Hockey Fight in Canada

Back in 2004, during the NHL lockout, I wrote a few articles for Maisonneuve Magazine's website. I thought I would re-post them here, since they are no longer available at their site, and since it is summer time, and we miss hockey. This one is about the hockey that was going on. Published around November, 2004.

My friend Cherine had never seen a live hockey game. To rectify this tragedy, she and I decided to head down to the Bell Centre last Friday. Since the NHL players are locked out, we didn’t go to see the Habs, but rather to see two teams from the Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey (LNAH): the Verdun Dragons and the Laval Chiefs. There was a distinctive non-pro feel to the night. The crowd was restless, there was a heavy police presence and when the first puck dropped, so too did the gloves. The fight seemed orchestrated—a way for the warriors on each team to say hello to the more than 7,000 fans in attendance. But when another fight began immediately after the next faceoff, it became apparent Cherine’s first live-hockey experience would be a night to remember.

Before seven seconds had ticked off the clock, five faceoffs had been attempted, and five players from each team had had their seats upgraded from players’ bench to penalty box. The game ended with fans throwing each other down the concrete steps of the Bell Centre’s lower bowl and attacking the Verdun players on their bench. This last move was a foolish one. One fan got whacked over the head by a stick-wielding Dragons' coach and then faced a flurry of fists from Clint Butler (who was subsequently ejected from play; the Dragons have since kicked him off the team for good). And yes, in between all of that, there was a game. The Dragons won 9-5.

After the initial boxing card—seven seconds of slugging drawn out over about ten minutes—the refs tried to put a lid on the fighting. They didn’t entirely succeed, but they managed to let the players play. In the end, the lax defence of both teams resulted in many pretty goals. There were still a few fights, but it seemed like the opening “faceoff” was part of the show; these enforcers were obviously excited to be offering their pugilistic patronage under the same roof (at least symbolically) as their heroes, John Kordic and John Ferguson.

Early on, Dragons' goalie Martin Villeneuve was hot, allowing his team to jump to a 4-0 lead on two goals by former Toronto Maple Leaf Daniel Marois. I was hoping Marois would get his hat trick, but the only foreign objects thrown onto the ice were a CD and a bottle of pop—the former in response to the bench-jumping, the latter (presumably) in response to the Chiefs’ lacklustre performance. The Dragons never relinquished the lead, though that didn’t stop most Chiefs fans, including one with the name “God” on the back of “His” Chiefs jersey, from yelling in their most profane patois. You’d have thought “God” would be offended by all the “Asti-de-câlisse-de-tabernac-de-trou-d’cul”s that were being hurlé’d from the stands. The best line came from the guy sitting behind us, who, after being chastised by another fan for yelling his way through the game, shouted, “C’est pas’d ma faute que t’es marrié!” (It’s not my fault that you’re married!). The chastiser and his wife left shortly thereafter, presumably at the wife’s behest.

With about five minutes left in the third period, the Laval goalie jumped into the fray, and started whaling with his blocker on an unidentified Dragon. This instigated the various fights in the stands. This is when Cherine and I learned why there were so many cops around. It took four or five of them to get the crazed fan away from the Dragons' bench and out of harm’s way.

This being her first game, Cherine was quite entertained, but I was compelled to keep insisting, “Hockey’s not really like that.” The fact that the Laval Chiefs wear the uniform of the Charleston Chiefs, of Slap Shot fame, didn’t help. Still, when you see a game with someone who hasn’t had hockey culture drilled into them since birth, it provides a unique opportunity for perspective. The similarities to Roman gladiator contests (or at least, pop-culture perceptions of them—Roman historians may beg to differ) are many: the coliseum, the armour, the drunk, revved-up crowd yelling for blood (“Du sang, asti! DU SANG!!!”). Having lived in Scotland for a time, Cherine wondered at the beginning of the game why the fans weren’t separated, as at European soccer matches. I explained that hockey fans were much more civilized.

In the absence of the NHL this winter, Canadians (and hockey fans in the United States) will have to make do with other hockey options, and so the LNAH will surely gain many fans in the coming months. In addition to fighting, new fans will see different types of regulation in practice, including no-touch icing, tag-up offsides, shootouts: it’s free-flowing hockey with very little clutching and grabbing (what little there is usually ends in a fight). When the NHL comes back—next year seems most likely—it will be up to the fans to decide if they want to see Koivu and Sundin try to beat the trap, and inevitably fail most of the time, or if they want to see James Desmarais deke out hapless defencemen with highlight-reel moves. Would fans rather see Tie Domi and Darren Langdon in a scrum in the corner or Steve Bossé squaring off at centre ice, helmet off, fists dancing?

As we walked through the Bell Centre’s parking lot, a chill in the air, trees aglow with Christmas lights, I heard a kid say to a couple of his friends, “Hockey’s not really like that.” Maybe hockey’s not really like that, but whatever that was, it sure was fun.

Old Reviews 2: Miracle Mile

I reviewed this short story by Alex MacLeod for Canadian Running.

In Miracle Mile, a short story by Alexander MacLeod, two 1500m runners on different paths prepare to run in the national championship. The race, however, is entirely beside the point. The story opens with the gruesome Mike Tyson ear-biting incident, a chilling foreshadowing of what happens when a person “gives in to his rawest impulse” or goes “all the way over to the straight edge.” One runner, Michael Campbell, has been at the top, and understands the sacrifice required to get there, but is considering retirement. “You have to make choices,” he says: “you can’t run and be an astronaut.” His pre-race hotel roommate, Jamie Burns, is on the way up. He’s pushed those limits, done all the right things. Of course he wins the race, but at what cost?

This story, yet another beautifully-made edition from Frog Hollow Press, will ring true to any runner who has had a sniff at top-level competition. The hotel room scene is as true a painting as any. The warm-up around the sub-division as well. Even the names, Bourque, Graham, Marcotte, will evoke a certain era for those in the know. For a recreational runner, it might be completely foreign, but it might be instructive—not in the sense of a training manual (there’s none of that here), but as a way of understanding those tall, thin wisps who run 10ks close to your 5k time. I’ve heard some people say that it must be easier for the “fasties.” No chance. Most people run for all the right reasons: fun, fitness, feeling good—a balanced pastime. The “pure specialists” in Miracle Mile are motivated from a darker place, it would seem. The story flips from the pure realism of the hotel scene, and the race itself, to the fantastical train racing scene, and the final, warm-down episode that bookends the Tyson opener with grim believability.

Old reviews part 1.

I thought I would post some old reviews, to maybe try to get me back into the poetry mindset. This is from Arc 57, Winter 2006, a review of The New Canon, an anthology edited by Carmine Starnino. I guess this is timely given the recent Cage Match between Carmine and Christian Bök. This is the unedited version (I think they took out the word "shit-wrecker" upon publication).

Middle-of-the-road-Margie Music
The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry

Carmine Starnino is not one to shy from a literary fight. Fully aware, I’m sure, of his reputation for literary shit-wrecking, he’s set out to anticipate every axe of criticism that might be ground on his anthology. In his introduction to “The New Canon,” the editor plants so many hedges, he’s got his own fund. It is pointless to argue with the choices in an anthology, but since the editor has provided us with extended criteria, it is a useful exercise, I think, to hold the book up to its own standards.

With respect to his “crusading” title, he writes of “generational unprecedentedness” and “getting away from the known.” Yes, there are some new faces here, but Anne Simpson, John Barton, Karen Solie and Stephanie Bolster are hardly unheard of. Starnino invokes the meaning of “canon as ‘tenet’ or ‘rule’” and suggests that this anthology is “concrete evidence…of a new principle at work in our poetry.” I wonder if he intended that this new principle consist of blasé mediations on middle-age, characterised by a lack of stakes, and without any kind of tension? There is a lot of that in this book. If poems are songs, this is a collection full of adult-contemporary tunes, of middle-of-the-road-Margie music.

Of course, no anthology has yet to show any kind of consistency, so there are some raucous hits and sincere ballads here as well. It is disappointing, however, to read through the editor’s tirading introduction, where he promises that this anthology won’t be like the others, only to find that it is.

In the first part of his introduction, Starnino positions his poets in relation to previous (and concurrent) anthologies, noting who has held on and who has passed us by. He wants this book to “brake sharply on our tendency to put money on the same sure bets;” however, the “plain, the soft-spoken, the flatly prosy, the paraphrasingly simple, the accessibly Canadian” poetry that he describes as this sure-bet, “ruling aesthetic” is not absent from The New Canon. Diana Brebner’s “Port” is a fine example of flatly prosy (not to mention melodramatic and sentimental) “verse”:

Sometimes the tricks you learn as a child
are useful later on. When I was beaten
or raped I learned to move myself away
to a place without pain or degradation,

As serious as the theme may be, there is no poetry here. The closest “form” this comes to is that of a high school confessional.

Some of the poems are far too perfunctory, too simple. John Degen, do we really need another meditation on crows? Yes, they are tricksters, and child-like, we get it, but why should this matter to us? While Richard Green’s “At the College” is impressive for its terza rima, the content—the lament of a middle-aged professor whose students fall asleep in class—is irrelevant.

The best poems in this tome are ones that engage so-called “traditional” poetic themes of love and death, but with a smart, crisp formal element, and an imaginative metaphorical thrust.

Thank you, George Elliot Clarke, for “King Bee Blues,” a poem with some passion and playfulness: “You don’t have to trust/a single black word I say/but don’t be surprised/if I sting your flower today.” Bruce Taylor and Iain Higgins take up the topic of death by going backwards, to childhood. For Taylor, cars are “optimistic” and “people who drive them have fallen in love with the future.” There is hope in Higgins’ work: “Skinned & still bleeding, his brother half-blind from another fall, they wheeled their bent bikes to the door.” The most energetic poems here come through the eyes of a child, for whom love has not yet hardened under the glare of cynicism, and for whom death is far enough away that it retains its mystery; there is no middle-aged resignation here.

Steven Heighton’s poems, though he writes in the middle-aged mode as well, conflict the delight of youth against dour adulthood—and youth wins. “Constellations,” his tale of putting a child to bed, “wrenches” us out of “that evening adult world” of rented films and “day-end bottle[s] of beer.” “Black jack” is a great poem about risk. The other poets in this anthology take note: “Many tombs/are made of unplayed cards.” In “Machine Gunner” he channels David Jones, reaching back to a time when war seemed to be able to touch people in a more personal way. He steps over the sentimentality of modern responses to war (Anne Simpson’s “Seven Paintings by Brueghel” is a prime example in The New Canon), yet doesn’t dip into the over-simplified, cynical response of anti-war activists.

As I moved through the book, I enjoyed more and more of the poetry. The younger the poet, it seemed, the more lively the verse—a departure from those “sure bets.” George Murray’s poems seem to be girding themselves for some impending storm; Sue Sinclair’s “Red Pepper” is a twisted metaphor for a weary, if not broken, heart; Pino Coluccio writes in a sad, yet playful tone; Adam Sol’s “Wishing you better” untangles a complicated love; Joe Denham makes me care about the life of a prawn; Shane Neilson’s “Open head injury” is passionate, gruesome, and tender. There is something at stake for all of these poets—their poetry is a response to deeply personal, but also common, feelings: love, fear, hate, joy.

David O’Meara’s “Letter To Auden,” a seven-pager, puts a casual conversation with a dead poet into a clever structure so tight you rarely notice the rhyme—as it should be. He bemoans a century of decline of human culture, and wonders where we are headed.

But history, more than ever, is now a snazzy show
Put on for the tourists,
As if no one lives here anymore
And culture just exists
To sell, promote, consume, and generally entice
Travellers to our merchandise.
(And correct me here if there’s some doubt,
But wasn’t the Great Wall constructed
To keep the tourists out?)

It is a bit of grander thinking that most of the older poets here are too chicken (or weary?) to attempt.

This anthology, the editor declares, is “not about test-driving the reputations of fifty Canadian poets. It’s about what happens the next time we, as poets, sit down to write a poem. What conventions will we agree to respect and what will we allow ourselves to wincingly push past?”

It seems there is no agreement on this, and sometimes the poems get lost in the shuffle. As interesting and specific an image as bees in a Pepsi can might be (and it stuck in my mind), without a corresponding meaning to hang on, it begs the question: so what? It’s pretty, but it doesn’t mean much; however, when the poets combine linguistic originality with figurative thrust, and a cocktail of youthful exuberance, innocence and scepticism that combines to reveal a deep desire for their subject, then we have good poems to read.