Dennis Lee approaching seventy

Jacob McArthur Mooney weighs in:

To see septuagenarianism looming in Dennis Lee’s near future is as inarguable a sign of time’s passing as exists for Canadian culture. His breakthrough success (1972’s Civil Elegies, the entirety of which Lee plans to read at the Scream) is so evocative of a certain point in the history of burdened optimism that it forever fixes its creator to a specific time and place ? as the perpetual radical twentysomething buzzing around Yorkville in the years before Canada stopped concerning itself with questions of what it meant to be Canadian.

Even more important than its introduction of Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies is memorable for its reintroduction of anger into Canada’s literary arsenal. A real, blood-and-spit kind of anger. And not just personal anger, either, or domestic anger. Instead, a massive, coast-to-coast, national anger. Anger as unifying theme. Lee’s early-career masterwork hums with a volatile disappointment that imposes itself on its readers, and that drags them into hard and surprising new territories. The humanism in Elegies is the kind that’s willing to put its head down and charge, unflinching, through to the far reaches of its philosophy and arrive as a kind of reactionary anarchism; as an anger that presents itself as both pout and polemics, before settling into its heartbreaking final movement as one young man sits in a public square surrounded by his fellow citizens and tries to give voice to his loneliness and rage.

Read the entire essay here.

And check out this event in this year's Scream Literary Festival. Lee will read Civil Elegies, Un, and Yesno in their entireties.

New on my bookshelf

Poems 1959 - 2009 by Frederick Seidel

Sometimes I don't know what to make of Frederick Seidel. Just when you think he's cracking off some bit of eye-rolling Muldoonish clownery, swoosh! Out comes the switchblade! (or sometimes vice-versa). He's been called both a "ghoul" (by Michael Robbins) and the “the best American poet writing today” (lots of people). His writing is extremely complex, not only in its poetics, but also (probably even more so) in its psychology. All this is compounded by the mystery of the author. I went out today to enjoy a coffee and read the introduction to this substantial volume of collected poems. But there was no introduction. No context or commentary. No welcome mat. No doorway in. Just the poems to wrestle with... and readers better be ready for a royal ass-whooping.








House of Anansi didn't have its annual poetry bash in Toronto this year, so I'm only now getting around to the rest of their 2009 poetry titles after first reading Karen Solie's Pigeon.


Gun Dogs by James Langer

Langer is a poet clearly energized by the present-day Canadian renaissance of New Formalism in lyric poetry (which is the hot topic in CanPo according to its champions ...and only 25 years behind the Americans who have long since moved on to more interesting discussions). The mode, however, suits Langer to a tee. Forget whether or not it's fashionable right now (and right now, it is); he's just really very good at making the sounds of language do his bidding, and reading very good writing of any kind should be a welcome pleasure for anyone, shouldn't it? Occasionally the style wins out over substance (a few poems are like scrimshaw -- rustic and ornate, but what do they do?), but overall this is an extremely polished and eloquent book.







Mole by Patrick Warner

There must be something about Eastern Canada that lights a fire in well-rounded poets like Patrick Warner. He strikes me as the same kind and calibre of poet that those other Easterners Milton Acorn and Alden Nowlan were at their very best: equal parts Romantic and Modernist, equally at ease with a tight quatrain or a whirling and lunging stretch of free verse, but also deeply and empathically contending with the haunting material substance of their worlds. Best of all, he possesses the ability to surprise the reader with small yet sublime revelations. Like a beam from a lighthouse, wherever Warner fixes his poetic gaze, he exposes the jagged rocks in the seemingly placid shallows.

New on my bookshelf

Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes

Hughes' classic 1967 work on the writing and teaching of poetry is back in print. For me, the first chapter (called 'Capturing Animals') alone is worth the price of the book, but there's a lot more. It's always a pleasure to read a book like this by a great poet who is also a great commentator on poetry. Delightful.















Fish Bones by Gillian Sze

Taking their cues from painted scenes, photographs and portraits, these poems bring the quiet tableaus of their subjects' private lives vividly to life. Often, poems that describe still images are overly static themselves, claustrophobic with stagnant austerity... but not these. Sze's poems are often tender, funny, erotic or ardent; this is another encouraging debut by a writer who isn't content to ignore the physical world or the readers who inhabit it.

Some recent reviews I've written for the Globe & Mail

Love Outlandish by Barry Dempster

"...it could be argued that love has been the principal subject matter of poetry since we began writing it, and from Solomon to Sappho, from Shakespeare to Sexton, many poets have made it their specialty. To that long list we may now add Barry Dempster.

Love Outlandish, Dempster's 10th collection of poetry, contains (let me count the ways) exactly 60 poems, and each one aspires to approach the well-charted subject of love from a new direction. In order to accomplish this feat, there are at least 4,000 years' worth of sap, sentiment and cliché to navigate around. It's a very tall order."

Read the rest of my review here.



This Way Out by Carmine Starnino

"What is surprising is how much more free-wheeling and playful Starnino the poet seems to be than Starnino the critic. For example, the poem Doge's Dungeon brilliantly uses this emoticon (:-o) as a kind of conceptual end-rhyme with the word “terror.” And the poem Heavenography is a stream-of-consciousness prose poem about “working-class” clouds. It's a rollicking, surrealist vaudeville of a poem that has more in common with experimentalist sensibilities than Starnino the critic might like to admit, but its jazzy freeform lightheartedness suits the poet so well that we should all hope he'll write more like it soon.

I like this version of Carmine Starnino best: the good-natured poet, full of beans, approaching his aesthetics with an air of carefree mischief. It's so refreshing, one has to wonder..."

Read the rest of my review here.

New on my bookshelf

To Be Read in 500 Years by Albert Goldbarth

It's here! Let the bells ring out and the banners fly! Feast your eyes on it! It's here! It's here! Reading Goldbarth is guaranteed to improve your life, and now his new book is here!












Selected Poems by Robert Bringhurst


One of our preeminent poets, thinkers, and typographic gurus has a new selection of his poems. It's been a long time since his last selected, The Beauty of the Weapons, in 1982 (CORRECTION: The Calling in 1995). This volume is (still) long overdue.












Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler

I was enjoying my friend's copy so much, I had to buy my own in paperback. Kleinzahler's poems really get into your blood and stay with you for while... like a symbiote. They speak to you when the world around you goes silent. I love these poems.

I translate Herman de Coninck in a new anthology

When I was asked to contribute to The Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take on the World, I knew right away that I wanted to translate the work of the Belgian poet Herman de Coninck. I had two main reasons for this. First, it gave me a chance to engage with a part of my own Flemish heritage head-on. Indeed, in my life I have had very little exposure Belgian literature in general and Flemish poetry in particular. As J.M. Coetzee pointed out in his book of translations of Dutch-language poems Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands, “Dutch is a minor language in the sense that is spoken by only some fifteen million people, and its literature is a minor literature in the sense that it is not widely read.” It is not minor, however, in its artistic accomplishments. And that brings me to my second reason for choosing Herman de Coninck. I was already somewhat familiar with, and certainly impressed by, his warm, surprising and magnanimous poetry. He is not only one of the most widely read of modern Belgian poets, but he is one of the most widely read poets in the Dutch language of all time. Despite his enormous popularity in Europe, only one volume of translations of his poems into English exists: The Plural of Happiness: Selected Poems of Herman De Coninck translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown (Oberlin College Press, 2006). Since I’ve been an admirer of de Coninck’s poetry since I first read one of his poems in translation many years ago, I couldn’t ignore this opportunity to share some of his work with a new Canadian audience.

The European Constitution in Verse

Recently, I was one of several poets who helped translate this international, multilingual project into its English version.

Originally conceived of and edited by Belgian poets David van Reybrouck and Peter Vermeersch (who may or may not be related to me. I actually have no idea. Peter, if you're reading this, please get in touch!) of The Brussels Poetry Collective, The European Constitution in Verse is authored by poets from across the E.U. in a variety of European languages, and published by Belgium's Passa Porta, a group that organizes literary festivals and publishes and promotes books, much like the Literaturwerkstatt in Berlin (as far as I know, there is nothing quite like it Canada.... and there certainly should be).

Here is what the editors have to say about their creation:

'If the EU is not to be given a political constitution, at least give it a poetical one.’ The European Constitution in Verse: a long poem in which enthusiasm for Europe is tempered by a critical view, the grand gesture rubs up against poetic intimacy and the necessary seriousness is counterbalanced by a satirical note.

The Brussels Poetry Collective started the ball rolling. The famous Geert Van Istendael, the Galician eurocrat Xavier Queipo, the rapper Manza and the French-speaking performance poet Laurence Vielle wrote an inspired basic text. At least forty other European poets – at least one from each European country – then set to work. David Van Reybrouck and Peter Vermeersch remixed the whole lot to form an alternative European Constitution.

This project is more than just a frivolous reworking of a political fiasco. The poetic constitution puts the debate on the fundamental principles of Europe where it belongs: among the free citizens concerned.

The project in available in Europe in book form, but you can read the entire text -- in English, French, Dutch, or in its original multilingual version -- online. It's an impressive undertaking, and I urge you to spend some time taking it in.

New on my bookshelf

Word Comix by Charlie Smith.

Charlie Smith's poetry kicks ass. The author of Heroin and Other Poems and Women in America has a new book, and that's reason to celebrate in ways that might make your neighbours call the cops.













Late Nights with Wild Cowboys by Johanna Skibsrud.

An extraordinary debut by a someone who very probably has the skill and talent to become one of this country's major poets. I'm eager for more of her work, especially after seeing her read at Harbourfront not too long ago.












Verses and Versions: Three Hundred Years of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov.

This book's a feast of genius. Russian originals with Nabokov's translations on facing pages. A must.