A true north strong and free poetics: Simon Fraser or UBC?

At my recent Erland Lee poetry readings two poets, James Deahl and Michael Mirolla, each made a passing reference to the University of British Columbia, Creative Writing Program begun in the mid-1960s by poet Earl Birney, the one in reference to poet Michael Bullock, a founding poet-member, and the other in praise of its effect on his own artistic development. Poet and blogger Joseph Hutchison has also related to me the enormous influence of UBC teacher George McWhirter, to whom he's dedicated the "Thread of the Real" poem in his recently published book by the same name. It did strike me as interesting (and I hardly doubt I'm the first) that here was a relatively little-heard writing school, praised enthusiastically by its students still, that had been all but eclipsed by that other West Coast Canadian literary movement associated with the very popular Simon Fraser "Black Mountain" poets & poetics and the well-known 'Tish' magazine  by which the whole movement's mostly remembered.

It struck me, indeed, that the Simon Fraser and UBC presence served as a sort of symbolic representation of the state of Canadian letters in which we still find ourselves today. A 'Modernism' of the Layton, Birney, Souster and P.K.Page variety mindful of national tradition, attuned always to modernist realities and the music of the lyrical heart, still competes against the wildly 'Postmodernist' 'Tish' poetics fostered and nurtured by Black Mountain and its stable of Objectivist authors Creeley, Olson, Duncan, Levertov, et al. Simon Fraser is credited still with being the  putative breeding ground of Canada's own avant-gardist version in the form, among others, of Frank Davey's Open Letter and the once popular Toronto Research Group of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery.   An 80's offshoot of the American L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school has also taken root in the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver Canada. The results of these heady experimentalist days are too numerous to mention (the writings of poets like Christian Bök and derek beaulieu come immediately to mind). To narrow the poetic practice of an entire nation to a field of two may be a unwarranted generalization--since there are bound to be intersections between competing literary credos--but I believe it's generally true. It's so typically Canadian.

I'm inclined to believe that Canadian poets seem condemned to stand somewhere in between, regarded as either wild-eyed imitators of their American literary masters (as Robin Mathews and Keith Richardson contend) or guardians still of a distinctively Confederation poetics suited to modernist times. UBC may have been intended as a check on the poststructuralist wildfires spreading from the south but in terms of its own influence on literary development and student following it's lagged far behind Simon Fraser. Tish is, for example, a far more recognizable name than Prism though both serve as archives of their best literary efforts. I can't (as I'm often prone to do) tie the popularity of Simon Fraser to any academic advantage either since the poet-professor was to be found in both places. In any event Canada has a pretty long tradition of the student- and academic-poet coupling movements with their own signature publications, such as the McGill group in the 20s of F.R.Scott, A.J.M. Smith and their pro-Modernist The McGill Fortnightly Review.

And so here we are, again: UBC (of high Modernism) or Simon Fraser (of the poststructuralist poesies of American invaders)? There have certainly been more offshoots of the latter than the former: again, Kootenay but also the Toronto New School of Writing. I'm not aware of any UBC-style writing programs springing up anywhere in the country. The idea of a Modernist (or Formalist) revival (pace Timothy Steele) almost seems silly in our day. So where do I belong exactly? Where do any of us in Canada? I can't rightly say since so much with me has been the result  of both happenstance and a case of following my own personal instincts. Yes, Birney's writing school paradigm--and even more so Simon Fraser-- was a novelty in its day and nothing like it came to the very conservative English faculties I attended in the 70s: McMaster University was once a Baptist college! But counteracting the horiible elitism of the Brits who taught me my English (and who always made me feel stupid!) were the wonderful poststructuralist theories of Derrida and Deleuze. The Net later provided both a technology and market share I could never have enjoyed in the old 'paper' regime.

So I trace my own poetical development to an early Modernist education (largely frustrating), growing allegiances to Continental language theory and an Internet forum for both discussion and publication. I guess it's regrettable that I can't seem to favour any one literary influence. I rather envy those (like Michael Mirolla and Joseph Hutchison) who can.

On Looking into Hutchison's "Sacred Stories"

It's always been a habit of mine to read transfixed to a single impression, to one significant moment and place: to the one truth that seems to speak for the rest. And when I'd found it in Joseph Hutchison's book of verses Thread of the Real, I knew I could now begin. "Sacred stories" is that bearer of truth and a starting-point, seeming to me marvelously representative of an entire work and perhaps of an entire body of work (though I've known the poet for only a few short years and am unacquainted with his other writings). And yet it is its own singularly unique self at the same time. Heraclitus is the work's epigraphical center, and with good reason.The single poem I've chosen--or rather the primacy of the poem-- must serve as a first and final step into the poet's Heraclitean waters.  And it does. In fact, any line from it will always suffice to give you a marvelous sense of the whole opening before you. Such as.

     "But true to your class,/you keep on dreaming of being let in" (Impression)

Reading from "Sacred Stories" will make Hutchison's world look neither illusive nor allusive. Words do stand for things. But things just don't follow after, servilely obedient to plain succession. It's a chronicle of "sacred stories" and sacred stories here are never at outs with the world.The whole (in true conflux) preserves a significant sameness--call it tradition, perhaps-- though respecting life's bruising particularities. And people, places and events have made a world of difference in the poet's life. To be found expertly interlaced in every poem are biographical details, excursions through landscapes and the generous lyrical insights they give: such as the admonition from a dear mentor George McWhirter and his rhapsodical "foothills and plains" to let it "be enough" ("Thread of the Real,or the old woman "with stick-legs" found adrift in a poet-narrator's dream ("Adrift"), or the "crazed razor" tribute-poem to South Korean poet Ko Un ("After Ko Un's Flowers of a Moment") or even a sense of the latter's own misplaced Eastern ritual settling uncomfortably on the poet himself. Impressions as beguilingly varied as these always suffice.

     "Breezy golden light/on the mountain"(Place)

Such things as "smoky quartz" and "mauve thistles" ("Three Sentences Toward Evening After an Early Spring Storm"), "mesmerizing" waters ("Kooser Creek") and an old woman's "ragged cards" ("Solitaire") come up hurriedly to the poet who's always attentive enough to fix them as parts of his own uniquely rough idyll.  But, despite even the "Sacred Stories" beginnings and a line like "Breezy golden light/on the mountain", there's no jump over the border into convenient symbolism or metaphor. There's no resting in cozy southern hemispheres. It's not easy to go beyond the gravelly experiences of the poetry alone, somewhere to rest the Yeatsian head. And it takes a kind of daring to move on with the journey, following the thread of the real, into places like the winsome murmurings in a spring ("The Spring"), "blazing bees" in Montana ("Winter Sunrise Outside a Café Near Butte, Montana): and, perhaps most daring of all, the derelict behind his "cardboard sign" ("Crossroads"). Wherever you go and look, there's a type of claritas that stings rather than sings ("Claritas").

     "...how bleak/this valley was before/their ancestors sailed" (Moment)

What a faithful gathering there is of American soldier, jihadist and torturer("Tests of Faith") now that the Signifier and Signified have finally split! And wherever there's the show of some poetic justice, with imaginative truth put forward, the reader still asks how this ghoulish mélange's possible at all. The answer is fated to come, of course, as the equation in public opinion of severed child limbs with one caged dictator, who picks at his lice ("Opinions"), of "slaughtered fighters" with skillful CNN camera work ("Ambushed by a Scene on CNN"). The American audience is always assured of media objectivity, notwithstanding the glaring two-headed monsters, assured typically to a point of numbing imbecility. Hutchison discloses an American media that do not reveal shadows on the border: but that rather crackle and burst with their own deadly "shock and awe". To read is to see more of the same pathetic resumption of war glory. Here is the stream's silent treacherous deep end.

    "Sacred Stories"(Truth)

But there is truth in the poet's heart, the sense of sacredness in change itself that the whole work never lets go, of which I take his "Sacred Stories" poem at the end to be the embodiment. But not in the sense of being transcendent over the Colorado mountains and plains but as just this abiding restless permanency to be found everywhere (which I take is Hutchison's own sense of the sacred). Take any line from it and read: the real that threads through begins and ends here  Take an impression such as that given by the narrative obstinacy of "pine tree/people" and "iron-jawed" settlers and see it refracted in an old woman's "ragged cards"; take a moment such as when "big desks" and "pistols" in 1929 successfully substitute rapacious "Easy Street fortunes" for aboriginal stillness and see even here the same two-headed beast in CNN coverage of severed child limbs.

Since "No stories here/mention you" there is entrance only through imagination. None of the self-absorbed "technics" of contemporary poetry here. To be "let in" is to both be a part of the unsettling dust up of history and rely on your own imaginative wits. The stories, though no longer constant to paradigms of the past, can be yet as pleasant as folksy Niedecker tributes, biblical passages and "rough-barked" characterizations; as houses and yards, valleys and ancestors. But we shouldn't be taken in. There is a truth keen as poet's westwarding dreams that's never veiled or only half revealed, for poetic effect only. Again, though something may appear independently, like good camera work or a signifier/signified split, it can only be a reflection of everything else. When everything's already known, you don't seem to matter at all, only "dreaming of being let in."

I admit my reading of Thread of the Real may be a little fanciful but then it does take some imaginative effort to follow what I've seen as the most skillful threading of parts. And picking "Sacred Stories" as a beginning may seem even more wilful (even self-absorbed). But if this were true, Hutchison would have stopped me at the gates. I do urge anyone to repeat my little inquiry into Hutchison's "Sacred Stories", and feel the same tenacity of impressions, moments and events I've felt: the same Heraclitean truth at work. Or choose another poem, such as "Mortality", my favourite in Hutchison's collection.  And having dropped the intrusive you, to step courageously into the stream.

Sacred Stories

Breezy golden light
on the mountain.
Breath by breath,

you climb the rope
of listening and vision
down into the valley,

where the pine-tree
people have already
slipped into a tall,

swaying sleep, while
(in their slim shadows)
the grass people lean,

whispering their most
sacred story: how bleak
this valley was before

their ancestors sailed
an ocean of wind
into its barren folds.

                  *

Your ancestors came
from Germany via Ukraine,
from Ireland and Scotland.
Dirt farmers, mostly,

mostly half-assed about it,
buying rocky ground (sight
unseen, but cheap), then
trundling west in Conestogas,

iron-jawed women birthing
and burying along the trail.
Wherever they settled, they'd
one day head to town and glare

into a lens for a family portrait.
What can you buy with joy,
their lampblack eyes would ask,
on this enemy Earth?

                        *

Here where Arapaho and Ute
hunted deer in summer, cut poles
for tents, told sacred stories--here
your people platted cramped parcels,
hammered cabins out of scabrous

pine logs, so that moneyed types
could flee the flatland swelter
and odious foreign laborers. Then:
1929. At big desks of burnished oak,
ruined men pressed pistol barrels

to their heads, leaving only a stench
of saltpeter and scorched pomade.
Soon the elite sanctuary's gates
were flung wide to almost anyone
with cash. If not for those shattered

Easy Street fortunes, there'd be no
you pondering these pines, that grass,
that ginger-furred fox, that Taoist
flash of a magpie into the leafy brush.
Why this melancholy, then? You grasp

the meaning of your past, the present
with its evening sun bleeding down
beyond the ridge. No stories here
mention you. But true to your class,
you keep on dreaming of being let in.

The blognoscenti: what I've learned today arranged by date, author and source, with brief excerpts (1)

I was saying to Irina Moga in a recent post-related discussion that a course curriculum could probably be generated from the people, writings, publications & general discussions posted online. Her own discussions of French writings (contemporary and classical), music, opera and Canadian poets are good examples. I think I'd like to try putting this idea to the test here. And I wonder if by purposely 'attending to' poetry-related information that comes my way anything qualitatively like it, say a significant self-evolving work, can arise from it. A textual figure from the ground.

There is no greater, more immediately accessible, source of significant content than the blogosphere (and I draw a purposeful distinction between the blog and Internet in general). I certainly take exception to any characterization of the blogosphere as the source of sloppy, unedited and generally uninteresting writing. No less a literary personage than Jerome Rothenberg has celebrated the blog as the arena "of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus...in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others." My own experiences have borne out Rothenberg's intuitions. I use the term "blognoscenti" to refer to bloggers or blog visitors from whom I've acquired vital (cultural, artistic) information about and/or insight into poetry.

Every item of particular interest I receive from the bloggers with whom I've most often conversed over the past year, and whom I've acknowledged in my recent "year in review" post, will be duly noted. I will acknowledge them as primary authors & sources, to be given pride of place. Information will also be drawn from other sites deemed too good to pass up. Later in the process, either at various points over the next several months or once near the end of 2011, I will try to construct from it (perhaps along the lines of a Jackson Mac Low-type "chance operation" or by other more author-directed methods to be determined) a document of some sort, or the preliminary sketches of one: for example an "Intro to Blog Poetry & Poetics" 101; or perhaps the outline of an evolving theory of cyberlanguage or primer on blogger poetics or literary manifesto, etc etc. I believe the open-endedness of Net technology, though providing a steady stream of content, may even eventually result in a larger, more focused work itself.

I'll give blognoscenti offerings, beginning now at 02 January, 2011 as often as they appear to me—hopefully on a daily basis—either here or at their source site, even citing interesting detail communicated through blog rolls, links or email correspondence. Nothing of a personal or confidential nature will ever be disclosed. I'll continue building my blog data from all the blognoscenti sources (until, of course, any one of them ask that I no longer reference his or her blog).

Any technical or literary terms will be boldfaced (leaving other boldfaced words that appear in the original source untouched).

The words 'poet', 'poetry' or names of poets or names for any type of poetry genre, style, movement or technique or any language suggestive of poetry must appear in each blog citation.

(a) 02 January 2011. Mark Smith, "Review of Contemporary Haibun 11" in Haibun Today: A Quarterly Journal. "One striking example of expanding the haiga genre is Ed Baker’s “butterfly in her garden.” Baker uses a traditional hand-drawn sketch and handwritten haiku, but the image of the nude woman straddling the stringed instrument while holding a flower is an almost illogical compliment to the elegant haiku ('butterfly/in her garden/playing with/a flower')";

(b) Andreas Gripp (in email correspondence) referred to "Recent Reviews of Anathema: Poems Selected and New and Reader Comments on the Poetry of Andreas Gripp [by myself and Katherine L. Gordon]" in andreasgripp.com. "Anathema also addresses the daring of this poet to visit emotional corners that most contemporaries avoid. Andreas Gripp's special signature, as an exciting modern poet, is to lead you trembling into terrible truths: a book of loss exquisitely delineated by the knife of the poet's language";

(c) Irina Moga, "The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention" in Word-Dreamer: poetics (comments section). The source of the Margaret Atwood quote (“A word after a word/after a word is power”) is "from Ms. Atwood's Spelling poem";

(d) Geof Huth, "The Texts of Your Life" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. A review of 60 Textos [textual poetry] by Sarah Riggs. "For these are books written in and of the world, during the regular process of living, poems written in the same way a breath is taken: naturally, normally, sitting down, standing, walking, while looking and hearing and being. These are all poems texted from Riggs' blue Nokia cellphone to her friend Omar Berrada's silver Samsung cellphone";

(e) Joseph Hutchison, "In a Bleak Year-End Mood, the Poet Tips His Hat to a 16th Century Colleague" in The Perpetual Bird. "A Litany for the Wheeling Year" by Thomas Nashe. "Again a grim old year is turning./Again the fires of war are burning."

Sentence: A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).

The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention

I won't bother to tell people how much I've read or watched or done (as if that matters); nor bore anyone with any end of year de profundis reflections on my life because, frankly, I happen to be a pretty happy & grateful guy who's never considered writing a form of self-imposed misery and thankless drudgery (as all too many surprisingly still do), as if somebody's always holding a gun to my head. As if there really is such a thing as the 'starving artist' in affluent North America. Writing and blogging are their own uniquely enjoyable rewards.

And unlike Geof Huth I won't be sending, as a sort of symbolic purge, all my scribblings to any academic institution around here: though my wife's been urging me to remove all my teaching- and-poetry-related folders piling up high in the closet. I measure progress, not in numbered boxes but by the amount of heart-satisfaction every form of self-expression gives. And I'm certainly not going to make any silly prognostications about the future of poetry in 2011 and thereafter. I think poets ought not to take themselves too seriously.

In 2010 and really throughout most of my adult life I wrote what I liked and liked what I wrote. But that's not to deny that really no more than about 20% of what I've done is really publishable. The books, though falling randomly into my lap, always seemed to fill a need for knowledge & inspiration, and there is no shortage of first-rate poets, critics and exceptionally talented people out there with something significant to say about art, life and the cosmos. The authors, poets, & critics I read are really a sort of privilege I don't share with many, except, of course, Amazon.com. The name-dropper, in any sort of company, is really the most pernicious killjoy there is.

I'd like to say as well that I'm a Canadian, first and foremost, a product of a distinctively modernist (Anglo-Saxon) tradition of which I'm proud, and to our language, landscape and mannerisms I've always headed my own poetical fires. My blog was intended for an exclusively Canadian audience, the hope being that a type of Canadian poetry network could arise through interactions & sharing of resources but my interests took me to generally more receptive and sympathetic groups elsewhere. With some exceptions, I've found the Canadian mainstream crowd to be a particularly arrogant & cliquish bunch. I know what I like but am also a pretty assiduous student of different  styles, methodologies & traditions. I hope anyone who's visited my site has seen that: if not, I've got some work to do.

Finally, I would  like to begin a tradition, at every year's end, of showing my gratitude to the few out there in the blogosphere who've helped make blogging for me a particularly enriching experience. To the following people I say thank you for a year of sharing, critiquing and respectful bickering: Ed Baker, Curtis Faville, Joseph Hutchison, William Michaelian, Vassilis Zambaras, & Irina Moga.

"Thankyouthankyouthankyou"