On Gwendolyn MacEwen’s "A Breakfast for Barbarians"
MacEwen’s gift is her voice. In “A Breakfast for Barbarians”, she exposes the deep, insatiable appetite of the soul for its mysteries, cajoling us with confidence, humour and a Rabelaisian delight in the universe that few contemporaries can match. She takes risks, offering us a diverse menu of possibilities that brooks no demur resistance. She will have passion, she will have joy.
The poem with its mythic overtones opens with an echo of Mark Anthony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”–addressing the reader in the intimate, knowing and suggestive voice that is MacEwen’s hallmark, “my friends, my sweet barbarians”. With the authority of an oracle, she asserts the claim that underlies all of her poetry — “there is that hunger which is not for food”. And then the transformation begins as a third eye seizes the centre of appetite, as it seizes the poem itself–“an eye at the navel turns the appetite/round” — enacting the turning point with the pivot “round” isolated on the middle line of the opening stanza. The first meal of the day becomes a visionary sacrament, “the brain’s golden breakfast” with its heraldic companions — “eaten with beasts/with books on plates” — an aside resonant of bookplates, claiming an ownership of extravagant proportions. Immediately we know we are in the territory of the soul, the insatiable landscape of MacEwen hunger.
On Robert Bringhurst’s "The Beauty of the Weapons"
In a pre-emptive strike at the outset of the Six Day War in June 1967, Israeli forces attacked the northern front of Egyptian Arab troops mustering in the Sinai region around the city of El-Arish. Casualties and wounded, both military and civilian, numbered in the thousands as Israeli regiments flanked and pushed back the Egyptian Arab soldiers into a retreat that, when coupled with Israel’s simultaneous airstrike, would eventually lead to their defeat.
Standard infantry issue for the Israeli army throughout the war was the Uzi SMG, a squat, boxy gun made portable by its wraparound breech and telescoping bolt. 7 1/2 lbs with a full clip, 18″ long, with an explosive muzzle velocity of 400 m/s, the Uzi can fire 600 rounds of ammunition per minute, or ten bullets per second. Consisting of a few basic stamped-metal parts the Uzi is easy to manufacture, easy to strip and clean in the most inclement field conditions, and can accumulate large amounts of sand and dirt without becoming prone to jamming.
The gun is also well-balanced, and with its magazine located in the pistol grip, the ammunition cartridges can be conveniently discharged and reloaded, even in total darkness; something the Israeli military referred to as “hand finds hand” reloading intuition. The Uzi’s sole purpose is to kill as many human beings in as efficient a manner as possible. Its design is one of utility; not a weapon that, in the vernacular of a collector or aficionado, could be described as “a real beaut”.
Or could it?
On Steven McCaffery’s "Position of Sheep I"
On Robert Kroetsch’s Sonnet #1 from "Sounding the Name"
Some poems resist working. They fight inquisitiveness into any of the secrets of their composition and critical decomposition.
Contrary to what it may tell you, Sonnet #1 is not a sonnet. It doesn’t follow any sonnet scheme. It could, tangentially, be said to follow a sonnet’s argumentative pattern (thesis, antithesis) but this is a stretch. Also, this isn’t new. Poets have been calling the strangest things sonnets since the time when it was the dominant poetic form. It isn’t new, but I think it helps this poem make meaning.
Sonnet #1 is, in essence, about gardening and about writing. In its most cultivated form, gardening is like a sonnet: based on tradition, entrenched in form and rules, rhyming of colour and species, a symbol of civility. Kroetsch says as much with that first line and its colon pointing to the blank white of page stock: my garden is the page and this is my garden/sonnet….
On Fred Wah’s opening poem from Waiting for Saskatchewan
This is the first poem in Fred Wah’s 1982 Governor General award winning book _Waiting for Saskatchewan_.
What surprises me about the first line of the poem, and about the title of the book, is the primary importance given to the gerund: waiting. It’s the only gerund in the whole poem. The gerund builds permanent expectation never fully achieved in the nasal glottal stop of the higher sinuses. A small grammatical element in a poem that writes grammar and identity together. But _who_ is waiting?
Nouns build nouns: “grandparents countries places converged / Europe Asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators / Swift Current my grandmother in our house.”
One of the more impressive buildings in most prairie towns is the Land Registry Office which store deeds and land surveys. In the land registry office in Ottawa, where I live, the architect has worked unhewn granite boulders into the building’s smooth concrete surface. I can’t think of a better image of land meeting real property law.
On Richard Outram’s "Barbed Wire"
Richard Outram is known to be a difficult poet. His poems are often philosophical and densely allusive, to the point sometimes of near opacity. This not entirely unearned reputation has made him something of a poet’s poet, very highly esteemed by a small number of dedicated readers. But, as Carmine Starnino has argued in his recent book [_A Lover’s Quarrel_], there is “another Outram” out there, one who does not need in-depth decoding by experts to be appreciated. Starnino singles out “Barbed Wire” as one of the finest products of that other Outram, and justly so. This profoundly moving occasional poem–one of very few overtly autobiographical pieces in Outram’s oeuvre–can be apprehended after a single reading by a non-specialist reader. This doesn’t mean that the poem yields its secrets easily; after reading this poem several dozen times, I still uncover previously unnoticed nuances in its lines.
On Peter Van Toorn’s "Mountain Leaf"
Peter Van Toorn is one of Canada’s most inventive and irreverent poets. The sonnet is one of the oldest and most venerable of poetry’s set forms, dating back to fourteenth century Italy. Put the two together and you get a unique sort of magic—and a poem that defies just about anyone’s idea of what should “work” in poetry.
At a time when most writers aspiring to compose poetry were scorning the sonnet as a fusty relic of antiquity and British colonialism (Mountain Tea was first published in 1984), Peter Van Toorn was playfully toiling to make the form new. In “Mountain Leaf” Van Toorn, far from finding the form constricting, seems to regard the strictures of a straightforward Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet as too easy. The stereotype of formal verse is that it involves conservative, conformist rule-following. Van Toorn, who is also a jazz musician and understands that genuine improvisation is impossible without strict discipline, will have none of that. Instead, he invents for himself a fresh batch of constraints against which to pit his free-wheeling imagination.
On James McIntyre’s "Ode On The Mammoth Cheese"
There are two ways for a poet to achieve immortality: 1) Write at least one, but preferably several, indisputably great poems; or 2) Write at least one, but preferably several, indisputably atrocious poems. The latter might seem easier to do, but to write verse that isn’t just slight, mediocre, disposable, dull–to write truly awful poetry–requires a kind of “inverse talent,” as Kathryn and Ross Petras put it in the introduction to their anthology Very Bad Poetry:
“It also helps to have a wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, a bullheaded inclination to stuff too many syllables or words into a line or a phrase, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence.”
Only three poets in the Petras anthology are allotted more poems than James McIntyre (1827-1906). Thus, although it remains true that Canada has not produced a Yeats, we can say without hyperbole that we have our very own “McGonagall”:http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/ …
On Pino Coluccio’s "Misspent Youth"
Here is a man of “words, words, words” quite lost in the game of action. Not a hockey player adept at stick handling, he remains shut out. And the rules of the game he does command–language and its grammar–imbue the poem with multiple texts: what the lines say, what is said between them, and what the loins say.
Coluccio’s hilarious and sexually-loaded wordplay throughout the poem is underscored with pathos, established first by the varied nuances of the title “Misspent Youth.” To miss is to fail to meet, take advantage of, or experience. ‘Spent’ suggests a loss of original force or a purchase at some cost. Immediately an overtone of regret is established. Readers expect some juvenile folly or guilty pleasure and anticipate its price.
On Elise Partridge’s "One Calvinist’s God"
The Christian doctrine of “The Rapture” and Calvin’s “Preordained Selection” are subverted in the predatory imagery of this poem. There is nothing resembling ecstatic delight to be found as prey in the clutches of a raptor, and there is more than a little sense of being duped when chosen by God only to find an omnipotent “yellow-eyed glare.” Poignancy and courage imbue the lines if the reader knows that the poet has, for a number of years now, been living with and fighting cancer. It increases the dread of “One midnight, you imagine, you’ll be swept up, / a mouse off a toadstool, shrieking into the air.” …
On Susan Stenson’s "When You Say Infidelity"
(How Poems Work, April 2006)
Susan Stenson’s “When You Say Infidelity” won first place in the League of Canadian Poets’ National Poetry Contest (1999) and is featured in Stenson’s first collection of poetry, [_Could Love A Man_]. The poem is fresh in its unusual treatment of content as well as the lush use of language and imagery. Stenson has given both a literal and figurative garden here; we could become lost in the foxglove and forget-me-nots of a night garden.
Stenson uses the title of the piece as the first line of the poem, creating an immediacy and cohesiveness to the verse as a whole. Her comparison between infidelity and gardening in the first stanza turns infidelity into something innately organic, leading into the specific naming of everyday garden-variety plants, “foxglove, forget-me-not” with “stems and furry leaves.” This specificity allows us to regard the concept of infidelity as something we might touch, something tangible and concrete and undeniably universal. At the end of this stanza, she suggests people “may even whisper its Latin name,” invoking an earthly timelessness….
On Stephanie Bolster’s "Les Beaux Jours (1937)"
(How Poems Work, March 2006)
This poem stayed with me for days after I first read it: the overriding image of blue, Bolster’s restrained use of language, the sharp image of the greed of artistry.
The poem was inspired by a portrait by the same name by Quebec artist, Jean Paul Lemieux. Les Beaux Jours (1937) details an afternoon with his new wife, the painter Madeleine Desrosiers, in Charlevoix. The painting was praised for its harmony of colours in the blue-green palette, as well as the frankness of composition. The poem echoes this aesthetic, capturing not only the tranquility of the work, but also the assumption of intimacy effused within it. Here, Bolster uses understated lyricism–“her scarf,/ flicker of summer maples against river”–to portray both the beauty and the tenuous relationship between husband and wife.