Carol Malyon: poet without an email address



Poet Carol Malyon

MOON & COW

they exist for each other,
this moon, this cow

cow watches
bright dappled clouds
graze like cattle
in fields of sky

moon lightens
cow's white patches
until a cloud
lies on the ground

on a moonless night
there's no such thing as
cow (from Headstand, 19)

As I always do when I'm at the Artbar in Hamilton, I meet people known for their unstinting devotion to art, poetry & music. Whether poet, dramatist or musician, publisher or translator there's something remarkably unique about each of them I usually like to take away with me, & I do this either by purchasing their work or through the ritual of conversation and hopefully an exchange of email addresses at the end. The internet's an ideal way to carry on the discussion & keep in touch: to me, in fact. it's become something of a sine qua non of literary expression itself.

How surprised I was to discover that Carol Malyon, one of two featured poets reading at the Sunday, November 7th Artword Artbar reading series didn't have an email address to give me. As elegant, articulate and gracious a spokesperson for contemporary Canadian poetry as she is, publisher and editor, writer of novels, short stories, poetry and children's fiction, friend to many established literary figures and a very familiar presence herself in the poetry reading circuits: I seemed unable to connect this respected, well known literary figure to cyber anonymity. It was hard to imagine how the real Carol Malyon I had the pleasure to meet for the first time at Artword was all but virtually nonexistent online.

No email address. By cyber anonymity I don't mean that information about author, background and her works can't be easily accessed (of course, nothing could be easier). She does have an online presence in that sense. It's just that Web 2.0, with all its resources, tools and literary cyberfora, has been a way for me to write for a public of more than one and receive the sorts of  responses the writer looking for attention is likely to get. If nothing else, Internet writing is a fast, complex and omnivorous affair that keeps in its meta-data stores a distinct literary imprint of every writer & work that crosses its path. And when I knew I wouldn't be able to fix my own brief encounter with Malyon on the usual cyber coordinates, the effect was a little disorienting. The computer, far from being a benign influence, actually threatened to turn this meeting between us into a non-event. Malyon, sensing the imminent extinction of a vital moment, purposely slowed the pace & tempo of our talk, making it very difficult to converse on my own terms. I felt forced (but not against my will) to pause at the threshold of a real encounter.

She made me feel, perhaps for the first time, the palpable tensions that do exist between two very different media that frame our lives: a live and a digitized one.Talking to her reminded me, in other words, of the more significant cadences & pauses of conversation with a live poet, unfiltered & unconstrained by digital technologies. It wasn't in anything she said to me for the entire discussion lasted just minutes, centered around general pleasantries of a first meeting and the purchase of two books of hers. Perhaps she sensed in my own rather busy (perhaps intrusive) presentation a typical privileging of the cyber over the real world of face-to-face dialogue that's all too fashionable these days & that must have struck her as unacceptable. As if she was trying to say to me, plus ça change plus ça reste la même chose! There's is to be no hurrying with her, and if the conditions are right, conversation with Carol Malyon can very well last for hours. Perhaps months & years: perhaps throughout an entire lifetime.

How lucky bill bissett is to have co-authored with Carol Malyon a book of recorded conversation entitled griddle talk: a yeer uv bill n carol dewing brunch, a work that seems to have offered a view of human communication as antidote to the highly impersonalized Facebook & Twitter varieties. How lucky we all are. I understand what inspired the great Canadian avant-gardist to record (as only bill bissett can!) conversations with this remarkable individual. If ever there was a case of human interaction that purposely transcends language, idiom and two very different poetic sensibilities, this is it. But I feel now as if Carol Malyon's included me in the same human community of poetry, language and compassion for the writer's calling: as if I'd been included in the same griddle talk.

Not only did I walk away with a sense of a potential friendship and a conversation to continue into the years ahead, I also felt inspired to read Malyon's Headstand (Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 1990). The presence of the poet I met at Artbar is particularly strong (and profound) in the poem "Iris" (49) to which I've written my own response poem (dedicated to Carol Malyon, of course). Eager for a reply, I will have to call Malyon by phone and announce my blog article and response poem directly to a real person, dialoguing with a live voice. And if the call happens to last for hours, I can't say I haven't been prepared for it already.

"Hollyhocks and a rose"

A poet's hollyhocks, a rose real as the vase,

  stem in water:

one's in a Malyon poem

 the other exfoliates in front of me

 Like a Malyon poem

in which a daughter & elderly mother

 at sunday dinner,

can't bear to look into each other—

  the hollyhocks (in my eye)

and a real late autumn rose set in a vase,

  don't sit together anymore,

at my table