Before heading to the airport, I grabbed a few books, including Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (the pleasingly compact clear cut press edition). It wasn’t until halfway through my flight to Vancouver that I realized that the book is largely about Vancouver. Strange synergy. Then I noticed a boarding pass tucked near the back of the book, documenting another flight from Calgary to Vancouver, in 2005. It occurs to me that I’ve been reading this book, in transit, for years. There are passages I must have read many times, I don’t remember particulars, but the book has become luxuriously familiar, a constant, I can dip into it at any point, it continues. On this reading,

“Thickets, a cave, a hut of boughs…”

called up Lyn Hejinian’s “A pause, a rose, something on paper.” But only briefly. It carries on:

“Thickets, a cave, a hut of boughs are the components of landscape that conventionally provide primordial coverage. Structurally the shack is a thickening, a concentration, an opacity in the lucid landscape.”

Elucidation of surfaces, space, enclosures: shacks, and scaffolding:

“When an immobile building, inevitably bored of its environment, wants a new site, a scaffolding can be constructed around it. Scaffolding substitutes for a site. By compression or condensation it transforms an atmosphere to a condition of access which is also a screen. The idea is easily inflated towards the surreal or the homeopathic, but it is based on observation. When at night we hear the scaffolding rustle, then look up to watch it sway, we feel voyeuristic longing. In darkness the scaffolding is foliage. Sometimes swinging on special leafy scaffolds we feel compelled to loose our little slipper.”

– Lisa Robertson, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

Looking for something to read? Read Taken by Daphne Marlatt. I just finished it and started Ana Historic, also by Daphne Marlatt. I read them both several years ago and was left with a lingering impression of Damn!She does prose well. And she really does:

And so there was the constraint of finishing tea, stiffly, passing the last of the Jaffa biscuits, wiping her mouth on the serviette before getting up to help Mother with the plates, the washing up she did herself now, and all the time wanting to rush out into the street, howling at the unfairness of it all. War. And what of those women who'd managed to get to Signapore and decided to stay there, stick it out to the end with their husbands? That kind of courage. What was Peggy doing now? Still meeting for coffee at Robinson's, displaying her baby over petit fours? Putting a brave face on it, playing mahjong with other wives holed up in The Raffles? And what if the hotel itself took a direct hit? Could she stand it? The game of keeping up morale, stacking your dragons and your winds in neat little walls, while the real walls were falling all around you -- surely they'd have a bomb shelter. But where? Under the dance floor, under the Palm Court where the waiters in their high-buttoned tunics would hardly be standing by? Panic, smoke, people rushing out to get the last food in the shops. No difference between mem sahib and servant.

-Marlatt, Taken

Currently reading:

• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (on the bus);
• What the Crow Said, Robert Kroetsch (before bed);
• Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, George Monbiot (actually only the first chapter so far; it may be too depressing to continue at the moment);
• Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Frans de Waal (still; I keep losing my place);
• far too many poetry books that I flit among and have yet to become absorbed in or give the necessary attention to: Fond by Kate Eichorn, Blissful Times by Sandra Alland, Drunk by Noon by Jennifer L. Knox, Broken World by Joseph Lease, The Iliad Book XXII by Lisa Jarnot, Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place;
• the stack of chapbooks and ephemera from the Blow-out Small Press Books and Arts Fair enticing and reproaching me (not currently, but soon);
• Hudson's English History: A Compendium, Roger Hudson (in snippets, because that's how it's written);
• The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Michel Foucault (not actually currently, because I already finished it, but yay! I finished it).

Currently reading:

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (on the bus on the way to work, because it fits in my purse);
• The Words of My Roaring by Robert Kroetsch (too quickly, because Kroetsch books are basically recreational drugs);
• Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals by Frans de Waal (partly for the pictures of apes and monkeys, partly because de Waal rocks);
• Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place (haltingly, because I'm too distracted to give it the attention it deserves);
• Chicago Review 53:4 & 54:1/2 (intermittently);
• Implexures by Karen Mac Cormack (barely, because I just started, but expectantly); and
• A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (again, because I need to refresh my memory).

Re-reading more of the books that I rescued from storage, including in immediate succession two of my favorite novels: Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley, and Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Both offer a satirical picture of mid-to-upper class English society uncomfortably adapting to modernity, Crome Yellow right after the First World War and Lucky Jim a few years after the Second World War. Each has a young man as its protaganist, in Crome Yellow a pathetic, ineffectual poet, and in Lucky Jim a frustrated, reluctant academic. I've read each of them several times, once every few years. I'm not sure why they have such a hold on me.
Lucky Jim is laugh-out-loud funny, with that British kind of humour that's witty, absurd and ridiculous, like Monty Python or Will Self. On this reading, however, I noticed the pathos more than the humour. Most of the comedy comes from characters who are stuck, either in their careers or in their neuroses.
Crome Yellow has its funny moments too, but it's much more subtle. It seems quite rooted in the era it portrays, and I get the sense that I'm missing some of the satire, because I don't really know what Huxley is referencing. Some of it hits home, though, like this:

Mary looked at the picture for some time without saying anything. Indeed, she didn't know what to say; she was taken aback, she was at a loss. She had expected a cubist masterpiece, and here was a picture of a man and a horse, not only recognizable as such, but even aggressively in drawing. Trompe-l'oeil -- there was no other word to describe the delineation of that foreshortened figure under the trampling feet of the horse. What was she to think, what was she to say? Her orientations were gone. One could admire representationalism in the Old Masters. Obviously. But in a modern...? At eighteen she might have done so. But now, after five years of schooling among the best judges, her instinctive reaction to a contemporary piece of representation was contempt -- an outburst of laughing disparagement. What could Gombauld be up to? She had felt so safe in admiring his work before. But now -- she didn't know what to think. It was difficult, very difficult.

Re-reading ribsauce, an anthology of women's writing published in 2001. When it came out I wrote a positive review for filling Station, but I couldn't remember any specifics. All the work has definitely stood the test of time (not that 2001 was very long ago...). It's particularly interesting to read works-in-progress from writers who've since published some awesome books, i.e. Heather O'Neill, Emily Schultz, Emily Pohl-Weary, Larissa Lai, Rita Wong...

Very taken with Rita Wong's forage lately. It's an incredibly full book, confronting so many different issues and taking on so much complexity. I thought a useful way to start summing up why I like this book so much might be to list in general terms the subject of some of the different poems. The list soon spiraled out of control, and I was just skimming the surface of her poetry: genetic engineering, US patents of wheat, seeds, grains, transgenic pigs, laundry toxins, chinese launderers, native american naming, chinese remedies, war, resistance, discarded computer toxins, oil, economy, smog, body toxins, prisons, wealth, weaponry, chinese language, capitalism, consumerism, endangered species, food, powell street, pride, connection.

It's a serious book, but also ironic ("disaffect, reinfect me.") and playful. Many pages have quotations in hand-written script scrolling along the sides, or Chinese characters nestled among the poems. The visual effect is one of having access into an author's notebook, where ideas and observations ferment among foraged materials. It's a subtle balance of political and personal, an organic panoply of affront at the myriad outrages committed on, by, and for us. Which us? Many us-es. It's a complex text, sensitive to the constantly shifting power imbalances that configure status in the hyper-capitalized, post-colonial, globalized world.

One of my favorite poems in forage:

canola queasy

vulture capital hovers over dinner tables, covers hospitals a sorrowful shade of canola, what gradient decline in the stuck market, what terminal severity in that twenty-year monopoly culled the patent regime, its refrain of greed, false prophets hawk oily platitudes in rapacity as they engineer despair in those brilliant but foolish yellow genetically stacked prairie crops. how to converse with the willfully profitable stuck in their monetary monologue? head-on collisions create more energy but who gets obliterated? despite misgivings i blurt, don't shoot the messy angels with your cell-arranging blasts, don't document their properties in order to pimp them, the time for business-as-usual died with the first colonial casualty. reclaim the long now. hey bloated monstrosity: transcribe your ethics first or your protein mass shall turn protean mess and be auctioned off in the stacked market and so you can reap endless cussed stunts.

- Rita Wong

reading Kyle Schlesinger's chapbook Look. from No Press (which has No web presence). intrigued by but not sure what to make of the period in the title and the complete lack of punctuation in the text. the poem reads like soundbites played over and over, snatches of phrase woven together. the alternation of phrases suggests a pattern, but if there is one I didn't discern it. the possibility of complex pattern hints at a procedural poetics, while the colloquial tone of the alternating phrases invokes a form of found poetry, an idea of the poet recording all the voices he hears in an urban environment, on a bus maybe, or a street corner. at first it reminded me of Robert Fitterman's notion of the unified voice of the poem giving way to a multiplicity of voices collected at random. but Schlesinger's text doesn't reveal any such method, it could just as easily record the speech of one putative person in snatches of time, or the thoughts circling and resurfacing in someone's mind. on a second reading, i realized that the text presents a narrative, actually a very strong narrative, centred on someone getting shot, money, drugs, danger, which makes me wonder why how I could have missed it at first. probably because I was so taken with the idea of sampling and remixing the text evokes.

...
Gonna take that
I'll take it
Worked you over
Cup of coffee
Along for the ride
Worked you over
Along for the ride
Holdin' the bag
Worked you over
Cup of coffee
Holdin' the bag
Put you away
Kiddin' me
Holdin' the bag
Kiddin' me
Save yourself
Holdin' the bag
Put you away
Save yourself
How you doin'
How you doin'
Save yourself
....

- Kyle Schlesinger, Look.

Book I have to read: just found out (via Lemon Hound) about Vanessa Place, a lawyer who wrote a 130-page book with only one sentence. Convergences of law and poetry are always good (her book is described as a novel, but I think when you're pushing the limits of grammar that much, you're writing poetry whether you mean to or not) but a convergence of law, poetry, and sentence is very exciting. I don't get the impression that the book is about law, but still. There are very few people, to my knowledge, who can practice law (meaningfully) and create art (relevantly). If she can do both, maybe I'm not insane to try.

Juliana Spahr's The Transformation is a fascinating convergence of autobiography and poetics. She writes about her experience of living in a relationship of three rather than two, of teaching in Hawaii, of living in New York around 9/11, and how her experiences have affected her political outlook, her intellectual thought, her writing, her conception of self. Spahr has such a strong unique style, it's mesmerizing and lovely. Like Anne Carson, Spahr can reference Stein in her style without writing like Stein. I think that's part of what draws me to her work. But I also enjoy how she works through complex questions using repetition and incremental syntactic shifts. Like in this passage, where she talks about the significance of poetry in the aftermath of 9/11:

The fragmentation felt reassuring to them. Felt like a trance-inducing chant. Like a philosophy of connection. Like a model of intimacy that was full of acquaintances and publics that recognized not only points of contact and mixing, but also relational difficulties, cultural and linguistic difference. And so they often wondered in this time if perhaps all those who claimed that poetry was a comfort were right. Even if those who claimed this were usually talking about lyric poetry and not poetry that used fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on. They had noticed before that they felt writing in their body. That they felt those certain sensations, those sensations of interested calmness that happened when their mind and their breath were working together, that pleasant boredom. And they began at this time to think of the poetry that used fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on not as a radical avant-garde break but as the warm hand of someone they loved stroking their head, helping them to relax the muscles in their hand and inviting them to just close their eyes and relax for a second with the words of someone else. This feeling somewhat answered that constant question of about the use of the avant-garde in a time like this.

- Juliana Spahr, The Transformation, p. 188

This passage is wonderful, and her conclusion strikes me as quite liberating. I too often wonder about the use of avant-garde poetry, particularly with regards to what I sense as a pervasive imperative to purge the personal from innovative poetry, to move away from individual voice in the service of isolating language, examining language, being radical with language. I don't want to write lyric poetry, and yet I don't want to write poetry that lacks emotion or that can't connect with readers on more than a theoretical/intellectual level. Avant-garde (or experimental, innovative, post-avant, I don't really have a word for what I think of when I think of the poetry that I think matters) poetry can be comforting, not in Barthes' readerly sense of confirming what the reader already knows, but in the sense of acknowledging the disjunctive, confusing, impossible nature of the world. I find that comforting. The problem with writing poetry, I find, is how to confront without disengaging, how to be radical but not alienated.

What I notice most about Dennis Lee's yesno is the pervasiveness of the verb to be in certain sections of the book.
...

fumbumbling what
aleph? whose googoo? which syllab? Test-living which
schizoparse of am? (p. 27)

....

Deep
is, and be
struck. Be stricken.
Be amnioflex of the daily, as
things wriggle free of their names,
subsist in
sheer diggity fiat. (p. 44)

...

You fold you are
folded, late-breaking primate, and
brought to who-new.
Fold you are
null again, nil again, knell again - one-swat no-
see-um & whose. You
fold you are un:
stud of no
throne no dominion, kingshit of doodly.
Frag in the mean of let-be. (p. 41)

-- Dennis Lee, yesno

I can't help thinking of editing manuals and writing workshops that preach the elimination as often as possible of all forms of be. Is is the weakest verb, is'll drag your writing down. Generally true, but Dennis Lee transcends generalities. He's not dealing with grammar's weak links, he's posing existential questions. What is after whatever apocalyptic ending may be coming? Nothing is. No-one is. What is the language to write about being and the frightening fallout of future not being? What is language after all?

And why on earth didn't this book win the Governor General's award?!

Many books in my mail today:
The Transformation, Juliana Spahr
Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse and Drudge, Harryette Mullen
The Body: An Essay, Jenny Boully

I'm also reading Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, which is intense, sprawling, profound as all Rushdie books, but it's making me restless. I'm not sure I have the patience for fiction anymore. I don't want to get lost in narratives as much as I used to; I just want to know things. I've started reading history recently, which I'd never read before. 1215: The Year of Magna Carta was fascinating, but I have a law-dork obsession with the Magna Carta. Last summer I read H.G. Wells' The Outline of History, almost a thousand pages of everything from the beginning of the universe to just after the Second World War. Some of his views are cringingly outdated and often racist, but it's a brilliant whirlwind tour through, well, everything. If nothing else, it provides context. It also makes me wonder how I got this far knowing so little about history. Then I remember that the only history I ever learned in high school was in French. If there's anything French Immersion teaches, it's how to avoid having to speak or read or write or learn anything in French.

Somehow I managed to overlook Anne Carson until recently I read Short Talks, originally published in 1992, and then republished in 1998 by Brick Books. A series of 45 prose passages, each a Short Talk On something, from Rain to Penal Servitude to Brigitte Bardot, it's one of those dense books of poetry whose substantiality belies its length. I keep reading it, backwards and forwards, and it keeps seeming new. Carson writes Stein-like without being at all derivative. She's absorbed Stein's influence and folded it into her own style. I always admire writers who can do that, it's a trememdous skill.

Two of my favourite passages:

Short Talk on Where to Travel

I went travelling to a wreck of a place. There were three gates standing ajar and a fence that broke off. It was not the wreck of anything else in particular. A place came there and crashed. After that it remained the wreck of a place. Light fell on it.

Short Talk on Van Gogh

The reason I drink is to understand the yellow sky the great yellow sky, said Van Gogh. When he looked at the world he saw the nails that attach colours to things and he saw that the nails were in pain.

Digging the PDFs of Juliana Spahr's subpoetics self-publish or perish chapbooks. Also can't wait to read The Transformation, which I had to order because bookstores around here, even the ones that carry a lot of Canadian poetry, don't seem to recognize more obscure American poets. Not that I'm complaining, local over global is a nice switch-up.

Just finished reading Lynn Coady’s latest book, mean boy. Set in 1975 New Brunswick, it follows a young poet through his second year of undergraduate drinking and professor-poet adulation. She really nails the undergrad creative writing workshop experience, so much so that I was squirming through certain scenes. Bad, bad memories of my naive and pompous ideas about poetry. Like all Coady's books, it’s brilliant and hilarious. She writes the kind of books I read way too fast and regret ending.

I get kind of neurotic about book reviews. I’d like to write them, but I find it hard to articulate why I like a particular book, and even harder to explain why you should like it, too. So I can’t really tell you why, but you should read this connection of everyone with lungs by Juliana Spahr. You should go read it right now. Seriously. I finished reading it in bed the other night and I fell asleep holding it. I love this book.

I re-read Postmodernism for Beginners every couple of years, just so I can try to remember some of the things that I think I ought to know. It's a fun book to read, although I'm skeptical about how accurate its explanations can be, considering how much material it covers. The few pages that deal with theorists I actually do know something about (de Saussure, Barthes) just confuse me, and that makes me wonder about the sections on modernism and post-modernism in visual art, which seem concise and condensed enough for me to grasp: a good sign that something important is being left out. Nevertheless, it's a great book to steamroll through, letting the names of artists, philosophers, theorists pile up and blur, ending up with a vague sense of discombobulation and awe. Also, there are pictures.

Sometimes I feel as though there’s something insidious creeping into my aesthetics, bias influencing my reaction to poems more than reasonable evaluation. I want to resist choosing sides. If there is a compelling argument for why formalist, lyric poetry is still relevant, then I want to know what it is. I want to be convinced.

So I started off reading this review with an open mind. After a brief stroll through Starnino’s caustic introduction, and a minor remonstrance for the apparently forgivable sin of spell-check-induced typos, the reviewer sets out his criterion for a good poem: the “interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources.” Ok, I agree with that. But when the reviewer gives examples from the anthology, he starts to lose me.

It is almost painful
to touch, but you can’t help
yourself. It’s so familiar.
The dents. The twisted symmetry.
You can see how hard it has tried.

I have a lazy intellect, so I have to rely on writing workshop questions, like Why is this a poem? What do the line breaks do that the same words in a paragraph couldn’t do? Where is the prosody?

His body divorced him slowly,
like a flock of birds leaving
a wire, one set of wings at a time –
still in sight, but past retrieving.

I like this image, but why is the form so controlled? If the body is falling apart, why isn’t the language falling apart too? Why aren’t the words more birdlike, or winglike, or why don’t they sound… I don’t know, interesting?

Hovelled in darkness two nights then,

bent blindly to the sleet’s raw work,
bodies muffled close for shelter,
stepping in circles like blinkered mules.
The wind jerking like a halter.

Two similes in two lines? Is an interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources? Really?

And finally, this gem:

The bony babes in Gap who lazily
Stroll with Starbucks cups at U of T,
Photoshopped or bio-engineered,
See me dreamy-eyed and think I’m weird.

Which the reviewer justifies thusly:

As with Larkin, it’s the self-deprecation, and the wit, that keep the misogyny bearable in these poems, though no doubt more for some readers than for others.

I must be one of those other readers, because I don't think misogyny is ever bearable. Dear reviewer: Replace “misogyny” with “racism” or “homophobia” and maybe you’ll understand what an asshole sounds like.

If witty formalism and self-deprecating lyricism are meant to make misogyny palatable, that's a pretty strong argument against them. And I still haven't heard a compelling argument in their favour. So, I remain unconvinced.

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary is a wonderful and fascinating book. It took over 70 years to complete the dictionary, and thousands of contributors. Many of the people involved were insane. It was like a Victorian rallying cause for the pedantic, the meticulous, the martyred; the British.

It's a charming narrative, only slightly marred by passages like this:

...the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

So, ever look up the word "hubris"?

I finally had time to read all of Shift & Switch and: wow. It's such an exciting book. It's so much the opposite of what anthologies are usually: a sort of gathering up and condensing. Most anthologies present writing so definitively. All you need to know is there, summed up and distilled.

Shift & Switch, on the other hand, is all possibility. So much of the writing seems in process, in flight. Some of the poems may be finished, but I'm sure a lot of the selections will be revised into bigger projects, or smaller, or just different.

Writing is always changing, writing is always renewing.

I don't mean that the book reads like a draft, because it doesn't: it's well-edited, well-designed and well-written. The poems are good, but not perfected. They're present, and vital. That's why it's exciting: it's like a promise of more and more writing to come.