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.