The Capilano Review 3.14: The George Stanley Issue

There's a phrase of T.S. Eliot's that has been in my mind for a long time. It's called “the intolerable struggle with words and meanings.” And I very recently realized that Eliot is wrong on two counts there. It's not intolerable, and it's not a struggle. It's attention, or attentivity to words and meanings and when you're writing expressively, say, or out of the unconscious, you're not involved with that. Now I'm beginning to think that when I go back to the original work it's going to be more conscious and more concerned with words and meanings than in the past. In the past my biggest strength has largely been spontaneous and... at least half of it has been spontaneous, from the unconscious. But I always have been interested in the choice of the right word. Sometimes the meaning is right but the sound is wrong. Or the sound is right but the meaning is wrong. That's what Eliot called “intolerable.” (“'This is the place': A Conversation with George Stanley,” by Brook Houglum & Jenny Penberthy)

With new editor Brook Houglum at the helm, Vancouver's The Capilano Review presents “The George Stanley Issue” as their spring 2011 release, #3.14, on the Vancouver poet George Stanley. San Francisco-born and involved in the San Francisco Renaissance under Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser before heading north to Vancouver, then Terrace and back to Vancouver, Stanley is the author of the poetry collections The Love Root (White Rabbit, 1958), Tete Rouge/Pony Express Riders (White Rabbit, 1963), Beyond Love (Open Space, 1968), You (New Star, 1974), The Stick (Talonbooks, 1974), Opening Day (Oolichan Books, 1983), Temporarily (Gorse, 1986), Gentle Northern Summer (New Star, 1995), At Andy's (New Star, 2000), A Tall Serious Girl: Selected Poems 1957-2000 (Qua, 2003), Seniors (Nomados, 2006) and Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) [see my review mentioning same here].

Snow moon stars twinkle

for George Stanley

on the outside, a

birthday cake, a

shadow, a squirrel

fried up in grease,

in the ninth line

the fifth circle,

circling useful branches

and a package or two of

chips,

in the news,

episodic, contemplating

chains of grace of

these particular

fragmentary evenings,

dreams, and chairs,

a thank you

for a random church,

the goats, and

drinking water,

a return to

first feeling, a

luster-streak

of stars. (Lisa Jarnot)

Part of the appeal of an issue such as this is in the continued realization of the disconnect, the chasms between regions, with much of the high regard for George Stanley and his work still caught up in Canadian regionalism, leaning west, a near-apathy up against the sheer number of writers who have wholeheartedly responded here to Stanley and his work, including Michael Barnholden, Ken Belford, George Bowering, Rub Budde, Steve Collis, Jen Currin, Beverly Dahlen, Lisa Jarnot, Reg Johanson, Kevin Killian, Joanne Kyger, Barry McKinnon, Jenny Penberthy, Stan Persky, Meredith Quartermain, Sharon Thesen, Michael Turner and plenty more.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I've long been partial to the literary festshrift, and consider the form to be an essential contribution to literature generally, something The Capilano Review has long been an active part of, featuring, over the years, issues on Sharon Thesen [see my review of such here], George Bowering and Robin Blaser, among others. Unlike the more formal essay series produced by Guernica Editions (another essential grouping of responses), the festschrift allows for more of a range of responses, from the critical to the creative and all between, from essays and interviews to small memoir pieces, poems and photographs. Featuring two interviews, numerous essays, appreciations and poems, the issue also includes a generous selection of recent poems by Stanley, from a work-in-progress entitled “After Desire,” which includes the title poem:

After Desire

After desire the springs of longing

dry up, beauty is almost unrecognizable,

astonished that you passed it by. The background

wants to come into sharper focus, by default,

but you know the background.

And football keeps us going too, politics, reports from the slave trade.

Always readying ourselves for a funeral—being asked

to real funerals just sweetens the pot—

some kind of game or other always in play.

It's Friday again, time to do laundry.

The world trying to come into sharper focus

has nothing to offer but the impersonal.

Fair enough, but keep the old identity

in your closet, to be trotted out for wear on holy days.

Even if you haven't read a single word by Vancouver poet George Stanley, this issue provides an opportunity for an entry point to his writing, an important connection between the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s to current and recent decades of Canadian writing in Prince George and Vancouver, and “Aboutism,” which he explains in his interview with Houglum and Penberthy:

BH: You were one of the founders of Aboutism—could you tell us about it? What were the tenents, the context? What are your thoughts on it now?

GS: Aboutism was an idea framed as if it were a poetic movement. The manifesto is from Ryan Knighton: “Theory guards us from error; we are for error.”

Aboutism was a reaction to language poetry, and language poetry quite clearly eliminated reference. I think what the language poets were trying to do was similar to what the post-impressionists did in painting. That is, to make a painting not out of the images of the world, portraits, and landscapes and all that, but to make a painting out of paint. So that's a lesson that one learns from Cézanne. So I think language poetry at a theoretical level, with a classic language poet like Clark Coolidge, was attempting to create an art form simply out of words abstracted from their signification. My sense of that immediately was “You can't do that.” It's not possible in language. In visual arts you can take shape and line and colour away from the world and make something new out of them that has nothing to do with any referential object. Abstraction. But you cannot separate a word from its signification. If you have the word “tiger” in a poem the image of a tiger will arise in your mind inevitably. It seems to me that even in the most austere language poets—like Deanna Ferguson or Clark Coolidge—there was always this sort of semantic haze around the poem of the meanings, of the significations that had been excluded but didn't go away.

Admittedly, one of the frustrations with Stanley's work recently has been how difficult it has been to see a copy of his selected poems, produced by a small American publisher; will a Canadian press take up the job of producing same, for those of us north of the border? At least his Vancouver publisher, New Star, has long kept to a commitment of keeping authors' books in print, so there are still books of Stanley's that remain available for Canadian bookstores. At two hundred pages, this is perhaps one of the strongest issues I've seen from TCR in some time, after a run of also-strong issues over the past couple of years, a worthy tribute to a still-working and still-relevant Vancouver writer. At the end of his piece “'Who Marks the Changes?': George Stanley at The End/The Beginning,” Reg Johanson writes:

If so much is changing so fast, if the soul has become privatized, to whom is the poet speaking? What is the world he or she can depend upon to be shared by, or recognizable to “the” audience? The Canada, Terrace, Vancouver, Prince George, San Francisco, or the justice, history, and economy that the poet knew has become a matter of conjecture. Its reality as a shared experience can be no longer assumed. The very idea of sharing can be no longer assumed. Following the trajectory of this style in later books, Stanley is beginning again, attempting to “mark the changes” at the scale of thought and perception. Stanley's work at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century is an exemplary, if despairing, “experimental” account of the passing of one global order and the emergence of another. It is this “heart” in Stanley's work—vulnerable, confused, mourning, mistaking, starting over—that I respect. History, of course, did not end—writing and resistance and resistance-writing continue.

12 or 20 questions: with Ryan Knighton

Ryan Knighton [photo credit: Brad Cran] is the author of the critically acclaimed Cockeyed: A Memoir, which was published around the world and is in development as a major motion picture, and a follow-up, C'mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark. His comic essays have appeared in Esquire, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and Salon. At the age of eighteen Knighton was diagnosed with the degenerative eye condition retinitis pigmentosa and is now blind, which is blinder than he’d like to admit. He teaches English at Capilano University and lives in East Vancouver with his wife and young daughter.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

First book was poetry. An apprentice book. I was trying my hand at the effects, at least the ones  I could manage, of line, measure, omission, metaphor, pause, and the rest of the springs and gears in Williams’ version of “the machine”. I was imitating books I liked: Gentle Northern Summer, For Love, Kerrisdale Elegies, Aurora, et al. Changed my application of language to experience, which is how it changed my life.

Now the lines are elsewhere. Haven’t composed in that way in a long time. It might come back. But for now I’m wading through sentences. So many directions to go. So many denials in making one sentence over another. Though I write memoir now – which is to say a combination of chronicle and gesture – it’s to make a version of what happened. Whatever the language settled into.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Physiology. I was losing my sight, of course, so as a student at SFU I studied poetry, particularly that with slender lines. Thesen’s jeweler’s cuts. Creeley’s nodes. I could string 3 letters together at a time in my right eye and, as they say, read. Less was more. I could memorize the poem and excuse myself from consulting pages when tasked to write essays. Three letters at a time is not a way into Dickens. Later I gave in to audiobooks. Clunky tape cassettes. Twenty-two tapes at half speed to read the idiot. Audiobooks gave me back sentences. I was raised in poetry, then moved to the paragraphs. Paragraphs are where I spend my day right now, but poetry taught me how to live there.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I have no idea how long it takes to start. How long is a start? It starts, I guess. It wasn’t, then it is, and on it goes the wrong way, then the right, and then the terms change, you shed the crutches of right and wrong,  and you start over, but that’s not a start, that’s just a continuation of what you suspect hasn’t begun. Meanwhile I sit at my desk eight hours a day, five days a week. Occupied. It’s the occupation that matters and gets me wherever.

4 - Where does a poem or prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

These days it always begins with something that happened. That combined with something I might think about. That’s about as plain as I can describe it. It also begins with digressions, because I don’t want to think I know what matters in order to tell a chronicle. I don’t’ want to tell a story, not exactly. I want it to tell me something. Sometimes, at least most of the time these days, I’ve proposed a book so I’m consciously working on it. It’s a book. But I’m always working on a piece of the book. So I work on pieces. But until I have a book, I don’t know what a piece really is, not until I look back and see how it could be just that, and so it conjures a thinking and telling that isn’t exactly my own, not the kind I might share at dinner or use to plan a vacation. So, at least for me, I tend to feel in any given sentence I’m wanting for something both big and small, something that has the quality of inertia necessary to books,  but also maybe something that wants to be left behind in passing, in the reading, to belong back there like a street corner, be it a sentence or an act or a passage or an ugly expository lump. Conduits to the book, but places of their own to be read. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

I’m  growing more verbally private the more I write about what happens. The books are becoming a public reading, I suppose. Maybe my voice is migrating there. My wife says I mumble more than I used to.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

This, like other answers I can try, is only temporary. My suspicion is that memoir does its work when it isn’t ultimately about you. How to accomplish that is of concern. What work it can do is provide a method – one of many, not necessarily the best or most significant, but a method – to shape questions from the fog of relative experience. What happened is not a personal thing. It’s too often assumed to be a question of the personal, or the psychological, or the private. What happened, to tell that, is to ask how we are in a broader sense of the world, its forces and its shapeliness. Memoir as method. Meta hodos. Greek for “on the road”. To be out there, not in here. 

7 - What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I wouldn’t prescribe, other than to say I hope there isn’t such a thing as “a writer”.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Both. But who cares, really. Agonism works. Just try editing something with “Have a nice day.”    

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Perspective by incongruity.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

A question of measure: how hard, easy, pleasurable, difficult, etc, the various facets of writing are for me. But it’s hard to answer measures.

My dad welded chain link fences while my mom dispatched for emergency services. Those strike me as hard jobs in their respective ways. Writing is hard, too. Sometimes. And driven by appeal, but only sometimes. And it’s also come to me with some ease, that of necessity – what’s a good job for this body? -- and genuine curiosity. Curiosity is the appeal that keeps me moving from poetry to memoir to screenplay to radio, etc.

But that movement, the indulgence of time and curiosity, is predicated on this: I’ve a good teaching gig, I travel, I’ve a home in this over-inflated market, I eat well and so does my daughter. All of that makes any hardship in writing easier, far far easier. Blindness makes all of it harder, again. Blindfold yourself and try to find a urinal at the CBC. Ask strangers to take you. Hard. So hard. But there’s a 7 year average before burnout, true nervous exhaustion, for most emergency dispatchers. My mom was forced to move to a whole new career when she was in her fifties. I lost enough sight to find sentences by the time I turned 30, and so I tried my hand at memoir. Blindness is difficult every minute, but I’m noticeable. And in this over-inflated market of books and writing, every glitch defines you from the noise. Blindness as ease. I eased from poetry to memoir, in that respect, too. So I’ve no

answer for how easy or hard it has been. You just weld it together.  

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

In the morning I drop my daughter at the university’s daycare, then work in my office on campus from 8:30 until 4:30, five days a week. I have lunch with her and the other kids at noon for an hour. Teaching takes away some of that writing time, but only part of the year. For the past few years I’ve taught from January to June, and  written from July to December. Whatever I’m tinkering with, I stop mid-sentence at the end of the day and leave myself a few notes that point to wherever it is I think it’s going. Easier to pick up the next morniof start it. And I never write after 5PM.  

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn away from whatever it is. Do something else. Do something.

13 - What was your most recent Halloween costume?

Don’t remember.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Radio. Bar stool yarns. Those and the way my brothers tried to one-up each other at the kitchen table. Shaggy dog stories. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I don’t’ want to leave anybody out and there’s too many. Of books, I will say that Jim Knipfel’s Slackjaw was immeasurably significant for me as a blind guy and someone who was about to try memoir. His book gave me a kind of permission I didn’t know I’d been waiting for. It’s permission was to say, “Stop waiting for whatever fucking permission you’re never going to get, you precious ninny.”

 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Play my Gibson like Cousin Harley.. 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I might not be writing in a couple of years, so maybe I’ll find out.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don’t want to know. I’m serious. I probably just like doing it. I’m suspicious of lending it the quality of a “calling” or something woo woo like that.

19 - What was the last great book you read?

My favourite novel is Great Expectations. I don’t read many books, though. Mostly articles and scripts right now. “Ruined Cast” by Dash Shaw, which has yet to be produced, is the best script I’ve read in a long time.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A travel book called Nothing to see here. It’s not about blindness. It’s a project about educating my other senses. I’ve also got two screenplays in development and two more in early stages. Most are adaptations of books by other folks. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;