No! I am not Madame
Cezanne
Nor was meant to be
Those wine bottles in
your neighbour’s garden
Have they begun to
sprout?
The Art of Work in the
Age
Of Mechanical Oppression
A future right turn
Overwhelm your comfort
zone
A lyric in flight (“CANTO
ONE”)
There aren’t too many poets these days in Canada working through poems to see where the language might land or extend, offering the next steps in a conversation around poetics that seems to have quieted down over the past decade. Through Walking & Stealing, Cain offers himself as example of the standard-bearer for an exploration of thought and form, continuing a trajectory of sound and meaning collision, playfully battering around a lyric too often staid or safe. Where have all the language poets disappeared to? With so many poets of the aughts either shifted in poetic or publishing far less (if at all), Cain almost exists as a central Canadian counterpoint, one might say, to the west coast poetics of further still-standing poets Clint Burnham [see my review of his latest here] or Louis Cabri [see my review of his latest here], all pushing further variations on a language-play through social commentary, countless quick references, and deliberate collision. “Canada Post- / Ashkenazi Anishinaabe,” he writes, as the eighth section of the nine-part “CANTO THREE,” “Two nations under clods / Anti-Semitism & assimilation // Fuck breathing fire / Spit sparks instead // Almost cut my fear / Flying my antifa flag // Smoke ‘em when you see them [.]” Are there any poets on this side of the country, still, referencing the work of Dorothy Trujillo Lusk (I would suggest there should be more, certainly)?
For years, Cain was engaged in book-length sequences and stretches composed across ten sections, a kind of decalogue of extended language structures, whereas Walking & Stealing exists as a triptych that breaks down into further sections—the seventeen sections, some of which are broken into further sections, of “Walking & Stealing,” the ninety-nine short sections of “Intentional Walks,” and the nine “CANTOS” sequences of “Tag & Run.” The geographic composition points, setting the moment to the music of language, is an interesting mapping across Cain’s Toronto, almost an echo of bpNichol’s The Martyrology: Book 5 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982), a book I know that Cain himself has written extensively on, or Lynn Crosbie’s legendary “Alphabet City” abecedarian from Queen Rat: New and Selected Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1998) [see my brief note on such here], a book that should have won all the awards after it first appeared. The mapping of Cain’s Toronto becomes, if not direct subject, a kind of backdrop and prompt, allowing the landscape of his city to breathe into the animation of his language. From the opening sequence, listen to the poem “Stan Wadlow Park (2017/08/12),” as the second section/half writes:
Map the Moores
Lede line locations
Also Etrog the obelisks
Opposing the ovarian
objects
Short & sequestered
in
Scarborough
No more sinister than
Sarnia
Oshawa obeisance
Adolescent anxiety
accumulators
Score on the fly
Beach bleacher bingo
Blanket the yield
Walking & stealing
What was once propulsive has evolved into something more meditative, akin to a kind of walking-text, comparable to works by Stacy Szymaszek [see my review of their latest here], Meredith Quartermain [see my review of her latest here] or Bernadette Mayer [see my review of one of her more recent titles here]; Cain the flaneur, perhaps, but meandering not through the lyric narrative but across a field of language. “Articulate the known-lines,” he writes, as part of the opening sequence, “Map the Masonic / Toronto Chthonic [.]” As he offers as part of his “Notes” at the back of the collection:
Walking & Stealing is a long serial poem composed over the summer of 2017. Each section was composed at a park in Toronto & the GTA between innings of games in which my son, a Peewee AA ballplayer, was pitching & fielding. The composition time of each section is the length of a game, & the first draft of each section was recorded in a notebook in the shape & design of a baseball. While the impetus & origin of the poem is juvenile sports, baseball is not so much the subject of the poem, but the site & event that allows the poem to arise as I explore duration, association, & subjectivity. The game of baseball also functions as an analogue for poetic exploration; for example, the title of the poem refers to plays in baseball (two ways in which one can gain a base without hitting a ball), but also to psychogeographic perambulation & “stealing” as poetic intertextuality.
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