The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011, edited by Priscila Uppal

In other words, if I have a critical bias, which I suppose everyone does as much as we try to remain as objective as possible, I admire poetry that surprises and challenges, that offers a new perspective or piece of wisdom I haven’t previously considered, that interrogates and innovates poetic conventions and genres and reverses the expected, either in terms of subject matter or language or form, or provokes unconventional emotions, that welcomes other fields of knowledge and art forms and methodologies, that reminds me of something important I seem to have forgotten or puts an entirely new thought in my head, that stuns me with exquisite beauty or sadness or profundity or ecstasy, poetry with a vision—whether pessimistic or idealistic—with something at stake, something to prove, something to lose, something to gain.

If I came to this project with any kind of agenda, it was this: to represent the vast range of styles, traditions, approaches, lexicons, genres, forms, influences, voices, and poetic subjects of the contemporary Canadian poetry scene, a diverse and vibrant community full of surprises. Sure, as any Canadian Literature will tell you, we write landscape poems, and love poems, and elegies, and odes, and family poems, and historical poems, fixed form poems, and identity poems (geographic and ethnic and cultural), but lots of poets are writing them in exciting, unconventional ways. We write poems that challenge the definitions of the “literary” poetic canons or centres; we are home to an accomplished visual poetry, conceptual poetry, spoken word and sound poetry scene. We write found poems, prose poems, academic poems, and collaborative works. We are meditative and intellectual, brash and angry, elegant and graceful, nostalgic and reverent, unsentimental and irreverent, serious and politically engaged, locally focused and globally aware. And we’re also funny. Funny, and clever, and playful, and ironic. (Why so few anthologies and literary prizes celebrate the range of humour in Canadian poetry baffles me.) And we are also beginning to engage more in poetic translations. (Even though these are not eligible for inclusion in Best Canadian Poetry for many critically sound reasons—permissions, different evaluative criteria—I would like to applaud those poets who produced many first-rate translations this year, including Di Brandt, Steven Heighton, Erín Moure, Eric Zboya for his algorithmic translations, and more, and the journals that published them.)

-- Priscila Uppal, “Connected Dots: An Introduction to Best Canadian Poetry 2011”

Even years before series editor Molly Peacock founded The Best Canadian Poetry in English through Toronto publisher Tightrope Books, I’d been complaining about it; complaining that if there were a Canadian version, it would ignore most writing across the country that wasn’t held to the mainstream verse of lyric metaphor. I was impressed with the first volume edited by Stephanie Bolster a few years ago, but the further two that appeared (edited by A.F. Moritz and Lorna Crozier, respectively) didn’t exactly prove me wrong. How does holding to a small handful of forms over the large range of what is being published equate to a “Canadian,” let alone a “best”? More of the same, as I’d rightly feared. This new volume, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011 (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2011), edited by Toronto writer and editor Priscila Uppal amazes, in part, because she doesn’t hold to the expected fears, instead including experimental, lyric, visual/concrete and other poetries side by side in a “best of” that doesn’t fall into dismissiveness, into the usual “best of Canadian lyric metaphor.” Uppal’s is a damned impressive list, including fifty poems by such as Ken Babstock, Jonathan Ball, derek beaulieu, Christian Bök, Dionne Brand, Don Coles, Marita Dachsel, Andrew Faulkner, Dorothy Field, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Julie Cameron Gray, Steven Heighton, Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst, Susan Holbrook, Dennis Lee, David McGimpsey, Shane Rhodes, David Seymour, Karen Solie, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Tom Wayman and Christine Wiesenthal, among others. Anyone who pays attention to Canadian writing already knows the wide range that exists here, and simply can’t help but exist, and this is a glorious thing.

My Life as a Canadian Writer.

My first short story, “The Provincial Far,”

was rejected twenty-five times before

it found its home in The Muskoka Review.

From then on it’s all been pretty easy.

I learned the beauty of socialism

from writers so passionate they’d cry

when they didn’t get a grant. We’d go north

and laugh at the thought of Alden Nowlan.

Yes, I have been on the radio!
If you heard that segment of Canada Reads

where a guy recommends the novel version

of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun, that was me.

Now I live and work in Montreal.

All we do is sit in cafés and talk through

the one remaining question of literature:

is it available for free on the internet? (David McGimpsey)

Uppal’s introduction is meaty, long and wide-ranging, and provides explanation and context to a variety of forms included in the collection, writing out sections on “Elegies,” “Memory & Family Poems,” “Intra-poetic Poems,” “Historical Poems,” “Concrete & Visual Poems,” “Scientifically Engaged Poems,” “Common Poetic Subjects,” “Love Poems,” “Poems that Engage with Other Art Forms” and “Political & War Poems,” with each section citing examples from the collection.

E. Coli

You never hear us laughing in produce

aisles, too baffled by your cartful of kids,

your cells and Blackberries. When the oyster

mushrooms send signals by satellite dish,

you’re oblivious. Don’t note the genius

of cauliflower, broccoli, brains cut

the stem, still working. Later, children

laid to rest, you shut down your antennae,

one by one. The TV stays on. Midnight’s

fridge light as the vacuum’s sucked open, and

your faces loom above the crisper glass,

anti-freeze blue, common as moons. Absent

astronauts, pupils in deep orbit, light-

weight targets. Purely, we assure you,

incidental prey. (Christine Wiesenthal)

The structure of the anthology comes from the editor scouring journals from a calendar year, and selecting fifty poems from print and online journals for the anthology, with a further fifty (“Longlist of Fifty Poems”) listed at the back of the collection. Part of the further list of fifty poems include pieces by Ottawa poets Pearl Pirie and Christine McNair, both here for the first time, which is pretty exciting. Another feature of the series are the “Notes and Commentaries,” composed by the author of each respective piece, providing a background of sorts on their pieces. McGimpsey, for example, writes: “I wrote this poem in Los Angelos a few Februaries ago. Some lyric sass, using contemporary Canadian culture marks, about the ways in which the life of a writer is imagined so easy and how beneath that veneer of ex nihilo grace is something not easy at all.” On her “Transcribing the Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson,” Windsor, Ontario poet and editor Susan Holbrook writes:

Gertrude Stein’s handwriting is notoriously unreadable. Taking on the task of editing her correspondence with Thomson meant a long apprenticeship to her scrawl. My co-editor, Tom Dilworth, and I greatly enjoyed ridiculing each other’s attempts at transcription. Many unlikely scenarios were born of our errant readings, the challenge all the more daunting because Stein’s letters accurately transcribed were, in fact, full of everything unlikely, playful, absurd. The most ridiculous mistake had to be mine, when I read that Georges Hugnet was getting “soooo famous” when he was actually getting “50 000 francs.” (Rest assured we spent ten years getting it right, so you can trust the edition!) This poem celebrates the fun of being confounded in the archive.

Seconded only by what Bolster worked in her first volume, this is the closest I’ve seen to a book in this series come to just how interesting this series could be, existing as not only a range of style, form and substance “best of,” but a worthy introduction to contemporary Canadian poetry for the wary, less-informed reader. These are books your timid high schooler should be reading, or your eager twenty-something, wanting to get out into that large world, and see exactly what the hell is going on.

Ottawa International Writers Festival, spring 09: poetry cabaret #1

Ah, festival. Is there anything we love more? Staged in its new location at Saint Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities in the Byward Market, the first poetry cabaret of the spring festival involved Ottawa poet and journalist Marcus McCann, Antigonish, Nova Scotia writer and editor Jeanette Lynes and Toronto poet and editor Molly Peacock, with a literary crowd out for same that included Ben Ladouceur, Nicholas Lea, Michael Blouin, Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Warren D. Fulton, Rhonda Douglas, Gwendolyn Guth and Steven Zytveld, among others. Our own Marcus McCann, editor of Capital Xtra, was launching his first trade poetry collection, Soft Where (Chaudiere Books, 2009). I’ve always been a fan of the acoustic gymnastics in McCann’s work, and not only because I’m the publisher of the collection. In his introduction, Stephen Brockwell compared McCann’s work to that of Hart Crane, which I thought interesting, a poet I don’t know the work of at all, as well as calling McCann one of the most promising young writers currently in the City of Ottawa.

Whoa

Whoa. Notice the boy’s gun hunt, clumsy
uncle? Summer fuss, musky, made the sun-cooked

custard sweat. Flin Flon’s cousin ate the costs.
That buddy was a husky punk – buddy,

that badunkadunk tongue was a thrum-sucker.
Once we snuck under the junked Cutlass, chunky

Todd undressed some buttons, thumbed my undies’
broad band. What was the rush,

I thought we were going four wheeling?
Got gummy, the dust stuck to our clothes’

dark spots. Ruddy grew redder, Grunts
turned jumpy, eyed the auto body’s grimed

shunts and udders, his palm buzzed where
I couldn’t look. Everything torqued, we were

both the busted guzzler’s undercab and squinting.
We stunk like what we’d done, I guess. I felt

like we’d shot a skunk, got sprayed – that dumb – until
cunning we skulked out to the tracks and began again.

Jeanette Lynes had not one but two new books last night, a new novel that wasn’t mentioned, and a new poetry collection that was, published by Wolsak & Wynn, neither of which I managed to sneak peeks at. With a poetry collection out last year with Freehand Books on Dusty Springfield, and her new collection, ostensibly, as Lynes claimed, part of her “blue period,” it seems as though she’s on a roll. And underplayed, as Brockwell later claimed; keeping her subtlety close and overt movements closer. When might I see these books? Is Lynes, editor of The Antigonish Review, around for another few days? It was interesting, during the event previous to theirs, hosted by the Dusty Owl Reading Series, a ferocious wind and rainstorm tore open the back door of the cabaret, sweeping a force of wind, rain and dust through the kitchen, cabaret and up the stairs into the main body of the old Irish church. Dusty Owl, Dusty Springfield; what else could we have expected?

Molly Peacock, Toronto poet and editor, responsible for getting the new series Best Canadian Poetry in English off the ground, read from her new poetry collection, the second blush (McClelland & Stewart, 2009), a collection she described as a series of “mistakes,” before going on to compliment particular lines by the previous two authors (including McCann’s “that badunkadunk tongue”). There was something odd about the theatricality she utilized while reading her poems, something that the host later claimed brought an element into the writing, subverting and not undercutting the subtlety of the poems in her collection (she talked about previously doing a “one woman show,” and the theatricality of her reading suddenly made a bit more sense). Writing a more metaphor-driven narrative verse, I wasn’t entirely sure how to enter her poems; I still haven’t figured it out, but there were some pieces there and here that I quite liked. Is it worth getting to know further of her collections, apart from this only one?

Our Minor Art

We make love better unobserved—not that
we’d ever throw the new cats off the bed.
We let them sit there, turning their backs,
but listening anyway. We don’t move in bed
quite with the freedom we might without them,
but the fact that they stay is like being
visited by minor gods. And we love the minor.
It inspires us because we like being
close to its genius—something we might come
to understand beyond our human bounds
but near to our kind—not like the major,
a capitalized God, for instance, or
uppercase Art. Those are beyond us,
yet our transformation here in bed is art,
something best made unobserved, even by the cats,
who leap off as we forget them and ourselves.

The Best Canadian Poetry in English, ed. Stephanie Bolster

Sleeping with the River

All that winter as the rains arrived,
sometimes as nobody’s footsteps,
sometimes as ack-ack, sometimes
hard bits of Braille flung at the house,
the mailbox, the woodshed, at the car parked
in the driveway, at all that is solid, all
that winter leaving the window open to its
pizzicati, hearing them accelerate and blend and
drown in the river’s big
ambiguous chorus, all that winter being
swept asleep thinking river is only rain
that has its act together, song that has never
passed through speech, unschooled,
other-than-us, thinking
this must be the voice of what-is as it
seizes the theme, pours its empty opera,
pumps out its bass line of sea-suck and blues. (Don McKay)

After watching the Americans produce the same for years, it seems interesting, ambitious, brave and even a bit foolhardy for someone in Canada to attempt the same, but the annual “Best Canadian Poetry” anthology has now been launched, with the appearance of The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008 (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2008). With series editor Molly Peacock, and first volume guest editor Stephanie Bolster, over one hundred poems were initially chosen from Canadian literary journals and magazines, boiled down to fifty to make up the current anthology, with the remaining long list of fifty listed at the back of the collection. As Montreal poet, editor and guest editor Bolster wrote to begin her introduction:

Who do you think you are? The phrase, inseparable in the minds of Canadian readers from Alice Munro’s book of that title, has arisen in a number of discussions with fellow writers over the years, referring specifically to the reluctance – in these conversations posited as particularly Canadian and, though perhaps secondarily, particularly female – to pronounce a viewpoint. It appeared in a thought bubble over my head when I received an e-mail from Halli Villegas early in 2007, asking if I would edit the first annual The Best Canadian Poetry in English. The invitation came as a surprise, an honour, and a privilege, one that I hesitated to accept not because of the inevitable time-drain, but because of the responsibility.

Can one, as the editors claim, wander through this anthology and get a sense of what is happening over the past year in Canadian journals? I would say not really, but it’s a good first start, although I am disappointed that they decided not to work their ways, also, through online publications. Still, with the work needed to put together a first volume, and wading through numerous Canadian print journals, I can understand why. At some point, I do hope they can work some online journals in, considering that there are some authors who might publish in one genre (print or online), but not necessarily the other. Why work to exclude? I know the American series considers online publications, whether Shampoo Poetry, Moira or Milk, and whatever else is published by our immediate neighbours. As series editor Molly Peacock writes in her prologue:

Canadian English language poetry is a dynamic art, and those literary journals that publish poetry reshape the landscape of Canadian letters every year. Yet few of us, even the most avid poetry-trackers, peruse all these magazines, and many of us are bewildered by their abundance. This is the primary reason for our yearly series. Our annual pulse-taking will track the birth of ideas, language, and rhythms of culture across the English Canadian poetic landscape. As well, it will highlight the emergence of new voices and the renaissance of familiar voices. From sound poems to confessional poems, from loose-limbed narratives to formal verse, from bellows to whispers, from the avenues to the bush, from west to east and all directions in between, prosodic decisions, geographical propensities and cultural proclivities give Canadian poetry its astonishing variety. The Best Canadian Poetry in English addresses both the confusion and the plethora by narrowing the field, providing a kind of qualifying finals for poetry every year.

The back of the collection includes has a list (with contact information) of the thirty-four Canadian print journals consulted for this collection, including The Antigonish Review, The Capilano Review, dANDelion magazine, Descant, The Fiddlehead, filling Station, Kiss Machine, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, QWERTY and Taddle Creek. One of the things I always wondered, if Canada had its own version of this series, is if the series would allow some of our less “mainstream” writers to edit a volume; I know one of the American editions was edited by Robert Creeley, and I’ve wondered out loud if a Canadian one would ever let our Creeley-equivalents, say, perhaps, George Bowering, Robin Blaser or Fred Wah, for example, even near such a thing. One of the American editions even included works by Erin Mouré, Steve McCaffery and Anne Carson; would such be allowed near a Canadian volume (keeping in mind, they would have to be publishing in Canadian journals that year to be considered)? I do like the book’s range, and there are some compelling pieces by some I wouldn’t have expected to see in such a book, including Dani Couture and Jeramy Dodds, and impressive pieces by old favourites John Barton, Susan Elmslie, Peter Norman, Shane Rhodes, Aurian Haller, Meira Cook and plenty of others. But still. Is my bias showing again? Is this simply a bias of Canadian publishing, something the creators of the current volume couldn’t have worked against or foreseen? Were the so-called “avant-garde” poets simply not publishing this past year?

Union Station

I cannot love you all and I won’t.

The shoulder knows the will of the heart and its way around
a crowd. The clam-soft give. The crack of the shell.

Help me recognize your humanity – talk in a low slow voice,
wave your lunch bone arms.

The children with keys at collarbone are building fires
in the tunnels, forts at every junction.

Let them go. The way is littered with leftovers –
pale while stalks, tender volva. Pick one. Another.

There are other ways home.

Brushed metal canines, the gate, will score
what you can afford to leave behind.

Impress me with your stones, your height.
The sweet dip of your neck.

All that you love,
keep high. (Dani Couture)

Part of what, at least, the American series achieves is not just an attempt at a cross-section of writing from journals across the country over the past year (finding the imagined “best,” if there is such a thing), but works to showcase that year’s American poetry to a foreign audience. This is something that Canadian writing has never quite managed to push out in the same way, given the lack of large Canadian publishers willing to produce anthologies of Canadian contemporary poetry for the sake of the foreign markets. If we don’t tell them how great we are, how will we ever know? Somehow, knowledge of Canadian poetry in the United States, for example, happens piecemeal, whether Sina Queyras producing an anthology of Canadian poetry coming out of her involvement in a reading series in New York City, the Canadian poets that have made it through SUNY-Buffalo as faculty, students or just passing through, the Lisa Robertson section in a recent issue of The Chicago Review, or other fits and starts that really don’t help to give anything much more than a taste. Is Tightrope a publisher large enough, or even interested in, pushing Canadian writing across geographic borders? Is it a publisher that should even be trying?

The Reflecting Pool

Illuminated by early evening sun, we walked to where the pool lies,
into the yielding forest, which shrugged when we tried to praise.

Inside its amalgam of shadow and cessation, the glassy pond
aimed its whole self down to the centre of the earth.

There was another world inside. Taut against the stick
and moss disorder, the water inscribed edge without movement.

It loved so thoroughly the small branches of the overhanging fir,
the dead, spindled tumbles of empty pine cones, the luminescence

of twinflower, wolf moss, fairy cup, mud. Its reaching became
an imitating eye, and the mirror elegy to what it loved.

Because it chose, we could see all things twice, and so had the chance
of glimpsing, the second time, what we always first ignore.

and as the water fell away, it took the image of the forest
and stretched it to the greenest shadows, taking our eyes

further and further down, and in. its lofted breadth
raveled the tapestry, learned every moment, armed gravity,

arraying knowledge in its rightness and its pull. (Maleea Acker)

But that’s neither here nor there. This is an impressive beginning to what, hopefully, can be an interesting series. The hard part won’t be in an editor selecting pieces, but in the publishers and Series Editor, Molly Peacock, picking guest editors that reflect the range of Canadian writing, and don’t simply perpetuate Canadian writings leanings away from more radical forms of writing. But time will only tell. Rumours have it that the next editor, for 2009, is already picked: A.F. Moritz.