on rereading: Short Haul Engine

I'm rereading Karen Solie right now, beginning with her first collection, Short Haul Engine. I realized that it's been a long time since I picked up her first book. I'm often returning to her third book, Pigeon, but cannot recall the last time I revisited her first, the one that made me fall in love with her work. (I was going to write her most recent, but I see that she has another forthcoming. Very exciting!)

I've reread more this year than any year before, and one thing that keeps surprising me, which really it shouldn't by now, is how little I remember from previous reads. Rereading Solie is no different.

There's lot to love in Short Haul Engine. It's an accomplished first collection, but like most first collections there is a rawness. It's a little messy, not at all self-conscious. I like that the edges haven't been all polished down.

I had forgotten that Solie once lived in Victoria, the city I now call home. I think of her as a Toronto poet from Saskatchewan, and I'm curious how long she lived here. There is a great poem in Short Haul Engine called "East Window, Victoria" about the longing for a real Prairie winter while living on the West Coast, where "Everything about the place/ demands affection." It was the second stanza that compelled me to read the poem to my husband last night:

In Edmonton, they are cursing
ancestors and old Volkswagens, shovelling
themselves into cardiac events.
In Churchill,
snow is an animal.

When I finished the poem, my husband said it was like the poem had been written for me. Here I am, living in what many consider paradise, but part of me longs for Edmonton, especially the winters. I know that I've romanticized our time there--my anger at the cold, long winters, the predatory johns, the crack-dealing neighbour have all softened. I loved all the free outdoor skating and I know I'd have become a cross country skier if we'd stayed.

Here, it's beautiful. Here it's always lush, even in the middle of December. Today, not only did I see robins, but also hummingbirds. It smelled of mud and new life. It felt like April. As Solie wrote, "So much evergreen. So much/ a constant."

The penultimate stanza sums up my longing, my strange allegiance perfectly:

But how dare you long
for those first mornings of frost
you bit into like an apple, the winters
skating an unbroken line
around your small clean body.
Ungrateful.

I do feel grateful to Solie for writing "East Window, Victoria" a poem I don't remember reading the first time, but now, where I am in my life both physically and emotionally, is the perfect poem for me. I suppose that's how all good literature works, but it seems especially true for poetry, that its meaning shifts as time does, as people do.

Undark: to have lived is not enough

I was first introduced to the work of Sandy Pool when we read together at The Edmonton Poetry Festival. She gave an incredible performance and was also completely charming. I finally read it recently, devouring it in two evenings.

It's an accomplished book, rich with stunning images and voices. It's subtitled "An Oratorio" and has a list of Dramatis Personae, which includes Sappho, Undark ("a propaganda radio personality) and the Radium Women (on whom Undark centres).

There's a mix of styles for each voice, although I had to read the dates for Sappho and Hatshepsut to keep them clear. It's all so cleverly done, but this book is more than just clever, it's political and human and incredibly moving.

When I started the book, I thought that it would make a great pairing with Marie Clements' Burning Vision and Veronique Greenwood's "My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And it Killed Her." in the New York Times for my imaginary syllabus. The syllabus would have to be flushed out some more, but I haven't read much that I could add.

Then, I came to Pool's poem "Nox, New Jersey, 1998"

…Women
are speaking. To have lived

is not enough. They have to
reverberate like elbows

poking through undergrowth.
The rate of pulses rising

to terminal buzz. Women
like whale music, singing

under the newly mowed lawn:
lick tick lick tick lick tick.

To be dead is not enough.
The Dopler shift of history

buries them deeper.Geiger
counter clicks into being.

and it reminded me of my own Glossolalia, and countless other stories of silent/silenced women. So many contemporary women poets are drawn to these historical women, trying to give voice to those who no longer can voice their own stories. Is it because we worry about our own fates? Perhaps subconsciously, but I don't know.

So my revised imaginary syllabus would have:
Undark by Sandy Pool
Glossolalia by Marita Dachsel
The Invisibility Exhibit by Sachiko Murakami
The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy*
The God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinksy

(*I have not read this, but I loved what Melwyk said about it over at Indextrious Reader so I'm taking her word on it, and still have it on my to-read list.)

But regardless of my imagined syllabi, do pick up Undark. It's so very good, plus the cover glows in the dark, so how could you pass that up?

deer and stones

Today is the fifth anniversary of the deaths of three very special people. On the first anniversary, I was by myself at the Wallace Stegner house. I went for a walk and came across three young deer. It was, of course, just a coincidence, but I longed to give meaning to their sighting. Also on that day, I read Louis Glück's Autumnal and threw three stones into the stream that ran behind the house.

Yesterday, I was at the beach with two of my children. I also threw three stones in the water, saying my lost friends' names in my head as I did so.

This morning, as I entered the parking lot at the university, I saw three deer. Again, I know this is a coincidence. Deer at UVic are like pigeons in almost any other city. But. But, still. Of course my mind makes connections.

I pulled Louise Glück's Collected Poems from my shelf and reread "Autumnal." That poem, deer in triplets, and stones in collections of three now, and probably always will, remind me of my young friends and have become symbols of their loss.

We can't help but make connections. We create narrative, find symbols to comfort, to ease ourselves through difficulties. It may be irrational, but we do what we can, don't we? I count deer, read poems, throw stones for this loss.

There are other losses, though. One only months old, another impending. I don't know yet what I'll reach for to guide me through their grief. But something will, won't it? Something must.

Edmonton Poetry Festival

I'm not sure how to write this post, how to start it except by starting it. Part of me doesn't even want to write it because you know how it is when you have such a wonderful time and you start telling people about it and after a while the story and the event loses it's magic because you've spread it too thin? I can't be the only one who feels this way.

What I want to write about is the few days last week when I was at the Edmonton Poetry Festival. (All my crappy photos are on my phone on which my daughter is currently playing.)

There is so much to say, but it all can be distilled into this: I had a wonderful time.

The festival is one near to my heart as it was so integral to my four years in Edmonton. I was on the organizing board for the festival for three years and attended many, many events while I lived there. To be asked to attend as a featured artist was an honour and I was thrilled to be reading with a healthy mix of people I knew and people I wanted to know.

Aside from getting to see some (but, alas, not all) my Edmonton friends, I got to attend and read at some great events. My first night in Edmonton, I attended an event featuring the transcendent Joy Harjo. The next day I got to read with Shirley Service, Julie Robinson, and Sandy Pool. Sandy read from Undark and she blew me away. A fantastic performer and glorious writing. If you ever get the chance to hear her read, please do. The next day I did a workshop with grade eleven students transforming Macbeth into erasure poems. So much fun. Then I read with Rhea Trebegov, Paul Zits, and Kimmy Beach (with whom I got to spend a lot of time, lucky me!) Wednesday morning before flying back home.

It was a whirlwind and I was fortunate to experience some stellar poetry, spend time with good friends and great poets. Such a pleasure. Thank you, Edmonton. I hope it won't be too long until I see you again.

Olive Grey Frost

A million years ago, I taught a course at University of Alberta's Women Words. I can't remember the title, but it was about creating your own chapbook. We looked at how to consider the body of one's work and we paid close attention to how to order one's work while considering narrative, style, and them. There was more to it than that, but this was the essence of the class.

One of the students was a really good poet. She was young and oozed with potential. We now follow each other on social media and I've enjoyed watching how she's coming into her own.

Relatively recently, she posted these and ever since, I've been itching to make some of my own. Here's my first one, and I'm quite certain it won't be my last. (You can see it better if you link through to here.)

Words Thaw

I'm honoured to have been asked to participate in this year's Words Thaw, a symposium at UVic that is billed as an “intellectual icebreaker at the cusp of spring.”

In addition to attending events all day, I'll be sitting on the panel The Inner Life of Our Words: Writing and the Human Spirit. The copy for the event is:

Is there a relationship between poetry and the inner life? And if there is, what form or direction—or directions—does this relationship take? Can writing and reading be a useful, even insightful tool to probe the spiritual life (or lives) of the self, of another person, of a community, or even of an age? With moderator Andrew Rippin as their “guide,” poets Marita Dachsel, Tim Lilburn, and Jane Munro, each approaching the inner life of our words from a unique perspective, talk about how poetry can be a catalyst to discovering and expressing not only “what we know,” but about “what we want to know.”

I'm hoping to listen more than speak, as I'm very much looking foreword to hearing the others' thoughts on this. It's such a wide subject and I know we're going to approach it in different ways, so it should be an enlightening and exciting conversation.

As a lead up to Words Thaw, Stephanie Harrington recently produced a podcast based on a conversation we had a few weeks ago. She's clearly talented as she took my 30+ minutes of babbling and crafted it into a concise six minute podcast. You can listen to it here.

on rereading Gloria, part four (and final)

I finished Gloria two weekends ago. When I was about fifty pages from the end and I kept trying to put it aside, not wanting leave Miss Gloria Cotter and 1957 just yet, but I couldn't. There is a momentum that builds that begs, no demands, the reader to read just one more page, until BAM you're at the end. And oh, what an end it is.

And then I spent the rest of the weekend googling characters and things from the novel, as if these were real people. Like Gloria's BFF Susie. I found this delightful video of a head majorette in 1950. Susie would have been a little younger than this woman, and I think she'd have been even better.



Fun, no?

I want to write about the ending and the book as a whole on last time, but I also don't want to spoil anything for those of you who haven't read it yet, but plan to, so I'm doing one of those fancy "after the jump" things. Trust me, you don't want to be spoiled, so instead of reading on, start on your copy of Gloria now.

Ahem.
Click here to continue (but only if you've read the novel!).

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part six (and final)

I finished reading Stag's Leap Wednesday evening and I really enjoyed the final section "Years Later," especially the final few poems.

I found the whole section strong, possibly the strongest section in the book, except for one poem. While I appreciated the visual play attempted in "Read Sea," I found it lacking. I suppose there is a reason Olds doesn't often play with form. I don't think she's confident in it. I think she could be--she's clearly an excellent poet--but like anything, it's a skill that needs to honed and perhaps she's not interested in it enough to spend the time working on it.

On thing I admired in "Years Later" was how imagery found in poems throughout the collection are revisited, reach what could be considered either their pinnacle or, perhaps, denouement--celestial, marine, sexual, geological, mortality.

The morality feels more pronounced in this section, but it has a different tone. Earlier, such as when Olds had written about her miscarriage, death and loss were about lives cut too short, about lost potential, about tragedy. But in this final section the tone has shifted. In general, it feels more generous, more open, more kind, and specifically in terms of morality, there is an acceptance--no railing against what could have, should have been--but an acknowledgement of death's inevitability in mentioning her mother's and father's deaths, the hoped for long life.

Years later, during his cremation,
the liquids left my father's corpse,
and smoke left the flue. And even
later, my mother's ashes left
my hand, and fell as seethe into the salt
chop. … (from "What Left?")

Clearly, this change in tone at the end of the book signals an acceptance to the narrator's divorce. In the poem "Years Later", the narrator and her ex-husband have met in a park (Central Park this reader assumes). There is acceptance, a longing that is less mournful than stoic, and it's not a longing of desire (what she wants) but a longing of what has passed--a gentle nostalgia. The poem ends:

...And then there is the spring park,
damp as if freshly peeled, sweet
greenhouse, green cemetery with no
dead in it--except in some shaded
woods, under some years of leaves and
rotted cones, the body of a warbler
like a whole note fallen from the sky--my old
love for him, like a songbird's rib cage picked clean.

Her love for him, no longer rotting or decomposing--stinky and messy--but clean and fragile. A skeleton of what it once was. I find the final two lines of this poem stunning.

"Years Later" leads in "September 2001, New York City" a poem, we know from the title, will hold death, but not the death(s) we expect. She opens the poem with:

A week later, I said to a friend: I don't
think I could ever write about it.
Maybe in a year I could write something.

Clearly, years have passed and she has written something, but other than the dream image of a a game of jacks, the events of 9/11 aren't explored directly. What I do find interesting, is the warbler image returns, this time as her mother:

… And I thought of my
mother, minutes from her death, eighty-five
years from her birth, the almost warbler
bones of her shoulder under my hand, the
eggshell skull, as she lay in some peace

I now want to reread the collection to see if the warbler image is used earlier. Not off the top of my head, but knowing how Olds returns to images, I think it must be there. The warbler image here relates to someone fragile, someone loved. Olds requests that we make a connection between her "almost warbler bones" of her mother and the warbler skeleton of her love for her husband--something precious, something fragile.

Before I return Stag's Leap to the shelf, I want to address the last poem briefly. "What Left" is where we leave the narrator on her journey, and it's a meditation on where she was and where she is now. There is a rhythm to the piece that builds, almost an incantation. She explores conception, birth, nursing, the death of her parents (as noted above), and ultimately what she and her ex-husband accomplished together and for each other in their marriage. The final third of the poem is one long sentence:

We fulfilled something in each other--
I believed in him, he believed in me, then we
grew, and grew, I grieved him, he grieved me,
I completed with him, he completed with me, we
made whole cloth together, we succeeded,
we perfected what lay between him and me,
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
I did not leave him, he did note leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.

That final line. Normally, that would make me cringe. It's sappy and sentimental, absolutely, but Olds earns it. If this line showed up anywhere else in the collection or even in the poem itself I would object, but ending the collection this way is especially rewarding for the readers who read from front to back.

I'm going to put aside Stag's Leap now, but I know I will return to it. If you've read it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the collection. Do you disagree with anything I've written? Have a completely different take? Please let me know! I'd love to have a discussion about it.

If you'd like to read all six sections, you can find them here

the God of poetry

"Gloria closed her eyes and tried to imagine her God--an incomprehensible, impersonal, sexless force--the God of coincidences, of her dreams and mental floodings, of the strange leaps her mind made when she knew something absolutely without knowing how she knew it; the God of love, certainly, and of the created world when it had been given to her to see it with heart-stopping crystal clarity; the God of poetry, she realized with a sudden inner leap--true poetry, she amended it--the God who inspired the words when they were true words--and her mind, taking off on its own, found the breath in the root of the word 'inspire.'"

from Gloria by Keith Maillard

poetry was far more than a bunch of pretty words

"Poetry had always been the great love of her life, and so, of course, she'd cried over it before, but she'd never before heard music like Wyatt's, and now she understood what she must surely have always known: that poetry was far more than a bunch of pretty words--it was, of all the works of man, the most beautiful and profound and eternal."

from Gloria by Keith Maillard

on memorizing poetry

I went to a Coffee Talk last week that has me thinking about memorizing poetry. The focus of the talk was a reflection on Harold Coward's lecture from the previous evening. I hadn't be able to attend his lecture, but I really wish I had.

In the talk, he spoke a bit about learning orally/aurally--how vital memorization is to fully understanding a text. There was discussion on how in many religious practices, the sacred text is memorized and this knowledge is passed down from teacher to student. Christianity used to have a much stronger oral tradition that seems to have disappeared in the mid 19th Century (reasons to me were not clear).

Harold spoke of how important it is for young children to memorize things (texts, facts, etc) as these are the foundations of their future knowledge.

Of course, this got me thinking of my own children. My eldest is a whiz at memorizing and has always done it for fun. He used to (may still) have all the countries in the world memorized. He reads a book more than once and has it mostly memorized.

My youngest is two and she's loved Julie Morstad's illustrated book of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Swing ever since she was given it--over half her life, now! The boys and I quickly memorized the poem to recite to her. After Howard's talk, I realized that other than sections of my own poems and Leonard Cohen's "Marita", it's the only poem I have memorized.

This needs to change.

I went to FB and asked what poems and why people have memorized. Over twenty people responded and almost all of them named poems--there was Shakespeare, Millay, Frost, Hardy, and many others, with very few repetitions. And what heartened me the most was that not everyone who responded were writers. That shouldn't surprise me, but it did, in the best possible way.

I once went to a reading where a poet put her book aside and recited a poem of her own. It was a true recitation and the delivery sounded like a child reciting "In Flanders Fields." This put me off wanting to memorize my own work, though through osmosis I have done so. I doubt I'll ever recite a poem completely from memory at a reading in fear of it becoming a parlour trick or transporting everyone back to grade three, but when I do read certain poems, they are mostly from memory.

There are a few poems I love and I'm going to attempt to memorize them, just for the joy of it.

(And then, of course, I remembered this video. Oh, Lynda Barry, you are brilliant.)

Too True

Glossolalia has been out in the world for almost a year now and has garnered a modest bit of attention. I keep planning on posting all the reviews and interviews I've received and given in support of my wives, not so much for bragging rights, but mostly so that I have them all together. Soon, I hope.

One of my favourite things I've done since Glossolalia was published is a reading and panel discussion with some of my favourite poets: Jennica Harper, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Amber Dawn, and moderated by Gillian Jerome. Gillian did a great job asking difficult questions, and I think the ensuing discussion was provocative.

It's about an hour and a half long, so make sure you have a pot of tea and a hearty snack beside you if you plan on watching it all in one sitting. If you do watch it all, let me know what you think. I'd love to keep the discussion going.

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part five

The "Summer" section of Stag's Leap only has four poems and they left me frustrated. Perhaps it's because I taught a form class last semester and I've become enamoured with form, constraints, and poetic devises, that these free verse (and not, may I point out, free verse in the sense of organic verse) confessional poems are starting to feel like a drag. More than halfway through, there has been little deviation--almost no stanzas, few indentations. They look and sound the same.

I reread the four poems of "Summer" only once. I assume if I gave this section closer read, I'd be rewarded, but I simply didn't want to. The subjects of these four poems were none that I wanted to sink into deeper. The one that held my attention the most, "Skleekit Cowrin'" turned me off with its heavy-handed symbolism--mice traps on the wedding china, leaving the mouse corpse on the plate on the porch and it being infested by bugs. I'm sure that there is more artistry in the poem and the others in "Summer" but I don't have the patience or inclination to find them right now.

The following section, "Fall," only has four poems as well, but this section appealed to me more. I read "Haircut" as I was in the salon waiting for one of my own, which was a nice little gift. It probably does not need to be noted that my haircut was nothing like the one in the poem.

That said, I find "Crazy" the most compelling in the section. Ultimately, it's a revisitation and reconsideration of what it means to be "crazy for each other"--a phrase the speaker claims to have used (often) in the past. It begins:

I've said that he and I had been crazy
for each other, but maybe my ex and I were not
crazy for each other. Maybe we
were sane for each other, as if our desire
was almost not even personal--

Olds' choice to have "crazy" end the first and begin the third line not only draws attention to the word in its repetition and prominent places on the lines, but also transforms them into their own parenthesis, having the second line--a line which simply announces she and her ex--be surrounded by "crazy." It's a subtle nod to what the poem will explore. Perhaps the crazy was not them, but outside of them.

The speaker ruminates on what the alternatives were, if they weren't crazy for each other--a marriage arranged by the elements (with "a fire of pleasure like a violence/of kindness); they were "sane for each other"; that their union was inevitable "like the earth's and moon's paths" (that line got an eye roll from me, I admit--so hard to invoke the heavens that way). The speaker then admits that despite these other options, she was crazy about him

--oh for God's sake
I was besotted with him. Meanwhile the planets
orbited each other; the morning and the evening
came.…

Her invocation of celestial bodies returns, this time paired with "each other," a term used throughout in reference to her and her ex--three times in the first four lines of the poem alone. Here, the reader can't but help fuse the speaker and her ex with objects in the sky.

Now that the speaker is confident with admitting that she was crazy for him, she considers what he felt for her and settles on "mortal fondness," a phrase that feels both full and paternalistic, or perhaps avuncular.

With this realization, that yes, he had positive feelings for her, but nothing near what she felt for him, Olds ends the poem, returning to the celestial imagery and "each other":

What precision of action
it has taken, for the bodies to hurtle through
the sky for so long without harming each other.

Is there relief or gratitude in this? The tone implies this, but there is also a hint of accusation in "what precision of action/ it has taken" suggests deliberate action on the ex's part, avoiding the implosion for as long as they had.

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part four

The most compelling poem in the short section "Spring" is "To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now." Largely, I find this compelling because I am drawn to poems about loss, especially the loss of a child. Part morbid fascination, part research, and part because I've been writing about this subject myself.

What I most appreciate about this poem is the tone--not sentimental, yet full of feeling; visceral without being macabre.

The poem is layered with loss. Obviously, the poet is ruminating on her miscarried son, and, being in a collection about her divorce, she weighs these losses against each other ("That he left me is not much, compared/to your leaving the earth…") but she also considers her own mortality.

The exploration of her own mortality was the most interesting to me, as she is reflecting on her lost son in what appears to be a new way to her:

…And yet
the idea of you has come back to where
I could see you today as a small,impromptu
god of the partial.

She imagines upon her own death, he will be there waiting for her her and asks,

When I leave for good,
would you hold me in your blue mitt
for the departure hence.

She desires to be cradled by this son she never knew, a son (who may not have been a son at all) who she never cradled, but who

…moved house, from uterus
to toilet bowl and jointed stem
and swear out to float the rivers and
bays in painless pieces.

She ends the poem:

I never thought
to see you again, I never thought to seek you.

What I find interesting in this, is she does not write "I never thought I would see you…" but "I never thought to see you" which sounds a little more awkward only because we are used to reading/hearing the former. In the way she has written it, she is clearly enforcing that she is conjuring her son. She will never see him again, but in creating this fantasy of him bringing her to the afterlife, in remembering his loss thirty years earlier, she finds a comfort. She had "never thought to seek" him, but does so now, in the wake of divorce. This seeing, this seeking is not a mourning of potential--of what or who the son would have, could have been--but a sense of perspective and, more importantly, a celebration of the essence of what he is now--a creation of her, of her imagination, of her creativity.

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part three

The penultimate poem of the "Winter" section is "The Easel." Other than "Not Going to Him" and "Pain I Did Not" I wasn't really taken with the poems in this section on first read. I decided to revisit the section before moving on to see what I may have missed. When I did, "The Easel" stood out.

On the surface, the poem deals with tropes I'm not excited by: the destruction of an ex's property, choosing art over family/love. I sped through reading this one the first time, but I'm glad that I returned to it.

Yes, the speaker is dismantling and then burning her ex-husband's easel. But of course, the easel is more than an easel. Once she has set it alight, "by the flame-light" she realizes that this easel is more than just something he once owned, but something that was integral to their early life together:

...all told, maybe
weeks, a month of stillness--modeling
for him, our first years together,

That honeymoon year, a month in hours of when she was his object.

Olds is famous for mining her family's life for her art. Her poetry is unabashedly autobiographical, confessional. When she writes:

… I am burning his left-behind craft,
he who was the first to turn
our family, naked, into art.

I cannot help but read this as an accusation, or perhaps a defence of her own choices. Ending the line on "to turn" is important, a signal to the subtext of the phrase.

The final seven lines explores the question whether or not she would have not pursued her craft if it meant he would never leave her. Upon first read, it feels a little trite, a little too predictable to me:

… --what would I
have said? I didn't even have an art,
it would come from out of our family's life--
what could I have said: nothing will stop me.

The last line feels a tad rah-rah-sisterhood, rah-rah-artist. But, there is more to it than that. Do we read that his abandoned craft is analogous to hers? That the abandonment of his craft didn't save their marriage any more than if she would have? Or do we read it that, ultimately, this is what she wanted? That she wouldn't go back in time give up her art because not only did the last thirty years of marriage give her great fodder for great art, but this moment, this divorce is also the case?

She's not saying she would chose art over love. She chose art because of love and both were inevitable.

In the poem, she is sacrificing (burning on a pyre) his lost art, while she is creating her own art out of it. In the first-half of the poem she writes

… And laying its
narrow, polished, maple angles
across the kindling, proving for updraft--
good. …

She is conscious here, lays the groundwork for the rest of the poem: her art is fed off of his, even in its absence, even (more so) in its distraction. Good, indeed.

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part two

The second section, "Winter," opens with a poem I keep rereading "Not Going to Him". I'm trying to pinpoint what I find so compelling about this one. Yes, there are some lines I love, "…I am a stunned knower/ of not." and "…on his neck, the scar, doll-saucer of tarnish,/ set in time's throat…" but it's more than just strong images, great word choices.

She builds a momentum that starts just under half-way through the poem and ends fourteen lines later with one long sentence snowballing a conjuring of her (ex) husband through memories of physical details. Her line breaks are interesting and help with the snowball effect. For example, when she breaks a phrase ending the line "and then" reading:

…and up to the nape and then
dive again, as the swells fly
at speed--...

My impulse would have been to end the line at "the nape" and begin the next line with "and then" but I see how this particular enjambment helps build momentum. Clever.

The poem ends with:

…He is alive, he breathes
and moves! My body may never learn
not to yearn for that one, or this could be
a first farewell to him, a life-do-us-part.

I appreciate the sentiment of the division between the body and the mind, the realization that this is the beginning of her knowledge, her acceptance that this is the end, even though part of her will never stop longing.

On Reading: Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds, part one

(What is this? You can read about the impetus behind it here.)

Received Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds for Christmas this year, officially from my father-in-law, but chosen and purchased by my husband.

Here's a confession: I haven't read much Olds. I've read some of her work in anthologies, but I've never read an entire collection and I haven't read any of her recent work at all.

Boxing Day, I curled up with the collection and a cup of tea and began to read. The opening poem "While He Told Me" is stunning, so much so, I read it aloud to my husband. The lines:

Later, when we took off our clothes, I saw
his deep navel, and the cindery lichen
skin between the male breasts, and from
outside the shower curtains's terrible membrane
I called out something like flirting to him,
and he smiled.

are gorgeous. I hope I never forget the phrase "cindery lichen." Perfect.

The poem has a sense of foreboding to it and, having not read the back cover or managed to hear what the book is about (how, I have no idea), I imagined what he told her to be his own terminal prognosis.

I flipped the page and read "Unspeakable"--a poem about their impending divorce and the other woman--then turned to the back cover:

Stag's Leap is a stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.

So I looked over to my husband and asked him what he knew of the book before he bought it. "Nothing," he answered. "You're not trying to tell me something with this, are you?" I asked and then read him the back cover. We laughed somewhat uncomfortably (at least, I did).

I pause. Do I want to read a full collection about someone's divorce? It's Sharon Olds and it won the Pulitzer, so yes, I will read it, but will I enjoy it?

"The Flurry" reinforces my bias against dialogue in poetry.

The next few don't excite me. I begin to wonder if confessional poetry just isn't my thing. I don't search it out and perhaps there is a reason for this.

I read "Stag's Leap" and wonder if it's possible to become the writer-in-residence at a BC winery. I'll name my next book "Red Rooster" or "Quail's Gate" for a case or two.

The final three poems in the first section (January-December) feel stronger. Why is this? Am I breaking through the confessional wall? Why do they speak to me in ways that the middles ones didn't? There are lines in each of them that make me pause (in a good way) that the others didn't. Their endings are especially strong. The final lines of "Known to Be Left": "Have faith,/ old heart. What is living, anyway,/ but dying." I love all of "Object Loss." It feels tight and there are strong, unexpected images to ground the emotions. At first, I wasn't sure about "Poem for the Breasts." The title implied a type of poem I read too often in workshops--a "funny" poem that relies on a "twist" or that is ultimately a joke heading towards a punchline. Meh. Thankfully, "Poem for the Breasts" is not a punchline poem, but one that has depth and insight. It was unexpected and a strong way to end the first section.

on biases

Yesterday, when the David Gilmour "I don't teach women, or Chinese" thing exploded all over my social media feeds, I have to admit, I was enjoying it. The man was so clueless about his privilege, about his sexism, he was the talking embodiment of what's wrong with old white men (yes, old, Mr. Gilmour: 63 is not middle-aged). I found so much joy in watching him not understand why everyone was so mad. I mean, of course, he found absolutely nothing wrong with filling his course with "books he loved" that were only written by "guy-guys" and that he doesn't love any books written by women.

In the midst of my cackling and being snippy on twitter ("I'm going down the hall," I wrote and retweeted others like a crazy person), I was supposed to be going over my notes for my class that afternoon. I stopped as I reviewed the names of the poems I was teaching that day: all white. Yes, there were men and women (mostly women), and there were straight and queer (mostly straight) writers, but all white.

My stomach turned as flipped back over the previous three classes I taught. All white except two: Vikram Seth and Claude McKay. I flipped forward--a bit more diversity coming up: Natalie Diaz, Dionne Brand, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, anonymous Afghani women, Fred Wah, Rita Wong, Sachiko Murakami, LeRoi Jones (Amari Baraka). That's not many. That's not enough.

I'm frustrated with myself. I like to think of myself as not a racist, as an ally. But my bias is obvious: I favour white women. I mostly read white women poets. This has to change.

I'm in a very privileged position in exposing a dynamic, interesting group of young writers to "advanced forms and techniques of poetry"--I get to introduce writers they may haven't read yet. It's my duty to reflect a larger world to them than what's on their shelves and what's on mine.

prairie polygamy

Right now I'm reading Jenna Butler's seldom seen road. This is her third full-length collection, although I don't seem to have her second in my library just yet. I did chat with her two years ago about her poem "Inter-tribal" from her first collection.

Butler writes of the Prairie and she does it so beautifully. By beautiful, I don't mean in the sweeping-cinematographic-romantic way, but she uses language with such mastery and precision that I can't think of a better word than beauty, though I'm sure Butler would as she's so meticulous with her words. When I read "Wild Onions" I had to put the book aside and then reread it a few times because of this:

bulbs unearthed like molars
crepuscular canyon light

Perfect.

Later, in the section Lepidopterists, she writes of Crowfoot's wives. This, of course, piqued my interest. I had read somewhere that some of the Prairie First Nations people practiced polygamy, but I knew very little about it. From what I remember from the book, it was almost a throwaway line, with not enough detail to appease someone like me. After reading that section, I turned to google, as one does. According to the internet, Crowfoot had up to ten wives, though only three or four at a time. Unsurprisingly, there was not much information about his wives, with the most detail here. I'm not up to it (it really is time for me to leave writing about polygamy behind), but I hope someone out there does write their stories, real or imagined. I'm also curious to whether or not contemporary Blackfoot people consider polygamy as part of their culture, and if so, is reclaiming it part of the discussion. Oh, Alberta, your history is so full of polygamy.

Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

Why yes, it's April, which means it's National Poetry Month both in Canada and the USA. It's the time of year where bookish folk remember the often overlooked, sometimes derided, genre, pull up their literary socks, and give it the ole college try of celebrating, and perhaps even reading, poetry. Thank goodness it's a short month.

It's also the time of year when poets try so very hard to have their work read by others. I'm as guilty as the rest, of course. There are so very many poets, and it's so hard to get even poets to read poetry at a consistent pace, let alone those wonderfully bookish people who devour novels like I do tea.

In celebration of Poetry Month, many literary blogs and sites are highlighting poetry in some way. Two places that have my attention are The Rusty Toque's collaborative poem and Literary Press Group 's "CoCoPoPro" aka Coast-to-Coast Poetry Project. And to be completely self-serving, you can see my contribution here.

If you want to go a bit deeper, my I suggest the always fantastic Jacket2 who recently posted North of Invention. I'm slowly going through each section. And I recently came upon Jennica Harper's The Sally Draper Poems. I was lucky to read early drafts of these, and am so happy to see them together like this.

So tell me, how are you celebrating National Poetry Month?

p.s. My giveaway for Glossolalia wraps up at the end of the month. So far only one person has entered the one on my blog. (Should I be embarrassed by this? I'm trying not be as the GoodReads number is higher than I expected. ) Follow this link and comment for your chance to receive a copy of your own. Your odds are good!