On the Tuesday evening of November 22nd, 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.