Poetry in praise of Elizabeth May & Canada's Green Party

I'm so happy Canada has a sitting member whose constituency is Eaarth itself (after Bill McKibben). I've been inspired to write some poetry in praise of Elizabeth May who has been elected our first Green Member of Parliament.

"Green" is the first.
__________________

GREEN

With an utterly cutting-edge type of green, the
leaf
is green and light as yr soul, and is poked
right
between the teeth. And once ground into mush
it’s
as easy for moles to chew it as mess for more.
Green!

And offshore winds blow seed, or the light-stemmed
weed,
spread-spreading them both, and as they do
so
both careening go like angels around the bay
And
the jaggy leaf, shoved by Time along the floor, its
leaf

body turn-turning into the rain, now looks like
a shore’s
mealy, lumpy grey-jacketed type of mold. And
after
the ground’s been dried & the ants have died,
both
leaves and ants will turn to sorrow, like a barn’s
sickly

floor, the sickly yellow sorrow found in an
                                                   autumn barn
But
for now a pre-Autumn green and the leaf in
                                                          the wind,
drift
together somehow and turn into sickle groves,
& shores,
and fields of moles who chew the light-stemmed weed.
Dreams!

Rudolph Ming

I was never more inspired to write poetry than when I'd just viewed (in fact, as I was viewing) a wonderful documentary film on a 12-year old Latvian boy, Rudolph Ming, who's precociously obsessed with making films of horror and death & whose own demonaical representations get shown at a final church-opening ceremony. I can't possibly have hoped to capture in verse anything like the essence of this troubled boy gifted with his own personal anguish and nor could I, stupidly hoping for some originality, have written anything like a complete poem without using materials & dialogue from the film. Rudolph somehow saw to that.
__________________________

Why a hole in the sand, Rudolph, covered over, nettles-full,
  a patina to lure the foot
or make the hole look not too unseemly? But dig one
  to hide the black in

& imagine them falling, as the apple-eater rocks in his tree can,
  image of a pensive boy, or
at even his piano as he slaps a sheet over & the notes whir
                                                                    ( angry as he is!)

Without too much reel it's even made, sharp to his fingers'-ends,
  christ-skewered, & no Sandra or sonata in it—
just the child's and "so much horrible emotion" as the priest
                                                                                     laments
  and a "room so bloody", too

But where's the fun? or love? "I don't like love" in a paper-roll film
   for a church-opening, most of all,
& some sectioned tap "to draw the film in", an oil text, & the script read
   in a woodlot silently

to look actually for a logo in "Book of Judges", Angel, barren wife
  et al. or in his hammock among gooseberry
inspired to add in vineyards where lions tear the kid, or flail like
                                                                                     bee swarms
  No birth here but a Riddle

No need for musick, just row of sinful dirty linen with 'Shimshon &
  Delilah a possible title, etched in,
& pyrotechnics, "real fireworks" instead of bonfires on the beach,
  He hammock-lies, dreaming

wondering what the film is, when he's not interrupted with potato-
  pealing, jar-filling Oh! young brechtian,
impatient of crayon-drafts & soundless table & who tears the paper
  off the demon's back

or digs a hole to put the nettle-screen in (this time), in the compost
  young fire-breather!
"Wasting such a beauty" as all this, does God need film-making
                                                                             as badly as this?
  Film's no scripture but script

read to the people: "no, Shimshon and nightmares only", a real case,
  a real death
oh! brechtian boy fingering the keys, always glossy, cool—
  Film's like viral spread into the lungs

with "blood at the mouth" Angels never look like one to Rudolph,
  & to "participate in threats"
is the way to film the bible for the Lord uses his mind as a weapon
  (No relief, please!)

Why Billy Collins is so popular: or why I like Bill Knott



Bill Knott

I was recently struck by a blog post by Bill Knott entitled "can she bake a cherry pie" that initially left me shaking my head: wondering how post-avant theory & practice (or any poetics) could be so curtly dismissed, & in language that doesn't pretend to be critical at all. Just outright invective in a glaringly large font, hardly fifteen lines long, directed against the critics of Billy Collins everywhere who (as the owner of Bill Knott's prose re poetry blog contends) can't reconcile the popularity of a single poet with their own "poeticspeak", try as they might. And tried they have.

Knott's blog post seems to speak uncomfortably to people like me who really can't seem to account for anything like public taste either. If the best and brightest post-avants out there (presumably the likes of Silliman, Bernstein, Watten, Armantrout et. al.), "armed with their grad degrees in poetics, in post-posty theory", can't really tell the good from the bad, then we're really left with two options: to damn poetry theory or the reading public. And of the two I'm going to damn least the reading public. Of theory & theorists he's pretty explicit & I'm inclined to agree with him for the most part:

Avant-hicks: I used to call them avanthacks, hacks, but hicks is I think more appropriate for these impoverished pockets so cut off from the rest of the world, saved in their isolation, incestuous, bristling, mad

"Incestuous, bristling, mad", indeed. Any poetry that's written to the specifications of theory can't help look lop-sided & a touch "mad": mad as anything that, as Einstein once quipped, does the same thing over & over and yet hopes for a different result. And why should cultural productions be exempt from this characterization? With Language theory you just get more Language poetry, whatever the practitioner, materials or artistic temperament, and if you expect anything interestingly different to arise, well, you must be a tad nuts. Even erudite commentators like Curtis Faville get hopelessly entangled in the insane circularity of a poetry that's slavishly tied to theory: as is seen in his recent discussion of Michael Palmer.

In fact, I might argue for a sort of poetic psychosis to account for the complete disconnect between reality & art, even going so far as to suggest (as I did in the case of Barrett Watten's Plasma ) the Language poem loses itself completely in theory, cast into the form of a literary changeling easily (& eerily) reproducible by mechanical means (such as a Google translator). And what does this mechanical reproducibility envisage if not a poetry that's been turned into a beast without a heart or a deleuzian "body without organs, or even a “natural language processing chatterbot” named ALICE to which Christian Bök recently posed a series of questions taken directly from Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris.

Does anyone expect a fashionable poetry interchangeable with translators, eviscerated literary tropes & chatterbots to be embraced by a reading public? Can ALICE really bake a cherry pie? After all, Knott had rather be asked, as he already has, to contribute to a Billy Collins poetry anthology than to one edited by more fashionable literary theorists.  Explaining the salient differences between them, he says in a Monday, April 4, 2011 post

Collins transcends the in-house standards of PoBiz, which most other anthologists are required to obey: he can include a pariah in his anthol and not suffer reprisals, whereas the other compilers fearful for their careers must exclude blacklisted writers like me or face negative consequences in their professional currency.

Billy Collins (if I read Knott aright) seems to have become the fearful Other of contemporary poetics, and with good reason. Like Frost, Sandburg & Crane before him, he commands an almost instant readership in his own lifetime & looks as if there isn't a single critical blemish to be found on him. At least that's the appearance & it's enough to make the "PoBiz" crowd a little flustered. The Language poets have only bought time for themselves by exporting their views into areas where Billy Collins will always be read with more enjoyment than Ron Silliman.

"Past the Erland Lee"

The decision to close the Erland Lee house has left me looking for a new place to host my annual Erland Lee poetry readings. I feel like a poet without a poem:

For where is the field, a silly 'ol mole
whos's made his ear as black as coal?
The leaf (of Nature) in Marjorie's shawl,
ol' red barn and a girl's leathery doll?

Who left the umph in the farmer's knee,
or stilled the guns of the gristly bee?


I've speculated on the reasons why & find it has everything to do with a growing distrust of surrounding fields and roads. I can feel the hatred of trustees threatened by solitary backlots. I can barely get the words out, in my astonishment, or keep the verses even. The Strangler is heard to say:

Look past the Erland Lee

Or kill that which leads to polyvocity/ Who'er came...
Who'ever came up with that or the
Farm's inner Tree Or that clearance
  of backlots is not A solitary but
  complex field or a Sensuous compiler
  of seed and interrelated types
  of a mossy handheld
Saw

   A soily brown, & of itself / Irrigated and...
Irrigated and dessicated field of
Charted conformity reduces to
Outlying shrubs and thistly rows
Of ghostly Others, after which
Punchbowls, rabbit ears
& nests never see each other more
(Both before and after the rain,
And up to the moment when
Merged two main arteries
To gouge out an escarpment of
Shales below)

    And field without a carriage house—
Blood of topsoil without roots,
Is deeply hurtful. Ferns
Only are a brimful unity,
At best

Margot Van Sluytman: the poet as shaman

Mother, I searched for scars in ox bone and tortoise shell,
desired the simplicity of a symbol: the stark perfection of moon,
horse, rain. But my heart is the relic, the pale artifact: a bruised
bone, an oracle (from Weight of Wings, April Bulmer)

There's a no more eloquent and impassioned voice for the joyous and healing dance of poetry than that of Canadian Margot Van Sluytman. Her writings & activism are refreshingly different from the noisiness of most of today's Canadian arts scene. She's a poet, publisher and victims activist known for her work as an expressive writing/transformative language arts facilitator as well as her promotion of the concept of restorative and transformative justice through The Sawbonna Project. Margot's is the shaman's strong clear voice that never wavers, sustained by a single unique vision, & that places her in the company of contemporary spiritualist teachers like Sister Helen Prejean, Ronald Rolheiser, Edwina Gateley, and Matthew Fox. Last year she shared the stage with Sr. Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, who enthusiastically supports Margot's vision about how speaking our voices is an act of transformative living for social change.

She is also recipient of The Queen Elizabeth the Second Graduate Scholarship, as well as The Seeds of Joy Award from The National Association for Poetry Therapy. Her published books include Sawbonna:  A Real Life Restorative Justice Story and The Other Inmate. Mediating Justice-Mediating Hope. Poetry and Workbook for Restorative Practices has recently been translated into French.

Propounding a view of language with an innate ability to heal has drawn her, again, into a clear poet-shaman tradition that seems to have all but disappeared today as a viable expressive vehicle. Canada has always seemed the place for a poetics rooted deeply in native spirituality. Chris Faiers has recently given a lovely anecdotal tribute to Milt Acorn as a shaman and elder figure in a Canadian 'people's poetry' movement: the voice not just of a people but of seasons, landscapes & whisky jacks. "I fondly remember", says Faiers,"his impromptu lectures as the wisdom sharing of an elder and a shaman-in-the-making." If divining the hidden in the poetic heart is a gift only a few possess, the poet-healers among us—Van Sluytman, Milt Acorn, Katherine L. Gordon, April Bulmer— ought to be venerated as transmitters of a vital cultural & spiritual tradition. They speak what we all are.

Margot, like Acorn, is the voice of human community, history & and the particularly 'restorative' powers of poetry invoked through a type of natural language such as poets, gurus and peace activists employ, one that redefines poetry as primarily a speech of gathering & acceptance: more a celebration and dance than written artifact. Her Yahoo! poetry group Dance With Words is just such a celebratory act. It's a kind of appeal to her writers to join in a common cultural legacy of ancient folklore, art, spiritualities (from any tradition) & earth-worship, Margot acting as both moderator and poet-healer who excludes no one from the dance. To use a term from the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 'planetization' is the ideal the poet-healer works toward, or a spiritual globalization that unites creative cultural forces into a 'One World' consciousness.

It's particularly instructive to hear Margot speak in a "Planetary Spirit" radio interview of the gift of the poet-healer as she's developed it through the story of her father's murder and the painful process of reconciliation with both the murder & murderer. As she's said, gift comes with the work, & the work of 'restorative healing' can be a particularly terrifying one. What better test of her own restorative justice idea than the act of reconciling herself to the man who murdered her father so many years ago: what better way for the emotional & expressive language of poetry to meet head on what it most fears? And yet out of this terrifying encounter came The Other Inmate, her book about forgiveness & renewal, a work that clearly validates Margot's 'planetization' vision.

Margot's writings are also decidedly Gaia-centered, a poetry attuned to powers of natural processes found in rocks, places & people & preserved always through an ongoing dialogue between the past and present. In a CHEX (Peterborough)Television interview, entitled "Wild Self - True Self: Poetry as Surrender Not Control", she mentions elements of nature that "speak poetry", using amber as a strong poetic symbol of human history, of dialogue with a prehistoric time past registered as creative force and inscribed in verse. In relation to what's been created, & preserved in ancient amber & mud, caves and the guacharo, the poet is a "wild self" figure who connects with the earth's own ancient poetry. The gift of this sort of openness to nature is achievable through a vital nature & words nexus.

Margot Van Sluytman is the "raven who speaks" (as a first-nations shaman once named her): for through her the language of the poem is alive to the feeling and movement of amber, mud & fall trees (It's interesting that the great Milton Acorn was also said to have conversed with ravens & taught their mysteries). "Poetry", as Margot defines it, "is concretizing the essential and exquisite emotions that we have in the depth of the darkest, and in the heights of the brightest" (CHEX interview). Though never meeting her in person & only knowing her through online, email and phone correspondence, I sense the depth and heights of her convictions as if I'd known her all my life. And in a sense I already have since her message is an ancient one & dear to our Canadian psyche.acilitatorxpressive Writing/Transformative Language Arts Facilitator

Barrett Watten's "Plasma" in three languages: and the poem's curious absence

Barrett Watten

This is perhaps the first time I've written something as the result of an error: and that error was to accidentally buy Watten's Plasma in the French edition, foolishly taking the accented Plasma - Parallèles - X title as the English. Not that the Martin Richet translation (Le Quartanier: Montreal, 2007) poses any particular difficulties: it actually reads rather well, very faithful to the speed & levity of the original. E.g., "Faire d'un ville une saison, c'est porter des lunettes de soleil dans un volcan/To make a city into a season is to wear sunglasses inside a volcano" can almost be taken as mirror images. And as I was doing a little online research on Watten's text I came across an Italian translation by Gherardo Bortolotti, both the English & Italian posted at GAMM, a site that, in the words of its owners, "just hosts research. _ low-fi, low-res, fragments, installation, no performance, no show."

It occurred to me that the three were practically indistinguishable & could all vie equally for the honour of being the best version. Or the worst. There's no sense in which Watten's is primary. It's as though the texts couldn't be read in any one language without somehow having to sacrifice a vital part of the textual guts or intention meant to reside in the piece Watten himself wrote. The effort at subsititution, which normally takes up most of our reading energies, is missing here since the poem is essentially empty. If you translate any passage from Dante's Commedia, it's clear the great Florentine is calling the shots. Perhaps Watten's work is more prose than poetry with the emphasis always to be placed on the poetic autonomy of the sentence itself: a sentence-centered work, as Silliman says in The New Sentence (62) where "ambiguity and polysemy" (90) are to be desired above all else. But, to my mind, the text even if read as a 'new sentence' poetics, seems for all that to have lost itself in translation. The poem does seem curiously absent.

The sentence-paragraph in Plasma—the only section of Watten's tripartite work I'm taking my few examples from— is a beast without a heart, & that isn't something Language theorists had hoped for. Watten, to his credit, does try at times to verbalize the unsayable quality of his writing, as in the following "The effect of the lack of effect/L'effet du manque d'effet". The Italian "L’effetto della mancanza d’effetto" gets us no closer to the heart of the original, as completely fragmentary as if it had been the original. What is the status of this thing the poet's made? The connection with Language theory perhaps puts it in too much of a conceptual haze. Curtis Faville in a blog article on Watten goes so far as to suggest it's to Lacan & the denigration of any view of language with the capacity for giving real objects that we turn for an understanding of Watten's poetics: to "make an object" is always one and the same thing as to critique the conditions of its own possibility. Perhaps it's a case of a poetry so theory-driven both poet & poem disappear off the page. After all, what do you get with "the effect of the lack of effect"?

Maybe we ought to discard radical theory altogether & try for a more traditionalist fit, the poem to be guided by the usual syntagmic clues.

The dim-witted inhabitants fuse with the open areas. All rainbows end in the street/Les habitants idiots se fondent dans l'aire ouverte. Tous les arc-en-ciel finissent dans la rue/Gli abitanti ottusi si fondono con le aree aperte. Tutti gli arcobaleni finiscono sulla strada.

Again, nothing suggests one is more exemplary than any other, even if we appeal to the traditional subject, tone, & imagery paraphernalia, and a contextualizing whole in which to piece them together. A Watten line is something the Google 'translator', operating in its own linguistic limbo, could have mimicked easily enough. Translated from the French Watten's line becomes "The people idiots are based in the open area. All rainbow sky ends up in the street"while the translation tool turns the Italian text into "The inhabitants obtuse merge with the open areas. All the rainbows end on the road". A case of clumsy word-order, at best, is all that distinguishes a Google-made translation from the product of human labour: nothing a little tweaking couldn't fix. But then again word-order in a master's hand is not something that can be mechanically duplicated. Ted Berrigan, for example, can write a line like "Head, dapple green of mien, must be vacated" (The Sonnetts, "XLVII") without fear of being outdone by IT competitors & John Berryman's "he's about to have his lady, permanent;\and this is the worst of all came ever sent' (Dream Songs, "44") is exquisitely unassimilable to any poetic medium but the poet's own.

So how is it that a poetic style that's supposed to work by being removed "from originating contexts" (Silliman, 62) can have been formed to make its part so easily interchangeable in translation (whether translator is human or machine)? Jerome Rothenberg has recently posted lectures by Brother Anthony of Taizé on the difficulties of Korean -English translation, the message being that a translated text, even at the best of times, can never hope to achieve the "same immediate, intense response" as its source. Watten's verses, as a case of radical Language theory in action, rather than flouting the importance of cultural transmisson via translation seem to have brought the "originating contexts" issue back to the forefront. And if that's what we have, Watten's quite unwittingly undermined the Language cause. Sensing that inner-contradictoriness in his literary practice, he may perhaps have been quietly homaging 'form' in a line like

When you’re perfect, people can’t wait to pick you apart/Quand tu es parfait, les gens sont impatients de te mettre en pièces./Quando sei perfetto, la gente non può fare a meno di farti le pulci.

A reasonable compromise might be to see Plasma as a perfect illustration of what Derrida calls the "substitutive significations" of the act of writing itself & Watten's the writer who's necessarily "inscribed in a determined textual system" (Of Grammatology,160) beyond which he cannot go. Between the poem and translation are endless representations of the thing that continually eludes us, & one of them can even be machine-made.

So what are we left with? The sentence-paragraph is a purposely ambiguous mirroring of traditional writing designed to create "ambiguity and polysemy" or, after Derrida, a tacit acknowledgement of the limit of the text itself: the poem as either a disguised 'formalism' wrapt fatefully in its own arms or an amorphous quantity that lacks a poetic heart. Again, more theory & the poem theory's always hankering after is nowhere to be seen, not even when presented in three languages. Perhaps I've been too hard on Silliman & his Language contingent who should be applauded for giving us something 'new': a poetry comprised of sentences reduced to having their meanings stray almost effortlessly off the page. A poetry that is both there and not there, reduced to a perfect illusion. Lifeless plasma.

April is not poetry month: certainly not at this poetry blog

Poetry is badly trivialized (and, in Donald Hall's way of talking, made into the "McPoem") when it's designated an April activity which poets everywhere are expected to celebrate through token acts of writing. The gesture is fake & insincere, designed to turn it into a spectator sport. It's just another way to institutionalize the poet's calling, another aspect of the "spectacle" it's become: writing class, performance & publication are, in fact, all departments in Poetry Inc. to which poets pay their dues if they want to be recognized. In fact, it dishonours the lives of poets everywhere who've had to face imprisonment, death & real alienation through self-expression (Radnóti Miklós, Joseph Brodsky,Václav Havel, José Martí, Paul Celan, García Lorca, Forugh Farrokhzad, Liu Xiaobo etc.). I will celebrate a 'poetry month' only when poets in our part of the world have to face real persecution for their work.

April will always be to me only one thing: Cancer Awareness month. I've lost to cancer too many friends, relatives & acquaintances. I won't dare for a moment to share this month with anything that has the potential to divert people's attention away from the vital issues of cancer and cancer research. Compared to this poetry (certainly as it's practiced in North America) is a frivolous pastime for people who are little able to appreciate what commitment to art really means.