The Best American Poetry

Greg Santos Interviews Jason Camlot (part 3)

For earlier installments of Greg Santos's interview with Canadian poet Jason Camlot, click here and here!

GS:  Do you have an audience in mind when you write your poetry?

JC:   I  think the presupposition of audience, which is a determining factor for any kind of poetry, is an interesting question to ask about poetry that’s written in English and Quebec. I taught a graduate course on English language poetry from Quebec last summer and we looked at this book by Carmine Starnino called With English Subtitles and the thing that I found interesting about the book was the vagueness, the strangeness of his presupposed audience. He seems to be talking to some imagined international audience of intellectuals. Or he addresses you very aggressively and idiomatically as though you grew up on the same street as him.  It’s all over the place in terms of the presupposed audience and I think that’s pretty typical of a lot of English language poetry written from here. Partly because there’s license to imagine any audience because there is in a sense no local audience for poetry, per se, I mean there is because there are a lot of students here and there are a lot of readings, so that is one audience. But in another sense I think it allows you to imagine yourself into all kinds of fictional or to presuppose all kinds of fictional audiences. The fact is in many ways my audience is David McGimpsey or the few poets that I actually share work with and that’s probably typical of poets anywhere.  In that sense it is an Anglo_Quebec audience because it’s David McGimpsey or it’s Todd Swift because those are poets I send my work to, so it’s the individuals who may get things that others wouldn’t because they’re from here.

GS: Who do you consider influential over your career as a poet?

JC:  It changes all the time. I’m always looking out for new poets. My colleague whose office is next door, Judith Herz, is always sending me the names of poets she’s just discovered so I really appreciate that. I think when I was young, poets who were important to me were songwriters. Bob Dylan was a huge influence as soon as I started writing songs, and the Beatles. As for poets who have been influential on the poetry I’ve actually published when I was an adult, I’d say, Elizabeth Bishop.  Zbigniew Herbert is a Polish poet who I’ve read and loved for quite a few years. A lot of Montreal poets, like Layton and Cohen, whom I discovered as soon as I left Montreal and started reading seriously. Peter Van Toorn, another local poet whom I read when I was quite young and really dug and loved. A.R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, a lot of Modern American poetry. There are others but those would be a few names that just popped to mind.

Greg Santos Interviews Jason Camlot (part 2)

For part one of Greg Santos's interview with Canadian poet, click here -- and read some of Camlot's poems here and here:

GS: In your poem “The Death of Roland As Peanuts Panel” you’re referencing the French epic poem, Le Chanson de Roland, which from my understanding is one of the oldest major works in French literature and you juxtapose it with Charlie Brown.  It’s a very funny idea.  You have this balancing act between a comic and a work of literature.  Is there a line that divides popular culture and literature?

JC: There’s certainly a line for people who write about culture.  I think if you’ve ever read a review of a David McGimpsey book, you’re aware of that.  One way to re-sk your question is, which is better poetry?  Chanson de Roland or Peanuts?  I think you could have a pretty serious debate about that.  I don’t know if you’ve read Le Chanson de Roland but it’s a pretty ridiculous poem in a lot of ways.  There are historical reasons for that but it’s a very cartoonish poem and there are historical reasons for that as well.  The Debaucher is a lot about rhyme and humor and about death.  I think that the Peanuts and Chanson de Roland convergence was more about the death element of the book than anything else.  There are two sections about the death of Roland and I witnessed the death of my friend and former teacher, Rob Allen, the year that I was writing that book and in different ways I was thinking about the dearth of my vocabulary, formal poetic vocabulary, for somehow making sense or even just formalizing what I was witnessing.  I did turn to Le Chanson de Roland because it was a very formulaic representation of death so it seemed to me in certain ways consoling because there were obviously protocols at work in the way his death was being represented but at the same time it seemed empty and existentially cartoonish to me as Peanuts does.  I felt as alone as Charlie Brown in a panel while I was reading it.  The convergence there just had more to do with how much certain Shulz panels move me and seem to be about death in as or more interesting ways than Chanson de Roland but it seemed like a natural convergence of two rather flat paneled ways of formulaically representing death.  There are other attempts to represent death in that book so it seemed like one way among a series that I was experimenting with.

GS: In the last line of your poem “Summer Caravan” it reads “Please, Professor, let me get a laugh.”  How does humor play a role in your poetry and in contemporary poetry in general?

JC:            I’ll tell you first, in my own poetry it seems to me a part of a larger interest in tonal registers.  I write a lot of persona poetry and a lot of poems are really exploring either gradual or quick shifts between tonal registers.  Sometimes it’s a drier drollery.  Sometimes it’s more laugh_out_loud type humor but it seems part of this larger interest in the continuum of tonal registers that can be achieved poetically.  That’s what my real investment is.  Also, I find the absurdity of life is probably best expressed through humor and that’s something, I don’t know if I’m interested in, but something I just happen to believe in.

Greg Santos Interviews Jason Camlot (part 1)

I met with Jason Camlot [left] on the afternoon of March 17, 2009 in his office at Concordia University in Montreal. I had misplaced my voice-recorder that day but luckily had recently downloaded a voice-recording applet onto my phone. Camlot also had a professional recorder on hand, which he told me had been used to record some of his practice jam sessions and also for recording poetry readings. We ran both recorders at the same time, just in case, and sure enough one of them ran out of batteries midway through the interview. Many thanks to Jason for having the good sense to suggest we use both of them. –- Greg Santos

GS: Montreal poets like A.M. Klein, Earle Birney, Louis Dudek, P.K. Page, Irving Layton, and Leonard Cohen dominated much of the Canadian poetry scene between the 1920s and 1960s.  In his classic 1954 essay, “The Montreal Poets”, Louis Dudek wrote “we can see in their poetry a sense of place, of a real city that has an odd, ugly vitality of its own.”  How would you define a Montreal poet nowadays?

 Jason Camlot: There are a lot of different kinds of Montreal poets, as there have always has been.  I don’t think there is a single definition of a Montreal poet.  Some of them are here for a couple of years.  Some of them were born here and are here for their lives.  I suppose if I had to answer that question and I’ve obviously been engaged in trying to or trying not to answer that very question…more like what is an Anglo_Quebec poet…someone who’s positioned a little bit differently in relation to language and in relation to macro versus micro culture.

            I went to parochial or private Jewish school.  I read the bible and studied it in Hebrew.  That’s probably the first poetry I actually read but didn’t really understand.  Which is a really nice way to encounter poetry.  It’s probably how everyone first encounters poetry.  You read something you don’t understand.  But also being exposed to it in high school in my North American literature class.  That’s how the course was described.  It wasn’t American.  It wasn’t Canadian literature.  It was my North American literature class.  Which consisted of American poetry but also especially of Canadian poetry so the first real poetry I read wasn’t Layton or Cohen but it was Earle Birney.  And I think Birney was the first poet that I’ve ever understood in nationalist terms or in the kinds of terms that you seem to be at least asking about.  But it just so happens that the guidance counselor at my high school, for example, was the daughter-in-law of A.M. Klein.  There were connections to other poets and I was exposed to them in different ways but it was only really when I left Montreal when I started thinking more about the kind of question you’re asking.

GS: You received your Masters in Boston and your PhD in Stanford.  What would you say are the differences between the poetry scene in those places and in Canada?

JC:            I was in the academic program at Boston University.  I could say more about California or San Francisco because I lived there for five years.  I actually sat in on a workshop with Simone Di Piero while I was there and so met some poets within the workshop like Nicole Krauss.  I was also involved in a poetry scene there, through music as well, with poets who I’m still sort of in touch with and whose work and activities as poets were completely separate from Stanford.  They weren’t Stegner Fellows, these people.  They were students.  Or not.  They were San Francisco dwellers.  One is Katie Degentesh.  Another is Eugene Ostashevsky.  We held readings and we did things but they were meant to have nothing to do with the university.

Greg Santos presents "Aphids" by Jason Camlot

Jason Camlot’s poem “Aphids” exemplifies his playfulness with language and his sharp wit. Every line is funny. Camlot takes well-known aphorisms, turns them on their head, and makes you think of habitual language in a new light. The decadent themes in the poem echo Oscar Wilde, a notorious debaucher and aphorist. I think of a line from the title poem of Camlot’s The Debaucher: “Débaucher is traditionally a verb./ It might have meant to un-bench/ (de-bauche) someone, that is, to disturb/ him in his work.” Here, Camlot unbenches aphorisms to make them flow in new directions.
-- Greg Santos

Aphids
The worst mistake in life or literature is to have the wrong feeling.
             – Louis Dudek

There are no real swans, only imaginary ones.
But imaginary swans still suffer.

Life is short and art long, unless you outlive yourself.
In that instance, you have your whole life to mourn in art.

Axioms are not axioms unless the letter x is available.
But for how long can we rely upon the letter x?

When you say, “I’m sorry,” I don’t want to look at you.
But then I can’t see if I still please you.

Absence makes the heart bleed profusely.
The heart loves to swim in blood and absinthe.

If I love you, I am not telling you.
If you ask, I will have to kill you.

Men and women are the only animals that blush.
And some fish sometimes deign to blush.

Aphids have piercing-sucking mouthparts called stylets.
See tiny Aphrodite in her sharp styletto heels.

Beware the man who abides by only one book.
But if he loses it, help him find his one book.

A cigarette is a perfect kind of love. Ashes are a perfect form of death.
An ashtray is like dying in a drained Motel 8 Jacuzzi.

Lies are only bad if they cause pain, truths are always good.
Truths can cause severe pain, but they are still right.

The superfluous can be most useful to someone.
Go to the superfluous store to find just what you need.

Aphorisms should be distinguished from axioms.
But who has the time, what with maxims and proverbs and whatnot?

The worst mistake in life or literature is to have the wrong feeling.
Come to me and I will tell you which of your feelings is wrong.

Jason Camlot, from The Debaucher, 2008

Greg Santos presents a Poem by Jason Camlot

Born and raised in the town of Mont Royal, a suburb just north of Montreal, Jason Camlot grew up in the Montreal Anglo-Jewish community, where his father was a furrier manufacturer.  Jason started playing music when he was young. He received an MA from Boston University, a PhD from Stanford, and is chair of English at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the poetry editor of the Punchy Writers Series. -- Greg Santos

Mouse Memorial

I live with mice inside a monument of mice.
They have lived here since before the First Crusade.
I have been here since I learned to talk.
The mice are proud
and one day I will be a mouse, too –
small, blind and unimportant.
I admire their irreverent creeping, timid squeaks, tiny
ebony nests where the young lie like peanuts.
I admire their precious breath
and fast-beating hearts.
The monument itself is in the fragile bones
of those mice who are still alive.
As human castles lose their walls,
as tinted towers rise and fall,
this scuttling monument endures below,
passed on from mouse parent to mouse child.
My big, awkward bones
are my impediment to being memorial.
Still, already I am unimportant, and I am blind.
Is it hubris to hope one day I will be small?

-- Jason Camlot [from The Debaucher, 2008]

Molly P's Coda to This Week's CanAm Blog: Stephanie Bolster on The Best

To find the last words for the Canadian-American exchange we've been having this week,  I quote Stephanie Bolster, the intrepid first editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008.

Though a reader of the Best American annuals, I’ve always balked at “best.” I don’t have the same “best” from year to year, perhaps not even from morning to night within a single day. As I read 2008’s possible contenders – each on several occasions, to increase a poem’s chances of striking me in a receptive moment – what was I looking for? 

First: good writing. Awkward or rote syntax; familiar expressions, images, and locutions; or random lineation, ruled a poem out. A meaningfully rebellious and distinctive syntax or a deliberately dissonant music often ruled it in.

Second: depth and challenge, be that emotional or intellectual. If additional readings failed to yield new insights and appreciations, but, rather, dulled the flash I’d sensed the first time around, the poem lost its post-it note.

Finally, and inseparably from the first two criteria: an interesting, even strange sensibility or imagination.  . . . I sought poems that excited and surprised me, that felt (boldly or quietly) necessary, often urgent. I sought poems serious and poems frivolous (though seriously frivolous). . . . I was without doubt a tougher critic than if I’d been reading fewer poems, but asking myself whether I could confidently put my name behind a particular choice forced me to be discerning.

In the end, the best is what you feel you can put your own name to -- that's what Stephanie Bolster did, and I am grateful.

It's been a joy to write this blog, to talk to all of you--and, importantly for me, to listen.  Many thanks to Stacey Harwood who added the photos to these posts, especially David Hockney's swimming pool and Mrs. Delany.  Now I'm going to take a nice dive back into the 18th century.

Warmest wishes,
Molly

Molly Peacock Adds Caribbean to Canadian & American, plus a PS

After an unexpected day off from this blog because of my secret life as a biographer of Mrs. Mary Delany (1700-1788, left) the remarkable flower collage artist, I return for the Poetry Weekend Blog with this post and an orchardful of thanks for all those who have hurled themselves with such passion into the Canadian-American-British poetry discussion, particularly Zach Wells, the editor of Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets.  Now it's time to bring in the Caribbean, and today's poem does just that.  On my blog break I attended one of the programs at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City where I am a Fellow this year, not thinking that that the prose writers Maryse Condé and Elizabeth Nunez, both born in the Caribbean, would lead me back to our discussions.  But Maryse Condé refused, à la Zach Wells and a bit like the grandfather in Joy Russell's poem below,  to generalize about what a Caribbean, particularly a French Caribbean writer is. 

While Condé was thoroughly uninterested in linking writers with nations,  Elizabeth Nunez found it irresistible to relate place and customs to a writer. I'm with Nunez, obviously;  I find it irresistible, but I also find it ineffable.  Characteristics I feel are solid start evaporating in my very hands.  Joy Russell also seems driven to make these cultural connections, and she makes them solid by inserting history, and family history, into her poem that was chosen for Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008.  Russell  depends on metaphor to carry this poem, especially "the city soot, a new glove for the body."  Thinking of verbal comparisons such as that "new glove" prompts me to remind Americans that Canadians rarely use the "melting pot" metaphor, where all cultures merge, then cool into a monolith.  Instead, Canadians use the "mosaic" metaphor:  the cultural mosaic, each piece grouted into the landscape so to speak, shining side by side.

Russell says of  her poem "On King George's Crowning" that "it is part of a poetry manuscript whose eyes and ears fall on Vancouver, London and Belize, their bodies of water and connection to Empire."  The Georges, particularly King George III, have their impact on our Canadian-American discussion, because George III was one of the supervising figures in the late 18th century revolution that created our two countries, and the reaper / raper of the treasure of the Caribbean.  He was also, I have to admit, a big admirer of the flower collages of Mrs. Delany, to whom I am devoting myself this year. What goes around comes around, in this blog, anyway. 

After Joy Russell's tercets is a PS I hope you'll read.

On King George's Crowning

On King George's crowning, the interviewee
said they all got sweets and little goodies, and when
they come by boat, some come as stowaways.  Once

they collect money for this woman's fare.  Others
come, a fiver tight in their pockets, like my grandfather
when he escaped from the belly of the crown and never

spoke of it again.  Others not bring overcoat--
no one told them how air moves vampires through
bone, erases memory matter.  Some dress in suits

tropical style, as the ship moved its shaky
hand over the old surface of the sea  They arrive,
say 'I born Jamaican, I die Jamaican,' take a bite

of the sweet, hand to mouth, take the test
of motherland's history--bitter--replied, when asked if
they spoke the Queen's English;  Enoch Powell's rivers

of blood forming a new oxygen, scarlet-marked
as they sliced through London fog;  iris recording
life, how it is:  Houses of Parliament, Big Ben

in the grey dank; a room, a galvanized tub to wash, emerge
baptized;  the city soot, a new glove for the body; the signs
reading no Irish or blacks or dogs, not wanted but

take your money, just the same.  Some, some,
carry hope like luggage, others not so sure-footed, others
not so childlike in believing all what this mother have to say.

Some bring formal names, leave pet ones behind,
whisper night bougainvillea.  How this country
cold, cold, cold through and through and no hot tea

enough to warm you, or hand friendly enough to pry
open the dark days, bring morning brightness.  Some come,
stay, patience worn thin like paper, hearts

tough as old bread, and letters back home with every
copper earned from the Double Decker, brow wipe
of the sick, hammer of nail into two by four--if they

lets you, if you not too dark for their liking.
Some, some, come long way, did bite
of the sweet.  Motherless mother's milk.

Ol' Englan'
cryin' crocodile tear
for her lost chil'ren.

Joy Russell

from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
Stephanie Bolster, Editor;  published by Tightrope Books

PS
I just want to  thank fellow poet and Best American blogger James Cummins, for bringing humor to these posts.  Do Canadian's have a funny bone?  You bet, but not when we're duking it out about poetry, so thank you Jimmy C!                                                                    

Molly Peacock Introduces the Mighty Website RPO

Rather than throwing more names of Canadian poets at American readers, I'm going to let you in on the mighty website that is a fabulous cache of poetry and commentary on poetry, Representative Poetry on Line.  RPO, the brainchild of Ian Lancashire, began as a teaching tool at the University of Toronto and has expanded, expounding on and exemplifying poetry, exonerating some poets, and exhilarating most of its visitors. It is a site that researchers visit as well as poets, professors, students, and casual readers  looking for a great Valentine.   Experts, students, old fans and newbies to poetry can all find something to dig into at RPO.   It is not a superficial site, or a even a particularly glamourous one, but it runs very deep as well as broad. I'm going to refer you to the Canadian Poets page.

And I'm also going to refer you to the threads from earlier posts, since I'll be spending intermittent moments for the rest of today replying to the likes of Zach Wells, Craig Poile, James Arthur et. al.  This blog has sparked a fray!  And I better get back into it. 

Incidentally, here's what Ken Babstock says about Hunter Deary, from yesterday's post:  ". .  . but was Hunter Deary herself who appeared, in the way fiction writers are heard to talk of their characters; like they'd stepped out of the shadows whole, historicized, and speaking like no one but themselves." 

All the best to all the readers of this blog,

Molly

The Homekid and the Prodigal: Molly Peacock on CanBrit and AmCan Poems

    It strikes me that there can be an unabashedly strong link between Canadian poetry and the muscular vigor of certain British poets.  Think Simon Armitage.  I see this in a number of the poems in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, particularly in the work of Ken Babstock, with its consonants and metrical quick-step. I see it as well in Carmine Starnino's poem "Squash Rackets" with his homage to Christopher Smart's "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry."  (Starnino's poem begins with these echoing lines, pumped up for the squash court:  "For they know us by their grip and the swordmanship/ of our swing.  For they are chrome lariats/ always bellowing, "here I come to save the day!"/ For they love, whenever possible, the crosscourt smash/and channel our inner thug for that grunting drive."

    If you compare a Canadian to a Brit, they aren't so squeamish as an American might become.  Is it because the Queen is on a Canadian five dollar bill?  There are no one dollar bills;  they're coins (and they have her Majesty's image on them, too).  Or it is because the essential historical difference between English-speaking Canada and English-speaking America is that the American descends culturally from people who broke away from England while the Canadian descends culturally from the people who didn't want to rupture that tie?  It's the difference between the sibling who strikes off for parts unknown and the sibling who stays home with mom and pop.  They both grown up, of course.  They both grow into their wisdom.  But from what different directions . . .

    Check out Ken Babstock's poem, which Stephanie Bolster, the Editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 called "quirky, wacky, noisy, dense and disjunctive," which Bolster, incidentally, attributes "perhaps  . . . [to] an influence of work from south of the border."  Well you never know about influences, do you?  Here's the Canadian poem, caught in our own editorial crossfire  of reasons why something is Canadian and something is the best.  (Not to mention that the homekid never compares well to the prodigal.)

PS

Here is A.F. Moritz's clue to what's going in his ekphrastic poem, "Odds and Ends," posted yesterday.  And to further edify American readers, the painter Emily Carr is an icon in Canada, our Georgia O'Keefe.

"Odds and Ends" describes a painting by Emily Carr in the city art gallery of Victoria, and, more particularly, the experience in which my viewing of the painting was set.  Leaving the gallery, I walked through the surrounding neighborhoods, thinking to come out soon on the ocean, but it turned out to be a long walk on a hot humid day:  I'd misunderstood my map.  And in a front yard I saw a rhododendron petal . . . "

HUNTER DEARY AND HOSPITAL WING

Hunter Deary emits noises like peach pits;
    dry scrotal humming that punctuates fits.
When a hip comes loose it comes loose
    before breakfast and she pops it back

in with a winch, a rock, a clean tube and a sock.
    Ask Hunter Deary what the microbes
are for.  Ask Hunter Deary what the library's
    for.  Ask Hunter Deary what agent con-

tested her birthright, her being out late, her
    transmission on broadband at night.
The men in the neon X.  The hole in the
    plastic.  The ppb.  The stitches.  The snug.

The snug.  The stitches.  The parts per billion.
    Hospital Wing sings to his children.
Children of blood lung.
Children of static.
    Hospital Wing sings to his children.
The snug.  The stitches.  The parts per billion.

Hunter Deary has clicked on the task pane
    reads there what they cut from the thought:
a topographical map of the region, a vein
    darkening wetlands, strung north through

some temperate zone.  Hunter Deary left gas
    in a bird's nest, bags under bypasses,
phenobarbital in the mud of the Don.  Hunter
    Deary in traction.  Hunter Deary in Huntsville.

She's counting down days to a hearing;  fed
    on black pumpkin, on cheese string, on
marrow sucked through wing of an auk. Ages
    in ice bubble.  Calving.  The fake vermilion.

Calving.  The ages in bubbles.  The fake vermilion.
    Hospital Wing sings to his children.
Children born sexless and cleansed.
Leaded gametes in frog ponds.
    Hospital Wing sings to his children.
Calving.  The ages in bubbles.  The fake vermilion.

Ken Babstock

from  The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
published by Tightrope Books

American Pool or Canadian Lake: Molly Peacock on Poets' Approaches

Can I put my finger on the difference between the Canadian and the American approach to writing a poem?   Let's try a water analogy.  Think of poetry as a swimming pool.  The Canadian poet has no trouble getting in at the shallow end and taking a reader with her, has no trouble assuming the reader will wade into this unknown pool with him.  Poet and reader go in together.  They take their time.  Finally they hit the place where their feet leave the bottom, and then they will swim, experiencing something they both know is over their heads.  (That is what poetry feels like to me, trying to stay afloat in an element in which you might sink, and which is surely over your head.)

   As a result the Canadian poem tends to be longer than the American poem (there are two poems over ten pages each in The Best Canadian Poems in English 2008);  it tends to wind along to more places, to be more interested in the side track, be more familiar with its reader, to assume its reader might be a cousin, or even a friend, swimming along together.  It is possible these qualities are a result of the Canadian poet feeling supported, both by grants and by the government as well as by a populace who actually looks to its poets to define what it is to be Canadian. Or simply the result of a generalized feeling on the part of poets who sense that their culture is responsive to them, or that they are necessary to how the country defines itself.  Small-audience art that it is, poetry is necessary to Canada.

        But the American poet, who generally feels much more extraneous to American culture (except for last Inauguration week) is strictly a deep end diver.  She mounts the diving board.  He walks to the end.  She flips upwards into the air.  He soars, curving, and splashes down into the depths.  All of this happens in the first five lines.  Forget the shallow end.  Forget the journey.  Forget the feeling of writer and reader in an exploration together. Sign up for being an audience, because the American poet requires being watched.  The poet has practiced that amazing dive, and it is thrilling.  You know from the first line that the poem is about to explode with experience, perception, language.  But the companionship of the adventure together can be missing.

        The American poem is compact and immediately surprising.  The Canadian poem is lankier and discovers its surprise.  Perhaps that swimming pool analogy needs adjustment.  Let the American stay with the swimming pool, because there's a sense with an American poem that the poet is leaping off a high board.  But let the Canadian get in at the shallow end of a lake, and take the reader along, feet cut by a few stones, goose-bumped, sea-weedy, out to the middle that requires some strong side-by-side swimming.

        Here's a poem by A.F. Moritz from the anthology that requires this tandem writer-reader companionship.  A reader simply must have the faith and time to follow the writer through his associative journal and its consequent emotional connections.  (I'll post Moritz's clarifying note tomorrow. Meanwhile, enjoy the swim.)

Odds and Ends

An evil swamp meadow, burnt and sawed.
Invisibly small lives hum and rummage in fearful humidity.  Among the stumps
lean six pine saplings, the bare slender trunks
tipped with cone-shaped tufts of needled twigs:
greenery arrowheads.  What made these arrow-trees
fall here notch first and sink their feathers
under the lava flow of golden weed --
what, beyond some whim and power of nature
and ideal of the painter, inexpressible in words?

I was glad as always to leave the museum
and regain the town and again be living
in a picture, restored to our nature as pilgrims
for the ideal law.  But when the walk did not turn
and open on the sea, as map misreading had told me,
my eyes settled on a fallen rhododendron flower.
Its petals, intact and perfect, were in fact
not petals but five rays of a single disc,
shadowy rose, with a circular hole at center.
It was a skirt for a dead Romantic waist:
the upturned, golden, hammer-headed pistil
had fit there, with its garden of ten stamens waving
ovular flecks, and these remained above
on their bush withering, while the shed pink dirndl
was put away in the grass.

                                            O clothes she wore
and we put them away for her to wear again
someday, and today they lie there still.

A. F. Moritz

from The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008
published by Tightrope Books

(Illustration:  David Hockney, Day Pool with Three Blues)

Best American Meets the Best Canadian - Picks by Molly Peacock

 As a dual citizen of both the United States and Canada, and as a poet who publishes in both, I play a constant compare and contrast game as I navigate between the two literary cultures.  Americans often think of Canada as just another state north of the border, though Canada has its own entirely  complicated culture.  Canadians look down to their southern neighbors with mystification marbled with hauteur and jealousy, the way someone who lives happily in a small house on beautiful acres looks at a neighbor who's built a McMansion right up against the property line.  Yet occasionally there's an American literary idea that intrigues Canadians, if uneasily.

     The idea of collecting the best poetry of the past year is one of those distinctly American ideas that has been adopted, but adapted in the great North, where people are nervous about ideas of THE BEST.  Yet Tightrope Books, a small press (yes, in Canada a small press can have a very large reach) under the valiant leadership of Halli Villegas, has undertaken to launch a Best Canadian series.  2008 was our first year.  As an admiring copycat of David Lehman, I am the General Series Editor.  Our first judge was the young, super well respected Stephanie Bolster, a poet all Canadian literature followers know, but who is not known in the US, where the few Canadian poets known are two better recognized as prose writers (Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood), one better recognized as a lyricist (Leonard Cohen), and of course, the inimitable Anne Carson.

    Our first volume of The Best Canadian Poetry in English is as different from its US counterpart as Canadian poetry itself is different from what is written to the south.  Same language.  Contrasting ways with it.  The poets of both my countries look inward for their communities;  very few poets trespass across either border.  Canadian poets, accustomed to looking to the south, know the names of American poets;  but American poets don’t know about their Canadian counterparts. They wonder, Who are these people?

    All this week I'll be trying to tell you by introducing Canadian poets from The Best Canadian Poetry in English, with heaps of thanks to Stacey Harwood.  Here's the first, by Margaret Avison, one of my faves.  It has a Marianne Moore-ish prickliness, and it unfolds as a metaphysical conceit.  It doesn't completely hit you at first, and I'll have more to say about this unwillingness to hit a reader on the head tomorrow.  I've kept the Canadian spelling -- yes, we keep the "u" in armour (and in glamour, too). 

Molly Peacock

Hag-Ridden

A plague of locusts is
a reminder that the
focus on knees and thighs
in stringy and gangling
insects can inspire in-
vidious
comparisons.
Nimble in
chain-armour (below) with an
upside-down carapace (shellacked),
these tiny
obstreperousnesses model
adoptable fashion trends.

The elderly, too,
are scant in under-
pinnings, and
angular.  But,
unlike locusts, these
swarm very seldom.  Each may
go with a stick; a plague, perhaps first to
themselves, Yet, their
undemanding pleasure in the
world out under such a
mysterious (some days dazzling) sky
may be a to-be-
desired infection.

by Margaret Avison

from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
Tightrope Books

Molly Peacock, Guest Blogger January 25-31

 This week we welcome Molly Peacock as our guest blogger.  She is the author of several volumes of poetry, including  The Second Blush (Norton, 2008) and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (Norton, 2004).  She recently introduced the first volume of The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books, 2008). You can read more about Molly Peacock here. Welcome, Molly.

In Other News :

Cool Poets, Hot Poems, and English Tea:  David Lehman, Laura Cronk, and our own Moira Egan touching down from Rome, celebrate erotic poetry.  Saturday, February 7, 3:00 PM.  Duane Park Cafe, 157 Duane Street, New York City.  $25 includes a full English tea-service accompanied by sexy poems in a romantic setting. Reservations required: 212-732-5555. More information here.