The Beats

            For some strange reason, on the Tuesday evening of November 1^st, my mind told me that I didn’t have to leave for Canadian Poetry class until 18:00. It wasn’t until 17:30 that I remembered that 18:00 is the time that class actually starts and that I normally head out at 17:00. I rushed to get ready and was there before class started anyway.
             George was late for the first time, but only by about four minutes. He explained that he was delayed because he’d had to stop at the photocopier to print up the list of topics for our second essays.           
            A young woman handed in her essay late and he said to her, “Thank you! Really appreciate this!”           
            When he took roll call and called my name he said, “Christian … Of course!” I felt special until he said, “Zack … Of course!” and the same for a few other regulars.            
            Before handing back our essays he said, “Now is the time, with the power invested in me, to canvas a few problem areas:           
            1. Repetition of the same words. “Not only does it drive me to insanity, but it is poor form. You are not advancing your argument. I’m not a composition teacher, but keep in mind that A plus B equals C. In every sentence, A plus B equals C. See? I’m right. Opening statement: ‘Margaret Atwood is an okay poet’. I am the jury and every paragraph is evidence for you to prove your case. Consult a thesaurus. I want to be led through your argument.            
            2. A few peccadilloes: Little errors, such as “its” versus “it’s”. Noun-verb agreement: a plural noun needs a supporting verb. “A bunch of tomatoes is…” not “A bunch of tomatoes are …”                           3. Mixed metaphors: A metaphor must be sustained in a consistent fashion. Overindulging in colourful language without consistency.            
            4. Prolixity is wordiness, such as when there are too many words to make a simple statement. Overcome with verbs. Expand your range of verbs. They will give energy to your prose and they will wake me up. For example, “Atwood writes a jolting phrase.” Energize your prose. One good verb is worth a forest of trees.            
            5. Some students focused on only one poet. George said they should have consulted him first.             6. Awkward syntax or punctuation. Some referred to poems as prose.            
            7. The vast majority received Bs or B+s. If you were graded below 14 out of 20 you should get assistance. Read “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk and E. B. White (of Charlotte’s Web fame).            
            George handed back each person their essay as he walked through the theatre.            
            I got 16 out of 20, so that’s an A-minus.            
            Our next poet was George Bowering, who also served as Canada’s poet laureate, but for three years, while our George will only have two. Bowering was one of the founders of the poetry magazine, “TISH”. They called it “TISH” because they couldn’t get away with calling it “SHIT”. His vernacular was down to earth. He was influenced by the Black Mountain Poets and by Beat poets such as Gregory Corso, who, in addition to being a poet was also a criminal, but he’s buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome along with Keats and Shelley. There’s a great poem on the stone: “Spirit / is life / it flows thru / the death of me / endlessly / like a river / unafraid / of becoming / the sea”.             Bowering was also influenced by Charles Olson’s idea of projective verse, where the line is decided by the breath. He championed informal and apolitical poetry in Canada. Not like Ezra Pound, with lots of high falutin allusions to art movements. Bowering’s poetry was conversational and understandable, with Tim Horton’s diction that did not allude to Shakespeare. More like Donald Trump, Spiderman, Archie, the National Enquirer, restaurant menus, Kraft Dinner, baseball and other common amusements of the masses. Then George made up a love poem from Superman to Lois Lane: “You drop me to my knees like kryptonite.” Cohen is a bit like that.            
            Nationalist poets of the 60s attacked Bowering and others like him.             
            Bowering was also influenced by Jack Spicer and William Carlos Williams.                                         Orientalism – Zen Buddhism. Vaguely Asian sensibility. Attempting to sound like Li Po because the West Coast was easily influenced by translated Chinese or Japanese poetry that give a laid back sense to poetry. It wasn’t necessarily Beat, but a rebel attitude. Connect this to Purdy and Acorn.           
            To Bowering, poets are priests rather than monarchs.            
            Tapinosis – Saying serious things in off-hand language as in marvel Comics, Gord Downie and Bob Dylan. Consumable but meaningful.           
            For the poem, “Grandfather” we need a volunteer, “Lord thunderin Jesus!”           
            I wondered about the phrase, “Apocalyptic Canada”. Weather, repressed violence, wilderness.             George told us about hitchhiking across Canada. When he was riding a pick-up truck into Edmonton he saw a sign that said, “Repent or burn forever in the lake of fire”. At the time in which this poem is set, Alberta was not even a province. It was part of the North West Territories. People needed salvation. The Greek word “apocalyptic” means “a revealing”. Bowering’s grandfather’s era was one in which child labour still existed in England. Notice the present participle “ing” giving action. He was building churches and stimulating the economy. “You get a church! You get a church!” He presents his grandfather as a heroic figure. A Johnny Appleseed of churches.                                There are a lot of gerunds or noun verbs like “bone bending”. The poem is full of Biblical references. That he died in a Catholic hospital is ironic. White sheets represent purity. The poem portrays a muscular Christianity.           
            The poem, “Bones along Her Body” is reminiscent of e. e. cummings, whose work was also simple, accessible and rhyming. Art versus reason. George says in the last line, “dancing bones on reason’s day”, “reason’s day” is death. “Letting half her reason go” means she went crazy from old age.            
            The poem reminds George of “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens, but when none of us showed recognition, he exclaimed, “Holy smokes! You haven’t read it?” It’s about a wake.             The next poem was “Elegy One” from Kerrisdale Elegies. There is contemplation and calm here. Then George imitates the Oliver’s Jewellery guy and exclaims, “Oh yeah!” The poem reminded George of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark”, which led him to declare that “New York City Serenade” is Springsteen’s best song. Working class.            
            The poem has openness and open endedness. It’s a gesture to the universal, though also to the personal and the nostalgic, like romance comics. This is not a moment for Byron or even Layton. This is about rolled up, fogged up car windows. “Oh yeah!” The Beatles. He said he did a book signing at a Chapters and heard the store refer to itself as a “cultural department store.”            
            Our next poet was Fred Wah, who was also influenced by the Black Mountain Poets. He probably met Robert Kroetsch in Buffalo. Wah was part Swedish and part Chinese. Connect his work to Charles Olson’s idea of composition by field. The page becomes your reference and the defining matrix of your composition. Pound’s “Cantos” – field. “The Pisan Cantos” (1948).
            From “Pictograms from the Interior of BC” I read “Father/Mother Haibun 4). There is no punctuation, there is only flow and so very Ginsbergian. This is a poem in the style of freefall, which is a flow of memories consisting of free flowing unblocked images. George urged us to stop censoring ourselves as poets. There is a little more control in this poem than in “Howl”. If you begin to think of your life as a series of images there will be onomatopoeic poetry and synesthesia.  Onomatopoeia are words that sound like what they represent. All of our lives are touched by pop culture. Memories of body are important. You will achieve tremendous power in your writing as a result of freefall.  Freefall is observation.
            The poem “Hamill’s Last Stand” refers to a stand of forest. There are actual references to reality when he includes the sale number for the lot. Trees are humanized here: “tree-murder”.  Forestry is known as sylviculture. As poets we alternate between the language of a discipline and poetic language. I thought his capitalization of “Forest Ranger” might be a wish for a hero like the Lone Ranger to save the forest. Describe anything in detail and you get poetry. “A forest moves towards the light.” This reminded George of Poltergeist.
            Our next poet was Margaret Atwood, or “Dame Atwood” as George said. Atwood’s protagonists understand their oppression and fight it. Her work is both Gothic and the counter of that. The oppression of women is as a gothic. The masculine fear of nature lies at the roots of misogyny, as women are blamed for death.
            The first Atwood poem we looked at was “Death of a Young Son by Drowning”. Lines from “The Journal of Susana Moodie” are written on Fort York. Her husband is Graham Gibson. The poem has succinct and clipped lines. There are no more words than necessary. Compare it to Pratt’s “The Shark”. There is reference to scientific diction and science fiction. It is about the failure of colonialism. Atwood is the daughter of a scientist and she is clinical. She has written in every genre. George started trying to sing “Love Is A Many Slendoured Thing” by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster.
            The next poem was “They Eat Out”. Of the line whether or not I will make you immortal”, in this case to make immortal could be to write about but also to give birth to. The poem, “Notes Toward a Poem That Can Never Be Written” is dedicated to Carolyn Forché, who is a leftist poet in the United States.            
            Our next poet was Patrick Lane, who George says looks like a real tough guy. I commented that the photo in the anthology kind of looks like Toller Cranston in Breaking Bad. George said he’s the kind of guy who could rip off your testicles or break a bottle and go for your testicles. He has kind of a Barfly persona. He’s both Beat and Decadent. Allign him with Acorn politically but maybe he was not a communist. He reminds George of the Outlaws country and western rat pack. Also Leonard Cohen. Also Gregory Corso, who was a lifelong crook, but loved Keats. Lane was inspired by Layton, Purdy and Hemingway. He founded with Bill Bissett Very Stone House publishing. Bissett is the living exemplar of the Beats. He is shamanistic.            
            From the poem, “Passing Into Storm”, reference to the left implies sinister, as sinister means left-handed. It’s reminiscent of John Newlove’s “Ride Off Any Horizon”. The style here is clear and full of plain language. It could be a horror film.            
            Patrick said it reminded him of the film, “Snow Walker”.            
            I asked George about a poem by Cohen that I’d compared in my essay to one by Baudelaire, beside which he’d written a short critical note that I didn’t understand. He said that the problem had been that I hadn’t quoted bits of the poems in the text. I had just included the full texts of each poem as attachments and said, “compare” as if that was his job.