’s nothing wrong with writing about nudity. If you see it as wrong you are envisioning it. George said it’s the same with Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita. You have to imagine the scenes. Nabakov uses medical terms to conceal meanings that you have to imagine. “White purse” is not just an innocent reference.

As Canada’s poet laureate, George said he couldn’t criticize any Canadian elected officials by name, but he said that a certain prime minister, whose initials might have been “S. H.” though George couldn’t say for sure, had been a promoter of puritanical values.

George said that Tim Horton’s Danishes are keys to twisted consciousness.

Kroetsch was a mythopoeic poet who used the narrative lyric sequence.

We looked at his poem, “Meditation On Tom Thomson”. Tom Thomson drowned while canoeing in Algonquin Park,

The poem has a decadent energy. The phrase, “The muskeg snatch of the old north” has a pop art aesthetic of treating highbrow in a lowbrow way that was popular in the 60s and 70s. Kroetsch was used to four letter body bawdy words because of his background.

The term “black bottom” can also refer to the Black slum of a southern US town, but also a type of jazz place. Neither of those references matched anything I found online. Black Bottom is the name of a neighbourhood in Detroit that only coincidentally also happens to currently be a Black section of the city. It was apparently named by the original settlers because of the darkness of the soil. There was also a very popular dance in the 1920s that was named after the Black Bottom part of Detroit.

The poem both damns and celebrates Thomson.

There is a reference to a line by Patrick Lane.

George claims that Kroetsch is using the poem to refuse Thomson a godlike status. I argued that he’s elevating him to the stature of a deity, especially in the stanza: “and holy shit mother the muskeg snatch / of the old north  the bait that caught / the fishing father …” The old north (the mother) is presented as a godlike entity with which Tom Thomson (the father) enters into a union. It seems to me that this is Thomson being deified. George argues that Kroetsch makes Thomson into a déclassé god. He’s the god of the Trailer Park Boys. He’s the fisher king.

George regrets that Gary Geddes, the anthologist, did not include dates on this poems, but he guessed that it was the 60s, when Andy Warhol rendered Mao harmless in a Day-Glo painting. It’s a Beat poem, with outbursts in capital letters like in Ginsberg’s Howl.

George said that a Group of Seven painting just sold for a very large amount. Patrick said it was 11.2 million. I found out later that the painting was Lawren Harris’s “Mountain Forms”.

George mentioned that a guy received the Governor General’s for performance art of throwing his own blood at walls. I guess this is Istvan Kantor, also known as Monty Cantsin (but that is the collective identity of several participants in the Neoism movement). I think that it was Istvan and Jubal Brown who were behind a book burning as performance art even that took place back in the mid-nineties.

Next we looked at one Kroetsch’s poems from his book, “Seed Catalogue”, which George told us is designed to look like a farmer’s ledger. The poem begins with what may be an excerpt from a real seed catalogue: “no. 176 – Copenhagen Market Cabbage”. George declares that, “Anything can be poetry. Anything!” The poem follows Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” as well as Charles Olson, bpnichol and TISH.

A seed catalogue is symbolic because it is a harbinger of spring.

The narrative of the poem is discontinuous, with disjunctions between descriptions of seeds, testimonials and biographical moments. The line, “A terrible symmetry” is a reference to William Blake’s “fearful symmetry” in “Tyger”.

The point is that anything can be poetry. Test this by looking at a list of ingredients. Then George dramatically spoke the name, “Monosodium Glutamate!” several times until I said, “MSG!” and he responded, “MSG? Monosodium Glutamate!” Think of George Bowering. Vernacular speech can be poetry. A mix of the tension between poetic and non-poetic speech is what creates poetry.

Our next poet was Albert Moritz. He worked as an advertising executive. George said, “He was a mad man! He is now the Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society, please and thank you!”

I volunteered to read Albert’s poem, “Stabbing”.

Both victim and murderer become symbols of sacrifice. The imagery of ascent to the gods is Biblical. There is a bit of Cohen maybe in the phrasing and in the mixing of the secular and the sacred. The poem is both primitive and profound with the transcendent idea of murder being a ritual sacrifice to preserve our own loved ones. Throwing someone else in the well to save one’s own daughter. He’s digging beyond the headlines to see the metaphysical manifestation of this crime. Cohen, MacEwen and Musgrave do the same.

Then George said, “I have to take it to the bridge now and reference one of the most occult forms: Deep Image Poetry!” (George had mentioned Deep Image to me when I’d met with him earlier and he’d told me he was going to talk about it but he confessed to not quite understanding it.) See the deep image in Moritz’s poem in the move from murder to deeper thinking. Deep image has great connections to surrealism. Pier Giorgio di Cicco, the second poet laureate of Toronto was instrumental in moving forward the idea of Deep Image Poetry. George added, “He was also instrumental in the fact that he plays the trumpet!”

We looked at Albert’s poem, “Woman in Astrakhan”, which George declared to be another example of deep image poetry. I suggested that the woman in the poem is a metaphor for the night. George dismissed my suggestion completely, citing all the references to light and even the sun. I argued that she is entering because it is the beginning of night and so light would be present as she is making her entrance. George still wouldn’t budge. Patrick started to defend my argument but George fought him off too. Then Sylvia began to offer that the woman represented revolution and George liked that. Patrick said, “Oh! So she can be revolution but she can’t be night?” George said, “This is the challenge and peril of deep image poetry.” Suddenly there was a loud, thundering sound outside of the building, too short for actual thunder but I didn’t want to venture to believe that it was gunfire. It turned out to be the sound of a garbage truck and perhaps the echoing noise of an empty metal bin being dropped back into its place. Then George asked, “Are squirrels nocturnal?” A few people answered that they are not. George said, “I rest my case!” This was in reference to the black squirrel in the last stanza of Albert’s poem. I found out later that squirrels are crepuscular in the warmer parts of the year and so they are active at dusk, which still fits with my argument.

I think the next thing George said might have seemed incongruous to the class, though it fit with the conversation that I’d had with him a couple of hours before that. He declared that, “Fidel Castro was not wasting of resources and he was a self-sacrificing leader of the people! That’s all I’ve got to say about that!”

At this point George introduced Joseph Maviglia.

One of the first things Joseph wanted to do is to get a student to use his laptop to take a picture of him and George, then he took off his glasses and put them down just to the right of my notebook on the long desk. I could tell right away that I didn’t like the guy because he didn’t even consider someone else’s space.

He recited a poem called “Winter Jazz” – “I may as well just listen to the jazz … listen inside the sound for something kinder than wind knocking cats down dirty alleys … not pay attention to the man sifting his hands for quarters last spent on the juices of his head’s uneven jukebox … wondering how many fires it takes to warm the wind …”

Then he said, “I got to find my glasses!” I said, “Right here.” he took them and declared to George, “You’ve got great students!”

He asked if anyone knew what “dharma” is. I said it’s “duty”. He said it’s cosmic order. Looking it up later I saw that there are multiple meanings but that my answer was one of them and his was not. If one thinks of dharma in terms of cosmic order it’s not the cosmic order itself that dharma represents but rather one’s relationship to it.

He then read his CBC poem for Allen Ginsberg – “Warriors’ guns full of rampant atrocity … the TV reeling stunned dreams … Allen the leviathan has grown heads … Oh beautiful for spacious skies when the sweat of air conditioning fans the mad line-ups increase … Why Howl? Howl because Dylan almost told the people the truth … Cassady still driving … Mad Gregory, Molock can sure make a mess out of you … Where is the urban ruin here as the saxophone plays in the middle of a dream … There is a rumour of happiness …”

Someone took a picture of him and George each with one arm around the other and hands on each other’s far shoulder.

He commented that November is a month for memorials and that we’d just lost Leonard Cohen and then he said, “Two years ago in November we lost a MAJOR … Lou Reed!” I really resented the implication in a poetry class that Lou Reed had made a larger contribution than Leonard Cohen. That’s like comparing a drawing of Mickey Mouse by Walt Disney to Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory”.

He sat down to play his guitar (another strike against him) and he played the first verse from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”. Then we heard that thundering sound from outside again. Another thing that Joseph did that annoyed me was to stop and make comments in the middle of the song. He segued from Suzanne directly to singing part of “Listening to You” by Pete Townsend – “Listening to you, I get the music, gazing at you, I get the heat, following you, I climb the mountain, I get excitement at your feet …”

Then he sang one of his own songs, called “One By One” – “Woman I know she wants to talk about the way she feels. At least that’s what she told me … Yesterday I heard a train ask the city how it feels … Your heart is your invention …”

George exclaimed, “Wow!”

Joseph said, “With everyone’s permission …” He asked if he would have time to read one of the essays from his book, “Critics Who Know Jack”. He said it was Beat stuff. George told him, “Probably not.” But he persisted and he got to read it anyway. The piece was called “Full Moon Lou” – “ … Feel that extra dimension … My filmmaker friend, Bill, he bought a yacht, but first he bought a Mercedes. He slipped a CD into his newfangled sound system. Where do you want to eat? Maybe Mars. Genius and high metaphor. The aftermath. The sensuousness of madness. Jim lit it up … off the Rimbaud  … There’s a killer on the road … This aint Sergeant Pepper …Given the present day context, Lou … kicked is own soul around New York … Walk on the wild side a whisper to the inside … Stretch rock and roll to its literary limits …”

I was not very impressed with Joseph Maviglia’s offering to our Canadian Poetry class. I thought that the first poem he did had some good poetic moments, but his song was not particularly interesting and his attempts at Beat derived prose were pretty close to horrible.

We had a short break, during which time a handful of students came down to the front to buy Joseph’s five-dollar book, including Patrick. Patrick almost seemed to be justifying his reasons for buying the book. He said it would be a memory of the course. He was standing in front of where I was sitting and he said, “For five dollars, it’s worth it! Right Christian?” I answered, “Not to me!”

George said that in his capacity as poet laureate of Canada he recently wrote a rhymed poem about senate reform. His parliamentary French translator liked it so much that he took the time to also rhyme it in French.

He mentioned that right now he is working on a poem on National Parks for the minister of the environment.

I expressed regret to George that we wouldn’t be covering Lorna Crozier, because I really liked her poem about carrots fucking underneath the ground. George said that he liked that poem a lot too. He explained that he’d had to make a decision on which poets to leave out and he left out Lorna because she’s a little more conventional than the ones he included. He added that he had been on the jury that gave Crozier the Governor general’s Award and he had included her husband, Patrick Lane in our readings. I hadn’t known that Crozier and Lane were married.

When the break was over, George mentioned his favourite soap opera. I don’t remember the context that brought it up, but the show was called “Santa Barbara”. When I looked it up, it didn’t seem to be critically acclaimed, but maybe George liked it because almost every character in the story over the years was accused of the same murder that happened before the show started.

Our next poet was Roo Borson. George told us that he really likes the book, “Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei” which she wrote as part of the collaborative writing group, “Pain Not Bread”, consisting of Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton. He said that the book mixes literary criticism with wine and living deconstruction. They play those terms against every day events while satirizing literary theory. The name of their group comes from the story of the death of French literary critic Roland Barthes, who stepped off the curb, perhaps thinking about his theories on “The Death of the Author”, when he got hit by a bread truck. The name of the group comes from “pain” the French word for bread, also used in the English sense of the word “pain”. I looked this up though and found that Barthes was actually hit by a laundry truck and he died a month afterward.

George said, “I think about contemporary jazz when I think of rhythm. Incestuous cadences! Everybody’s got a cadence! You don’t need to take a political stance. Stand on your cadence!”

We looked at Borson’s poem, “Talk”, the last line of which, “something to be tinkered with at their leisure”, George said is a zinger, like something by Atwood or Musgrave. He compared it to a talking blues song. The title says a lot. The poem covers different groups, different types of talk and the restrictions of talk in each group. There is an oppressive commentary given to different economies of language deficiency. George concluded that the narrator of the poem is a pontificating talking head, like Rex Murphy. A sexist, anonymous speaker employed by Talking Head Incorporated.

We looked at her poem, “A Sad Device”, which George said reminded him of posters from the 80s. There is a cubist collision of disparate images and jarring disjunctures, like the ROM. I commented that the extension on the ROM looks like an alien popping out of somebody’s stomach.

The poem has a kind of deep image, but not really. It presents a transmogrified reality containing a death wish, so maybe it’s deep image after all.

There was a question of to what is meant by “the frozen mammoths in the laundry room”. I said they are the old laundry machines. At first George rejected that, but then he read further and admitted that I was right. There was a good ten minutes of discussion about why they are mammoths and why they are frozen. I think it’s just that they are large and ancient and probably don’t function properly.

Our next poet was Dionne Brand, who was born in Trinidad in 1953and came to Canada by herself in 1970. George urged us to think about that. She traveled on her own to live in another country at the age of seventeen. She has been a member of the Communist Party of Canada and she received her MA from OISE, which George declared is “the red campus!” She is a filmmaker. She worked as a social worker in socialist Granada. The Cubans resisted the US invasion of Granada.

She is interested in nouns and influenced by Pablo Neruda. Nouns are political. He pointed to someone’s water bottle and said, “Your water is political. Your water bottle is political. This desk is political, though it’s also warm and stylish. Everything has the politics of production behind it. Someone is managing the water supply when you make coffee. This is a Marxist viewpoint.”

He told the story of being at the checkout counter at Loblaws and seeing that a bowl of chocolates had been strategically placed within a child’s frame of reference.

I wondered about her poem, “Ossuary I” in which she eliminates the verbs halfway through. I observed that what she ended up with is a list that goes nowhere. George explained that the list is a catalogue and a catalogue is your life. To work on creative writing make a list of nouns. Our identity is anchored in material things and that’s why fire is so devastating. Dionne Brand is political and politics creates abundance or scarcity. She’s always jamming the abstract and the concrete together.

We looked at Brand’s poem, “Ossuary XV”, which George said is about body parts holding descriptions of possibilities of explosions and butchery.

George mentioned related current events, such as native women being attacked by the police and sexual assault in the Canadian military.

Brand telescopes outward and inward, making the connections.

George said that Brand also wrote in the ghazale form, which he reminded us is properly pronounced “guzzle” but added, “Unless you are a Ryerson student.”

George suggested that in the future people might look back and conclude that those people of the early 21^st Century were ridiculous, except for the ones that graduated from the University of Toronto.

With not much time left before the end of class, we quickly moved on to our final poet of the term, Erin Moure. George said that she’s an autodidact that applies pure reason to attentiveness to the politics of language. She is difficult to get through. The poet should not short change the reader.

George told us the story of how he went down to the Royal York and said, “I want champagne and caviar!” The caviar came with little pieces of toast and various sauces. “Holy smokes! $500.00! I don’t recommend it! 15% tip too!”

We looked at her poem, “For Mitterand’s Life, for My Life, for Yours”. Maybe it’s a deep image poem. Mitterand was anti-Semitic, but later denied it. I couldn’t find any proof that that is bluntly true. His early political career was on the extreme right before he joined the French Resistance. He might have been anti-Semitic in the sense that every non-Jew in that era seems to have been anti-Semitic. Maybe he was, but people do change. Maybe he felt that admitting to having once held certain beliefs would ruin his political career. He certainly didn’t behave like an anti-Semite when he was the President of France.

George finished our final class by declaring, “Language is political. There is no escape! We are all convicts in the prison of language! Have a good week!”