Allan Safarik. Famous Roadkill. Regina: Hagios Press, 2012

~Reviewed by rob mclennan

In his poetry collection Famous Roadkill, Saskatchewan poet Allan Safarik opens with the acknowledgment that “These poems were written in 2011 in the historic Jacoby House (1906) in Dundurn, Saskatchewan. A quiet location in a rural town 35 km south of Saskatoon just off the Number 11 Highway.” It’s been a number of years since I’ve read through Safarik’s work, having been more familiar with his working-class Vancouver poetry from the 1980s, around the time he edited the anthology Vancouver Poetry (Polestar, 1986). Saskatchewan poetry over the years has long been characterized, it seems, by long, narrative stretches and lyric metaphor-driven storytelling, influenced in part by writers such as the late prairie poets Andrew Suknaski and Anne Szumigalski. I have often wondered about poetry that reads more like prose with line breaks, and yet, for writers like Suknaski, it was the unbridled, nuanced lines (“loping coyote lines,” as he called them) that made all the difference.

Safarik’s short poems are about hard work and death, rough landscapes and abstract dreamscapes, and they reference a number of his concerns and markers, whether geographic or poetic, including Estevan, Dylan Thomas, the twentieth century, the Great Horned Owl, Czeslaw Milosz, and Saskatoon. In poetry that focuses on small declarations and local landmarks, some of his abstractions become difficult to follow, and some of his stories read so straight as to make the reader wonder what their purpose might be. Although a poem such as “The Summoning,” for instance, comes out of 1970s-era Andrew Suknaski, Safarik does not seem to have harnessed the skill to make Suknaski’s techniques sing. “The Summoning” opens:

Looking at the worn out photos
of peasant farmers from an earlier era
in a country whose name and borders
have changed often in dividing times
here are the isolated, serious faces
the unhappy few who were caught
by the camera before they were ready to smile.

These poems don’t read as portraits, but they often leave too much out to provide a proper picture. Too often, the poems in Safarik’s Famous Roadkill appear descriptive without an apparent purpose, simply showing off for its own sake—and they lack a required nuance. Still, there are occasional moments that do transcend, as in the fourth and final stanza of “Dryland,” which reads, “In a small graveyard / a few family names repeat / in a sequence of straight rows / Strangers die in other places.” Certainly Safarik’s Famous Roadkill is a tribute to the prairie local, but one that hasn’t learned well enough from previous works in the same vein, whether Andrew Suknaski’s Wood Mountain (1976) or Eli Mandel’s Out of Place (1977).

rob mclen­nan is author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fic­tion and non-fiction. The most recent is Songs for lit­tle sleep, (obvi­ous epi­phanies press, 2012). He blogs at robmclennan.blogspot.com.

prairies, coasts and everything in between: Arc is Canada’s Poetry Magazine!

Maureen Scott Harris. Slow Curve Out. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Pedlar Press, 2012.

~Reviewed by Alexis Motuz

Maureen Scott Harris’ evocative Slow Curve Out places us in conversation with the natural world and explores the possibilities and the apparent limitations of language to communicate with the Other. Her collection opens with “Walking in Saskatchewan with Rilke,” a lyric spoken from the point of view of a deeply meditative yet playful narrator who describes her failed attempt to engage Rilke in the beauty of the prairie landscape. The poem recalls Rilke’s own “A Walk,” in which his speaker is grasped by the ineffable and changed into “something else which … we already are.”Harris’s poem follows a similar trajectory; however, her spiritual experience is an embodied communion with the land: “things surge into being, here, claim eyes, claim / mind, claim my very heart, beating and beating.” “Here” refers both to the prairie landscape that “claims” us (and so inverts the conventional trope of humans claiming ownership through naming) and also to the page where Harris’s poem “surges into being.” “Here” is also an offering, an invitation to the land to “claim” her mind and heart and so to enter her fully. The poem concludes as the speaker imaginatively transcends human-animal boundaries and becomes what Rilke suggests “we already are”:

his silence

pulsing makes me want to throw back my head

and yap like any old dog, yellow fur rough with dust,

skin flaking, and a flea in my ear driving me

wild, so I’ll run for miles, nose down on prairie

scents, heart crazy with sky and wind.

This motif of crossing borders between self and other to know “differently”—“I want three minutes in the skin of another animal”—as well as the recognition of the alterity these borders protect, creates a dynamic tension that permeates the text. One of Harris’s strongest poems, “Epistemology: The World Speaks,” explores this tension by considering the limitations and possibilities of language in allowing us to understand an Other. While she recounts how a man’s words “opened / a space in my head, and everything rearranged” (14), her own “words fall short” (39) in her interaction with nature. Despite learning the names of trees from a book, she knows that walking into a forest would still result in “encounter[ing] nothing / I could name” (14). By identifying such naming as insufficient, Harris open up a space within which “the world speaks” (15) and we might listen. Even as she delineates the shortcomings of language, however,she reminds us that it too has a place—“our talk might also be to praise”—and invites us to “choose words with care. / Let our sounds play among the others” (82).

While Slow Curve Out contains primarily nature poems, she intersperses these with poems about relationships, aging and disease, violence and capitalism. Her final poem, “Homecoming,” concludes with the advice, “[l]earn this, not / to despair but to vanquish despair. / Be astonished,” and it is this astonishment that she models and then recreates for her readers throughout her collection.

Alexis Motuz is a PhD student in English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON. She is currently researching representations of the land in Canadian women’s poetry.

It’s a Slow Arc Out, and a fast Arc in

Brenda Schmidt. Grid. Regina, Saskatchewan: Hagios Press, 2012.

~Reviewed by Tanis MacDonald

I read Grid with a lot of curiosity about its title, for the back-cover blurb about living “off the grid” seemed true enough but entirely too easy a metaphor. These poems use rural life in northern Saskatchewan to propose an existential dilemma whereby the beauty of distance squares off against the queasiness of intimacy. The grid is a visual metaphor: the patterns of roads travelled by trucks and cars that are forever heading somewhere else; the parallel lines made by harrows and tractors; even the checkerboard pattern made by quarter-sections of farmland. But most pertinent to the collection, the word “grid” works linguistically: it’s a near-homonym of “grit” and, more than once, my eyes changed the order of the letters to read the word as “gird”—to encircle for protection—perhaps best read as a warning to the reader looking solely for beauty. Caveat emptor: Brenda Schmidt has an uncanny ability to find exactly the sharp shock of pain hidden in the lyric moment.

There is grit in these poems, so much that it seems unfair to think of them as nature poems; like the best nature writing, they undo our expectations of nature rather than uphold them. Schmidt’s most thoroughly mined poetic territory is close observation, as she discovers not only a luminous presence (a rare bird, a stunning photograph, the sublime moment) but also forwards jolting reminders of absences that demand attention: a history of colonialism, dying relatives, the debate about childlessness, isolations of all kinds. Sometimes, Schmidt recasts the act of watching as a revelation of guilt, as in “Barometric,” when a weather report shifts into the memory of a man’s face and the speaker’s recognition of the “current conditions” of his age: “roads through the stubble, / ruts in his lips then / I recognized the greyness the storm / I can’t wait out.” “Too Far” begins as a mediation on driving northern roads in winter—and Grid serves up plenty of winter – and ends with the eerily apt simile of a Great Grey owl that “looks up / like a doctor might from a chart with bad news.”

While most of the pieces are straight-ahead lyrics, Schmidt threads a wild humour through many of the poems, and her tone—sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes fierce—reminds me of the guffaw-out-loud-then-stop-guiltily comedic ironies used by Susan Holbrook and Jeanette Lynes. “Express Lane, with American Scientist in Hand” turns the tables on looking in order to riff on the discomfort of being watched and judged for one’s reading material, while the satirical stance of “To Those Considering a Return to the Land”—including step-by-step instructions for the Saskatchewan version of a hot-stone massage—strikes just the right balance between amused bitterness and social parody. I can taste the dust in this one, and I think everyone would benefit from getting a bit of this kind of grit in their eyes.

Tanis MacDonald lives in Waterloo, Ontario, where she teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her latest poetry book is Rue The Day (Turnstone Press).

Arc: undo your expectations of poetry.

Tom Wayman. Dirty Snow. Madeira Park, British Columbia: Harbour Publishing, 2012.

~Reviewed by John Lent

These are such mean, square, bullying times. I am gripped by this realization every day. Crazy. Unnerving. I was born in 1948 and grew up in the 50s and 60s in Edmonton, and I never thought I might be living, eventually, in a culture and a time more conservative and square—as imprecise as those terms have become—than those times and that culture. But these times and this culture are more conservative. We have allowed that to happen, and I’m not sure how, but we did. If we are at last to dismantle indifference, apathy, complicity, we must begin by staring more deeply and critically into our political and cultural machinery to support, in time and through assiduous effort, a political and cultural machinery that is more variable and celebratory.

It is precisely this kind of stare—both critical and loving—that Tom Wayman provides in his latest book of poems, Dirty Snow. Like Neruda, Lorca, Guthrie, Brecht and so many others before him, Wayman uses words and images—the craft of twentieth century poetry—to cut through the steel irony and stylishness of these times and quietly expose the machinery that encloses and constrains us. There is no other poet in this country who is articulating the issues Wayman is staring into. Artistically, it would be too risky. Such a voice and gaze as his might even seem politically incorrect. But Wayman’s voice is crucial. His aesthetic has always been engaged in politics and people, but, for me, this is his most political book since The Face of Jack Munro, and there is a power and exhilaration in it that needs to be singled out and celebrated. The publication of Dirty Snow is an important event in the life of our culture.

Dirty Snow is divided into three sections: “The Effect Of The Afghan War On The Landscapes And People of Southeastern British Columbia”; “My Wounds”; and “Calling The Season Home.” The juxtaposition of these sections reveals a strength that has always characterized Wayman’s poetry: the drawing of the political into the daily lives of people, the careful situating of the political, the external, within the powerful consciousness/awareness we have of politics internally. Wayman’s strategy has always been to include himself at the heart of any critique. This strategy insures that the poems do not perform as rants; they are never simply prescriptive; they are always inclusive, open, and self-questioning. The voice that delivers this material is a smooth, accessible voice that Wayman has grown into over such a long, rich career. Like a seasoned jazz saxophone player, Wayman leans back into the music he is creating because he has paid his dues: he has reached that point of grace in improvisation, a poise that takes years to acquire. This aspect of ‘voice’ in Wayman’s poetry is seldom commented upon, and yet it is such an enormous presence in his work.

This is a stunning volume of poetry. An important volume of poetry. It is written by a poet who has already given us much, a poet who has reached a poise and suppleness of expression that offers something rich and crucial. I have followed Wayman’s career and have come to feel that his voice is more important and significant than it ever was. If a new generation of young poets, artists, and activists ever needed wonder, or a mentor to inspire them, they should look no further than the body of work Tom Wayman has created over the past forty years, and maybe especially in his latest volume of poetry, Dirty Snow. For an older generation, this volume, Dirty Snow, offers a reinvigoration and re-motivation.

John Lent has been publishing poetry, fiction and non-fiction nationally and internationally for the past thirty years. He has published nine books of poetry and fiction and his latest novel, The Path to Ardoe, came out with Thistledown in 2012.

Dismantle apathy through poetry with Arc.

Though there could be general agreement that found poetry works with existing texts, re-fashions them, re-orders them, and re-presents them, in some way, as poems, in practice found poetry should probably be seen more as a technique with varying levels of application than a poetic sub-genre. Looking at it this way, one can conceptualize found poetry along an axis that ranges from non-interventionist at one extreme (where found text is used verbatim with no or little interference from the author other than the original act of finding and excerpting) to the other end where the found text is doctored, and “poeticized,” and, perhaps, included within a larger unfound structure. Along this continuum, there exist many side variations that elude categorization altogether; here you might have texts that have been photographed (see Arnaud Maggs’ “Contaminations”²), sewn (see Jen Bervin’s “Nets”³), beaded (see Nadia Myre’s “Indian Act”⁴), photocopied (see the 1970s and 80s for the plethora of photocopy art), or (and you’ll see this later) shot. There are poems that are completely found; there are poems that contain found text within larger, lyrical structures. There are poems that don’t much care about what was found but only about the procedures and rules of finding. And there are poems that only want to give you the sense of being found to add to some faux-documentary authenticity. Found poetry isn’t necessarily radical, new, or experimental—though it can be all these things—but its use brings interesting new possibilities and meaning in contemporary poetic practice. At the same time, we can see many Canadian antecedents to its current use.

In Canada, found poetry as a conscious practice is generally traced back to F.R. Scott, John Robert Colombo and Dorothy Livesay. In Scott’s Trouvailles: Poems from Prose (1967), he describes his technique of turning found prose into poems: “In a strict manner, no words should be added or subtracted; the original should be printed with only a change from the prose to free verse form.” In his introduction to Trouvailles, Louis Dudek defined found poetry as “a piece of realist literature, in which significance appears inherent in the object—either as extravagant absurdity or as unexpected worth. It is like driftwood or pop art, where natural objects and utilitarian objects are seen as the focus of generative form or meaning.” Scott’s purity of approach (where the poet’s only role is to find and add line breaks) mirrors the approach of John Robert Colombo. In The Mackenzie Poems (1966), a book of poems constructed from excerpts of Mackenzie King’s speeches, Colombo defines his found poetry as “redeemed prose”; elsewhere he described them as translations from English and poems of theft. Of any Canadian writer, Colombo has made the greatest career of the found where his many books of found poetry bleed naturally into his collections of Canadian quotations and Canadiana.

With its connections to realism (and the assumed factual immediacy of prose) and with Pop Art’s new-found interest in Dadaist techniques, the 1960s and 1970s made much use of found techniques. In Canada, examples range from Dorothy Livesay’s The Documentaries (1968) and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), to Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston (1974), Robert Kroetsch’s The Ledger (1975), and Mick Burrs’ Going to War: Found Poems of the Métis People (1975). Though none of these books take a purist approach to found poetry, they are united in their use of the found to reframe history and question differences between fact and fiction. As Franz Stanzel notes: “Many if not most of the found poems, certainly most of those produced by Canadian writers, belong to documentary literature, employing historical or social documents as literature.”⁵ This echoes Livesay’s sentiment that found poetry and documentary techniques are “a conscious attempt to create a dialectic between the objective facts and the subjective feelings of the poet.”⁶ For Livesay, the use of the documentary and found was much more of a moral concern than a technical one: getting away from modernist poetry that valorized classical allusions over lived realities. Tied to preoccupations with Canadian nation building and its attendant immigration stories and mythologies, many of the found poems from this time functioned as a sort of literary archeology focused on recuperating and repositioning histories.

The exuberant production of Canadian found poetry from its early practitioners in the 1970s has only been matched in the past decade,⁷ as evidenced by books such as (and this is just a sampling) Gregory Betts’ If Language (2005), Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources (2007), M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), derek beaulieu’s How to Write (2010), Helen Hajnoczky’s Poets and Killers (2010), Garry Thomas Morse’s Discovery Passages (2011), and my own Err (2011). This resurgence is even stronger south of the border with the creation of the email “flarflist” by the Flarf Collective in 2001 and the exuberant production—Fidget (2000), Day (2003), The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008)—of Kenneth Goldsmith, one of found poetry’s most eloquent spokespersons. With the American poet Matthea Harvey’s 2011 Of Lamb (which uses erasure techniques to create a long poem from David Cecil’s A Portrait of Charles Lamb) making it onto Oprah’s “Top 11 Books You Never Thought You’d Read (but will fall in love with instantly),” one can really have no doubt about found poetry’s presence as a mainstream practice of the marginal.⁸

Though Kenneth Goldsmith reasons that our resurgent interest in found poetry lies with the cyclical nature of boredom (with the unboring boring currently ascendant),⁹ how found poetry is being made, and what drives the current interest, is markedly different from the past. Technological change, and the rapid digitization of contemporary and archival text, has had a profound impact on what found poetry now plays with and how it plays. Once largely the purview of academics and archivists, access to archival texts and documents has now become simple for anyone with a computer, internet access and time. Do you want to see the 1513 text of the Spanish Crown’s El Requirmiento? No need to go to the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla, Spain; just Google it and you will have it in 0.22 seconds. Want a searchable copy of the Phaedra by Racine? Go to Project Gutenberg. Simultaneously, the rapid digitization of texts has also opened up whole new methods of reading, finding and textual manipulation all with new potential for artistic appropriation. For example, derek beaulieu’s “How to Edit,” is a six page conglomeration of search results for the use of the word “edit” in 1,100 digital texts at Project Gutenberg.¹⁰ In my own “The Body,” the poem’s source material is a decades long archive of a question/answer forum on HIV/AIDS maintained by thebody.com; such an archive—the existence of which is, itself, fueled by the easy anonymity of the internet—and its found poetry have never before existed.¹¹ Even erasure poetry—long associated with highlighters, black markers and sinus-numbing quantities of Wite-Out—has been electronically facilitated: wavepoetry.com can now help you make your own erasure poems from pre-existing texts by Henry James and others. As Kenneth Goldsmith states in the special issue of Poetry dedicated to flarf and conceptual writing, “Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers,” and found poetry is one of the most popular reactions.¹²

Compared to Canadian found poetry of the 70s, recent examples, though still continuing the work of historical restoration and revision, are much more interested in dissent. That found poetry can be a medium for protest might seem unlikely; indeed, flarf has been criticized for its seeming blindness to the un-neutral commercial interests that power the search algorithms upon which it depends.¹³ Yet, for all that, one of contemporary found poetry’s strengths is as protest poetry of the post-: post-colonialism, post-feminism, post-capitalism, post-Marxism. Its engineered play within shifting temporal and cultural contexts exalts in exposing the ridiculousness and offensiveness of previous narrative structures, writers and their writing. Today’s found poetry thrives in counter discourse—not just finding texts but speaking back to them with, and within, their own words.

Found poetry derives meaning from the relationship between the poem, poet and source material—that is, understanding the reason why something was “found,” why this “foundness” needs to be signified, and the new contextual frame in which the found material is now placed. A new context motivates new meanings. The high valuation placed on changing contexts can be seen in “No Comment” by Garry Thomas Morse and his use of historic letters from Indian Agents in the 1910s to draw attention to government efforts to destroy the cultural practices of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples. In effect, Morse, who is of Kwakwaka’wakw background, re-deploys the letters’ own strategies of control, selection and erasure to create poems.

Last

spring

arranging

a feast of

oolichan

grease

some

time

about

Xmas

advise

you

sell

grease

give

away

against

the act

persist

no choice

compelled

prosecuted

govern

accordingly

Wm. M. Halliday, Indian Agent

Nov. 20, 1918

[“No Comment,” p. 36]

The poem moves quickly from simple language describing arrangements for a feast of oolichan oil to the heavy gutturals and plosives of prohibition (“against / the act / persist / no choice”) and prosecution. The poem alludes to the Indian Act’s potlatch ban (the ban was added to the Act in 1884) and its enforcement—which was invigorated by Duncan Campbell Scott when he became Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1913 and by the efforts of Indian Agents such as William Halliday who was responsible for the Act’s enforcement among the Kwakwaka’wakw. What is stunning about “No Comment” is the mass of historical information these few found words bring with them, how the poem creates meaning through Morse and his finding, and how the technique of finding and erasure of Indian Agent letters draws out the larger political correlatives of finding and erasure in relation to Canadian discovery, colonization, and cultural control. “Finding” isn’t only about finding and erasing words; in this context, it is also about finding and erasing people and their cultures. Though page-based, Discovery Passages’ found poems are similar in sentiment to Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s performance piece aptly named “An Indian Shooting the Indian Act” where the performance consisted of Yuxwelupton shooting copies of the Act while O Canada plays in the background.¹⁴

In Canada, it is no wonder that so many recent examples of found poetry are taken with post-colonial concerns and reading the colonial past’s atrocities and racism through the present. Constraining itself to the 500-word decision of the Gregson v. Gilbert legal case about hundreds of African slaves murdered by the captain of the Zong in 1781, M. NorbeSe Philip’s Zong! builds poems through the gaps, sparse words and silences she finds in the original court document. As Philip states in her foreword to poems published in Fascicle: “As poet/writer/creator I become censor and magician, simultaneously censoring the activity of the reported text, and conjuring something new from the absence of the Africans as humans that is at the heart of the text.”¹⁵ Philip employs different strategies throughout Zong! to work within such constrained source material. In the first sections, the poems are constructed from whole words; by the last section, however, the poem has begun to rip the words apart and compose new vocabularies. Much of the power of Zong! is built through repetition and space which highlight both the artistic act of arrangement but also the original act of cutting from a surrounding text:

the truth was

the ship sailed

the rains came

the loss arose

the truth is

the ship sailed

the rains came

the loss arose

the negroes is

the truth was

[“Zong! #14,” p. 24]

Kate Eichorn, writing about Zong! in Cross Cultural Poetics, states “There is only one choice and that is to tell the story that can’t be told through its constraints.”¹⁶ The suspense that powers Zong! is how Philip works within the constraints of found poetry and breaks her own self-imposed constraints, all the while trying to divine the “truth” of what actually happened on the Zong through the few words she has found.

The activist nature of contemporary found poetry isn’t, however, only constrained to historical documents. In “Boycott,” Gregory Betts uses much looser constraints to sample language from boycott movements from around the world to highlight the arguments that happen in and through consumerism.

If I boycott you from my point of view I boycott you. I boycott you who boycott girls, without girls, you cannot exist and I boycott you Canada!!! You don’t boycott me, I boycott you! Really, Pampers? Must I boycott you too? I boycott you blog that is full of shit. I boycott you illiterate Facebook applications. The reasons I boycott you? At first, it was simply because it was so hard. Here’s my question: should I admire you for sticking to your unnecessary, overtly sexual guns or should I boycott you because of, um, the same reasons? How can I boycott you when I never darken your doors to begin with? I boycott you Naomi Klein. This comment has received too many negative votes to show. Click hide. I boycott you because you are so ignorant that you are mixing art and politics together. Get a crash course on Art 101!!

[“I Boycott You”]

Betts’ project, with its text built from thematically driven internet search results and the harder work of arrangement, could be considered “flarf plus”; that is, flarf with a political conscience and organizing or curatorial manifesto. As Betts stated in Geist, “The boycott project is thus a mirror held up to a black hole, an enormous globe-spanning chattering of threats of economic negation. It is a collection of the calls to boycott at both the most individual and futile of phases, from the blogosphere, from Facebook boycott groups, and from the comment streams beneath provocative articles.”¹⁷ Betts’ objective in Boycott is similar to Helen Hajnoczky’s in Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising where, through lines taken directly from advertisements beginning in the 1940s and working up to 2010, she “demonstrates how we can talk back to advertising by using its diction to undermine its messages.”

That poetry can be built from the unexpected and the unpoetic that surround us has to be one of the continuing attractions of found poetry. At the same time, what found poetry has always offered to poetic practice—whether now, in the 1970s or before—is a shift away from the expected poetic building blocks of classical allusion, metaphor, simile, rhyme and rhythm to focus instead on poetry’s ability to interrogate histories and engineer a critical space for dissention, commentary and argument. With the ever evolving integration of technology into poetry and the increasing availability of interesting source material and new means of collection, sampling and manipulation, this restoked interest in found poetry—as evidenced by recent examples—is only at the beginning. Who knows what next we will find.

1^ Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston: Northwestern University Press„ 2011), xliv.

References

beaulieu, derek. How to Write. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2010.

Betts, Gregory. If Language. Toronto: Book Thug, 2005. Boycott. Los Angeles: Make Now Press, publication forthcoming.

Boycott. Los Angeles: Make Now Press, publication forthcoming.

Burrs, Mick. Going to War: Found Poems of the Métis People. Regina: Province of Saskatchewan, Department of Culture and Youth, 1975.

Colombo, John Robert. The Mackenzie Poems. Toronto: Swan, 1966.

Dworkin, Craig. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 2011.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. Fidget. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2000.

Day. Great Barrington, The Figures, 2003.

The Weather. Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2005.

Traffic. Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2007.

Sports. Los Angelese: Make Now Press, 2008.

Hajnoczky, Helen. Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising. Montreal: Snare Books, 2010.

Harvey, Matthea. Of Lamb. McSweeney’s Publishing: San Francisco, 2011.

Kroetsch, Robert. The Ledger. London: Brick Books, 1975.

Livesay, Dorothy. The Documentaries. Toronto: Ryerson University Press, 1968.

Marlatt, Daphne. Steveston. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974.

Morse, Garry Thomas. Discovery Passages. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011.

Ondaatje, Michael. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Toronto: Anansi, 1970.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Rhodes, Shane. Err. Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2011.

Scott, Francis Reginald. Trouvailles: Poems from Prose. Montreal: Delta Canada, 1967.

Zolf, Rachel. Human Resources. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007.

Shane Rhodes is Arc’s Poetry Editor. His most recent book, Err, was published by Nightwood Editions in 2011. “Reuse and Recycle: Finding Poetry in Canada” is based on a talk originally commissioned by Ottawa’s Tree Reading Series.

Leah Hervoly is a writer and visual artist from London, Ontario with a Major in English and a Minor in Creative Writing.

Natalie Zina Walschots. DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains. London: Insomniac Press, 2012.

~Reviewed by Christopher Doda

With her second book, Natalie Zina Walschots continues to explore poetic territory left largely unmarked by others. After Thumbscrews, a book of S&M flavoured poetry, she has turned her quirky pop-culture eye to the now-seemingly ubiquitous world of comic books in DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains. The subtitle says it all: this is a book that imagines the erotic lives of fictitious beings who a) have superhuman abilities and b) are evil. The resulting collection is not to be taken too seriously, and I mean that in a good way; indeed I may be guilty of enjoying DOOM for what it isn’t rather than for what it is. After too much oh-so-important Canadian poetry blandly ruminating on memory, gardens, stones, and mournful window-staring, it is refreshing to read these playfully exuberant pieces. In short, it’s fun. The poems themselves are brief, sparsely worded to the point of being nearly epigrammatic, with no punctuation and titled by either a villain’s name or realm of dominance, covering decades of comics lore from long-known scofflaws Dr. Doom, Magneto, the Joker and the Green Goblin to more recent nasties like Bane and Omega Red. The perspective is always first person, either from the villain’s point of view or that of a (semi-)willing paramour. The unadorned wording invites the reader to fill in the tawdry details of each encounter from his or her own imagination. For instance, in “Galactus,” (a planet-consuming alien largely fought by the Fantastic Four), Walschots imagines a lover who could soothe his insatiable cosmic appetite: “you must eat my love / it is your nature to devour / and for my insignificance/the smallest of suns / ignites my cells’ engines // let me extinguish myself / in your hunger.” Considering the proliferation of various kinds of fan fiction on the Internet, DOOM is not as outlandish as it may first appear; Walschots simply relocates an online tendency into print, fan poetry as it were, and brings it up against the conventions of love poetry. All that classical verse (Ovid etc.) of unadulterated gods who love/rape their mortal playthings invites the same kind of speculation. Placed in context, Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” is surely a love poem to a supervillain. As if to cement the connection to the ancient world, Scylla and Charybdis make an appearance (though they are conflated with a duo that fought Aquaman). My major qualm about DOOM is that knowledge of several comic-book cosmologies is essential for understanding the individual poems—a kind of reverse elitism—though insider knowledge is a characteristic of any obsessive fan fiction, or indeed fan poetry. As someone whose regular reading of comics ended around 1985 at least a third of the book’s characters were lost to me. Otherwise, I remain curious as to what strange and tender subject will attract Walschots’s wandering eye next time around.

Christopher Doda is the author of two poetry collections, Among Ruins and Aesthetics Lesson. He is currently working on a book of glosas based on heavy metal lyrics.

It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Arc Poetry Magazine!

Erín Moure. The Unmemntioable. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2012.

~Reviewed by Michael LaPointe

Erín Moure’s The Unmemntioable is a modern artifact. Recalling an age when a volume might comprise poems, stories, illustrations, translations, and philosophy, The Unmemntioable is a book containing, among other things, “poems, a filched Moleskine, a correspondence… a dog with a headache, and sundry philosophic remarks,” as its cover advertises. Not to be confused with a miscellany, however, this medley has a story to tell. Moure (or “E.M.”) arrives in Bucharest, Romania, having spread her mother’s ashes at the site of a Ukrainian village effaced by World War II. Elsewhere in Bucharest is Elisa Sampedrín (or “E.S.”), the heteronymous poet of Moure’s previous collections, O Resplandor and Little Theatres, who witnessed E.M. “burying the ashes of her mother, in the grove where once a latin church stood” (section “1/1”). Unable to cope with the psychic burden of her mother’s experiences (“At night the children were harvested with flames. / The buildings spontaneously combusted” [“1/1”]), Moure relinquishes the task of writing The Unmemntioable to E.S.: “Perhaps it is better if Elisa Sampedrín writes of these things” (“1/1”). E.S., in turn, takes E.M. “for my experimental subject” (“1/5”) in order to conduct research into the nature of experience. Alas, were it not for a back cover summary, it would be impossible to seize this narrative thread, which stitches together the poems, filched Moleskine, aching dog, etc., and elevates The Unmemntioable to the status of “book” rather than “collection.” While Moure clearly locates her power in obliqueness—in her self-styled biography, she claims her work “has been honoured with awards almost as often as it has been received with puzzlement”—the fact that most readers will require the package’s exegesis to obtain her book’s most basic platform seems unnecessary, not ingenious. The summary provided is the key to a door that might have been left open a crack. This wouldn’t be a valid complaint of a book of interest only to a rarefied readership, but The Unmemntioable has much of value to share on family, history, memory, and above all, experience. Read the back cover, and The Unmemntioable reveals its true nature: a generous book with an unfriendly face. The book becomes especially active on the subject of experience, reading at times with Heidegerrean rigour (“experience itself has its core in the impossibility of experience––a proximity to death” [“1/5”]), at other times with otherworldly awareness (“Experience does not come out of the mind or imagination but from a deep and irrecusable need. It rents the entire person” [“1/6”]). The core of experience, teetering as it does on the verge of annihilation, is the title’s unmentionable, a word Moure collapses (or “collpase”s, in a favourite construction of hers) as she “sew[s] the alphabet shut” (“the unmemntioable”) and points toward where “language ceases,” the “beyond of experience,” “beyond of borders” (“1/5”). Moure’s mission calls to mind that of Polish Holocaust survivor Tadeusz Borowski, who in an introduction to This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (trans. B. Vedder) termed his stories of Auschwitz “a voyage to the limit of a particular experience.” For two of her own governing influences, Moure selects Paul Celan and Ovid, poets who witnessed “what [they] cannot speak of” (“jocurile de noroc”). Naturally, Moure has been spared a glimpse into the darkness of these poets’ experiences. But in a heroic effort of multilingual erudition, lyrical intensity, and unwavering humanism, she voyages toward the limit. Pushing language against its point of endurance, Moure makes each reader a witness to the unspeakable.

Michael LaPointe is a writer and literary journalist in Vancouver.

a medley of miscellany: it’s Arc!

Julie Paul is the author of the short fiction collection, The Jealousy Bone (Emdash, 2008). Work has recently appeared in Qwerty, PRISM International and The Rusty Toque. She lives in Victoria, BC.

Asa Boxer. Skullduggery. Montreal: Signal Editions – Véhicule Press, 2011.

~Reviewed by Lise Gaston

Asa Boxer’s second book is a collection of unabashed, raucous, and occasionally raunchy mimicry. Not only does Boxer confront some of the biggest personages, myths, and motifs of the Western canon, but he slips his name in alongside them: the “The Boxer Primer” introduces a sequence on imagined firearms, such as “The Coleridge Porlock” and “The Browning Colt .45.” “Dear Asa,” the collection’s first poem, launches directly into audacious vocal play, as Boxer addresses his persona in the voice of God. The imaginative vocal blending culminates in “Primer to the New World,” a section that applies the fantastical travel narrative of the Middle Ages to a provincially categorized Canada: “Myrrh blisters from tree trunks / in the royal forests of Newfoundland”; apparently, we can find “the Well of Youth at Thunder Bay.” Stylistically, Boxer also builds a playful fusion; long sentences judder through tight tercets and quatrains, and rhyme is pervasive but irregular, fluctuating between internal and end-stopped, perfect and slanted: “Owl, wise anatomist, studies / the tissues, then spits the gist: / the shag and bone of what exists” (“Night Shift”). The tension between conversational phrasing and strict stanza structures is reinforced by the incongruous rhythms often produced through internal rhyme: the titular skulldugger trips us up, cackling. There is perhaps an over-reliance on naming, in poems such as “The Pomegranate” a verse play, in which many Greek gods are invoked not for narrative or imagistic heft, but simply to point at the myth (it is also unclear what makes this poem a “Play,” apart from its name, for dialogue is in quotation marks, and it is structurally identical to the other tercet poems). Much of the fun in the “Primer to a New World” poems is the slapping of place names onto the poetic frame, which does little to serve the place itself, or the poetic content. This irony between place and content hinges on an enjoyable predictability, much like “The Coleridge Porlock,” which ends in “knock, knock, knock, you start / with a shock that burns away the dream.” But the most compelling poems in this final section, among them “Prester John’s Seduction,” are those that move beyond the tricks of incongruous naming and fanciful description, and into psychological narrative. Boxer puts on the trappings of the skuldugger, the cheat, which is itself a deception, an act by a poet profoundly interested in how truth arises from mimicry. There are moments of sincerity and sentimentality among the playfulness and irreverence, but the focus of the book is in the amalgamation between the imagined, the appropriated, and the true, creating a comedy that is alternately overt and subtle, and that leaves the reader teetering, not sure who or what to trust—but, as we’re told in “An Old Skulldugger’s Testament,” perhaps the joke’s on us: “what you choose to trust // is circumstantial.”

Lise Gaston’s poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in journals across Canada, most recently The Fiddlehead and Matrix Magazine. She lives in Montreal.

Explore the myths and motifs of Arc!