"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.