True to its title, this "selected & new poems" collection will (as Gripp says in his 'Foreword') probably be regarded as anathema to CanLit: shorthand for establishment writing as conceived and promoted by 'Canada Council' and the types of Arts subsidy programs that spawn it. There is something in that comment worth reflecting on. I sympathize with the poet's aversion to CanLit, seeing in it everything that stops Canadian poetry from evolving its own unique voice.
It seems to me there are two types of publishing, operating on separate but parallel tracks: one that caters for authors pre-selected (and feted) by CanLit, and the other more self-published or 'small press' variety, usually more community-based, and more open to experimental, personally 'edifying' styles. The distinction may be a bit overstated, for I recognize that there exist small presses that fall somewhere in between, both fund-based and yet reaching out for more localized readerships. Needless to say, I'd prefer an even more autonomous version of this latter type, able to operate without any form of grant structure.The type of literary community I envisage , being the most optimal condition of all for artistic production, is one where an engaged reading public, attuned to creative forces, would create its own demand.
The result of this market and artistic production disjunct has proved disastrous for writers. With an appetite for more academicized, and even politicized, writing that appeals to the few, CanLit will likely overlook both poet Andreas Gripp and this his eleventh book of poetry, again. But it does so at its own peril. CanLit has all but ignored (and has been all but ignored by) real Canadian readers anyways, and for precisely the 'elitism' it engenders. The market for poetry (outside of academia and state-sponsored publishing) is dwindling sadly enough, and CanLit has made no small contribution towards this declining readership.
The reader that looks for 'classical lyricism' in a poem, language as a vehicle for real human emotion (however complexly it must sometimes be used) and the oftentimes terrible incongruities of living the Canadian experience will, ironically enough, not find these among the better known poets. Even the avant-garde is afraid to set foot on our shores. Where in Canada, for instance, is the equivalent of Charles Olson's "Black Mountain", the San Francisco "Renaissance" or even today's
British "Innovative Poetry" or
Ron Silliman's "Language poetry" movement. Ours is a poetry that cannot look beyond itself, rooted too deeply in self-promotion: too self-satisfied and thriving not by its own lights but by government sanction. Gripp's poetry is never conscious of itself in this way because it's never had to be. It's primarily writing that can be appreciated through stylized and meaningful expression, faithful always to a core of sensible literary values and, above all, to the reader who looks for them in poetry.
"Anathema" works in a mostly lyrical-narrative style, divided into old and new work. I will isolate for discussion both personal favourites and newer pieces read for the first time, poetry exhibiting qualities of meaningful writing, the skillful nuancing and treatment of life's complexity in the most accessible language that always sets Andreas Gripp apart from the norm.
A Week in the Life of Morgan
On Tuesday,
wheat stalks bowed in half
as if bending to a god;
a god without mercy,
and a field of gold
at once showed its fear.
It was hot that day
and that's all it was.
On Wednesday,
I said there was no god
or gods
and that droughts and rains
don't depend on deity,
but on currents
and jetstreams.
On Thursday you picked some blooms
and made a garland
for Saint Jackie.
I said there was no "Jackie" saint
and you dropped the "Jackie O".
"Oh," I said and sighed.
Maybe for the Kennedy years
but wedding Aristotle
raised too many brows.
Let's talk philosophy, shall we?
On Friday, the King of David
brought us fish.
I thought the reference
was biblical.
You said your friend
delivers to Catholics
and he runs a market stall.
Saturday, everything changed.
It didn't stop raining,
the neighbours built an ark.
You called to cancel our session
under the stars.
I would have proven Sagan right
and Einstein a cosmic fraud.
Sunday we rested
according to the Sabbath.
The Adventists say it's Saturday
and we know they're damn well right.
I cut grass with scissors.
When no one was looking.
On Monday you met me on the campus.
We read the books of Donne.
I spied your lashes
and your eyes, a powder-blue,
lips that curled to stanzas, commas,
thinking you'd found me wrong,
that Jehovah laughed last,
that by tomorrow
I'd confess belief,
my sins,
light a candle to the Christ
and whisper prayers to Jackie O.
You said you simply found him funny,
would look for Bukowski,
Plath, a Ferlinghetti work
that rhymed.
" A Week in the Life of Morgan" combines dramatic format, lyricism and allusion and yet despite its 'classicism' the most accessible language, all of which makes for a pretty interesting poetics. What won't the engaged poetry reader find of value in this?Throughout the course of a week the poet, accompanied by his silent partner through a mythological "field of gold", gardens in bloom and a university campus, discovers that the deities have fled and the significance of the human narrative must turn on the inexplicable and inaccessible like "currents/and jetstreams", marriages of convenience and alluring similarities between Christ and Bukowski.The reader wonders how so much cultural 'stuff' can be regarded so casually. The presentation of serious ideas is a playful ruse: it's not inquisition that matters but the friendly colloquy of poets, lovers, inclined always towards, not finality but the pleasures of daily 'discovery'.
The interweaving of character, imagery and 'theme' is remarkable as is the attitude to the topic, always casual and incidental. Insights into the living condition are offered as choices along the life-journey. Poet and 'partner'see that any overbearing religious, metaphysical or even poetic narratives with the potential to inhibit dialogue (such as the recurrent 'either-or's': Sagan or Einstein, philosophy or religion, rhymed or unrhymed verses) will be easily dismissed. The damage done, if any, is minimal.
Hildegaard's Tomb
I offered to go with you,
to the mausoleum,
thinking you'd said "museum",
believing we'd gaze at vases
and cracking busts
made by the dead;
instead we entered a corridor
filled with corpses filed in rows,
inscriptions engraved
by the living
in a climate-controlled
grave,
and I wondered which was better
in terms of art,
immortality.
"Hildegaard's Tomb', encountered for the first time in an online poetry forum, brings back what most endeared it to me plus all those missed hidden qualities that a rereading gives. For example, the symbolism of 'mausoleum', itself announced as a misread intention, is remarkable for the enveloping senses of 'concealment' it discloses: the spatial ("museum"), epistemological ("inscriptions") and then finally (and most importantly) poetic ("art"). Here's a skillful design done purposely by accident.
Prepared for 'death' in a mausoleum the poet-narrator visits instead 'death' preserved " in a climate-controlled/grave"; and from here it's on to a brief Keatsian reflection on the nature of art. Is death entombed or death preserved in a museum the key to art? Which of the two reveals a truer sense of art's lasting permanence,immortality? The reader and poem alike seem to be put to some final unanswerable question, and any intermediary ground sufficient to lead reader from question to answer is casually set aside (in typical Grippian fashion). But, as I've said in regard to the previous poem, the damage done is minimal: it's been all pleasurable enjoyment of place and dialogue instead of serious subject matter.
But it's in poetry dedicated to individuals that playful lyricism can also turn elegiac, revealing the deep-rooted cynicism that's at the heart of a lot of Gripp's poetry. Consider the case of Francesca and Louise.
Francesca, Weeding the Garden
My daughter, all of six
and bursting with a Big Bang
sort of energy,
zigzags across our fenced backyard,
picking dandelions she holds
in her fist,
for an "I love you daddy" bouquet,
like the lofty ones
I snagged for her mother
before the tumours took her away,
their sunny heads of yellow
jutting freely from curling fingers,
my steady, sturdy voice
now a downcast, trembling shell,
saying they last a little longer
than flowers,
we'll wish you better
when they turn to spores.
Francesca, child-bearer of cosmic energy and renewing hope, offers dandelions that won't give hope to the grieving parent. The consolation a child's gift of flowers gives is momentary, causing the inconsolable husband to utter something strangely unprophetic about how growth into new life is reducible to spores. A strange sort of poetic adornment to this Wordsworthian impulse of the child's for simplicity and communion with natural event.
I might even be tempted to call the dandelion gift a tragic anti-symbol, or even the italicized lines (a device used in the poem below) an anti-dialogue dropped into the poem almost haphazardly, without any real communicative value. It really does strike the ear as "downcast" and "trembling", eerily unresponsive even to a daughter's voice.
Bitter Jeez Louise
The raincoat that she dons,
on sunny days, makes them laugh:
the girls in tank and halter tops,
the boys on black skateboards,
even grandmas walking dogs.
She spends her Spring
in stack 9B,
section E point six-four-three.
She's working on a thesis,
I've heard,
from the driver on my route.
How fossil fuels
can be replaced
by solar panels,
westward winds.
"Louise" never smiles
when she boards the city bus,
her change dropped like anchors
from her hands.
She gave her quarters
all to bullies, learned to study
without lunch.
Even now,
she sits in corner cubicles,
eyes graffiti scrawled of her,
twelves year past,
has yet to scratch it out
or eat a sandwich,
soup, at noon.
Gripp's portrayal of the lonely student Louise may be an even more startling specimen of what I've called poet's anti-conventionalism. Though removed from any perceivable network of family and friends, always alone, perhaps not far herself from real homelessness, she seems strangely alien to our sympathies, as though she'd resist friendship or sympathy if any were offered. Even the "Jeez" in the title is there as a temptation to make us laugh at her, too, even before reading through to the end.
In fact, since Louise stands in no visible relationship to community, not any the reader's aware of, everything else poet allows us to see is at most a shadowy, indefinable something. Is she a student researching a thesis or a homeless person who visits "stack 9B" everyday? The graffiti scrawled in front of her may even be a sign of cubicle as in public restroom instead of university library. As in the "Francesca" poem the reader can't help feeling a little disoriented at the end, sad that readerly expectations don't always conform to the way things appear even in a poem.
