Hans Arp sitting in a chair

"I was alone with a chair on a plain
 Which lost itself in an empty horizon"
                                 (Hans Arp, "The Plain")

Sounds alone

of a weasly disjointed memory. Hans is old,
  sinewy like the hand he prises
  day from, rising just there—
soul of chairs reified in his favor, but yelling

—& worth every bit the night it's dying of, itself—
  "Dark hole!" Char isn't old man's meat
  to make you rise, ice-lashed
enough & hand too stiff on the edge of ghosts

And what churns inside, like steeple o'er steeple, be
  the white inside him, ol' saint
  with mostly work on his breath
A chancy plain evening (& all that) for cold ol' boys 

Omnivorous

is a variant of the ancient mover, too
  stray as a word, up-turned
—and flung with thumb-pulsion across!—
  It's the hideous you know

  & enough to make you cry

for what moves the idea, my dear
  comes twixt & for real:
it's a tic in the fur, blood to the tolerable
  step, up and so,
right terrible screech to the bone

  & harder than you are

and far from any straw man and yes so
  "How do you know we're not
in a black-hole, right now, stretched, dying?"
  Right again, dear

A "Human Rights Event": A poetry reading/cabaret to celebrate Human Rights Week at Artword Artbar (Hamilton, Ontario)

Poet, publisher and social activist James Deahl hosted a wonderful evening of poetry and performance at the Artword Artbar in downtown Hamilton, on Sunday, December 13th. I felt privileged to be asked to read at this 'Poets for Peace' event. Sharing the stage with featured poet/performer bill bissett and other well-known Canadian poets such as Ellen Jaffe, Stan White, Jeff Seffinga and Honey Novick was a delightful experience.

James Deahl reading from his Blackbirds: War Poems

 Deahl began the afternoon with a 'Poets for Peace' mission-statement, a movement he founded twenty-seven years ago to promote a culture of peace and non-violence. And emphasizing that living in Canada doesn't make us immune to violence committed here, particularly against women, he urged poets to act to redress injustices anywhere in the world. He read from his Blackbirds: War Poems (Unmon Northland: 1999), poetry as chronicle of the atrocities in the Yugoslav war.

May-Marie Nuyaba, social worker, feminist and community developer from HCCI (Hamilton’s Centre for Civic Inclusion) and the Sexual Assault Centre of Hamilton & Area underscored the importance of Deahl's message, adding that as a result of unequal power relations and cultural traditions women face the brunt of violence in Canada, and still continue to fall far behind men in wage equity.

May-Marie Nuyaba from the Sexual Assault Centre

The 'Poets for Peace' theme was creatively interpreted by poets and performers, each giving his/her own personal nuancing to poetry and art. Genres ranged from avant-gardist sound poetry to social justice drama told in folklorish conta storia to traditional. bill bissett and Honey Novick gave a wonderful long song poem, part choric chant, part duet, bissett's almost mystical lines & repetitions working to let spirit rather than cold-lettered verse work on us.

Honey Novick and bill bissett

A "theatre of liberation" performance by Melanie Skene, Simon De Abreu and Jeff Seffinga consisted of narrative in traditional conta storia form with the aid of a series of painted cloth storyframes held on branch supports: the message at the end being not "to let the big foot crush you". De Abreu, recalling his experiences in foreign jails and the human rights violations he saw there, talked about the need for performance-based therapy: & the saving capacity to be other than who we are through theatre.

Theatre of liberation

Poetry came also in the form of Stan White's own splendid cadences, Ellen Jaffe's lyrics, Jeff Seffinga's fun Tim Horton's limericks and Dave Haskins's skilfully juxtaposed imagery. My own interpretation of the 'Poets for Peace' theme was to express in verse the peace I derive from communing with the dead (American poet Jack Spicer) and a radically heterodox (gnostic) text.

Kudos to James Deahl for his vital poetry community-building and social activism work in Hamilton. It's rare that poet, poetry and advocacy for human rights can merge so wonderfully (as they did!) in a single afternoon, mystical, imaginative and fun.

Journals of a running poet

Since I can trace the exact moment I wrote a first serious poem (& tried publishing it) to a late afternoon run after work, in mid-January about ten years ago, with just a sliver of a moon above & Venus's faint smile, vision dampened slowly by car lights and snow, alone in a perfect world of breath and tempo only the marathoner knows.

And since I was pretty certain also that because of my familiarity with local terrains I'd probably be the one to discover the body of a missing local school teacher who they thought had been buried in a snow drift, covered over in a culvert or field somewhere, having been last seen eating at a McDonald's and then carelessly wandering towards the lake, and who'd recently been on sick-leave for depression.

And since the mystical union of approaching night, sympathy and physical endurance, added to some gnawing pressures of a personal nature, gave me not just the first line of a possible tribute piece (that I did call "Dead teacher dirge") but an impending sense of the nearness of a lost colleague who, as it turns out, was to be discovered days later by a teenage volunteer, a frozen limb poked out by the hockey stick he'd been using.

Well, you'd think I'd have published a book of running verses by now: poetry about the extreme exhilaration of the race itself (of which I've run my fair share) or even one about my idols Billy Rogers, Rosa Mota and Haile Gebrselassie. But my running poetry may have been romanticized by a particular evening, and tied inexorably to a terrible incident and discovery. The journals of the running poet, if ever written, are fated to look for the inexplicable connection between inspiration and a death. With some fanciful derridean subtitles like "running as the death of teaching" or the grander modernist "portrait of the runner as snowy fields".

I have written the odd running poem since then, like the following, always inspired by a sense of life's cruel stony finish,

Long as the slope feels right and a stride can bite

& a tail-wind's favourable,
with spring hostas & grass along the way(& love of sky
going dearly 'afore)


then I can run!—

& even as the thunderhead's
snarly fifes, lake over lake
& the cars' brash ferocities, too, nose round me
at every mile,


still there's breath means to go on


and the road ahead
(same long sun-loving one) —
spun of a breakthrough


will add to it, down the mazy path, a drama too
for gravelly shades and Lady,
accompanied by rain, wind; or moles in a winding ditch;
or leaf hoppers startled


to their knees; or teens, all teeth & gauche hate,
who wait for me,
a roving Aeneas, alone in the world, a warm body on legs
laughed at in spades


For the day's the same, howso'er it lisps with slopes,
and dandelion yards,
and a runner all eyes & ears for a dear blue sky,
who'll gladly turn home

when the tall winds die

or ones intended to turn into a wider musing on lonely deaf-mutes or a dead animal lying by the side of the road or something even more crypto-romantic:— always a small but significant excerpt from a life-writing that only 25 years of continuous running seem to have given. So a lonely deaf-mute I met almost daily inspired a 'courtly love' in me,

     What kind of love is past
& imagines more proffered water than's drunk
    at the steps of vinyl homes?

     What kind of desire is that
runs to its destination without benefit of sound
   nor of animated arms at her door?

     What of the silence in there
open to shadows and all eyes for the umber limbs,
   with impassioned steps & breath?

     What unmerited word tries
and encircles willing neighbours as part of its rout,
    more heated sequels to come?

     What unrequited puzzle is that
kneels to plants instead of more water-offerings,
   and the sad returns to her door?

while the dead cat I once saw lying by the road became a type of consolation for grieving spouses, both seriocomical and lyrical.

If it elicit a comfort and sorrow
all the way from the head to its look-up
and the nape can curve for talk,
a dead cat looks like Fay,

turned as is across an ICU cage
like a vessel, storm-racked, emptying into a bay
poor Fay! where nurses dab her back
and prick her so I could say,

"Oh Fay! I saw a dead cat as I ran
as I ran today by the side of highway twenty."
—so I'd say this to curved space
& pass my hand through

"It looked like you & you like me."
All soft repose, all sprightly pillow pose
configured for the box's arch,
at last. "A night for snuggling close."

But softly-stencilled forms fade to the earth,
returning powdery for the day.
If I ran my finger down its face,
could I still say I'd kissed its face, dear Fay?

And then there's a pleasant little roadside alcove (I've run by hundreds of times) literally arced out of a forest clump, with bench and a large smoothed quartzite rock, somewhere near its centre, on which are etched the words 'Dean's Vista'.

Since to him Fay's as terrible as she was to me
   or worse (god help me!)
—and regarded as such we felt the same—

   Dean, real or imagined
I say (I do even now) even after an evening rain
   I saw alone on a bench,

smoke in hand, lounging jauntily 'gainst the back
   staring at the road ahead,
& at the dry gray guy who was running by, me—

   and locked eyes with me,
who felt a little shy, seeing he had something to say
   & that something was Fay,

   Dear god! he was dying to say
as paternally as he was able, & without stopping
   "Morning hang-over

is nothing compared to this itch to kill, eh!"
   Dean flicked his ash,
feet crossed under him in the wet sprig turf,

   and gave me a look
as if to say "Who's killing Fay can only one man be."
   Dean, who's an angry boy

and slightly leaner and taller than I'll ever be,
   with ash at his feet,
shirt rolled up and clearly itching to kill,

   suddenly turned to stone,
stone of 'Dean's Vista', just as the bunting flew in,
   wet turf at his feet

The connection between inspiration and death? I can trace to a particular event (a run and body) the exact beginning of a poetry vocation. How oddly whimsical (or mystical) a dead teacher gave way to a first poem, just as Mallarmé had called it: "With nothing for language/But a wingbeat in the skies/The future poem emerges/From its most precious dwelling" ("Fan"). Precious dwelling of silent women, road kill, and snowy culverts. And how irreal the landscape of the running poet who, perhaps as a trick of breath and feet, always seems to intuit from that site the most fragmented lives & themes imaginable: dangers of youth who wait at street corners, healing softness of a dead cat, a bird's stony feet.

Perhaps I've known all along that the "wingbeat" the runner feels isn't a trick of breath and feet but always a first poem. That the lost body of the dead teacher always leads to it first.
 

How books on Canadian Literature are still being typically written: as in the case of Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature by Joanne Saul

Even in 2006, the year Saul's book was published (University of Toronto Press) CanLit is a template (or "palimpsest") for fashionable academic discourse. Literary topic, genre or target  audience being scripted for the same postructuralist discussion. CanLit is shorthand for the stranglehold that Canada-Council, academia and mainstream publishers still have on the maket of ideas. I've discovered that, as a rule, when writers with an interest in things poststructuralist try to stand out from the rest, they tend to go overboard: whether it be reading a dictionary five times (Bök), writing in a consistent "hypo-dyslexia" (bissett) or strangling the lyric voice til there's nothing left but a little prairie dust (bpNichol). Resulting in a type of writing that is cold and lexically rigid: page after page (in the case of Bök's Euonia) of vowelled verses squeezed into tiny little coffins. And always the eyeing of the Sobey, Giller, Griffin or Governor-General prize.

Academics and critics like Saul, eyeing the prize & vying for their place in the right literary franchise, oftentimes follow the same instinct to overdo things. And unwittingly deep-six their subject. The "Biotext' title promised something new but the book smothered it. Buried under academic verbiage, dry peer-edited phrasing and a potentially vibrant idea that was reduced to exact Ph.D specs. They make literary exposition out of the thick stew of privileged author-positions, a mainly male discourse, suspect textual layering, repetition, and a watered down derrideanism (far removed from Canadian waters), with the usual ersatz alienation backdrop. Among the many available multicultural motifs, always the same 'alienation' worked to death.

And the tone throughout is always servilely attentive to a turgid academic prose, designed to please thesis advisors rather than interested readers like me. Over-the-top, imitative & pure Canada-Council grade.Saul's reading, in particular, of Ondaatje's Running in the Family is typical, from beginning to end nothing but standard CanLit fare. And I wonder if it hasn't silenced the voice of the "roaming subject" itself, killed dead in its tracks: Ondaatje's interesting work about the recovery of a Ceylonese past, the vital transformative role of memory or even the limitations of literary autobiography as a poststructuralist genre. Not that Ondaatje isn't complicitous with the contemporary discourse of academic writing, himself slavishly tied to poststructuralist theory and a publishing system that he's helped to create.

This triad of author, theory and government has always seemed incestuous to me. As though participants in the discussion agree to disagree: a pure theatre of politeness (not the Artaudian 'cruelty' it should be) and endless scaffolding rather than critique that counts.(Something similar to this bizarre spectacle of discussion has been lately staged at Mt. Royal University in Calgary, in a ("cage match") debate between Christian Bök and Carmine Starnino on contemporary Canadian poetry). It's almost impossible to tell Saul's from Ondaatje's own discussion of the Running in the Family text. Any consideration of a privileged author-subject is likely to tie into a way of talking favourable to both author and the publishing-academic institution that fosters it. So that literary critic Joanne Saul and subject Ondaatje can write virtually the same thing, in perfect textual synchronicity.

And ironically hegemonic discourse of this sort, affiliated to but not interested in discomfiting real privileged discourse, is always bound to ape a distinctively 'male' language of 'search, write and negotiate'. As though the quest for the missing Father (the dominant trope throughout the entire discussion of Ondaatje) hadn't gone on long or hard enough. Strategies are employed everywhere, opponents destabilized and single subjects, linear discourse and referentiality of any type routinely dismantled. The reader stumbles constantly over modernist corpses. Searching and writing can be not unreasonably seen as a type of colonizing albeit in a homeland that's turned very foreign to Ondaatje, and among a people he finds laughably uncongenial and weird.

For Ondaatje, 'Asia,' in its vastness, lacks specificity; his journey is, at least in part, an attempt to define it, make sense of it, an attempt to make it his own. This is part of Ondaatje's process of cultural recovery, the taking ownership of the past in the present...Running in the Family is a text of cultural recovery in the sense that it allows for unsettlement and doubt while still insisting on the necessity for self-exploration and representation". (The Biotext in Canadian Literature 50-51)

Ondaatje, privileged culture-hunter, isn't portrayed (at least, not intentionally) as the congenial introspective flâneur, after the manner of Walter Benjamin, who speculates deeply on artifacts of civilization as he sees them; he's rather too whimsical, intrusive and laughably involved in his Ceylonese adventures to be regarded as anything but a native son who returns to get material for another literary work. Saul's chapter on Ondaatje reads like a clear case of cultural-textual expropriation. Nino Ricci is another author who can be accused of the same mercenary handling of his Valle del Sole setting, in Lives of the Saints: a cultural exploitation scripted for movie and accolades.

It's Saul's failure to get the irony that causes much of the too-easy textual layering that goes on. Rather than real 'tectonic' grinding between naturally opposing narratives (the authorial self and the 'other', among others), text and its academically fashionable 'poststructuralist' design merge too nicely. Examples of this false "slippage" are numerous: (a) Ondaatje, Canadian immigrant, and the nicely exoticized homeland he records in his journals (reminiscent of Gilpin's picturesque travel narratives); (b) "negotiation of self" (47) that is rather a re-affirmation of both privileged Sri Lankan background and Canadian literary status; (c) "intertexts", in the derridean sense of self-displacing discourses, that really are chapters of a work being written for mass consumption in a North American (mostly academic) market; and (d), as already mentioned, the unseen irony of postcolonialist intention subserving an actually intrusive and exploitive literary practice.

Every page of this postructuralist critique is the same, every one: the mantra of intertextuality, displaced subject, negotiated self, etc. gets repeated ad nauseum. But repetition is here not the death of the overarching patriarchal narrative that Saul's concept of 'biotext' puts into question in her reading of CanLit. Among the list of repeated (& repeatable) terms are 'process', 'polyvocality', 'recovery', 'non-linear, fragmentary narrative,' 'negotiation', 'dislocation', 'doubleness', 'subjects in process', 'relational account', 'gap', etc etc Repetition signals Saul's own clumsy handling of concept and content, aping without sensing the importance of postmodernism. And failure to appropriate a crucial derridean principle of reading so that the whole critical edifice comes crashing down to the ground, like the unsteady house of cards it really is.

In particular, repeated references to 'site' (the celebrated mise en abîme) as a failure of author Ondaatje to recover his cultural past is too smoothly glossed over, never more than a pat academic's transition to the next paragraph. Far removed from the serious work(See "Cognitive Mapping" by Fredric Jameson, for example) for which 'site' is intended in serious culture studies

The text itself thus becomes the site of an exploration of self through familial connections, origins, and place; it becomes the site of Ondaatje's complex act of cultural recovery. Throughout the book, he struggles to come to terms with a disconnected past through the acts of imagining and writing himself into a particular time and place. (35)

And on it goes from Ondaatje through Daphne Marlatt and Roy Kiyooka to Fred Wah, the same poststructuralist scaffolding, repetitive language and an 'alienation' motif bled dry from over-use. It should by rights have stopped at Atwood's Surfacing. Only the critical apparatus changes from feminism (Marlatt) to postcolonialism or the immigrant experience (Kiyooka) to Canadian identity theory (Wah), though Saul admits that Wah's "Diamond Grill is an almost impossible text to define generically". (103)

I'd be properly discouraged from reading more contemporary works on CanLit except that perhaps a younger post-millennial crowd might begin to sympathize with what Terry Eagleton's named the "illusions of postmodernism", and call for something less drearily repetitive & predictable.Perhaps already that critic, poet, as A.M. Klein says in his celebrated "Portrait", "has climbed/ another planet, the better to look/with single camera view upon this earth" ("Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" in A.M. Klein: Selected Poems.)

Perhaps s/he has and I've yet to begin at the first page.

What it feels like to be a canadian ghost: again, with Jack 

   

What is seen in the distance when the murmurings of some defeated ideas, or lives, or even dreams are suddenly manifest?
     A ghost. (Jack Spicer, from A Fake Novel About the Life
                                                           of Arthur Rimbaud)

Your life does not count

Even if I can number among the defeated not just the idea,
   but gary's receding grave (of christmas past), 

filled with glass, and squat to the head til I lilt into Main Street: 
   soft step here & veiny softness there, gosling's

quiet step to lakes and back and to my Secret Sam in acrylic
   mitts? Smiling through the lens

Everything is fixed to a point

Like soft shoe over bridges, through alleys and to a lake and back
   Waterless fountain at the park: or

the exact grainy spot he stood on &  I consigned to dear space,
   gary's most of all,

ecstatic I'd consigned anything as delicate as that & his mostly
   because of a gosling step

Give up

Wish I could (for his dear sake): dead don't hang light on me
   like they used to! Scarborough Fair,

in particular, can't make a 60s sage garden die more, not even
   in song, space between us 

a matter of a gray evening & stolen child-plant (or whatnot),
   tamped down at dusk

The very words I write
Do not purify

But, again, I thought at that very spot stepped a gosling-boy, purity
   & without math knew something'd last

and that space really could love him, too. Who wouldn't leave
   him receding like that. A matter of a stolen lily

And the lake he would not so much as dream of soiling
   (were it a popsicle stick!) could love him, too

Love makes the discovery wisdom abandons

Yes, after the act

I gave you my imaginary hand and you give me your imaginary
      hand and we walk together (in imagination) over the earthly
      ground

I was reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by a well-known Canadian poet

when Jack Spicer suddenly dictated the following to me by way of an apology, illustrated by Jess:
   

     Let us fake out a frontier—a poem somebody could hide in with a sherriff's posse after him—a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles—a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people..

              The poem. In all that distance who could recognize his face.

Again, from one ghost to another separated by miles