Arc Poetry Magazine #62: A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson, etc;

I’m quite taken with parts of Ottawa’s Arc Poetry Magazine #62, including a section of “White Salt Mountain: A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson (Sackville, New Brunswick, November 2008).” I remember hearing of this small conference after the fact, and being quite envious of such, circling around an appreciation of the late British ex-pat poet John Thompson, author of the infamous posthumous Stiltjack (1978), later included in a collection still in print, the Collected Poems and Translations (Goose Lane, 1995), ed. Peter Sanger. The “White Salt Mountain” conference, organized by Janna Graham (the section of such is also introduced by her) includes essays, poems and interviews with Rob Winger, Peter Sanger, Harry Thurston, Amanda Jernigan and Allan Cooper. As Sanger writes in his “Night Sea Voyage: John Thompson,” writing thirty-nine sections for the thirty-nine parts of Thompson’s original Stilt Jack:

None of Thompson’s ghazals appeared in a periodical while he was alive. He did submit the first dozen or so to the magazine Saturday Night. Shirley Gibson arranged for Thompson to meet her friend Robert Fulford, then the magazine’s editor. All three had dinner together in Toronto, probably in 1974. Thompson gave Fulford a typescript of a dozen or so ghazals. Fulford rejected them as “not suitable” for the magazine. Various typescripts of the ghazals, as they developed, were given to friends between 1973 and 1976. Thompson, in effect, increasingly circulated Stilt Jack as a samizdat publication, existing outside the conventional Canadian structure of grants and grant-fed publications. I think he did so with a discouragement which was both dismissive and despairing.

The most impressive part of the section at all has to be the essay by Arc editor Rob Winger, “A brief history of the Canadian ghazal,” taking an overview of how the ghazal entered North America at all, and then Canada specifically, thanks to Thompson and, a couple of years later, Phyllis Webb.

Since its posthumous appearance in 1978, Thompson’s book has been what Lorna Crozier calls a “classic among writers, passed by word of mouth and from hand to hand.” In terms of influence, it’s an earthquake. It shifts the ground of Canada’s lyrical poetics. That’s why Atwood says “certainly for readers of Canadian poetry in the 1970s this is an essential book”; why Ondaatje claims that “John Thompson was our bright, brief star”; and why Patrick Lane enters into shameless superlatives: “No one who reads his life’s work can go away unchanged.” That’s certainly been true for me.

Yet, Thompson is excluded from the mainstream. He’s never been anthologized, and except for the invaluable, pioneering scholarship of Peter Sanger, he’s rarely discussed with critical acuity. Instead, we get myths of the man that obscure conversations about the incredible imagination of his work. In a way, Thompson suffers the same fate as Glenn Gould: instead of talking about technique, innovation,
challenging complexity, microphones placed on strings, couplets placed against traditions, most commentators simply dismiss or celebrate these guys as mad geniuses.

And it is certainly true. In her note on the issue as a whole (perhaps her strongest editor’s note so far), editor Anita Lahey talks about influence, writing “Stilt Jack. It’s a collection that—like, say, Babstock’s Mean, Solie’s Short Haul Engine, or, to reach back a little further, Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid—is likely to have been read by a significant percentage of the poets toiling in Canada today. ‘In terms of influence,’ writes Arc’s poetry editor Rob Winger in this issue, ‘it’s an earthquake.’” That, too, is entirely true, on the question of earthquakes, although I’m not entirely sure if I agree with Lahey’s first two “earthquake” examples. What of Barry McKinnon’s own I Wanted to Say Something (Prince George BC: Caledonia Writing Series, 1975; Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1990), another “lost classic” of sorts, said to be an essential prairie influence, despite its original lack of real distribution, influencing a whole generation of writers? That would certainly be a work I’d like to see written about more, in terms of what happened next. I’d be interested to see where Lahey’s specific argument for these first two works might go, had she furthered (I think I might argue, perhaps, for other titles before those, but that might be a matter of different points of style, influence). And I do like that there are (as I’ve complained earlier) some Ottawa poetry book reviews (Richardson, O’Meara, Reid), but is it enough? If one doesn’t get reviewed here as an Ottawa poet, arguably, some might not get reviewed at all; it makes for a worrisome change over the past couple of years, and a question that none of the editors I’ve poked at have really responded to. Still, I’ll leave the last word for Thompson himself, from that infamous little posthumous collection of ghazals:

Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats.
Why wouldn’t the man shut up?

The word works me like a spike harrow:
by number nine maybe I get the point.

It’s all in books, save the best part; God knows
where that is; I found it once, wasn’t looking.

I’ve written all the poems already,
why should I write this one:

I’ll read Keats and eye the weather too,
smoke cigarettes, watch Captain Kangaroo.

Big stones, men’s hands, the shovel
pitched properly. The wall of walls rises.

If I weren’t gone already, I’d lie down right now:
have you ever heard children’s voices?

Sometimes I think the stars scrape at my door, wanting in:
I’m watching the hockey game.

Likely there’s an answer: I’m waiting,
watching the stones.

another old poem embedded in thoughts of sex and discovery

l. is for ______

texts or pastures further hope
of one through step

a life of lonely, net
we safety caught

distangled lines
& awkward

what could we regard; you sweetly,
laugh

pouring out what left
of our hearts

set into; twin suns

the fire escape; a city
we went nowhere

between intermissions
, intolerable

mid-afternoon

the rain that marked
the length of jasper ave

blue in your tights

Over the past few years, my poetry has become less interested in the large sweeping gesture, working out rhythms and flow of the piece as a whole, focusing instead on the minutae of what is possible with the individual, accumulated line. Even as some older writing only recently in print in book form is focused more on quick rhythms, line breaks, collage and where sound can go through a sequence constructed out of a series of extended single breaths, those same sweeps have given way to shorter bursts that stack up against themselves. Perhaps this shift in consideration came out of my interest in the Canadian ghazal, from American ex-pat John Thompson, starting to influence my writing around the end of the previous century. I finally wrote a collection of same myself, a year or two into the new millennium, appearing in Ireland as a compact of words (Salmon Poetry, 2009). It may have been completed some six years earlier, when I simply presumed the push for the ghazal form was put to bed, but apparently the form somehow still quickens, out from under my collection of ball-points.

Much of what my poetry has been interested in has been caught up in “the logic of the fragment,” a phrase borrowed from the Ottawa poet and critic Gwendolyn Guth, as the poems work their way into seeing just what is possible with what can be placed side by side into a writing that makes sense somehow because of that disconnect, that sequence of fragments.

Still, exploring individual lines has become more important, through reading the works of American poets such as Lisa Jarnot, Fanny Howe, Juliana Spahr and Sarah Manguso. Whether long, shorter or in fragment, just what can a series or sequence of words hold on a single straight line? In 2008, I wrote a one hundred and forty page poetry manuscript for the beginning of a relationship that came together as “Poems for Lainna,” much of which works this disconnect, and works what the lines can individually do, titling a number of the pieces inside “another (short) history of l.” This small piece, part of a further manuscript working up to our time together in Toronto, extends some of those considerations, and includes a number of poems that work the long, and not the short. But still. One word after another word, and where, in the end, it can’t help but go. Where will it take us?

a much earlier version of this piece appeared originally on the globe & mail book blog;

Rae Armantrout: Next Life and Versed

Having known nothing of her work previously, with the publication of Rae Armantrout’s newest trade poetry collection, Versed (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), her tenth or eighth book of poetry (whether or not you want to believe the inside back flap author biography or the one inside the book itself), I thought it good to also pick up a copy of her previous collection, Next Life (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Going through the poems in her previous volume, I find the short moments of phrases interesting, in the way she knows to step back from completion just enough, almost writing a semaphore, writing dot, dot, dash. As much as anyone writing short phrases in clipped lines shouldn’t automatically be compared to the late Robert Creeley, it’s hard to stay away from him here as an influence, especially with a poem dedicated to him. There’s even something ghazal-like as well to her composition (thinking specifically of the Canadian ghazal that began with John Thompson), working a leap to leap element that rides each poem through a seeming disconnect that still manages to hold, and in a way that almost make all of her poems into one extended serial unit, much like the work of Fanny Howe. Everything connects into everything else.

Next Life

1

Last of all and
most reluctantly
you said goodbye to
“near”
and “far away.”

2

Fuzzy-minded
clouds sprout

from one another’s
foreheads.

But you were more exact.

You unzipped yourself
in the dark

back there,

counted yourself
in half

and cut.

That was before numbers.

3

“Don’t be a commodity;

be a concept:”

a ghostly configuration
of points or parts—

trivia snippets—

which appear inside
locked cabinets.

Be untraceable
but easy to replicate.

Be relative.

Be twice as far
and halfway back

Two years further, in Versed, the two extended sequences, “Versed” and “Dark Matter,” seem to extend the argument of a single poem. The late bpNichol once suggested that all of his work was part of larger single project, but made it sound almost arbitrary, that it was all “made by the same hand,” but for Armantrout, it does read closer to Howe, writing a further line, a further stanza and a further poem that exists as a part of this larger ouvre (far more than, say, Robert Kroetsch’s poetry all fitting into the structure of “Field Notes”). Her poems almost seem as a single extended piece, an accumulation of short, halting lines and phrases, holding the breath, burst after burst, and the poems in this collection don’t seem to contradict, as in this piece from the second section of Versed, that writes:

Anchor

“Widely expected,
if you will,
cataclysm.”

Things I’d say,
am saying,

to persons no longer
present.

Yards away trim junipers
make their customary
bows.

“Oh, no thank you”
to any of it.

If you watch me
from increasing distance,

I am writing this
always

Ghazal of July Storm by Matthew Holmes

Ghazal of July Storm

The smell of greenstalk tomatoes
on my fingers

The wind pressing into windows
testing their ripeness

The dog pacing
unsure of our night movement

The bamboo I’ve taken from the basement
to tie my plants

Moments of love
talk that pauses into sleep

This short poem, originally appearing in the first issue of echolocation (2003), published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of Matthew Holmes’ shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness.

Since first reading his work around 2002, I’ve been an increasing fan of Holmes’ poetry, from seeing his poems in literary magazines, to his small self-published letterpress pieces through his bad repoesy Mfg. Co. (publisher also of the zine Modomnoc), and to his chapbook Hitch (above/ground press, 2003), but I’m much more taken with his shorter, punchier work. Holmes’ longer pieces seem somehow less effective.

The ghazal, as worked in Canadian literature so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones.

Lately, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (2003, Hagios Press: Regina) by Lorna Crozier, for example, but for her postscript "Dreaming the Ghazal into Being." Vancouver poet Catherine Owen has done some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (2001, Wolsak & Wynn) and since, and, as I’ve said before, I think Edmonton poet Andy Weaver is just brilliant.

With recent stints in Ottawa (where he joined the editorial board of Arc magazine) and Toronto, Matthew Holmes has recently returned to Sackville, New Brunswick where he went to university, where he plans to simply write for a while.

There is an essential slowness to Holmes’ piece, pausing and pauses which go against the storm, the dog; against the restlessness of what else is happening outside the scope of the narrator’s hands. The tender action nearly zen against the suggestion of rage of wind and rain. And such a thin, thin line between.