The political poetry of Wanda John-Stewart & Mariner Janes

Mariner Janes. The Monument Cycles (Talonbooks 2013).

Wanda John-Kehewin. In the Dog House (Talonbooks 2013).

These two books raise a number of questions about what we call ‘political poetry.’ Not ‘political poetry,’ what is it? But ‘political poetry,’ how does it work? Wanda John-Kehewin is a First Nations writer who announces in her Preface that these poems ‘discuss taboo topics . . .; what it is like to try to understand all these experiences as part of the creative writing process…’. She sees In the Dog House as ‘a healing journey of sorts, a way to stand in my truth, and a way to give others, like my mother, a voice.’ Mariner Janes ‘works in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and he aims to incorporate the multitude of voices he encounters there into his work, through found poetry, transcription, and storytelling.’ Janes is not quite so personally inside the lives he represents as John-Kehewin is, but both writers clearly seek to give voice to those who usually do not have on, especially in poetry. how do they do this?

John-Kehewin writes with great honesty about living a life in which those taboo subjects ‘like alcohol addiction, abandonment, religion, and sexual abuse,’ interpolate their way into every day’s living. The problem for this reader is that her writing works best in the story telling mode, one which tends to lack the rhythmic intensity of the poetry I most admire. So the more narrative pieces move me, but more for the truth of the story than anything to do with their shaping on the page. Perhaps as ‘spoken word’ performances they would have greater impact. Take ‘Colonial Pest-aside,’ with its angry riffs on the ‘colonial pesticide’ of ‘flaming words of righteousness’; on stage this would catch an audience’s interest. A lot of these pieces use abstract terms but do not utilize them satirically against themselves so much as simply registering their oppressive power, which is itself useful. Rather they seem to be a fallback vocabulary that fails to get inside what they present.

There are some sturdy lyrics of pain & love, including the title poem. ‘Luna,’ about an isolated whale, does a better job of finding images that carry the poem: ‘Mist / across the mountain jags’ & ‘when you’re all alone, / you can hear her cry / through the mist — / clotting the air with longing.’ Nevertheless, I found the little memoir about her father teaching her ‘The Medicine Wheel,’ which appears as a kind of Afterword, perhaps the most powerful piece in the collection, with its straightforward narration cutting right to the bone.

Janes also takes on concepts of power & powerlessness, more in terms of the poor & wasted of the inner city. One way of suggesting the difference between his writing & John-Kehewin’s is that he sees words as themselves material not just pointers toward the material lives beyond. So, although he too tells stories, he does so by finding a charged language of each story he uncovers in the language of its teller. There are a lot of personae in The Monument Cycles, although there are also angry statements by the author. Nevertheless, the ‘I’ of these poems is an ever shifting person lost in the maze of ‘i / many / i’ who all too easily finds him or herself

• off the train and walking
• but the shipwreck loomed in the corridor
• right in my path
• prow jutting out of concrete
• with a gorgeous woman
• erupting out of the bow
• no way around
• left only to gape
• and wonder what
• is happening to me

This is Janes at his best. Elsewhere, he utilizes headlines, signage, graffiti, & various overheard conversations to create collages of the found & rehabilitated language of those he serves in his day job. He does tell stories, in the noirish prose of ‘in the shangri-la,’ the jagged fragments of many verses, or the rangy narratives of musicians like Robert Johnson. This is often exciting because much of it’s lean, & it leans into the material world it represents with energy & thwarted love.

Both these books speak from personal worlds most readers will not know well if at all. Both are telling in their different ways.

Lise Downe does it This Way

Lise Downe. This Way (BookThug 2011).

Blurbed about as ‘an alternative take on the genre of detective fiction,’ the poems in This Way do contain ‘an assortment of clues’ etc, but any expectations that there might be some kind of playful take on a mystery story here is quickly undermined.  Yes, the first poem, a kind of Prologue, ‘The Influence of Complete Darkness,’ takes us to ‘a November evening / somewhere in the mid-seventeenth century; where, nevertheless, ‘nothing is concealed or conveyed.’ And those lines do deliver clues: in that ‘somewhere’ in time rather than somewhen’; in that (non)choice between ‘concealed’ & ‘conveyed’; & in the possible narrative that seems to follow, in Japan or somewhere else. Despite the specific details, all is left uncertain, & that is the mystery of all these poems.

The sequence, ‘Small Mysteries,’ that follows, derives formally from Wallace Stevens’s ‘Theory,’ but if it shares Stevens’s concerns it does so in an errant manner, playfully shifting from particulars to abstractions, never quite saying what it may just be saying. The 1/3/3/1 form keeps readers on their toes as the poems meander through various representations that aren’t quite present: ‘A towel folded on the handrail. // Suspicion planted / in things of the spirit / and things of the world.’ The writing voice here shifts between ‘I’ & ‘we,’ as it assumes the reader’s complicity in whatever might be occurring: ‘Unsure whether the receding waves.’

The poems collected in ‘The Range’ offer what seem to be more conventional appeals. Each one stands alone, yet they accumulate a kind of sensibility, a tone of wary apprehension. Some pay homage of a kind, as ‘Please’ does, with its borrowing of a line from Elizabeth Bishop, yet the result strays from Bishop-ness, insisting on ‘flying / out of our old arrangements.’

I especially like the final section, ‘Then,’ where Downe uses a 3 line stanza of carefully constructed sentences  to explore the ‘This because of because of’ qualities of asking questions, seeking always deceptive answers. There’s a wry insistence to this sequence:

 Ah, the difficulties. Not everything works.
For every small step we take, there is usually more song
than dance. “Did you hear, dear?” Here. Tap into.

All in all, then, This Way lives up to its front cover illustration of a sign pointing in both directions. Downe demonstrates wit, savvy rhetoric, & a talent for the unexpected image. This Way’s two sequences do the most work, their accumulations effecting the greatest power, but the whole book is well worth a visit.

Andrew Faulkner. Need Machine (Coach House 2013).

Well, I’m certainly not as in touch with all the new writers as I once was, so I have not come across Andrew Faulkner’s poetry before. It’s definitely worth knowing, & Need Machine, his first collection, provides a solid & entertaining introduction. If we are wondering what 21^st century surrealism might look like, Andrew Faulkner’s writing provides one answer: surrealist as stand-up. After all, ‘That’s what the one-liner wants, / it wants to get out.’

Faulkner’s speakers (personae abound) live in a variety of simultaneous worlds, inner & outer. They include poetry, history, every kind of pop culture, a strain of the domestic, among others, & his general speaker, a Mr Sardonicus is ever there was one, views them all with bitter wit. Images collide; they seem to go nowhere but eventually arrive somewhere unexpected; they’re clear but subtly deranged:

•                A long-beached whale
• repurposed as a hut. At times I step in and wear
• the bones like skin. except they’re bones,
• and when it rains I wonder where it is
• my skin has gone. is this what it’s like
• to be wet inside?

Many of these pieces work the apostrophe; they address someone in particular, or more politically the larger world, whether or not the addressee can be known (to either speaker or reader). This leads to a lot of what we might call metaphysical slapstick, where a great deal of the pleasure of this text lies:

• But the switch that toggles my factory settings
• is a finger loitering between a door
• and its frame, caught between ‘delight’
• and ‘just missed a 80%-off sale.’ My tongue grazed
• like an atv, and then you sidled up like an ied.
• I’m on my hands and where my knees used to be.

Faulkner watches the news as well as the many sit-coms he references throughout Need Machine, which gives away some conceptual aspects of his craft. He has the wit to play the clichés & near quotations awry, slip-sliding along discursive ice or skating smoothly over it as in ‘Party’; which is

•                            Doped up. Def.
• Dumb. I’m rocking this party like Sisyphus.
• Broadly speaking, this party is an animal
• that escapes from the zoo, has its photo captured
• on the cover of several major newspapers
• and is quietly euthanized a few weeks later.
• Narrowly speaking, this party is as novel as a new tattoo.
• Parliamentary democracy, journalistic responsibility
• and this party: these are the pillars that hold society up
• like a bandit.

The pratfalls in these pieces, the excursions to reality-TV versions of both teen-age (Faulkner is still in his twenties) & workers wastelands, emerge as rigorously & ingeniously constructed; they’re purpose-full. Sometimes Faulkner makes his way out of the lyric trap by making fun of the lyric in the lyric: it works, on the whole. These ‘I’s are too busy trying to stay on their feet to moan sentimentally about their situation (& some of them do seem to be in romantic straits: after all, ‘According to my horoscope, / love is a thug with piano wire’).

So these poems offer a funhouse mirror to the reader, one very specifically tied to now. The acronyms, the TV shows, the computer/net savviness, will identify these verses to anyone reading them some years from now as early 21^st century; nor is this to complain. Faulkner is writing in & of his time, & doing so in a highly engaging manner. Need Machine is a fine debut.

[I apologize for the list icons on the poetry, but for some reason that was the only way I could get them single spaced; not sure what went wrong in the copy & paste.]

Garry Thomas Morse on a wild voyage of discovery

Garry Thomas Morse. Discovery Passages (Talonbooks 2011).

Collage, documentary, lyric cri de coeur, satiric history, Discovery Passages covers a lot of ground, & does so with unsentimental brio. One can read it as a collection of short & longer poems, or as a single long sequence; either way, it strikes home, as Morse excavates the many appropriations of his Kwakwaka’wakw ancestry, scattered like the people themselves over the past few centuries of colonization.

Morse opens Discovery Passages with a series of lightly walking poems, taking the page as a field (in Olson’s sense) & stretching his ‘long clean lines like cedar’ across the whole page.  These large hearted & wide ranging pieces, full of the voices of many ‘other / Multitudes,’ lead readers into a maze of many other voices, but first the slowly coalescing volume takes us into a narrow (minded) & fixed rhetoric, that of the Indian Agents of Duncan C. Scott’s Department of Indian Affairs, in the sequence titled ‘No Comment,’ all the quoted bits of which are laid out most strictly down the left hand side of the page. These pieces tell eloquently against themselves.

About the only thing that could follow that is ‘The Indian Picture Opera,’ a rollicking ‘treatment’ of ‘Creative Non-Fiction Escapades of the Kwakiutl [sic].’ Morse plays many voices into this piece, & then brings even more into the poems that follow in order to begin interrogating the kind of ‘Romantic’ fallacies even the most scholarly anthropologists of the late 19^th-early 20^th centuries committed. See, for example, the photograph of Franz Boas, just before the sharp & powerful ‘Interpretive Dance / for Franz Boas’:

Listen

      (ethnographer of

bifurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrcate tongue

listen nicely

       & I will tell you

   a tale

so that you may know

        of me

      & my particular line

for a split-

second crawling

      through loop-

     hole in

intellectual

    properties

which demonstrates Morse’s command of both poetic & political lines.

Morse argues with many other writers, past & present, especially some who have written about the geography & history of the West Coast, from Alert Bay up to Quadra Island & back to Vancouver, with many side trips to museums (& poems) across Canada & the US. ‘Hamat’sa’ take off from one of George Bowering’s poem of the same (almost) title, ‘Hamatsa,’ both understanding how that earlier poem adapted oral tales documented by the anthropologists & undermining its sense of proprietorship (whether meant or not). In its playful move to the chomping (eating) of elemental roots, its mash-up of past myth & present pop culture, it swings hard against being told by others, & appeals at the end to language’s privacies as well as its open mouth: ‘Chomp (sky).’

Morse enters many ‘I’s, looks out from many eyes, here, having been forced to see so narrowly in ‘No Comment.’ There is great richness in the tangled lingos of the later poems in Discovery Passages, especially the wonderfully witty ‘Wak’es,’ about what Harry Assu remembered as ‘the big carved wood frog displayed at my father’s potlatch’ now in the Smithsonian. But such open-heartedness almost always meets a form of control, which the final 12 pages of ‘500 Lines’ demonstrates in its repeated ‘I will not speak Kwak’wala.’ Followed by a final separate page:

Kwak’wala’ma?

 K’i. k’isan kwak’wala

Discovery Passages is far too rich a mélange to be fully appreciated in a single reading. A super kind of bricolage, it’s a cornucopia of gifts from Garry Thomas Morse’s personal potlatch that readers will accept with deep gratitude.

This Poem: Adeena Karasick’s road of excess

Adeena Karasick. This Poem (Talonbooks 2012).

The first thing to say about This Poem is that it’s a lot of fun. Talk about playful: puns are in full force, neologisms proliferate, & internal rhymes, all manner of soundings explode. Among Karasick’s many acknowledgements, there’s one to ‘Charles Bernstein’s “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” from which This Poem was born.’ But it’s a feisty bastard: where the Bernstein is ironically straightforward minimalist understatement, This Poem is the mad clown’s circus tumble, as excessive as can be.

That begins with its Foreword, which clearly forewarns & will either welcome readers in (as it intends) or ward those who don’t like this kind of thing off, already parodically demonstrating the game to be played: ‘Whatever your reason for visiting, This Poem will offer a perfect destination spot. . . . Insert it in your firewall, your slippery systems, resonant splendor, and release yourself into a rolling surface current of cascading triggers, t’issues, steaming in the magnificence of polychromatic euphony.’ In fact, the Foreword intimates much of what happens in the rest of the text. This Poem sets out to comprehend the total contemporary (multi)cultural surround. Where the Bernstein poem undermined a particular understanding of ‘the poem’ & its ‘meaning,’ This Poem seeks to expand the reach of all poetry, but especially This Poem, which ‘is also working on a 4G network,’ &

Counting its corollaries
managing its waste. Living beyond its mean
ing: comes equipped with
a bibliontological all-access pass

And is going public

I could quote page after page just for the pleasure of this (sounded) text. This Poem is, among other things, a performance piece, & its best performer would be Adeena Karasick (I’d definitely recommend catching her if she ever performs in your neighbourhood). But it does so ‘in a vexed nexus of philio-illogical lexis / flexy excess.’ Still, because it is so strenuously playful, it can slip in many bits of sly, allusive (cultural/social/political) commentary that slowly accumulates among all the words at play in the fields of the word, advancing an oblique critique of consumer capitalist culture & its workings, as, for example, when it ‘is disaffiliating itself from its own whiteness’ or when

… it has been repeatedly invaded
by bands of plundering scandals
visiglots and pirating spirals

but continues to strut and fête
upon its merry page like an
alfresco catwalk of committed partiers

And there are reasons scattered throughout for this, ‘‘cause nobody knows the rubble it’s seen.’

Having taken her readers on such a wild ride, Karasick provides the light entertainment of ‘Rules of Textual Etiquette / A Gentlewoman’s Guide,’ with its illustrations by her daughter. It works as loving parody of those 18th century guides to behaviour but can also be read as a helpful commentary on This Poem’s manners. Speaking of illustrations, Talonbooks has gone the extra km in presenting Blaine Speigel’s gorgeous slide images, which colourfully expands (upon) the text.

Although it’s certainly not to everyone’s taste, I thoroughly enjoyed This Poem, & was, at least while reading, infected by its infectiousness. Readers who enjoy extreme wordplay, & the sense of sound, will do so, too.

Daniel Zomparelli translates Vancouver’s Davie Street

Daniel Zomparelli. Davie Street Translations (Talonbooks 2012).

Talonbooks’ write-up of this collection of missives from a specific cultural niche of the city, explains that they are carried off in a number of jargons & ideolects, ‘with each poem “translating” another chapter in his documentary of gay male culture in Vancouver.’ The poems certainly take us deep into that culture, & they present themselves as deeply personal, ‘confessional’ in the sense that they offer themselves as statements from the author’s life (whether or not this is more or less fictional, a
trope, is deliberately left ambiguous). At the same time, the ‘translations’ are right up to date in the way they represent technology & social media as part of the common surround.

For many, this book will prove a heady introduction to gay culture, with all its (usual) ups & downs, the highs & lows of living the life. In this, it serves a non-literary function, as the many poems dedicated to specific people in this world indicate. Still, the question that arises for me is: how well does it work as poetry? A number of the pieces feel as if they would work as well as short prose takes (& there are pieces, like the ‘Alphabet’ sequence & the finale, ‘Tomorrow,’ that present themselves as such, very successfully, too (perhaps kinds of prose lend themselves best to a Wildean sarcasm & irony]).

There are references & allusions that probably mean more to Zomparelli’s community than to many readers but the poems don’t keep anyone out. Still, he is concerned to write to & for a certain group: the drag-queens, the druggies, the one-night stands, the boyfriends, the mentor-writers, all of whom he ventriloquizes or translates in various poems. After all, the highs & lows of love, nights out, drugs, are all things most of us know, at some level or other, & Zomparelli’s wit, at its best, will catch most readers’ attention. We all get ‘Apartment haunted by plastic ghosts.’ Or ‘I had a career in careerism until I lost it all when the precession hit.’ There’s also a lot of what can only be called verbal collages, full of both commercial & consumerist clichés & what I also suspect are clichés of gay lifestyle: they raise the intriguing question of just how much of a knife-edge irony dances on in this volume.

I find most interesting those poems that set up baffles, some kind of formal restraint, like the sentence structure in ‘If You Are’ or ‘If Vancouver,’ the latter one very long sentence constructed of ‘if’ phrases (‘…if you can’t pay your rent, if art, if nature, if I forgot my umbrella again, if we are the ownership of death, if you have ever lost a loved one to Labrador lululemon leprosy call Sarah McLachlan right now…’). Or the variations on the glosa Zomparelli plays on at various points, & the sequence of poems in which the first line of one stanza repeats the final line of the last one all the way to the return to the first line. Here, the formal aspects also seem to demand a greater discipline within the lines: everything moves with great force & rhythm.

In the end, Davie Street Translations offers a fascinating glimpse into ‘gay male culture in Vancouver,’ but with its tip of the hat to raucous poetry of various historical periods, &, in its most formally interesting poems, a dash of wit & deeper intents, it reaches for something more, & sometimes finds it.

Sheila E Murphy’s very American Ghazals

Sheila E Murphy. American Ghazals (Otoliths 2012).

Since I collaborate with Sheila E Murphy on a long poem, Continuations, I may be seen as biased, And I am: have been ever since I came across her superbly titled & terrific Selected poems, Falling in Love Falling in Love with You, Syntax. Readers who wish to can read what follows with that in mind, but it’s just another of my reviews of books I like.

In her short but pithy Preface to American Ghazals, Sheila E Murphy acknowledges the ancient tradition while pointing to the way the translated tradition of ‘American’ (or, really, English-language) ghazals proves so useful to many poets, including her. The results of her research & creativity, this set of 60 ghazals delights, exhilarates, provokes both thought & empathy. American Ghazals is very much a 21st century work, with all the slippery connections between the couplets readers expect, plus delightfully quick allusive grabs at the zeitgeist of now.

Take 22, for example:

Accidental friendship spaces itself, so psyche turns
to sponge, inhering and eventually releasing.

Together we enjoy the common area, a difference
between legal and ethical, regardless of desire to speak.

In America, one takes a class before claiming
to know a thing, at which point one teaches a class.

A meadow returns, by way of the olfactory,
moments that have meaning in the fore-life we now live.

Amber necklace that belonged to her is mine,
the mild opacity of separate pieces.

There’s a slip in each couplet, the third being the funniest. That’s the hidden connective, but there are political undertones, &, for some, a lovely remembrance of a famous poem, & poet that’s a demonstration of how memory is itself a kind of poetics. Every couplet makes grammatical sense, but all engage & explore the possibilities of that ‘mild opacity.’

So the couplets are complete in themselves & part of a larger mosaic, not just each ghazal, but the whole volume, in which writing, music, visual art, community, love, & the sheer complexity of living, among others, fade & cohere, escape & suddenly become the focus of attention/attentiveness. These poems circle back to earlier images, allusions, poems: they allow the feel of the deeply personal while giving away little (especially of the ‘confessional’) biography. In that sense they are ‘open’ in a most ‘American’ sense of innovative poetics. American Ghazals is a fitting addition to Murphy’s superb & growing oeuvre.