"Bridget bird" book launch: reflections on Cid and Milt and what matters in poetry

Pre-launch chat with guests

                (for Katherine L. Gordon)


When I told a small (but appreciative) group of poets at my Bridget bird poetry launch that in poetry nothing matters more than the "work" and always the faithful readership of a few, I saw suddenly how indebted I was to Cid Corman (whose correspondences I've been reading rather intently over the past several months). Now that I think on it (a day later),  the event may have turned out to be a silent tribute to a communitarian ideal of poetry whose greatest American exponent was Corman himself. And since the poets with whom I'd been privileged to share my day are each uniquely a people's poet the event was also every bit as much a tribute to Milt Acorn, a literary figure James Deahl calls in his recently published Milton Acorn: In A Springtime Instant (Mosaic Press, 2012) our greatest national poet. James read at my Puddicombe launch and seemed, in his usually gracious way, to give the pro-American ship of poetry I seemed to be steering at times the ballast only the great poet from Charlottetown could give it. As one of the founders of the 'people's poetry movement', he has every right to. For every Cid there's also a Milt to be found in Canada.

The people's poet in Canada, as real poets everywhere in the world, get usually squeezed between academic verse and popular mainstream gunk (both taking their impetus these days from the language experimentalists of the Kootenay school variety). The problem is that we seem to know what the poem is and how it's usually written and to whom it's addressed-- all deriving undeniably from Canada's own rich literary history and its cultural legacies-- but the poem, now that it's been equated in our day with Canada Council and writing school regimens long grown accustomed to the instant attention & notoriety of the seminar room: the poem (and poet) is no longer valorized over the means of production, no longer the palpably real difference between the world and the word. Everywhere there are spurious substitutes for the lyrical anguishing of Milt's pure heart, with the only differences between world & word that matter suffering a near liquidation. It seems rather (as perhaps James and Milt both attest) that we've lost our collective memories, rendered unconscious by the repeated blows.

The true poem dispersed among its fake copies has been all but forgotten, and it's the mandate of a people's poetry (of which my own annual summer solstice readings are a small part) to bring to prominence the gathering voice of a few who still believe in poetry community and the intrinsic value of the "work". The traditional commonplaces or even commonalities of poetry--voice, lyrical tradition, cultural influences--cannot but help look remarkably uncommon and exceptional in the face of a bland, heavily bureaucratized Canadian milieu. We each gave yesterday our own alternatives to the specious and fake "meanings" of contemporary verse (or so it seemed to me). My first will most likely be the most stylized (probably the most accessible) of the books of poetry I hope to publish in future because each poem's been consciously modeled after a tradition and distinctive poetical influence, because each is uniquely beholden to a learned form, rhythm & sensibility. And for that I will never apologize to anyone.

Poet with publisher, Stella Mazur-Preda

 To the people's poet the world suffices still, always the repository of imagery and meanings, poets will always mean what they say and the act of writing can still hold up "as 't were" the mirror to a beautiful escarpment scenery of vineyards, ponds and local churchyards. As I've often said, it's a privilege to have been published under the Serengeti imprint, Canada's version of Corman's Origin, and Stella's and Serengeti's ties to the prestigious Tower Poetry Society magazine (Canada's oldest literary magazine) place my first book of verse among some pretty distinguished company. To the people's poet it's good to feel perennially young, always bested (maybe even co-opted) by the 'makers' who've come before (the Crawfords, Acorns, Purdys). No one is bigger than the community to which s/he belongs (certainly no poet) and no poetry, of the kind nurtured and published here, will ever fail to be the bearer of a distinctively Canadian place and of the bard's loving devotion to it. In poetry it's good to feel small.