Hecatomb sixty-six
drove impertinently blowing latitude
Nemesis munificently vouchsafed
boondock grids no-rooster-tail slow
admiring he her profile she horizon
till he goosed the accelerator guying
pronghorn in the way to mortifying flight
witnessed it clear bobwire on three stressed
legs one broke fore a’dangle faster ‘n hell how
magisterial adept stept panickt in badger sett
expulsion paradisal days demonic
alien hardship of the plains rapturous
pacific city tenure attaining purgatory
mnemonic her profile joy and absolution
After
going through Guy Birchard’s Only Seemly
(St. John’s NL: Pedlar Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], I was curious
to go through some of his other work, and he was kind enough to send along a
copy of Hecatomb (Brooklyn NY:
Pressed Wafer, 2017), a collection of one hundred poems, numbered in reverse
order. The “hecatomb” is said to come from Ancient Greece or Rome, and refers
to a great public sacrifice, originally of a hundred oxen (“heca” = one
hundred), suggesting that Hecatomb is
composed as a sequence of losses or sacrifices, but one that moves through a
sequence of tales from his own history and life, sacrifices as both to atone
for, and those he had to work through, to get to where he has ended up.
Hecatomb three
Sacrifice is hard to know how
to make. Quiet defeats me
though I keep it. I rave. Nothing
so unseemly as an aging guy’s
anger, what once was his
glory and chance.
What
becomes interesting is, in part, the stories that the poems suggest, infer and
tell, however indirectly, for a poet who seems to put all into the work, and
less so into biography, as the biography at the back of the collection
includes: “After gleaning the poems themselves, what’s left of Birchard’s
biography might better remain the preserve of honest privacy. Anne Heeney and
he remain an item after forty-some years, which we mention as salute to her
tenacious artistry. Senior’s Home address: Small Provincial Capital of Dreadful
Night. A lay poet.” As with Only Seemly,
as well, the poems in Hetacomb are
equally evasive, slipping easily between direct memoir and abstract, writing
poems that explore less a straight line than the points along it, allowing the
reader to complete those connections. Given the nature of some of these
stories, the poems feel less like losses or sacrifices, per se, than simply
lessons he’s learned (or finally learned) over the years, despite the mantra of
“Hecatomb thirty-six,” that includes:
Motive, theme: sine qua non. Only
then dare start,
Falter, start over. Anticipating no conclusion.
A hundred amends.
More. Deletion. Dilation. Heeding the
sumptuary. In the end,
Doubt. Repeat. Ignoring exegetical itch. Exhaust
the doubts.
Specious challenge, diction; structure, bona
fide. (Or v. v.)
Such the frailty of the laity. Poetry is simply
a taste and a practice.
Bespoke speech that stays spoke. No expatiation.
Ecstatic.
“Consolation and exultation over imbecility,
vanity, cupidity.”
What
first caught my eye in this collection was “Hecatomb ninety-one,” a poem that
speaks to his attachment to Ottawa literary history, including the former Pestelozzi College on Rideau Street and Commoners’ Press, both of which were run as
communal and community enterprises [see my interview here with Neil Flowers on the anthology Northern Comfort, which was published by Commoners’ during the same period]. There are some fascinating
stories and connections throughout this collection, from his Ottawa days (a
reference to the Britannia Yacht Club) to travelling around New York, Bismark
and Saskatchewan, as well as Vancouver stories, each of which suggest far much
more. Given there is remarkably little information I can gather on him or his
work online, but for entries upon the existence of his books, elements of his
biography do exist as a thread through his poems, somehow concurrently less and
more than other poets.
Hecatomb ninety-one
Back-when, Cam printed me “First
Sight”
at Commoners’ down at Pestalozzi
basement. (Juvenilia,
granted.)
Display of frisky eagerness and artless
ineptitude in boyish abandon.
(Risky
maneuver, for novice littérateur, true,
cack-handed, at that.)
Buoyant enough to mail a copy
to the still still-exiled resident of 8 Duke
St, St. James’s,
baleful author of “Naked
Lust”
(notoriously retitled Lunch by hopped-up cap. T typist).
Who decently returned holograph p.c. (prized)
with thanks for “First
Sighs,”
and also advised,
Disguise as typical scene…
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