Elisa Gabbert, L’Heure Bleue or The Judy Poems

When we argue about war,

I say I’m a pacifist

and he looks for a loophole.

He brings up Hitler, genocide—

these noble causes.

The problem I have

is distinguishing between atrocities:

the genocide on one hand

and on the other

atomic bombs (their eyeballs melted),

torture, women and children

raped and murdered

for the greater good.

It’s like the difference between

a billion and a trillion—

I believe they are different

but can’t conceive of it.

The moral imperative

justifies the amoral,

the technically lesser atrocity.

I think citizens don’t have to think

like countries.

Denver, Colorado poet Elisa Gabbert’s third poetry collection, after The French Exit (Birds, LLC, 2010) and The Soft Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013), is L’Heure Bleue or The Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016), a collection, as the back cover informs, that “goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution.” In the introduction to the collection, poet, musician and multimedia artist Aaron Angello explains the process of how a conversation he had with Gabbert and her partner, the novelist John Cotter, turned into the a series of informal performances, and therefore, an ongoing study, of Shawn’s play, which then prompted Gabbert to explore the play further through poetry:

Throughout our rehearsal process, Elisa (who played her part brilliantly, in spite of the fact that she constantly reminded us she was “not an actor”) often voiced a frustration with the way her character, Judy, was written. The character, she felt, lacked a depth that the male characters had. Within the text of the play, Judy seemed relatively underdeveloped, shallow. I think, like any good actor, Elisa began exploring the mind and history of the character in a much more nuanced way. She had been living with Judy for a year and had been imagining her unwritten life; she had been imagining Judy’s feelings toward her father and toward her husband with a level of complexity that the play does not. It made her performance as sophisticated as any I’ve seen by a “professional” actor.

However, Elisa is a poet. It stands to reason, then, that she would begin thinking through Judy in the form of poetry. A short time after we stopped performing The Designated Mourner, Elisa started to write what would become L’Heure Bleue, or The Judy Poems. This is how it happened, in her words:

All I know is that once I was sitting in the audience at a poetry reading, which is one of the places that I often get ideas for poems… and I suddenly had the first couple of lines from the book come to me. They’re still the first lines of the book. And I wrote them down, and I was like, Oh—I should write in Judy’s voice.

Composed with an opening poem, “I’m not in love with Jack.,” before shifting into two numbered sections of short lyrics, the poems of Gabbert’s L’Heure Bleue or The Judy Poems explore the details of “Judy’s” character, backstory and situation, from pieces such as “Some days I can’t escape the feeling,” “When we argue about war,” “Nostalgia is the only cure” and “I’m happiest when I live simply,.” The most striking of these poems explore the moments between the moments, revealing much while saying little, such as the poem “At the poetry reading.,” as “Judy” catches a stranger’s eye, writing: “There are times when desire seems / to transfer. He communicates desire; / I am infected by desire. /// It’s the worst kind of desire— / too thin a film / between desire and reality.”

The idea of composing a collection of poems around a fictional character, with the purpose of expanding upon that character, is an intriguing one, reminiscent of Canadian poets Dennis Cooley and Lorna Crozier who both, separately, worked to flesh out the story of Sinclair Ross’ “Mrs. Bentley” (she was never given a first name) from his classic novel As For Me and My House (1941); Cooley, through his poetry collection the bentleys (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006), and Crozier, through A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1996). So often, it seems, these reclamation projects emerge from classic texts that underwrite female characters, and have the potential to reveal intriguing elements of their source materials in new ways, that straight literary criticism couldn’t do nearly as well. Without knowing the source text that Gabbert works from, the full effect of what she adds and reveals might not be known, but not necessarily essential; enough to know that she was composed in two dimensions, and Gabbert has allowed her, finally, character, heart and flesh.

Jack is jealous

Of our scientist friend.

He comes over for dinner

And eats a bowl of cereal.

Cereal is a local maximum,

He says, trying to impress me.

Jack can see it’s working.

He says the scientist is my type:

Tall and an asshole.

He’s right, I say, You’re right,

But the scientist is sweet

Beneath his ego.

He doesn’t care about looks

So I can be alluring

Without embarrassment.

The scientist: There are now more deaths

From suicide than car accidents.

You can’t harvest those bodies for organs.

Jack says, Ah! Progress!,

lights a cigarette.

Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize : Writers' Trust Announces Career Prize for Canadian Poets

Writers' Trust Announces Career Prize for Canadian Poets

Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize becomes country’s newest literary award

April 22, 2014, Toronto – The Writers’ Trust of Canada is thrilled to announce the creation of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, an annual award in recognition of a Canadian writer’s exceptional body of work. The prize, which is sponsored by the Latner Family Foundation and administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, will be presented alongside five other prizes for excellence in Canadian literature at the annual Writers’ Trust Awards in November. The winner will receive $25,000.

The Writers’ Trust has assembled a three-member jury consisting of Stephanie Bolster, an award-winning poet and coordinator of the creative writing program at Concordia University in Montreal; Lorna Crozier, an award-winning author of 16 books of poetry who is based in North Saanich, BC; and Fred Wah, formerly Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate and current Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary.

“We know that the financial rewards to poets can rarely match the joys their work brings to so many readers, and that work's importance to our national literary culture,” said Steven Latner. “Through this partnership with the Writers’ Trust, the Latner Family Foundation is honoured to invest in the future health of one of Canada’s most vital art forms.”

“The Writers’ Trust now has a portfolio of ten prizes to reward Canada’s exceptional writers at all stages of their careers,” said Mary Osborne, executive director of the Writers’ Trust of Canada. “We are delighted that today, with the support of the Latner Family Foundation, we are able to round out our awards program with a prize to recognize Canada’s finest poets for their contributions to our country’s literary culture.”

The $25,000 Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize will be awarded once a year to a Canadian poet in mid-career in recognition of a remarkable body of work and in hope of future contributions to Canadian poetry. For the purposes of this prize, mid-career is defined as having published at least three collections of poetry that demonstrate outstanding mastery in the art of poetry. No age restrictions apply. Recipients must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada. There is no submission process for the prize.

The Writers’ Trust administers three existing body of work awards. They are: the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award, for a body of work that is predominantly fiction, the Writers’ Trust Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, and the Writers’ Trust Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life.

The winners of these, plus the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Writers’ Trust/McClelland and Stewart Journey Prize, the Writers’ Trust Distinguished Contribution Award, and the inaugural Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize will be announced at the Writers’ Trust Awards on November 4, 2014.

About the Latner Family Foundation
Founded in 1972 by Albert and the late Temmy Latner, the Latner Family Foundation has been providing support to health care, education, social development, and the arts in the Greater Toronto Area.

About the Writers’ Trust
The Writers’ Trust of Canada is a charitable organization that seeks to advance, nurture, and celebrate Canadian writers and writing through a portfolio of programs, including literary awards, financial grants, scholarships, and a writers’ retreat. Writers’ Trust programming is designed to champion excellence in Canadian writing, to improve the status of writers, and to create connections between writers and readers. Canada’s writers receive more financial support from the Writers’ Trust than from any other non-governmental organization or foundation in the country.

See the link to the original press release here.

The Best Canadian Poetry in English, edited by A.F. Moritz

Song for the Song of the Sandhill Crane

It eschews the ear,

with its toolshed, its lab, its Centre for Advanced

Studies in Hermeneutics and Gossip,

to boom exactly in my thorax,

rattling the bones and waking the baby. Garroo:

the o’s are caves of lunar gravity, the rolled r

recalls the ratchet of life and death.

Why am I standing on this frigid porch

in my pajamas, peering into the mist

which rises in little spirals from the pond?

Where they call from the blue

has nearly thinned to no-colour-

clear. Where

they call form hominids haven’t yet

happened. Garroo:

who can bear those star-river distances?

I’m so lonesome I could die

happy. (Don McKay)

A few years ago, in my essay on the anthology Breathing Fire 2, “the trouble with normal,” I worried about what might happen if Canada started producing a “Best Canadian Poetry” equivalent of the long-standing American series. After Stephanie Bolster’s impressive debut last year [see my review of it here], it seems the series might be falling exactly into that potential trap of mainstream beige through the second annual edition of the series, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009, edited by A.F. Moritz (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2009), with a third already in the works by Victoria poet and editor Lorna Crozier. Far more than Bolster, Moritz’s argument of poetry moves almost exclusively into metaphor-driven “finely wrought” verse (one of the driving complains of the Breathing Fire anthologies); is this the “Best Canadian Poetry” or “Best Canadian metaphor-driven Poetry”? The poems, fifty in all (with an appended “long list” of some fifty further), are technically good, but too many read as “good” in similar ways with their neighbours.

Moritz’s lengthy and even muddy introduction doesn’t help, when he includes in his introductions such arguments as “In fact, we know it isn’t so easy to write a poem. To write a good one, worthy of the subject matter that lies within and around us, is hard and rare.” Further on, he says that “The poems here defend faith and hope in human life and in the earth. They uphold the sense, primordial within us, that earthly life for all its hardships and problems is a good gift, the hope that human existence is not pointless, is not reducible to doings and distractions that for each of us end up six feet under.” It’s as though he insists in his argument that poems are exclusively about; doesn’t he understand that poems simply, often, are? Poems are made out of language itself, and not the exclusive property of those who choose subject instead of the pure mechanics of the language. It’s as though he has written not an introduction or edited a collection based upon the best of the available, published poetry by Canadians in Canadian journals during a calendar year, but instead worked something based on an extension of his own personal poetic.

I’m admittedly disappointed that, after Moritz, the third volume is being edited by Crozier, who seems to have entirely too much overlap in consideration with Moritz as to make the range of what the series as a whole could be become diminished. Why not ask someone such as Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Erin Mouré, Christian Bök, Fred Wah or even George Bowering, the first of our Parliamentary Poet Laureates, and allow the series to open up into something that really represents new and different corners of Canadian poetry? It feels as though I’ve wandered into a fruit and vegetable market, and every stall carries exclusively apples. I don’t care how many varieties of apples any supplier might have, if you are going to call it a “fruit and vegetable market” (or, a “Best Canadian Poetry”), then you are required to have more.

Becoming a Writer

What could be easier than learning to write?

Novels, poems, fables with and without morals,

they’re all within you, in the heart, the head,

the bowel, the tip of the pen a diviner’s rod.

Reach inside and there they are, the people

one knows, their scandalous comments,

the silly things they do, the unforgettable feeling

of a wet eyelash on your burning cheek.

This moment, that, an eruption of violence,

a glancing away, the grandest of entrances,

the telling gesture, the banal and the beautiful,

all conspire with feeling and passion to transport,

to deliver, to inspire. Story emerges

from this cocoon, a crystalline moment, epiphanies

flashing like lightbulbs above the heads

of cartoon characters. All this within you

where you least expect it, not so much in the head

as under the arms, glistening with sweat, stinking

with the knowledge of the body, the writer

neither practitioner nor artisan but miner, digging

within himself for riches unimagined, for salt. (Dave Margoshes)