Aestheticism and The Canadian Modernists: Aspects of a Poetic Influence by Brian Trehearne: true imitation and/or directions towards a new Canadian 'aesthetics'

"A poet's impact is measured by how much he has to say that is important about man and his essential being, not by his innovations of style, though these may lead to a new discussion of thought and feeling" (Raymond Souster, cited in Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists by Brian Trehearne)"

Reading Trehearne's interesting study of the origins of Canadian Modernism in the early twentieth century brings to mind some obvious parallels with that other equally significant experimentalist revolution in 60s Vancouver: significant because both were indigenous to a place and cultural milieu (McGill University in Montreal; University of British Columbia in Vancouver), associated with a particular university-based press (McGill's Fortnightly Review UBC's radical TISH), and led by strong activist poet-voices whose literary temperaments gave impetus and direction to literary innovation (W.W.E. Ross, Raymond Knister, Robert Finch and F.R, Scott in Montreal; George Bowering, Fred Wah and Frank Davey in Vancouver). But the most interesting similarity (and difference) lay in the degree to which foreign influences made their way into Canadian cultural domains and created new literary paradigms. Trehearne's study offers a truer case of literary imitation at the end of the nineteenth-century than was the case at the half-point of our own.

In my opinion, failure to offer anything more than imitation was the undoing of the Canadian avant-garde movement in Vancouver. The same could not be said of its earlier historical counterpart in Quebec. Why? An understanding of 'imitation' is pivotal here. American Objectivism, at least as heralded by Olson, Creeley and Duncan in Canada's own 60's revolution, offered wildly experimentalist models of  writing, shored up by French poststructuralist thought, most forms of which never seemed to outlive their authors. With their most notable advocates usually left with nothing to do after a few seminal starts, radical poetries during this period lived in brief glorious spurts and then grew out of fashion (or morphed into different but structurally analogous visual and aural offsprings in the 70s and 80s).  And were it not, of course, for Canada Council and the solidification of state-sponsored Art, the Gordian knot of poetics and politics, university Anthologies may have been reluctant to offer them as specimens of good Canadian writing and a whole Ph.D industry devoted to solidifying even more, and extending into the publishing world, new postmodernist styles would have ground to a halt. Were it not for bad imitation,in a word, there would not have been (as there continues to be) this proliferation of mostly derivative art.

Imitation, on the other, took a very different turn in 20s and 30s Montreal, a kind that matters and may go quite a ways towards redefining a true Canadian  'aesthetics'. If I'm asked what the alternative to contemporary poetry is I'd say it's been pushed to the side so long I hardly recognize it but it's there, reappearing in the oddest places: by temperament and tone a type of writing that is faithful still to an earlier Canadian generation of 'aesthetic' writers like Robert Finch, F.R. Scott and John Glassco. Canada's first poetic avant-gardists, "[f]ar from interrupting the flow of European literatures from the Renaissance to the modern age" (11), saw the necessity for both adaptation and critical awareness of its shortcomings once transplanted onto Canadian shores. Wisely tracing from Restoration to Romantic, to Victorian and then to Aestheticism/Decadent the pattern of adaptation to foreign literary paradigms, Trehearne portrays the Modernists as writers conscious of the continuity of tradition whose grip on them seemed all but impossible to shake off.

In a discussion of the displacement of Romanticism by the Victorians,Trahearne makes the important point (one worth remembering throughout any discussion of poetic influence) that innovators "felt called upon to struggle beyond [the literary past], to turn its renovation of the human spirit outward to a reconstitution of society, to which endeavour their greatest cultural achievements seem fundamentally linked." (11) The same point could have been made about the substitution of Victorian by the later Aesthetic/Decadent poetries. And, of course, Trahearne is diligently making the same point about that of Aesthetic theory by Canada's own budding Modernists. The players may be different in any generation, and the literary names and methodologies, but a principle of aesthetic adaptation is clearly envisaged as one in which newness must be conditioned by both artistic temperament and uniquely distinct native sensibilities.

A similar spirit of renovation exists today, where it dares to be seen, known only by its dusty skirmishes with Can Lit and forced to claim for itself the role of a new avant-garde (as I've mentioned in my blog posts on the poetry of Andreas Gripp): not so much iconoclastic in spirit as 'eclectic' in the old Modernist sense, reconfiguring without dismembering the past.  As Eliot says "No poet, no artist, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists." (The Sacred Wood) Alternatives such as these to contemporary models seem not to have been given a place at the literary table: remote guardians of a vital literary appreciation lost in postmodern spectacle. Not that the lyrical voice doesn't exist today but it's been sadly denuded, reduced to shadowy content of bpNichol, bill bissett, Daphne Marlatt and scores of weaker imitators. Diminution (trivialiazation) of true lyrical voice today in Canada that go hand in hand with markets and state-sponsored Art instead of meaningful cultural transmission. The demise of the lyrical voice in postmodern poetries is a topic worth exploring in detail.

Almost a hundred years later a need arises (as never before) for a return to the art of aesthetes, writers with an ear for rhythms, creative dictions and latent unconventionalities of expression: unafraid to revisit stock themes of death, nature and nation-building that have sadly been devalued. I have located in Trehearne's study of the Aesthetics influence on Canadian writers in the 20s a living alternative to the failed radical 60s project, a work valuable primarily in the way it envisages for us today possible directions towards an aesthetics rebirth. Aesthetes arise wherever you are! it seems to whisper into the ear. Disbanded forces of inspired writing, take heart!  How oddly scholarly researches into poetic influences have left me not just more dissatisfied with the present but yet hopeful, at the same time, that literary-historical researches can draw instructive parallels and the show a way out of the morass of failed experimentalist writing. Scholarship that doesn't subserve state ideology, for once disinterested, patient and respectful.

But is the idea of searching for the avant-garde in an earlier experimentalist period a case of useful analogy-hunting or pure serendipidity? Does aesthetics as an alternative poetic trajectory divorced from Aesthetics the late nineteenth-century European movement of Wilde, Swineburne and Morris qualify as a valid literary category, much less the rallying-cry for the type of literary newness I want? Trahearne's thesis is that Canadian Modernists are not glorified late Romantics but a group of engaged artists who found elements of Aesthetic/Decadent elements more congenial to a distinctively Canadian project, for which reason (among others) they never really took to the very fashionable Imagistic poem of Pound and Williams. (12-13) Similarly contemporary aesthetic writers are not just disgruntled postmodernists who've been rejected by mainstream publishing (though that's true to a certain extent) and want change for change's sake: having just recently found their voice in putting forward a more congenial 'aesthetics', they've opted rather for a more 'formal' or lyrically self-defining style particularly adept at sensing the "'dangerous', unnatural, or artificial intensities" of human experience. (15) In this category I place contemporary poets like Andreas Gripp, Michael Mirolla, Gregory Gunn and Stanley White.

In the era of canonized feminist, gay/lesbian and poststructuralist studies (now considered the 'Postmodernist past' in this new paradigm of change) a new 'aesthetics' won't just affirm what's been done but take them up into a new synthesis: in fact, not to see it as doing this would seem a strange, hostilely unwelcoming gesture because, in Trahearne's view (and mine),

The poetry of Aestheticism expresses an exhaustive appreciation of beauty, in an atmosphere more or less of poignancy, and reflects a concomitant search for intensity of experience, whether in religious passion, aesthetic rapture, or a sexual intensity that uplifts the lover to a vision of his beloved...(14)

and,

...there are elements in the literature of Aestheticism that are not only congenial to Modernist theory but central, that Aestheticism was a necessary cultural step taken before the Modernist revolution could be initiated. (18)

As I've said, we can cull from Trehearne's insightful characterization of early poetic influence an 'aesthetics' rebirth of sorts. I'd like to summarize (within the restrictions of a blog article) just those points in his discussion of the rise of Modernist poetics in 20s and 30s Canada that can serve as markers of a rise of a growing aesthetic sensibility in post-millennial Canada, one defined by the need to restore to poetry its voice and lingistic richesse too sadly compromised in a failed experimentalist poetics.

Firstly, Aestheticism by definition celebrates richness of imagery, rhythm and diction, a pursuit of "style for its own sake" (in Trahearne's words) that calls for a more layered, encrusted poem than we've been accustomed to. But the form does not marginalize those who opt for narratives of opposition, difference and institutional defiance; it can embrace even radical poetries as inspired (and inspiring) presences in their own right. The contemporary(as minor) and modernist (as major) poet distinction is offered as a paradigm against which anyone may rebel without loss of artistic integrity. For, to our detriment,

The line between major and minor poet has never been so obscured as in this late twentieth century of settled critical relativism, or in this difficult nation, whose most significant poets still struggle to achieve the mastery that earns world acclaim for an enduring voice in literature (71)

Meaningful discussion around both the negative and positive aspects of literary influence is be encouraged. To trust in established conventions and styles of effective writing won't for aesthetics poetry ever amount to the same damning of execrable styles (like the lyric) as in the Vancouver 60s manifestos.

Secondly, approximations to a standard, if put into question, are only done so as a way of maintaining a salubrious sense of the past held in reverence in Canada long before it became the dirty postcolonial discard of today. Trehearne says that "all literary movements have deep roots in the standards that they think to reject" (40), but also that

it may be that we have arrived a point of cultural security at which we will not be afraid to discover the influences that have shaped us, a point at which we can seek and take pride in the ways in which our artists have seized upon, and adapted with their own efforts, the traditions of other countries and of foreign artists (9)

so that both questioning and adaptation, the "traditions of other countries" and our own are kept as commensurable sides of the same movement towards newness. Failure to recognize this homeopathy of literary transmission in our Vancouver 60s experiment resulted in creedal and top-heavy state-sponsored Art.

Thirdly, a poetry graciously acceding to both tradition and accommodation acknowledges a useful (Bloomian) need to homage poetic strength as the basis for an understanding of imitation. What that means is that practitioners of 'new writing' could write as convincingly in old. Trahearne speaks of Ross and Knister as alternating with skill between new experimentalist and traditional forms (as in the case of Ross's Sonnets): fruitful imitations of Amy Lowell or Pound never straying from their their own predilections for traditional verse.

There is no question at all that Imagism influenced Knister and Ross, that there are elements of their poetry that are Imagistic, or that the word has some usefulness in our discussion of their canons. But what manner of Imagism touched them? The Poundian? The "Amygistic"? Williams's Imagism? Did they receive it passively or develop it in directions that we can now delineate? If the latter, how far did they go? (37)

That sort of elegant versatility is a function of a key synthetic impulse in Canada's very best poets (an observation, in my view, that doesn't apply to the 60s Vancouver experience): namely, however late (or early) the inheritances of foreign literary models, readers can in their poetry expect a unique hybrid of past and contemporary that looks as if it could've been written only on our shores. Even when poets in the 40s (Layton, Dudek and Klein) wrote in a more distinctively modernist style, the voice and tone were always lyrical. Poetry seemed always (and continues even today) to swing between the Aesthetic and "committed and realistic poetry" (314). In fact, "So necessary is Aestheticism to the birth of Modernism that, in a country where no significant Aesthetic period had existed, one had to be created before Modernism could occur." (314) Trehearne is even quite correct in wondering if even Canada's most famous exponent of the Beats sensibility, Leonard Cohen, was really influenced by them at all (313).

Contemporary Canadian literature: Lament for a literary nation

                                          "Squalid acquiescence in the cast-offs

                                            of reputed poetry. Here, Bellerophon,

                                            is a livery hack, a gelding,

                                            easy pace, easy to hire,

                                            all mansuetude and indifference"

                                                                         (Basil Bunting)

If Writing in Our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003), by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005) is the effect, the causes are enough to give pause. So what effects in particular? As a chronicle of fifty years of radical poetries, and a pretty well researched and thoughtful one at that, the book gives a rather straightforward narrative of interesting experimentalist writings (and researches), reinforced by relevant critical theory. In Butling and Rudy's own words,

We chose the adjective "radical" because its general definition—"tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions" (Webster's)—encompasses political, social, and aesthetic activities. The radical poetries in this study all enact "extreme changes." In the chapters that follow we discuss aspects of the TISH poetics, concrete and sound poetry, deconstructive poetics, and poetry inflected by race, gender, class, and sexuality (xi).

Thoughtful commentary buttressed by good examples, and even interesting anecdotal information by author Butling who's lived with partner Fred Wah a good deal of the early 'radical' period in Vancouver, make for a good, informative read. They've done exactly what the Preface said they'd do, and in lucid, well-articulated and accessible prose (some of the technical 'bafflegab' kept to a tolerable minimum), surveying the course of the Canadian 'avant-garde' across generational, ethnic, national and cultural divides: leaving no doubt, in the end, as to the effects of this literary-cultural development on literary studies in Canada today.

And as for causes? Anything approximating the 'radical' in Canadian poetics can be traced to well-documented literary developments: firstly, a kind of student activism in the 60s aimed at dismantling traditional elitist 'imperial' discourses, and led by activist-poets like bpNichol, Fed Wah, George Bowering, etc; secondly,the concomitant rise of what the authors (citing American poet Robert Duncan) call "working ground magazines", the small "grass roots" type press that served, in place of mainstream media, as primary conduit for the dissemination of a new poetry and poetics;  thirdly, the influence of the American Objectivist poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, etc) visibly present on campus, teaching, workshopping and inspiring a generation of primarily middle-class student-writers; and lastly the direction the early literary activism gave to a later (perhaps even more radically) marginalized poetics of women, gays/lesbians, and First Nations writers.

But causes, especially when we consider those of experimentalist writing in Canada, can be every bit as authorially/textually unstable as the subject they try to develop. What I mean is that for every given there is a curiously implied ungiven: the troublesome 'shadow' to the work's claim to give true "historiographic and critical" things.The field is fraught with inconsistencies and clearly emerging 'political' predilections. Precisely because the book's so neatly documented and elucidated Butling and Rudy can't help but disclose (intentionally or not)  a set of  problems that lie at the basis of 'survey' studies in general and, in my view, threaten to undermine the work's own particular insights into the nature of a Canadian avant-garde. What looks like disinterested scholarly work serves as a reminder of why (and how) a real nationally distinctive poetics never could flourish here (even when it tried to): borrowing a phrase from George Grant, Writing in Our Time is actually a lament for a literary nation.

While not accusing authors Butling and Rudy of purposely misstating the case, the former seems to be aware, at least in principle, of how anything new ever tries to get a foothold here, anticipating (and anticipating only) a kind of balanced overview of the history of contemporary writing:

...new subjects do not birth themselves, fully formed by their individual talent and energy alone, as the restricted economy of capitalism would have us believe. They enter the social imaginary via the material spaces of little magazines and small presses and by virtue of the work of editors who change the discursive terms within those sites. (229)

And that's as far as healthy 'self-critique' gets for it relapses again into what has been the book's predominantly self-justifying portrayal of literary newness. For given the tenor of her work she cannot believe that progressive editorial and publishing practices alone are sufficient, and says as much in a sentence or two below,

The literary struggles of the 1990s are informed by the broader social/political justice movements of the past few decades that sought self-government, territorial rights, redress, and legislated equality by and for historically disadvantaged groups. (229)

politicizing literary production in Canada in ways all too familiar to us. The rhetorics of this politicization of the Arts has been the subtext of this work. A radical poetry can't flourish here because it's bound to be (i) too imitative, (ii) too 'acritical' (not critical in the sense in which, for example, Peter Bürger claims in Theory of the Avant-Garde an avant-garde must be), and, most importantly, too creedal (read state-dependent) for a sense of its own value and self-legitimacy.

That a poetics native ('aboriginal' in a true sense ) to Canada never emerges is clear, to begin with, from Butling and Rudy's own characterization of the influence of American poets and literary movements on the TISH poets during the heady 60s Vancouver 'liberation' movements. (3 TISH: "The Problem of Margins"). Not just the seminal TISH but even magazines (small presses, too) like grOnk/Ganglia, blewointment, Scree, dANDdelion all look as if they could have been mimeographed in Robert Duncan's basement.

The authors also (and regrettably) rely for most of their exposition on Deleuzzian and Derridean notions of the 'rhizome', 'margins' and 'intertextuality' without considering if they belong at all on Canadian soil. Not that postmodern theory is a bad thing: it just seems to have been uncritically deployed. (See 4 bpNichol and a Gift Economy: "The Play of a Value and the Value of a Play"). Consequently not just poetry (workshopped and imitated ad nauseum) but poetics itself relies, ironically enough, on new imperialist languages of both French poststructuralist and American Objectivist, Beats and Language theory, an inconsistency that oddly seems not to have been noticed. Afraid to strike out on their own, towards a distinctive Canadian 'avant-garde', too many writers of experimentalist poetry sound 'derivative'. And so academic literary theory (and even appropriations of that current 'mainstream' view by publishers) tends to look 'acritical', neither too imitative nor too original in design but always something in between, a composite of all the fashionable 'isms' awkwardly handled. Just textbook critical discourse and the Ph.D industry it always empowers.

And if publishing (and the ancillary 'awards' and 'promotion' industry) is to flourish, it must read from the same critical texts so that a 'creedal' (read state-sponsored) notion of the Arts emerges in which writers "pick a critical apparatus" (186) and apply for the appropriate Canada Council grant. The result is the most indissoluble link of "politics and poetics" imaginable.  Butling concludes her discussion of radical poetries by asking: "What is an activist poetics? So many of the cultural activists of the 1990s are also poets, but how are their politics and poetics linked?" (244) I think, ironically, she and co-author Susan Rudy may have unwittingly answered that question long before we get to the end.

Michael Mirolla's "Light and Time": mysteries of imagery and language

One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language." (Gaston Bachelard)

  

Michael Mirolla looks into his art as into a language prism: light glances off  many sides of the  'object' at once and time, particularly time, is what attempts to hold it still. They seem to work as artistic principles, informing and revelatory: the condition and product of the work itself. But as time lets go, the poem is left not just as the brilliantly light-refracted piece it is but also as that always perennially interesting "description without place" (as Wallace Stevens says), the demystified "thing as it is". As he says in "Descendings", "One toss and th' impressions gone./Time is a vengeful puddle quick to dry/behind us." (28); and in the same poem, "And yes, th' impression's still there/where you left it/and, as you slip in, the sun/ rises on thick haunches".(32) Once seen it's changed for ever, and always set afterwards to reveal more significant properties and depths. 

Is this the artist in a Surrealist trance or word-dreamer of daring and verbal precision? A proponent for a radical Canadian nouveauté ?

Or perhaps a classicist at heart, a transmitter of culture, language and literary influences? We can't read Michael Mirolla with pre-set notions of the poem in mind, and it won't do either to restrict him to place, time or literary influence, not if we want to keep the true constructive impetus of the work. Novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright, recipient of numerous literary prizes, Mirolla's appeal must be to a world-wide audience: certainly wherever poetry is venerated as among the highest expressions of human sentience and sentiment. 

Light and Time

Light

and time—

you know the two well

don't you?

The empty heart of the tunnel

that beats against you

photon by photon

and chips away at the edges

     where you exist,

Given time

there'd soon be

nothing left

but light.

Light, time: object of light and then of reflection are promising as literary first principles. Mirolla's is a unique type of impression-gathering that at first can reduce the object to a sum of pure visual (or imagistic) effects.The nature of poetry is to never lose sight of the object, writer glued to it sometimes with an irrepressible tenacity, for whatever light illumines will soon strike the reader as a vibrant living presence. To turn the poem one way, held high in front of you, is to look for delectation and brilliance but to sense also that something's been transformed in the viewing, whether poem, object or reader. Mirolla doesn't just aestheticize his objects in the hope of turning them into traditional vehicles for a personal lyricism of his own: the object that's read also envelops, offering a wealth of phenomenal details. In the case of "Light and Time", the poem that frames the whole work, light is in the end an eerie sort of receptacle for darkness imaged as the "empty heart of the tunnel/that beats against you/photon by photon". A similar sort of falling into the thing's inscrutable heart after an extinction of light appears in "Roman Sketch" where "Gravity sucks you down into/the tombs, the dry unlickable dust,/a shimmer of molecule slipping/past molecule" (46). Instead of simply describing  Mirolla's reduced poetry to mystery of illumined seeing. 

Crane Lake 1

We all speak of depth

as if the water mirrored something

more profound than the dragon-fly

that lands non-chalantly on your arm;

or the snapping turtle that hovers near,

its craggy face blowing bubbles

thru the lattice of sunlight, the gleam

of an ancient presence that ignores

all around it...even our god himself.

We all speak of silence

as if the momentary glimpse

of loon should make us hush

in awe. Should make us forget the rivulets

of a dying lamp pointed

at the tight core of our betrayal.

We speak of memory

as if... as if...

How much can literary first principles help us really to understand Mirolla's treatment of other objects, such as lakes, works of art, philosophical ideas? Light and time are more limitations than ways to unpack the poem, or rather conditions that can only be impossibly met. As they should be.The object of "Crane Lake 1", for example, can't be just metaphor of "depth" and "ancient presences" as if that were enough nor a presentation of fragments of a landscape, "dragon-fly", "water","rivulets" pieced together only and strictly in imagination. Speaking about Crane Lake as the poet's traditional lake divests it of its 'substantive', irreducibly real nature, that more vital something to "make us hush/in awe". 

The depth we've come to the poem for soon reduces to the empty "silence" of language or retreats  into "memory", if all we've got is the stammering language of "as if": if instead of a lake, only a sinister immersion into the "the tight core of our betrayal." Note the inadequacy of figurative language to get the memory exactly in line with the passing of a friend in "Snap: On The Death Of A Friend": "like bed-sheets stiff with starch/like the smell/like the smell/like the smell of me." (40)

So what, and where, is that essential poem we seem to be always anticipating and never getting? Its timelessness, in fact? Mirolla himself can pose the question as "What certainty? What dense core?" ("Between the Lines" 17) because I suspect that each poem is its own unique way into the elusive heart. And the heart seems to lie somewhere between "the ghost" and the "flaxen-haired body" ("Rational Thought" 16); the "green boat" and its occupant "who can't wave back" ("Is It Someone We Know" 77) words and flesh ("Between the Lines" 17); and also between road kill  and all the signs in Nature that should have alerted you from the beginning: like a mourning dove's crucifix, trees "strain[ing] against their leashes" ("The Art of Walking" 79) In every poem an object, dancer, rower, road kill and then its lightless, denuded form as the poem that leaves us only with Rilkean mystery . Perhaps the poet's enjoined the reader "to play with words/like a whistler in the dark." ("Descendings III." 30), sensing the impossibility of giving the poem whole to us.

To Franz K.

Tubercular swimmer in the o'er-

brimming soup, let me throw you a line.

We have voyaged together in short bursts

like DNA but you've outstripped me

now, diving beneath the fetid waves

without cease, only to surface again

with the swollen worm firmly between your teeth.

Severed antenna from a long-lost sense,

you held it tight, held it accountable.

And it wasn't enough that it tugged at the human

in you - how could it have so misunderstood?

I, on the other hand, friend to the shattered

light, the crystal blossoming, have flown

towards a sky full of glass tinkle and

laughter, the intense magic of daily events.

There, I await you, dangling a thread

like a viral infection before your eyes.

Yes, it's a desperate re-creation—

lacking cruelty—but you will reach for it.

Won't you?

Gaunt scissors dipped in red

I suspect that the poem can only approximate to its object, imprisoned in the light of bewitching vision itself. A register not of synthesis but of the essential irreducibility of language to its object, as if the poem itself could only be "shattered/light" and nothing but that. Language can't connect to the subject, poet calling it "a desperate re-creation", and if it tries to the effect is as absurd as trying to throw a life line to a drowning Frank K: a Kafkaesque impulse to revel in the improbabilities (or absurdities) of using the poem as vehicles for meaning. Even at the close DNA level (and what can be closer?) kinship between poet and literary ideal is too impossibly irreal. Life lines, in Kafkaesque style, metamorphose into viral threads, and implements of writing "Gaunt scissors dipped in red".

Its seems now light and time are agents of a new opening to language (as Bachelard says), reconfigured on patterns of incongruities and asymmetrical viewing that mark the true experiences from which poetry arises. Looking at the model of Vieillard's painting, in "Le Repos Du Vieillard", is not to see a person, delineated in shade and tones, but a transformation of a model's stillness, grace into ghastly insect body and a place of Art itself into Tartarean hell. "Foreign hands have gripped her iris./She crawls in the cellar dense with sand,/looks for the nipple of gas her breath can ignite./Snow hisses in recoil." ("Le Repos Du Vieillard" 19)

And, of course, it won't stop there. Not In this new transfiguring language of darkling meanings where light seems to give shape only to sinuous Kline bottles, and air itself "moans when invaded" ("Blind Alley" 44). Metaphor can empty itself out and leave the reader following the insect's trail to sense: for example, "The day is a slow beetle" in whose head a day of mortal living is reenacted ("The Day Is A Slow Beetle" 21). Mirolla also refers to similar "beetle dreams" in another poem ("Blind Alley" 42). A classical author like Prudentius, known for purity and  asceticism, can become a sort of foreground to the poet's portrait of the quintessential  lush Etruscan garden ("The Garden" 23). Or the dying light of day "at the deep end/of the garden" can be imaged as "the silent dog...slashing across the moonbeam throat." ("Extinguishing" 35) Or even a lie's "essential geography", said to reside just below the heart, turns into "the mauve outline of a lamb caught high in the gorse" ("When We Lie" 33). 

Data De Facto

Only from the unbidden will 'things' come clear;

only from the margin will the centre be found;

only from re-vision will the spectacle unfold.

Reverse the prism to see the light;

undo the machine to regain your limbs.

But the opposite of complex is not the simple

and ill-logic won't cure what ails us.

The frozen fields just beyond our doors

aren't devoid of life. They're only waiting

for the right time.

What comes from the unbidden is the blackbird's wing;

all the margin tells you is: Yes, you are here;

the spectacle holds up its own mirror,

bloody at the edges.

Mirolla can now enumerate some of the 'givens' (data) of his work, in an attempt to save it perhaps from the ravages of postmodernism. Mirolla's unspoken references to Derrida ("margin") and Debord ("the spectacle") are telling and well-timed. The reader, first, cannot call forth 'things', for things are already there. The complexity of the poem means envisaging the appearance of sudden (delightfully paradoxical) 'newness': how else to refer to the staleness of old friends as "Zeno upside-down" ("The Secret Place" 52) or even Los Angeles as an outmoded "parable of the world" (("L.A" 50). And, second, if we lose the centre in illumined viewing (as is the effect of reading most experimentalist writing today!), it's all the more reason to refocus or even shift perspectives a bit ("Reverse the prism to see the light"). It seems to follow that, third, the poem is a 'de facto' product, not the mirror but the mirrored, and not so much surface reflection as depth undistracted by chimerical light.

Imagery and language, however valuable in themselves, really can't be seen as anything but limitations of the poetic craft. Approximations at best. But there's no mistaking the centrality of the object in Mirolla's poety, its "Quint Essential (58)" lucidity and also depth and mystery. Unlike a lot of experimentalist writing in Canada, there's a traditional reverencing for object and narrative voice that can't ever be open to the charge of housing sexist or imperial sentiments (contrary to what most Canadian 'academic' readers still think to this day). Here poetry is not textual collage nor the site of multiple discourses nor specimen of any of the experimentalist credos responsible for some disastrous writing within the past few decades. Has it become unfashionable then to speak with "God's Language" (76): has the impetus to that sort of poetic scope and intention been beaten out of the literary psyche? Has anyone dared as courageously as Michael Mirolla to bring back the mystery of reading and the integrity of poetic experience?

Awakening: there are puddles

everywhere; images of time that reflect

for a moment and then evaporate

with the sun.

                         god's language only

is spoken here.

"Death of a Monarch"

 

(Monarch butterfly in 'Longwood Gardens', Pennsylvania)

 

 

It's good to see, borne on the same wiry wing,

  both flight and an aery death—

 

Straying beyond impassioned needlefloors,

  wind-coarsened,

a butterfly still thinks it's good to be: a Monarch,

  alone, high as angels,

and even as she flies, the lone spectral sunspeck

   of my eye,

and dies unambiguously in my dream

 

For catching a poppy sun late, she raises fairylands

  wherever wings go,

& wing for wing she's the equal of any avifauna,

  vivific and bright!

Or even as a noon's lone rover, a last sweep

  into dusk, this queen's akin

 

to noonshades, too, as if she fell trying to beat back

  a rigid bark-cold

or a cruel rasping petal-heat: death on some cleft leaf!

  But see her (as I did!)

hop from out some doddered spider tree, tangled,

  spun on day's filthy dreck,

 

& rising tempestuously, loosing into worlds! Look!

  Seer to the azalea, pearly-cute,

just there as she's about to fade flaring into night, quiet,

  becoming breath,

and winging a phantasmal virginal flight into reeds.

  Moonshades to soften a fall.

 

Poetry of Penn Kemp: participating in "a seasonal song cycle of ecco poetry"

When a poetry reading is accompanied by choric chant, dancing and audience participation, it creates, as owner and director of "Aeolian Hall" Clark Bryan says, a "sacred place". And it did. And when the poet is Penn Kemp, activist, publisher and artist who's known for taking the "textual & aural boundaries" of language into a uniquely Canadian avant-garde, the poetry reading can sing to its own sacred energies. And it did.

This "Summer Soirée Festival Event" at London's "Aeolian Performing Arts Centre"played to a full audience, privileged (as Maria and I were) to view "a seasonal song cycle of ecco poetry", the lyrics of Penn Kemp wonderfully transformed into music and dance accompaniment. The tempo (as how could it not) alternated with great skill and precision between the dithyrambic, lyrical and elegiac: every stage in the cycle drew on the powers of language, movement and sound to tell the tale ('epic' in scope) of seasonal growth, the world's present disaster-course and the hope of regeneration. Both social awareness and healing that lie at the basis of Penn's sound opera and her poetics, both at one incredible reading.

Ruth Douthwright's interpretive dance evoked the very primal motions of living and dying, hands, arms and feet shaped into seasonal winds, rains, while artists Anne Anglin, Brenda McMorrow, and Rob Menegoni created through vocals, music and percussion the "paeans of praise or rant" necessary to give essential voice to what Penn describes as a "MotherWorld's enChantments". From the striking of the Keiso through the rhythmic refrains and to the exotic Djembe and cymbals, Penn's reading was designed to elicit response, at one moment holding an audience in reverential silence and the next releasing it to the poem's wildest impulses.



I celebrate the 'ecco' in her ecco poetry, enjoying the playful senses of language, sound-effect and ecology activism that inform Penn's work, as also the whole Art-and-social change impetus of "The Aeolian Performing Arts Centre": for I believe the two are of a piece. The website announces "Aeolian" not just as a Heritage site but a place where culture lives in partnership with the local community. Since it's run for profit, undistracted by the politics of funding, it meets a real need for the type of Art that matters: one that's self-generated, innovative and sensitive to social change. Marion Drysdale's Black Madonnas and AIDS art hang on the walls as a visual representation of the Art and social activism nexus which"Aeolian" was created by Clark Bryan to promote. I celebrate Clark as true cultural entrepreneur.



And, of course, I celebrate Penn Kemp, artistic spirit of MotherWorld poetics whose work in Sound Opera and videopoetry will form the subjects of a later blog post. Meeting her for the first time only confirmed my impression of her as visionary, artist and one of Canada's greatest literary innovators. As I saw Penn after the performance move gracefully among a crowd of friends and supporters, receiving thanks, embracing everyone she met, I couldn't help thinking that the words of the third Chorus served appropriately as homage to someone who's been for many years an active, engaged and always inspiring presence in Canadian poetry: "There you are in moments, between friends, among many. (There you are, again)."

"Anathema: Poems Selected & New" by Andreas Gripp: poetry as true, anti-CanLit and Canadian Part 3

 

Part 3:

What can be said about Gripp's language, or rather the way it reflects an unjust, bizarre and irrational world? How does it come to terms with the equally bizarre way Canada envisages the role of artist in the world? I'd like to continue the discussion of CanLit establishment, a topic begun in my first blog post, with three final poems from "Anathema" serving as illustrative material. 

Gripp's poetry turns out to be a critique of sorts: Gripp the poet a bit of an avant-gardiste, too (post-avant-gardiste?) Peter Bürger in his influential work Theory of the Avant-Garde says that only art with the ability to critique itself can sense both where it's come from and where any development of cultural expression in the future must lie.The role of the individual artist is avant-gardiste in that unique sense. If CanLit can't see its shortcomings, the alienated artist certainly can: for the poet can hold the mirror up to the world of art (through poetry itself) and to institutionalized art, in particular, trying to make the case for something different but that's only been pushed aside to make room for mass-consumable work. Of the poems that conceive themselves as critique and, at the same time, bearers of new expression, "Before It All Gets Read In Books" is an elegant example.

     Before It All Gets Read In Books

     I'd like to damn the poets

     who've said it all before:

     the encounter with eyes

     as jewels. With hair that's gold

     in ponytails,

     that's brushed

     or held in braids.

     Who've met the small

     of slender backs

     and the curves of hips

     and their sway.

     If only none had written

     of a bliss in a kiss of lips...

     I want to be the first to sing

     you are the prettiest girl

     in the world -

     and because a million bards

     have penned it,

     it's trashed as trite cliché.

     O God of archaic

     verse and psalm,

     bring me back

     to English Dukes,

     to Scottish dames and castles;

     not to fight a flaming beast

     or bear the shield of the Lord -

     instead, but for a moment,

     with feathered quill in hand,

     let me write of her radiant face,

     how it enraptures me,

     and her lissome, favoured figure,

     how I'd lose my life to hold.

     Let me be the first

     to say, to state, to scribe I love you.

     Allow the pressman's ink to dry

     on antique, rolled-up parchment.

     Award the abbey's archivist

     the sealing of the Queen.

     For it was never, ever heard

     of such a lovely maiden, fair -

     for just this wondrous instant,

     a thousand and one years past,

     before the Shakespeares,

     Blakes and Burns have poems

     that scream from my horizon.

 As compared to this, CanLit may ask for empty lyricism alone (such as you find in Ministry-approved school texts), easy to read and quickly adaptable to any uses (what Bürger calls the "means-end rationality"), or rest content with the old grand narratives of Nature and cultural 'nation-building' still inexorably tied to an Atwood poetics. Without the possibility of critique, it's either-or, and anything in between, labelled as too abstract or too traditional, gets rejected. I consider Andreas Gripp as falling under the 'traditional' category of a new Canadian avant-garde: poet who treats earlier lyrical models as a type of newness.

CanLit is a self-congratulatory system that purports to justify funding on the promise of celebrating cultural-linguistic heterogeneity but having, in fact, clearly drawn the lines of artistic sensibilities beyond which it won't go because it can't. The very thing that's worth preserving in work like Gripp's goes strangely unnoticed or, more sadly, unappreciated . How inexplicably CanLit stifles the open-endedness of discussion about the very Canadian experience it's been directed to turn to for its own literary materials!  How inexplicably especially when it's confronted by poetry as uniquely true to a Canadian sensibility as the following.

     They Asked Me to Write a Poem

      Against the War but I Only Came Up With This

     It's not about borders

     or bombs at all,

     guerrillas in camouflage

     or secret air raids in the night,

     when the presidents are sleeping

     and the warlords

     are dancing two-steps

     till the dawn.

     It's not about prisoners

     encamped by fences

     or the tanks

     carving tracks

     in Arab sand,

     or the manner in which

     white leaflets drop

     warning masses

     of impending doom.

     It doesn't mean a thing

     that missiles spin

     in secret silos

     underground,

     or warheads

     crown their apex

     with coordinates

     set in space.

     It's about the brother

     you called a "fag,"

     the girl across the street

     you said was "gross,"

     the kid rebuffed on corners

     'cause he's black

     and sporting "Pistons"

     on his shirt,

     that suburban shoppers

     are quick to make assumptions -

     about the businessman

     you assume

     cares for nothing

     other than cash,

     the twins you feel are the same

     and soldiered commies

     if shy Chinese,

     the hatred seeded

     in budding hearts

     with your "children

     keep your distance."

   

 State-run art is especially vulnerable if, by its own mission statement, promoting diversity of linguistic expression is what it has to do, the failure of which will put its entire funding structure into question (as it recently has by the Harper government). So it seems it can appear every bit as conspicuous, when it decides what's in, what's out, as the avant-gardiste him/herself.Every poem it cannot promote is a potential 'gap', 'rupture' in its fabric: the proverbial nail in its coffin.

Without meaning to be it turns out Gripp's poetry is also experimentalist and not just because of its own incompatibility with the  prescriptive impetus of mainstream publishing: it's peculiarly ironic that CanLit cannot ignore him without imperilling itself. Work that underscores this sort of inner-contradiction is, in my view, socially significant. Poetry with the potential to achieve a new 'synthesis', exposing CanLit for the deadening monolith it is,won't ever fare too well in this unresponsive literary environment, and probably never in a poet's own lifetime. But the potential is there. Literary critic Charles Bernstein uses the expression "frame fixation" for the way institutionalized culture tries to inject a false sense of professionalization into art and the kind of legitimacy it hopes culture in the hands of experts, (academics/bureaucrats) will produce. After a time it may be impossible to envisage true competing artistic expressions. Nothing better describes the predicament of the "culture industry" in Canada today.

Maybe a return in Canada to a new 'aesthetics' down the road, awaiting more receptive conditions in a different political milieu. Maybe. But what about the present? If an older classical or traditional or Celtic or Baroque style is offered as new and tries to compete with mainstream art (as just this new experimentalist 'synthesis'), the problem is it can't do so without mainstream art inflicting its terrible imprimatur on poet and his or her work. So why not write a classical poem on why classical poetry can't be written, both critical and self-affirming in the same breath?

     Why I Refuse to Write a Sonnet

     If you were to give an ape

     enough time, behind a typewriter

     I've heard,

     it will compose an English sonnet -

     via the laws of chance

     and average,

     a billion trillion years

     if needed,

     defying the rules of death,

     decomposition,

     in the process.

     If granted a span

     of the same duration,

     I wonder if I'd fare any better,

     constantly failing

     in bumbling attempts

     at the alternating

     rhymes and schemes,

     confusing all the a's with the c's

     and then forgetting

     what quatrain

     should be.

     Although,

     if I were honest,

     I'd say it has nothing to do

     with technique,

     that my inability

     is tied to its subject,

     the what

     that inspires the write,

     or to be more precise,

     the who -

     your face and your body

     untouched by my hands

     as I type and I type and I type.

    

  I believe it's a necessary risk that poets like Gripp, (and also Gregory Gunn, Katherine L. Gordon, Richard Vallance) both retrospective and mindful of their relevance to the world, have to incur. And hasn't Gripp made just that point already in his "Foreword" ? Hasn't he been all to aware already, throughout his years in the poetry biz, of the dangers of mixing art with the institution of art, CanLit? And this in the case of someone who's written rather extensively in both Western and Eastern forms.

He clearly has and, not surprisingly, some of his poems directly reflect the perceived disconnects between language (of art) and the world. Ironically enough, the very poetry CanLit cannot countenance has in it a lot of the same impulse towards nurturing (and promoting) diversity in the Canadian experience that brought the idea of state-sponsored art into being, and yet "Anathema", a marvellous compendium of every imaginable life-experience, from joyous to the most tragic in interhuman relations, cannot be assimilated to it. Gripp understandably deals with that sad alienating fact of his own writing, as he very soberly does in the poem after which his book of verse is named: a poem of mourning as much for the alienated artist as for things forgotten in attics, left with all the mouldy prayers, books and even "an old prophetic song".

     Anathema

     The path to peace

     it's said

     is found in sacred books of old,

     on parchment, dust and ink;

     in a choir's

     hallelujah,

     ringing bells

     & fervent prayer;

     in your mother's photo,

     safe and sound

     with rusted lock and key.

     You scribe your tired platitudes,

     your old prophetic song,

     say the bomb will never fall;

     that cops will join the protest

     and the judge will grant a pardon

     to the Native kid in chains.

     We've kept it all a secret

     in these last and sinful times,

     a post-it note stuck in a box

     of many splendoured things.

     Your haystack's in the attic

     and your treasure chest has mould,

     and forgiveness lies discarded

     as a Christmas wreath in June,

     like a velveteen rabbit

     or a yearbook left to rot

     while the pages curl and brown

     and there's nothing in your future

     worth a simple look and find.

     It's not that hard

     to add a verse

     and paint a pretty picture:

     Governments disband,

     there's no more need

     to demonstrate,

     and prison gates swing open,

     those who leave

     bear violets,

     while violence

     drops as dust.

     Faith begets trust,

     trust begets love,

     and the one

     who was your enemy

     brings you candy in the night,

     saying all is calm in Jerusalem,

     and flags

     are neither waved

     nor burned.

The concluding verse is particularly prophetic: in a country where apathy for the arts grows daily, "and flags/are neither waved/nor burned" even enemies are hard to distinguish from friends, a prevailing CanLit from the few true Canadian poets who feel the rejections the most.

"Anathema: Poems Selected & New" by Andreas Gripp: poetry as true, anti-CanLit and Canadian

Part 2:

   "Don't lament or don't lament only: construct"

     (Charles Bernstein)

   

Even when poems aren't named after people,and perceptions not too narrowly confined to place and circumstance (though these are the attributes I admire most in Gripp's poetry), the effect of reading "Anathema" can be to find some rather surprising twists to stock literary themes of nature, death  (considered in this blog post) and the act of writing itself (the subject of the next). Gripp is a poet who can disclose all those curious windings of the imagination at work because they've been layered expertly into his work. I've identified so far two types of writing in "Anathema": poems like "A Week in the Life of Morgan", "Hildegaard's Tomb", with its attention to the individual, and the more stylized work considered below, distinguished primarily by artistic daring and design.

     And about the wind, the branches will bend

     from its affection

     Though the sun and the rain

     take the credit or the blame,

     it's the wind that roars

     like a neglected middle child

     receiving little thunder

     for its contribution to our lives

     (for it's the water, dear,

     that nourishes;

     the rays of our star

     that causes things to grow).

     And scribes of old and new

     romance the heavens,

     the seas that tickle feet

     upon the beach,

     whispering now and then

     of the wind's surging power

     to make the surf

     that pummels sand

     and draws our shores,

     strength reserved

     for the usual suspects,

     ignorant of the fact

     that the wind has had its fill

     of flapping flags,

     hoisting balloons,

     raising bubbles blown by children,

     keeping kites

     from knotting in trees;

     wishing to be something more,

     paradoxically less -

     gentler, yes,

     than even the breeze

     that guides our sails

     and bounces hair,

     nudging tiny

     seeds

     when farmers

     miss their mark;

     saving a moth

     by lifting it

     out of an awaiting spider's

     reach;

     taking sides, perhaps, heroically,

     but never tearing

     wing or web

     in the effort.

The poem presents wind as a misprized force ("a neglected middle child/receiving little thunder") that is reduced to softer, more poetically treatable qualities. How is this done? Dropping in importance from roar to a gently nudging influence on sands, seeds and webs isn't something wind does by accident; the change in character is a product of the power of expression itself to release a symbol's latent powers (something Gripp also manages to do remarkably well in "The Language of Sparrows").

Both tenor and tempo change just when the presentation of wind as a noisome presence "that pummels the sand/and draws our shores", and brief commentary by ignorant scribes end. The wind, by "wishing to be something more", actually becomes something less in the sense that letting go of cumbersome strength is the way to unleash its truer protective, nurturing side. Biblical or Taoist in inspiration, with its strength on display or "gentler,yes,/than even the breeze/that guides our sail", the wind symbolism used here is among the most effective I've seen in his writings.

Not afraid to use this type of thematic play (and ask for real attention from the reader), Gripp, of course, alienates himself even more from a CanLit verse culture that demands easier, more consumable popular writings. Without trying to make him into something he's not, it's still easy to detect in his work a tension between commercialism and a need for genuine artistic expression: between what  avant-garde theorists like Peter Bürger refer to as the  "ideological reproduction of society"  (what Gripp and I call CanLit) and more self-satisfying expression. A hip hop-inspired 'raving poet' style , lying on the extreme side of poetic popularity, seems to be an offshoot of this growing trend to merge art with immediate commercial success. For Andreas Gripp it's lyrical expression, balanced phrasing and the infusion of an engaging authorial presence that matter and these, paradoxically enough,  are what alienate him from the norm.

To be appreciated, whether in analysis or in the act of reading, the poems have to be clearly 'intuited' as unique expressions of a single living voice engaged with a variety of significant life-experiences. One of Gripp's recent poems, "Chatting with Death over Chai",another work of skillful technique, gives the poem the same sort of textual uniqueness 'wind' enjoys in the above discussion, a stable identifiable design that even among some wildly erratic turns won't ever threaten to break apart. It's what it is and will always appear to be: interestingly arranged typographical and literary composition never leading to anything too abstract or too wildly experimentalist. It's poetry that never fails to make an impression. And the impression here is that of a poem that tries to make dialogue with Death look eerily (but not too ridiculously) plausible. Given the poem's length I will consider sections of it.

     Chatting with Death over Chai

     I met Death

     for tea today,

     surprised by its

     invitation,

     sent

     nonchalantly

     like a post

     from a Facebook friend.

     It asked

     how I was doing,

     why I hadn't

     cared to call,

     or write,

     or even think

     of its existence

     in the days and weeks

     gone past.

     I said

     I'd been

     too busy,

     that Life

     snatched all my time

     (being the

     possessive sort

     that it is),

     telling me to hurry,

     to walk a little faster,

     put my heart

     out on the line.

In a macabre "My Dinner with Andre" setting Death is personified but also trivialized, the interlocutor treated casually and conversation with 'it' reduced to monotonous bits of  "Facebook" talk. Content is dry and  a little ragged; even a potentially momentous (allegorical) drawing up of Life-Death battle lines is comically passed over, as if the thought of treating 'Death' as anything but an amusing topic of conversation over chai is out of the question. This setting and style of talk, potentially comical if we forget what the discussion is about, frame the entire text.

     I confessed to Death

     that it nagged me,

     Life that is,

     like a spouse

     that cracks a whip,

     grinds me to the stone,

     imploring me to reach

     for unseen heights,

     failing to configure

     that from there

     I tend to fall,

     bruise and break

     on the ground,

     that it seems

     to disappear

     in the aftermath

     of plunging,

     returning to rasp

     sweet nothings

     in the time

     I start to heal.

The effect on reader of this absurdist staging is to cause some disorientation since what is perhaps the one topic that deserves to be treated definitively is made the object of endless description. Meanings seem to  have the flightiest regard for the language of conversation itself; the discussion format of the poem (in which Death itself is visibly 'absent') serves up speech as a series of mute half-expressions, a dialogue reduced to a virtual monologue, and generally bored expressionless exchanges instead of real engaging talk. Instead of meaningful literary energeia there is confusion bred of this intentional mocking of dialogue convention by the very participants who try to keep it going. The linguistic center that cannot hold can't but help turn communication into a free-fall that reduces everything to "sweet nothings".

     Life

     was once its friend,

     I hear from this jaded

     soul,

     extra cream and sugar

     in its ever-steaming cup,

     stinging

     from a throbbing hurt

     I didn't know

     it had,

     treated oh so frosty -

     like a neighbour

     that we see

     but never wave

     or smile at,

     one

     we've heard

     bad things about,

     lamenting

     its ostracism,

     our blatant hatred

     of its name,

     our avoidance

     at every cost,

     our refusal

     to look it in the eye,

     to hear its side

     of the story,

     it's claim it isn't

     so bad,

     it's been

     misunderstood,

     that's it's here to shield

     and shroud us

     from the wounds

     that Life

     inflicts,

Borrowing terminology from Charles Bernstein we might say Death's revealed not as ominipresent but as "omniverbal": not symbolic but "heterosymbolic" (My Way: Speeches and Poems). And that ghostly parti-coloured ("scarlet-lettered", Gripp says later) entity that Death's become, present everywhere but nowhere, is subject of an almost endless list of epithets the poet is eager to give, one following the next down the entire page (the typographical arrangement noted above). A portrait of Death that's as quirky as this, one moment the erstwhile friend of Life who's turned "jaded/soul", the next some self-pitying sot who says he's been misunderstood, may seem senseless, and poetically counter intuitive, until we remember that that's what strong unconventional poetry has always been about.

      that breath

     is the ultimate villain,

     a hero of sham and spell,

     Life's night of sleep

     a lie,

     our pillows but a tease,

     that only it,

     our scarlet-lettered

     Death,

     cold-shouldered to the bone,

     gives rest

     that won't be ruptured,

     time without a tick,

     that its bond with Life

     was severed

     by assumptions

     that weren't true,

     that Death

     was the cause of sorrow,

     we should flee it

     whenever we can...

And the list of second-hand reports about what Death is purported to have said or thought, continue on, seeming almost to spiral out of control. Dizzying in scope but essentially unfinished, poem strikes us as lapsing into verbal frenzy that is the result, ultimately, of collapsed subject matter and a misguided urge (every poet falls prey to sometimes) to have the last 'canonical' word: but, of course, it's what Gripp had in mind anyways.