The good...
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
(from "The Fall of Rome", W.H. Auden)
The bad...
Sometimes in mid-April we fill our hot-tubs
with Perrier water, we are so pacific, west
coasting through spring, casting not a thought
to our poor cousins in Toronto, slogging
through dirty snow to their cute restaurants
with nifty names. Casting not a thought
but delivering an image if we can, posing
wisely as the people who were foresighted enough
to create a city with warm winters. Would anyone,
they ask in gelid Ottawa, live on the edge out there
except for the weather? This will make
a good enough question for a gentle poem to pose
(from "Van, Can", George Bowering)
____________________________________
Since when did music and diction not count anymore? Two places, two times and yet two 'musics' as wildly different as these could not have been better imagined. It's rather the difference between aria and hitchhiking. In the one case, a poet sits at an outside cafe stirring epochs into his coffee, with a full view of Etna or Umbrian vineyards, noting rhythms, Sibylline prophecies; in the other, just kids in sneakers with limited imaginations, limited coordinates looking for a free ride. In a country as monstrously vast as Canada nothing's easier than to go hitchhiking in sneakers from Toronto to Ottawa. Good grief, and from this a Poet Laureate is sprung!
And as for 'gelid': well, only Keats knew how to use that word.
