POLITICAL
POEM
This is a political
poem.
Shortly I will allude
to some political
things.
Not yet, though.
First: a one-winged bat
is dead on my sidewalk.
Then: the lake is
crispy today.
Also: the man in the
wizard gown
drove by in a Honda.
Now for the political
part.
Right after I get some
Triscuits.
I like them with soy
cheese
and avocado. Everything
is political. “Even
that piece
of chewed gum on the
ground
with pebbles stuck in
it?” Yes,
even that piece of
chewed gum.
“So when you were
saying
you were going to
allude to
something political,
that
was a trick, you were
already
doing it.” Eat the
rich.
Cobourg, Ontario writer, editor, publisher and blogger Stuart Ross has been enormously
productive, with chapbooks produced by numerous presses including Room 3O2
Books, The Front Press, Apt. 9 Press, Silver Birch Press, Pink Dog Press and
his own Proper Tales Press (launched 36 years ago), as well as three that were
released last year: Nice Haircut, Fiddlehead (Puddles of Sky Press), A Pretty Good Year (Nose in Book Publishing) and In In My Dream (BookThug). The author of more than fifteen books of
fiction, poetry and essays, he’s already published two more this spring: Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2015) and A Hamburger in a Gallery (Montreal QC: DC Books, 2015). A Hamburger in a Gallery , listed as his
“ninth [trade] collection of poems” (a full Stuart Ross bibliography would be
interesting to see, someday), is a collection of more than one hundred pages of
shorter lyrics and lyric sequences, and even include a small handful of his
ongoing ‘one-line’ poems (he is also, among other things, editor/publisher of Peter O’Toole, a journal of one-line
poems) that explore elements of the mundane, personal and immediate. Ross’
poetics shift from the surreal to the straightforward, from the concrete to the
downright meditative and philosophical, as well as through a strange humour, self-aware
and even ironic sadness, and sense of deep loss that permeate much of the
collection. “I stagger in my living room,” he writes, to open the poem “IN A
FOREST OF WHISPERS,” “wedged between the piano keys / You could go cryogenic /
outside your own borders [.]” Some of his political references through the
collection also provide interesting counterpoints and connections back throughout
the length and breadth of his work, from the anthology he co-edited with
Stephen Brockwell, Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament (Toronto ON:
Mansfield Press, 2010), his infamous poem quoting Prime Minister of Canada,
Jean Chretien, “A Minor Altercation,” included in his book The Inspiration Cha-Cha (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1996), to
references in earlier poems on wars in El Salvador. As he writes to open the
poem “POEM DURING A TALK BY CARLA HARRYMAN”: “We are not happy / until we are
almost / noise. To make noise, / the Viet Nam war / is focused on /
improvisation, mingled / with kind notes / and protective armour.”
EARNING
MY NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
I have invented a new
dental floss
that makes you
depressed.
It will be a good
seller, Dad.
Every time a car goes
by my window,
my dog reads another
George Eliot novel.
I will buy her a new
bookmark.
Let’s move on to the
issue of “size.”
The latest issue of Vogue
is bigger than the town
I live in.
Mark Laba once lived a
block away
and I thought that was
far.
Now he lives in
Vancouver.
I worry that the dog is
bored.
I train her to ride a
tricycle
and invent a dental
floss for dogs.
Have I won
the Nobel Prize
for Literature yet?
At
the end of the collection is a forty-page interview conducted with Ross by DC
Books poetry editor Jason Camlot, who deliberately composed a series of “stupid
questions” that Ross was meant to answer seriously. It’s a strange, and rather lengthy,
read, but occasionally provides some interesting insight into Ross’ work and
method. Part of the interview includes:
JC: Can you
control your poems?
SR: I can
control the words and where the lines break, but I can’t control how someone
reads it.
JC: Can you
control how you read it?
SR: No, sometimes I write a poem and I look at it a lot later and suddenly I see a lot of things I didn’t think were there before. So I don’t think I control it.
SR: No, sometimes I write a poem and I look at it a lot later and suddenly I see a lot of things I didn’t think were there before. So I don’t think I control it.
JC: How much
control do you have?
SR: Of my poems?
JC: Okay.
SR: Of my poems?
JC: Okay.
SR: I choose
the words, the lines, the sentences, the breaks. But the poem has its own life.
That sounds cliché, but when you write the poem it might have some effect on
you and others, and a year later it might have a completely different effect on
you and different people. So, I would say I don’t have a lot of control over my
poems.
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