How Poems Work

(How Poems Work, February 2006)
This poem is one of an 11-part collection entitled “Elles” that won PRISM International’s Earle Birney Prize for Poetry (2000) and was shortlisted for the National Magazine Award for Poetry (2000). Based on the series by the same name, produced in 1896 by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, each poem takes on the voice of the woman featured in the lithograph. They are residents of a brothel, yet each poem reveals the woman separate from her profession; these are women caught in ordinary activities: waking, dressing, bathing….

(How Poems Work, December 2005)
Like the title of a realist painting–say a work by Edward Hopper, who gave apt shorthand titles to his canvases (“Drug Store,” for example, or “A Woman in the Sun”) that summarized the landscapes or cityscapes, people, or moments he wished to frame–the throwaway evocative power of Sandra Kasturi’s title anchors her poem. Its power is reechoed throughout in phrases like “these old men who smoke” and “these men,” even in “they”–smaller and smaller skipping stones from which meaning devolves. And yet, like the old men she describes, Kasturi’s title is reticent. It betrays little or nothing of her themes….

(How Poems Work, November 2005)
As in Outram’s “Story,” the aural weave of this poem is tight: not only with rhyme and alliteration, but with repetition (heft/heft, evening/evening, thunder/thunder). Like Corkett’s poem, this one employs a strong falling rhythm that elbows its way into one’s mind. Unlike Outram’s and Corkett’s poems, however, George Johnston’s “Firefly Evening” does not have an obvious narrative line. It is less about story than it is about image; its effects are less cerebral than sensual.

(How Poems Work, October 2005)
If Outram’s “Story” draws its stylistic authority from the diction of religion and mathematics, Corkett’s “Moses Wisdom” draws its stylistic authority from the diction of the nursery–a no less formidable source. Nursery rhymes are, for many of us, the initiation into figurative language, into rhyme and metre, ordered speech: in short, into poetry. When we recognize the diction of “Moses Wisdom,” then, it is with a very old part of our memory; buried that deep, education is transmuted into instinct….

(How Poems Work, September 2005)
“[P]oets are like great chessplayers with language,” Don Paterson says; “they look less at the next move, or the next ten moves, than at a Gestalt, at a system of relations.” A short poem offers us a prime opportunity to study this ‘gestalt,’ for just as every ‘move’ takes place within the larger system of the language, it takes place within the smaller system of the poem: each word in a poem is related to each of the others. These relations may be aural, grammatical, semantic, or spatial; they may be consonant or dissonant. They overlay the straightforward progression of the poem, so that the best poems–particularly once learned by heart–take on, for me, a quality of ‘thingness,’ of substantive existence that transcends their linear construction.
Richard Outram’s poem “Story” comprises a single sentence, twenty-six words in length. It is divided into two three-line stanzas. (The break, appropriately, comes after the word ‘breath.’) The first line of each stanza has three strong stresses; the second and third lines have two stresses each, though the metrical distribution of these stresses varies. The rhyme scheme unites the stanzas: aba cbc–or, if we count the slant-rhyme, aba aba….

(How Poems Work, August 2005)
Karen Connelly’s “How Clean You Have Become” is a poem of the experience that follows mourning. It illustrates the loss which occurs after grieving has passed, as our memories diffuse, slip away from us. It speaks of what we are left with in the wake of not only the loss of the person but also the loss of grief and the loss of memory. “In the end, the edges of memory/ are licked smooth/ by the rough tongue of time,/ wiped clean./ All you did was beautiful, and good.” In the aftermath of mourning, the poem indicates, we in essence rebuild those we have lost. The dead, or more aptly our recollections of the dead, become regulated to a type of purgatory where we, the living, choose to ignore sins and scars. We choose forgetfulness and push recollection to the margins of consciousness….

(How Poems Work, July 2005)
In the first stanza of Karen Solie’s poem “In Praise of Grief”, the second person narration does what few second person narration pieces of writing are able to accomplish. It literally refers to you and is not an “I”. Solie is successful at this, in the first stanza, because her poem is tightly woven, the images are sparse and exact, for some people certainly do live their whole lives (yes, their whole lives) coddled as eggs. Though the images are sparse, exact, and tightly woven, they are also universal. They are applicable to most readers. Solie offers us comfort with the realization that, of course, like the speaker of the poem, we feel alone at times….

(How Poems Work, June 2005)
Brad Cran’s poem “On Childhood” works on several levels, as most evocative and strong pieces of writing do. It is fundamentally a lamentation of childhood, of loss, imbued with particulars. The poem suggests a strange almost melancholic longing for what most thirty-somethings have in common: the sophisticated childhood gleaned from growing up in the aftermath of free-love. It speaks to the children moving out from the communes filled with doodleart and ponchos, finding Clifford Olsen (for those of us from BC) calling us at dusk from our cul-de-sacs : “We dreamt of bloodied hammers,/ a bad man and a rusty van hunched down/ in the parking lot of Safeway.” However–and this not an easy task to undertake, let alone to succeed at in such a small, contained piece of writing–the loss of childhood is made tactile. It becomes real, remembered, the loss irrevocable: “This tree I passed every night without interest/ until the potential of slick rubber tires,/ the sparkling handlebars that I gripped/ as my imagination pedaled off into the night, / where what exists around the corner is left/ out of the lens.” Cran has the ability to articulate the universal grief of growing up, and leaving behind the child we once were….

(How Poems Work, May 2005)
Hip-hop has not, as of yet, extended its influence to the ring of Canadian poetry in the same way it has, to varying degrees, fashion, cinema, and dance, all active participants in the macro social-space of youth culture. Perhaps this is because Canadian poetry–its citizenry and institutions–has consciously endeavored to position itself culturally as mature, if for no other reason than to counter Northrop Frye’s claim of ours as “a literature that has not quite done it.” The end result has been a continued passive-aggressive articulation of youth culture as anathema to the nation’s more “serious” poetic project–whatever that may be….

(How Poems Work, April 2005)
Each of David McGimpsey’s first three collections of poetry–Lardcake, dogboy, and Hamburger Valley, California–includes installments in what are commonly referred to as his “chubby sonnets.” Sixteen-lines in length; dividing equally into four four-line stanzas; picaresque in tone–the poems carefully locate and straddle pathos and bathos, sentimentality and irony. Part character, part caricature, the speaker is, to borrow from “KoKo,” “one of the great defectives,” a resident of Loserville, described by McGimpsey elsewhere as the “demented but proud and gated community / that will not let the winners in.” He is perhaps most-aptly described as a warm-hearted Travis Bickle, or, inversely, a cold-hearted Quixote….

(How Poems Work, March 2005)
Carolyn Smart’s “Frangipani” is as close to a perfect poem as I can imagine. The poem is firmly situated in the imagist tradition, yet distinguished by how it subverts such a tradition–historically, a tradition overly concerned with the beautiful–by inscribing its central image, that of the frangipani in all its various conditions, with a subtle but unsettling touch of the macabre. The macabre recalibrates notions of beauty, while also intimating an underlying humor.
The opening stanza’s function is two-fold. First, it is expository: the speaker is paying her respects at a wake. The speaker’s experience is entirely sensory, as she immediately recognizes the “odour.” Second, it establishes a governing poetic style, one in accordance with Pound’s oft-cited direct treatment of the thing. Also noteworthy in the first stanza is its detached tone, which suggests the speaker’s disassociation from a pained reality; perhaps this is a defense mechanism….

(How Poems Work, February 2005)
… In the poem, “12 O’Clock News”, Bishop looks at our ability to feel alienated from the world around us, even when that world is occupied by familiar objects.
Each object on the left and each description on the right works in interplay between object and image to create metaphor. The objects from her desk are metaphors for the descriptions that go with them, but the descriptions are also metaphors for the objects, for the wider world, the mass media and the writer herself. Bishop builds from the light (i.e. her gooseneck lamp) and works outward to show all the objects that are illuminated and what they are capable of being.
The poem can be read as a commentary on the mass media and how it portrays foreign landscapes. During the early part of the Iraqi war the grey-green surveillance footage depicted an alien world in a way that could only heighten the viewer’s sense that Iraq is different and its people “in the dark”….