April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

see myself staggering through deep snow
lugging blocks of wood yesterday
an old man
almost falling from bodily weakness
— look down on myself from above
then front and both sides
white hair — wrinkled face and hands
it's really not very surprising
that love spoken by my voice
should be when I am listening
ridiculous
yet there it is
a foolish old man with brain on fire
stumbling through the snow
                    (from "Listening to Myself", Al Purdy)

The bad...

essorer, autoriser, liquéfier, cancaner,
the burning ice which was of course
the body between paradox
inside a tent of skin
unwrapping organs with two eyes
they call (our) planets in orbit around
lost saturday's rotisseries
and we'll all be graduate students forever
in phonetic manners metaclosure
remembering parks forget
their golf course mandates in penumbra
the homeless
settle in as antimatter at the same time
a labyrinth of flint hits syntax
as a throat tongue and six teeth form
a hebrew letter meaning aids
intellect and capital in drag
the paper occupied by paint a "had-to"
into focus drawing out to new communities
from vertigo
         (from "ATTRITIONS", Steve McCaffery)
____________________________________

Again, Al, and closer to home, and the linguicides on Canadian shores. Why bother to compare them. With the self-portrait of the artist, with real poets and hewers of verse in Ontario, as indeed with all "old men with brains on fire", all the Purdys turned to statues and looking always deep, manes ruffled in the wind,  it's always like this. Everything else, even on Canadian shores, is just vertigo and antipoetry.

The Poet turned to stone and the early-decaying poetry of Steve McCaffery: look for them and see the difference yourself.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

I was altered in the placenta
by the dead brother before me
who built a place in the womb
knowing I was coming:
he wrote words on the walls of flesh
painting a woman inside a woman
whispering a faint lullaby
that sings in my blind heart still

The others were lumberjacks
backwoods wrestlers and farmers
their women were meek and mild
nothing of them survives
but an image inside an image
of a cookstove and the kettle boiling
— how else explain myself to myself
where does the song come from?
         (from "The Dead Poet", Al Purdy)

The bad...

Day is a type when visible
objects change then put


on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed


The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually


concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth


Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace


copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery
       (From "That This", Susan Howe)
_______________________

The clattering of definitions is irksome to the eye and ear, and particularly to the ear: the predictable obeisance to the usual "objects", "form" and (always after Zukofsky) "music" accompanied by the fawning self-congratulations round a grand piano. One turn through the Science & Technology pages is more than enough to fill Howe's verse, reinforced always by a few choice admonitions to look "disjunctive" with lots of space. Is the poem "visible" or "form", "half truth" or "whole truth"? But "lumberjacks", "farmers" and "women" are as real in Purdy as the words of flesh of which the Purdy poem is made. As perhaps only Chris Faiers knows it best, Al's not a name but a place of fest and friendships, sturdy (decades-old) A-frames and cold lakes. Where Al lived and wrote, now worthy of writers'-residence sanctity, is the hearth of the poem, particularly the Canadian. And because Purdy's Canadian, and the poem and the place, Howe's imported linguicide can't touch it.

This is "song", man; that is just prescribed Zukofskian sheet "music".

"Homer's Poem" by Al Purdy

This is quite possibly the best look into poetic processes I've yet seen: or, at least, the deepest kindest (most affectionate) acknowledgement of the source of true writing in general. It's to Homer every poet must light his fires.
_______

Homer's Poem
(There's only a hyphen between me and death)

Listen
- we are about to be born
we are soon to become alive
and fear is always alive
when death is near
Listen
- sounds outside the womb
outside are living sounds
of things alive
and they have names
and say their names aloud
but I remember
I have no name
I cannot remember my own name
Listen
to the name of fear
animal fear
for cattle are being slaughtered
it is a great feast day
and there is loud rejoicing
the sounds come to me
as from a far away river
a thunder among the mountains
Listen
I say to him
my brother beside me
waiting as I am waiting
Listen
I say to him
let us stay here
let us not be born
I am afraid of being born
and then whisper to myself
did I say those words
did I say that I was afraid?
-it was only a fever of darkness
only a shred of a dream
Listen
they are making ready the feast-day
there is excitement in their voices
they are celebrating
and the sizzle of cooking meat
comes to me
like the hissing syllables
of words I do not yet know
and saliva in my mouth
is flooding my name
- my name?
what is my name?
but I am not yet born
I have no name
tell me I say to myself
what is my name?
Listen
but there is nothing to hear
there is nothing outside
and we shall be born
into a world of nothing
a world in which there is
nothing to believe in
nothing to hold to
and I think if there was a choice
I would not be born
but there is no choice
Listen
I have remembered my name
and say it to those others
the others around me
who are also about to be born
although not into life
they are being born into death
I say my name to them
my name is Odysseus
in the city of life
which is the city of death
- my name that you may remember
my name is Odysseus
                                 (from The Collected Poems)