Sean Howard, overlays

 

PREFACE

Tidelines in &
out of print (the

only ever briefly
laid stress): cloth-

bound back-
wash. So

soon,
the

self’s
worn copy! I

don’t know: gha-
zal? haiku? rain

to snow…Just
gulls, rough

edges

I’m fascinated by Cape Breton poet Sean Howard’s latest poetry title, the deceptively-subtle and sleek production of his wildly inventive overlays (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), a book subtitled “( scored poems ),” with addendum “from Sea Run: Notes on John Thompson’s Stilt Jack, by Peter Sanger.” The poems that make up Howard’s overlays quite literally respond to the work and structure of Nova Scotia poet, prose writer and critic Peter Sanger’s critical monograph on the late John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt Jack (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1978), a monograph originally published by Xavier Press in 1986 (a “fully revised and expanded edition” appeared with Gaspereau Press in 2023). As British Columbia poet Kim Trainor writes of the first edition of Sanger’s monograph in a review on her blog back in March 2014, the book is “a meticulous line by line commentary on Thompson’s Stilt Jack,” and Howard’s collection holds to the structure and spirit of Sanger’s short work while entirely dismantling the language. “Canada, still harrowing? Pen / knife (but why?),” opens the poem “IX: SCRAPES,” “scraping star- // light from stone. Keats’ cease / fire (so the world we shut // up…): negatives leave / room for the dark. // Left standing, / children’s // voices / over // the wall.”

One might say that Howard’s project responding to Sanger’s text is very meta, set as an homage to an homage, a response to a response, riffing off Sanger writing on Thompson. “Key / note,” opens Howard’s “XXXV: GREENS,” “silence’s / tonic: soon, a // plenty. History’s / dead aims: as Joyce // might sway, gnaw- / ledge is dour…(Me- // thodically, Occam cuts / the world shaving: High // Table, Apollo’s spoon / on the moon.)” The poems are precise, playfully clipped and exact, seeking the moment within the moment, within and around the boundaries of Sanger’s own possibilities, and Thompson’s as well. Howard’s poems are precise, but packed with a density that is both wildly propulsive and accumulative, offering a joyfully-jagged rhythm and staccato that display him clearly having an enormous amount of fun across this myriad of collaged lyrics. As the poem “BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES” begins:

Blackouts: child’s-eye, searchlights…(Everywhere, sold-
iers, compulsory figures.) Cold War: atoms, butterflies &

wheels. (Learning class, Manchester’s grammar.) Ill-
fitting, often, sign & sound: after the storm, find-

ing language’s anchor. (On course in the
woods? Trout make themselves

clear?) A while, Dylan
Thompson: double

vision,
loose

locks.

Whereas the notion of the response or translation is more familiar in other corners of contemporary (experimental, avant-garde, what have you) poetics—whether bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report (Milwaukee: Membrane Press, 1979), Erín Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (as Eirin Moure; Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001) or more recent book-length projects responding to different poetry books through her own individual poetry-length works by American poet Laynie Browne [see my review of her latest here; see my interview with her on her ongoing projects here]—it is a form and approach less visible across those working more formal lyrics. One can cite poems here and there, certainly, including the endless array of responses to Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but very few in the way of book-length works, making this poetry title a kind of formal outlier (and an absolutely delightful one).

Echoing the structure of Sanger’s poem-by-poem critical response, Howard’s overlays is structured with three opening poems—“PREFACE,” “INTRODUCTION” and “BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES”—prior to the body of the collection, a section titled “NOTATIONS TO STILT JACK,” made up of the opening poems “EPIGRAPHS” and “THOMPSON’S PREFACE” before launching into thirty-eight Roman Numeral numbered poems (a la Thompson’s original ghazal-sequence) to close the section with the poem “CRITICAL ESSAY: JONAH’S ROAD.” The book then ends with Sanger’s own piece responding to the response of his response to John Thompson’s infamous ghazals, the short essay “NIJINSKY’S LEAP: AN AFTERWORD,” that opens:

Sean Howard invited me to comment on his book. He suggested I might respond to his use of Sea Run as framing context for Overlays. I accepted, hoping to say something useful about my intuition that prose commentary, even when as focused as that of Sea Run, can only be penultimate in nature and can only be complete when it is renewed in poetry. I connect that intuition with Mandelstam’s remark in his essay “Conversation about Dante”: “a metaphor can be defined only metaphorically.” In other words, it takes a poem to know a poem.

It can’t be overstated the effect that Thompson’s original Stilt Jack had on Canadian writing, introducing the English-language translation of the Urdu structure of the ghazal [see my review of the 2009 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine, “A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson” here], a structure furthered as well by Phyllis Webb (I think it was Agha Shahid Ali who introduced the form into the United States). I think it is fair to consider Thompson, and his work, beloved across elements of Canadian poetry, especially upon the east coast, making this a project not just of playful and inventive structure, but in loving homage. It is an absolutely delightful work. And, in a similar spirit, might some further critic attempt to look at the three works in tandem, or even attempt to respond in some other, further way?