Evensong
[Coventry Cathedral]
In this place, this
slow mausoleum
space held by cold
stone & glass
angles criss-cross
into shifting
open-occult wings.
Where sunlight strikes
air bleeds multi-coloured
psalms
and when, in service,
the choral voice
raises William Byrd,
feathered
quavers trace the
arcing roof,
fan
a rainbow of harmonic
hope
then fall to ground,
flame-tongued.
Profound expectations
fibrillate
the hearts of the
faithful. Some glimpse
doors in stone &
burning air beyond; some
fixate on the eagle
rooted
to the lectern’s edge,
freedom tethered
in its held wing,
law nailed
in its
claw
In Britain, no direct
engagement beyond being a consumer of mags which provided different sets of outlook: Stand
– toward Europe largely; Agenda –
Poundian modernisms; Grosseteste Review
– openings toward USA, combo of projective & objective ‘schools’ filtered
through a very English light.
Attended readings at
the then Cariboo College where I heard but didn't ‘meet’ Birney, Newlove,
Bowering et al. (A long parenthesis, 10
to 15 years, takes me into a North American cult/church community where I
become an elder & preach regularly – until finally reading my way out of
that wilderness – picking up while there some useful self-discipline for essay
writing & a preachiness in my poems that I have to guard against).
Real connections began
on three fronts in the 1990s: firstly, through the Internet & an email I
sent to Nate Dorward I connected up with British & Irish poets I felt at
home with & led to the publication of the first Wild Honey Press chapbook;
through Nate again I learned of a reading at the ksw whose venue I failed to
find then but, thanks to Rob Manery, found it for the next time; the Kamloops Poets
Factory where Warren Fulton’s energies created a local scene & we brought
in some good writers to read & conduct workshops (my contributions were all
through the ksw connection: Mike Barnholden, Aaron Vidaver, Ted Byrne on one
occasion; Lissa Wolsak & Lisa Robertson on Easter Sunday, 2000 – Lisa read
from The Men. Not so many personal meetings really, lots of
recruits I bring in from my reading, not in order to name-drop, but to share my
experience in a particular text-world. Exploration & celebration.
Smith’s
poems favour a kind of narrative and tonal discord, pounding sound against
meaning and sound in a way reminiscent of some of Ottawa poet Roland Prevost’s recent writing. As Smith writes in the poem “From the Olfactory”: “Swamped by
irritants / air-borne and scoped / he defended a weakened immune / system, set
about mopping up / incontinent emotions, / secured HQ in the lachrymal ducts.”
Composed over a period of some twenty-plus years, the collection is constructed
into two groupings each made up of three sections: “Part One: Pointes &
Fingerings,” that includes “One-Eye-Saw: ‘in the sure uncertain hope,’” “20/20
Vision” (an earlier version of which was produced as a chapbook through Wild Honey Press in 1998) and “Evacuation Procedures,” and “Part Two: Three Fancies
in the Key of BC,” which includes “Strum of Unseen” (an earlier version of which was produced as a chapbook through above/ground press in 2008), “48
Out-Takes from the Deanna Ferguson Show” and “Mother Tongue: Father Silence.” Perhaps
due to the extended composition of the collection, Smith’s variety of
structures holds the book together incredibly, shifting his punctuated
collage-works from short fragments to prose poems to poems that break structure
down altogether. Interestingly enough, Smith’s writing comments on the visible
absence his writing creates, as he publishes quietly, nearly invisibly. In “48
Out-Takes from the Deanna Ferguson Show” he writes: “Let me introduce you to my
anthology. Your absence will guarantee you pride of place.”
one: desire & music are a vortex
two: the rhythm the rhythm the rhythm
the rhythm three: dithyrambic
celebration collapse
bottom fish sit this
one out
on top of the news
four: slow dance among the picnic debris
lives measured out in steps
portraits of soles on
the move
& at rest
waltzing through wilted
lettuce
crusts of cheese
crumbed stones of bread
dancing away from
stilled life (“Third Movement”)
There’s
an incredible density to Smith’s work, one that comes across as a narrative
collage, excising unrequired words for something built as both incredibly
precise and remarkably open to a variety of possibilities. In his review of the
Wild Honey Press edition of 20/20 Vision
for The Gig, Nate Dorward wrote:
The wit catches the
ear: not the deadpan standup comedy sometimes the fate of the New Sentence, but
a mode of inquiry into poetic style and into cultural authority. There’s a wish to avoid “the poet shrunk to a
witness”, reproducing the personal, religious and social nostalgias on offer:
“technes create / instant nostalgia, break you and your dear ones / into timed
fragments: zoom, smile, cut; / in your pram with soother, in your graduation /
gown, in your senile frame with demented smile.” High prophecy may be unavailable, but one can
be “eloquent” in “disbelief” […].
Bamboo-heart,
water-heart teach us the meanings of friendship. Between heaven and earth, a
journey to share – everyday home. Be with until public law – BC Security Commission, March 4 1942 – states you are decreed
nisei, sundered by stained metal
blade of fear-hatred-greed. “Relocatable persons” are asked to be rootless,
artless, homeless &, best self, lifeless. Everyday home claps you into its pure bamboo, empty
water jail. Be your own best friend – a shade yellow, simulacrum/b of white
(boss) man – bereft of former chums.
claw
metal clap (“Mother Tongue: Father Silence)
