On his birthday, let us remember Milton Acorn and his contributions to Canadian poetry. His was a gigantic, even mythic, presence in our letters. We might suspect he saw himself this way as well. Consider his famous poem "The Natural History of Elephants" which he wrote as a kind of poetic self-portrait.
If you didn't have enough reasons to like Barack Obama, the American senator who is equal parts brilliant orator and amiable everyman, here's one more. He was once an aspiring poet! And, to be sure, not a terribly good one.Underground
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.
What?
My review of two collections of poetry by Judith Fitzgerald is in this weekend's Globe and Mail Books section.
For my leisure reading this week, I'm alternating between a couple of fantastic books, both 'New & Selected,' and both by two American poets who deserve a wide readership. These are the books:
Remember that article in The New Yorker last month? The one in which Dana Goodyear skewers the Poetry Foundation's business-like strategies for promoting poetry? I wrote about it here, and I even agreed with some of her concerns.And then there’s the question of the poems the magazine chooses to run. Granted, picking poems for a national publication is nearly impossible, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, probably does it as well as anyone could. (Quinn is also liked personally, and rightly so, by many poets.) But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.But it gets worse. We might have suspected that a big, hip magazine like The New Yorker would be a wretched hive of nepotism and cronyism, but we were probably thinking about the suits in the advertising department, or maybe the effete snobs who deal with the theatre reviews, but certainly not the well-meaning people who select the poetry. And we'd be right. Right?
The second issue with The New Yorker’s poem selection is trickier. This is what you might call “the home job”: the magazine’s widely noted fondness for the work of its own staffers and social associates. The most notorious examples were the three poems The New Yorker published by the Manhattan doyenne Brooke Astor in 1996-7 (one more than Robert Creeley managed in his whole life). Some representative lines: “I learned to take the good and bad / And smile whenever I felt sad.” Even more questionable, however, is the magazine’s preference for its own junior employees. In 2002, for instance, the poet who appeared most frequently in the magazine was the assistant to David Remnick, the editor — that assistant’s name, coincidentally, was Dana Goodyear. In fact, since 2000, Goodyear (who is 30) has appeared in the New Yorker more than Czeslaw Milosz, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Wislawa Szymborska, Kay Ryan and every living American poet laureate except for W. S. Merwin. She’s already equaled Sylvia Plath’s total.Bastards! Right?
I don't know how I missed it, so I'll link to it now. Last month, Chris Banks' book The Cold Panes of Surfaces received a very good review from the Toronto Star's resident poetry critic Barbara Carey. Here's a bit of what Carey had to say:". . . his pensive poems take hold of the reader in a quiet but emphatic way. . . . Look past that frost-forming title; this collection is chock full of deft phrasing and memorable images."The entire review can be read here.
Back in November, I reported on the forthcoming release of a new book of essays by Lucia Perillo. Back then, the book was to be called Ground Truth: On Disability, Poetry, Nature, though now it would seem the book's title has been changed, probably for the better, to the very catchy I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature.During her days as a park ranger, Lucia Perillo loved nothing more than to brave the Cascade Mountains alone, taking special pride in her daring solo skis down the raw, unpatrolled slopes of Mount Rainier. Then, in her thirties, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In I've Heard the Vultures Singing, Perillo confronts, in stark but funny terms, the ironies of being someone with her history and gusto for life being suddenly unable to walk.... These essays explore what it’s like to experience desire as a sick person, how to lower one’s expectations just enough for a wilderness experience, and how to navigate the vagaries of a disease that has no predictable trajectory. I've Heard the Vultures Singing records in unflinching, honest prose one woman’s struggle to find her place in a difficult new world.
