Matthew Zapruder "On Criticism"

This excerpt comes from Matthew Zapruder’s essay "Show Your Work!" and can be found here. He is speaking primarily about contemporary American poetry, but the same can be applied to contemporary Canadian poetry. A terrific essay. He states:

"Readers, sophisticated and beginner, need critics to explain why and how poets are using language for these different purposes, and what those purposes might be. Our attachment to familiar language is powerful, and understandable. Without critics, we will hold on to the familiar and be unable to accept that there are other uses for language, that there is new and exciting poetry all around us.

Critics can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people. The second is to write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader. Only then can the reader grow to meet work that is unfamiliar, that he or she does not yet have the capacity to love.

Today, in American poetry, very few critics take it upon themselves to examine the choices poets make in poems, and what effect those choices might have upon a reader. As a consequence, very few people love contemporary American poetry. Many more might, if critics attempted to truly engage with the materials of poetry—words and how they work—and to connect poetry with an audience based on an engagement with these materials."

- Matthew Zapruder, "Show Your Work!"

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

I hear that song There is a light that never goes out

but it rings less true than it did once upon a time.

The older we get, the more we turn to silhouettes,

so when I hear the chorus, I feel only at a distance

from the tell-tale guitar of Johnny Marr or Morrisey’s cries.

His voice singing, there is a light that never goes out,

A requiem to teenage years that never quite existed

except in old music videos, or the pages of Rolling Stone.

No, the older we get, the more we turn to silhouettes

where our memories, mere shadows of sense, emerge

on the other side of a train platform in a grainy film noir

or like a sweeping beam of light that never goes out

cutting through a fogbank warning ships off rocks,

the shoreline obscured, invisible, too far away to imagine.

No, the older we get the more we turn to silhouettes.

Our leather jackets with band patches and buttons

hang in the closet or attic. We raise our children

saying our love is a light that never goes out,

While slowly they watch us turn to silhouettes.

by Chris Banks

My Story in a Late Style of Fire

There is a new fund-raising venture for a documentary film about the work and the life of American poet Larry Levis. I stumbled across a trailer for the proposed film last year and became tremendously excited, posting a link to it on my blog, but it seems now the director Michele Poulos needs help to fund the remainder of the project.

Making a documentary costs money and Poulos has been funding the film out of her own pocket. She has since created a kickstarter page so fans of Larry can make donations without hassle. The poetry of Larry Levis has been very important to me these last several years and so making a donation was an easy decision. If you are a fan of Larry Levis's poetry as I am, I hope you will consider making a donation to such a worthy project!

(Thanks to Rob Taylor for keeping me abreast of these new developments)

Mark Callanan “Gift Horse”

John Keats remarked in a letter to his friend Haydon that “Difficulties nerve the Spirit of Man – they make our Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a Passion.” No stranger to suffering himself after attending to his mother before she died, and then watching his brother Tom waste away from a disease which would later claim the poet himself, what Keats meant by this statement is that suffering does not simply make one’s poetry a salve or a balm. Suffering also elevates perception, intensifies life experiences, so a poet may come to greater self-knowledge and a new understanding of the human condition.

This idea is threaded through much of Keats’ work but it is also found in Mark Callanan’s new collection of poems Gift Horse published by Signal Editions. As hinted at by the title, however, Callanan’s brush with death in the form of a medical emergency a few years ago has made him less inclined to talk about it in terms of anything except as a gift. There is a real humility to his poems, which reaffirm life’s uncertainties rather than bolstering the grandiose claims Keats made for poetry as a physic for all the hurts of the world.

This is not to say Callanan’s poems are not ambitious, but rather his ambition is found in the workmanship of his craft which undertakes a serious examination of the physical world, a world he unwittingly almost lost, rather than in some prophet or philosopher’s private musings of an ethereal paradise.

Take for instance, his poem“Meningitus” from the first section of his book where the speaker’s hard-earned wisdom is that life is far more fragile than he realized:

Meningitus

I wait here for the sky to quaff the harbour sludge,

the hills to slough off houses, light poles,

cars parked neatly at the curb, the sun to burn

away the trappings of the city with its bulbs

of suburbs, the sea to rise and gorge itself

on cruise ships, trawlers, pilot boats, upended

punts whose gunwales melt into the earth.

Instead, I find myself compelled toward the dirt,

a writhing fit on the bedroom floor.

I kick my hooves and stare

past the faces of my family,

toward the future, that uncertainty.

Unlike the first stanza with its apocalyptic imagery where the poet sits waiting for some revelation, for some vast image out of spiritus mundi to trouble his sight, the second stanza begins with a glimpse of his own near death. This revelation is very different from the one he anticipated. More akin to animals than to the divine, it is his mortality he learns which connects him to all existing things in nature, rather than some imagined metaphysical realm.

This pragmatism enters into another poem “The Meaning of Life” which wanders further into this territory:

The Meaning of Life

It could be that this line drawn taut

between my fist and Bonnie’s kite—

the nylon wings and plastic strut—

is closer than I’ll come to revelation.

Or trust, I mean, in the sort of heaven

a feather’s width between the fingertips

of god and Adam insinuates,

their faith enduring on a chapel ceiling.

I’m the kind of man whose mind

is often flocked with herring gulls

that dive for chicken skins in parking lots.

And yet, at times, I almost grasp

what’s lost down on this lower plane:

the pull of unseen hands, a gentle tug.

Tangled string; me staring up.

Unlike others whose near death experiences have lead to a fervent belief in god, the speaker’s faith resides only in a world he can feel and see in some way, where his mind “is often flocked with herring gulls / that dive for chicken skins in parking lots”. Instead of belief, this poem insists the only connection to what lies beyond this life is the speaker’s own uncertainty anything else exists. Even so, the last four lines admit that powerlessness in the face of mortality has the speaker, at times, staring up and looking for a god to make sense of it all.

Ultimately, Mark Callanan’s collection Gift Horse is concerned with a whole array of things – mermaids, snowmen, extinct wolves – but the terrifying fact of one’s mortality underscores the whole collection. Lucia Perillo talks about powerlessness in the face of death in “Job versus Prometheus” from her essay collection I’ve Heard The Vultures Singing where she concludes:

The worst thing about disease is how it undoes Prometheus’s good deed and gives the patient a flash glimpse at his or her possible death—a flash that’s never exactly accurate, of course, because we all ride the plotlines of our singular, inevitable physical demise. Disease is notoriously inconsistent. And yet the flash is still horrifying, frightening beyond belief, because it might contain some truth after all. (54)

If you have enjoyed these poems by Mark Callanan, please go buy a copy of Gift Horse from your local bookstore and discover his poems for yourself.

Mark Jarman’s “Black Riviera”

Mark Jarman’s poetry has always had a strong religious influence, partly a consequence of growing up the son of a preacher, for his work wrestles with larger questions of belief and illumination. I’m thinking especially of his books Unholy Sonnets and Questions for Ecclesiastes, which mine the fertile territory of devotional poetry without parroting any particular faith. The overwhelming feeling one finds in those books is a reverential view of our all too frail human existence, where the question posed is not whether God exists, but why has so much of our humanity been shaped by a religious impulse to seek some higher power in the first place?

I believe Jarman answers this question in a thoughtful essay “Poetry and Religion” from his book The Secret of Poetry when he says: “the religious impulse in poetry endures; many poems being written today show that urge to be tied to or united with or at one with a supernatural power that exists before, after, and throughout creation” (13).

If you look past that word religious, Jarman is simply saying the impulse toward the sublime or the transformative or the transcendent – whatever you wish to call that sudden release from the ego – manifests in many different guises as it does in one of his earlier poems "Black Riviera": a stirringly beautiful narrative poem ostensibly about a teenage Jarman and his friends buying hallucinogens from a street-level drug dealer in a slick black car, but the poem marks the site of a powerful spiritual awakening too.

Black Riviera

for Garrett Hongo

There they are again. It’s after dark.

The rain begins its sober comedy,

Slicking down their hair as they wait

Under a pepper tree or eucalyptus,

Larry Dietz, Luis Gonzalez, the Fitzgerald brothers,

And Jarman, hidden from the cop car

Sleeking innocently past. Stoned,

They giggle a little, with money ready

To pay for more, waiting in the rain.

They buy from the black Riviera

That silently appears, as if risen,

The apotheosis of wet asphalt

And smeary-silvery glare

And plush inner untouchability.

A hand takes money and withdraws,

Another extends a sack of plastic—

Short, too dramatic to be questioned.

What they buy is light rolled in a wave.

They send the money off in a long car

A god himself could steal a girl in,

Clothing its metal sheen in the spectrum

Of bars and discos and restaurants.

And they are left, dripping rain

Under their melancholy tree, and see time

Knocked akilter, sort of funny,

But slowing down strangely, too.

So, what do they dream?

They might dream that they are in love

And wake to find they are,

That outside their own pumping arteries,

Which they can cargo with happiness

As they sink in their little bathyspheres,

Somebody else’s body pressures theirs

With kisses, like bursts of bloody oxygen,

Until, stunned, they’re dragged up,

Drawn from drowning, saved.

In fact, some of us woke up that way.

It has to do with how desire takes shape.

Tapered, encapsulated, engineered

To navigate an illusion of deep water,

Its beauty has the dark roots

Of a girl skipping down a high-school corridor

Selling Seconal from a bag,

Or a black car gliding close to the roadtop,

So insular, so quiet, it enters the earth.

The poem begins with the rain’s “sober comedy” and a small knot of teenagers, the young Jarman among them, waiting anxiously to buy “light rolled in a wave” from “a long car / A god himself could steal a girl in.” The black Riviera itself is a mystery cloaked in “smeary-silvery glare and plush inner untouchability”, whose enigmatic qualities make it an appropriate substitute for God.

In the second stanza, the car appears silently out of nowhere to bestow a fleeting sense of grace – a plastic sack of drugs in lieu of holy communion – upon these young men, but the ritual is more than enough to enlarge how they see the world.

This is where the poem reveals itself to be a secular non-Christian parable but one profoundly concerned with spiritual yearning. The poem moves deeper into this metaphysical realm as the young men take the drugs which allow them to see ”time / Knocked akilter” or when dreaming of love inside the “little bathyspheres” of their bodies, to imagine :

Somebody else’s body pressures theirs

With kisses, like bursts of bloody oxygen,

Until, stunned, they’re dragged up,

Drawn from drowning, saved.

In fact some of us woke up that way.

These last two lines are interesting because of the double entendre hinging on that word saved which clearly implies a spiritual experience and extraordinary change, but the young men are saved from what exactly? The quotidian? Mere boredom? Self-centeredness? More drug-use?

I think what I like most about this poem is Jarman does not explain what that salvation looks like and lets readers come to their own understanding. What is clear, however, is the boys are now left with a vision of a transcendent reality, one which questions their finite selves and view of a temporal world. This is the great beauty of this poem: it is charged with religious feeling while remaining profane. If you enjoyed “Black Riviera”, please seek out Mark Jarman’s latest collection Epistles published by Sarabande books at your local bookstore.

On Winter Cranes

I think of Winter Cranes as an homage to an invisible world. A world I take on faith and try to apprehend daily as if the divine, or some over-arching pattern, or those answers to the questions of who I am, or what is my purpose, could be found if I just took more time to look for them.

I suppose I could be called a lapsed romantic for my poems are elegies to the world as it should be lived. Not as it is lived. It comes down to my anxieties really and an inability to accept my lot in life.

I share what Theodore Roethke once called “a longing not for escape, but for a greater reality”; however, such longing is also tempered by a knowledge that any connection, any feeling of transcendence, if it does come in one’s poetry at all, is always fleeting.

Praise and mourning. These are the twin subjects of my poems. I want my experiences, my perceptions, my memories; in fact, my whole life to be changed, made meaningful, by shaping such inner observations in a way that they are made permanent fixtures. In death, Ansel Adams become those mountains he loved so dearly for we still gaze upon his photographs today. To me, he is a colossus of the imagination. I want nothing less than that for my poems but, at the same time, my poems mourn the naivety of such an idea.

Thomas Lynch “Walking Papers”

I was living in Seoul South Korea teaching English to kindergarten students when my American room-mate gave me a copy of Thomas Lynch’s book of essays The Under-taking: Life Studies From The Dismal Trade. I had never heard of Lynch before, as this was long before I came to a book-by-book appreciation of his tremendous skills as a master elegist and a genius of blank verse, but those essays stuck with me. Perhaps this was because I was still ploughing through my first manuscript writing poems akin to small epitaphs to my own estranged childhood in Southwestern Ontario.

All I knew about Lynch was that he was an under-taker from a small Michigan town, and an American poet, but his cogent thoughts about the lessons the living take from the dead were a revelation. In an essay entitled “Mary & Wilbur”, Lynch accounts for people’s impulse to memorialize by saying:

“We need our witnesses and archivists to say we lived, we died, we made this difference. Where death means nothing, life is meaningless. It’s a grave arithmetic. The cairns and stone piles, the life stories drawn on cave walls, the monuments in graveyards, one and all, are the traces left of the species before us—a space that they’ve staked out in granite and bronze. And whether a pyramid or Taj Mahal, a great vault in Highgate or a name on The Wall, we let them stand. We visit them. We trace the shapes of their names and dates with our fingers. We say the little epitaphs out loud. “Together forever.” “Gone but not forgotten.” We try to reassemble their lives from the stingy details, and the exercise teaches us something about how to live” (117).

Lynch is talking here about the covenant the living make with the dead—the need to remember so we may, in turn, be remembered—but he could just as easily be talking about poetry which has traced these grand themes with its own fingers too.

What I like about Lynch’s prose, and his poetry for that matter, is his nostalgic eloquence but also the ever-present mindset of the small town undertaker. A dispassionate voice that never preaches, never sentimentalizes, and reminds us there are some things in life from which there can be no deliverance.

Take, for example, this poem called “Oh Say Grim Death” from his most recent collection Walking Papers published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Oh Say Grim Death

No doubt the Reverend Ainsworth read from Job
Over the charred corpse of the deacon’s boy
To wit: “Blessed be the name of the Lord”
Or some such comfortless dose of holy writ
That winter morning after the house fire
Put all the First Congregationalists
Of Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire
Out weeping and gnashing, out in the snow
Whilst the manse at Main street and Gilmore Pond Road
Blazed into the early Thursday morning.
God’s will is done as often without warning
As with one. Either way, Revere His laws
Is cut into the child’s monument
To rhyme with a previous sentiment:
Cease, Man, to ask the hidden cause. As if
The answers ever were forthcoming. So
Little’s known of young Isaac A. Spofford—
His father, Eleazar, his mother, Mary,
His death on the thirteenth of February
In Seventeen Hundred Eighty-eight.
A brand plucked from the ashes reads the stone
Of Rev. Laban Ainsworth’s house; which frames
The sadness in the pastor’s burning faith,
In God’s vast purposes. As if the boy
Long buried here was killed to show how God
Makes all things work together toward some good.
And yet the stone’s inquiry still haunts:
Oh say, grim death why thus destroy
The parents’ hopes, their fondest joy—
Or say, instead, grim death destroys us all
By mighty nature’s witless, random laws
Whereby old churchmen, children, everything—
All true believers, all who disbelieve,
Come to their ashen ends and life goes on.

What can one say when calamity strikes and our children meet untimely ends? A burning faith in God or the shaking of one’s fist at “nature’s witless, random laws” will accomplish very little. Whatever your belief system or lack of it, death simply does not care, for no one thing will bring back the promise of a child that has been taken too early to his grave. This is what the poem is saying. Why did this happen? Because. And life goes on.

This is not to suggest everything is quite so gloomy in Lynch’s essays and poetry for every death is also a solid affirmation life is for living. Life can be taken away at any moment. The question then becomes how to live? I will let Lynch himself answer that question from another of his remarkable essays called “All Hallow’s Eve”:

“Revision and prediction seem like wastes of time. As much as I’d like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. Here is how the moment instructs me: clouds afloat in front of the moon’s face, lights flicker in the carved heads of pumpkins, leaves rise in the wind at random, saints go nameless, love comforts, souls sing beyond the reach of bodies” (148).

If you enjoyed the poem “Oh Say Grim Death” and the essay excerpts by Thomas Lynch, please pick up his latest collection Walking Papers and The Undertaking at your local bookstore.