I don’t know you, WB.
I don’t know you at all.

I’m thinking of the way people seem to hear about you serendipitously, repeatedly.
I’m thinking of the leather suitcase that disappeared after you died,
its contents alleged but never located: postcards, a manuscript, a pipe, morphine.
You are gone but you ghost our post-modernity.

I found your Archives in the university library.
Renewed it as many times as I could.
Then the public library.
Ditto.
Finally, I got you for good as a Christmas gift.
Flew you in the belly of a plane across Canada at the end of 2008,
68 years after your death.
Since then, we’ve slept in the same room.
You on the art table
or the floor beside the bed.
Proximate yet private.

Now, I walk towards you through these pages, a fractal of your archive.
You were a collector, an organizer, a preserver.
You constellate in motes, acidic yellowing papers, tiny script.

There is that famous photo of you engrossed in research
taken by Gisèle Freund at the Bibliothèque nationale.

There are well-loved notebooks:

a worn, black leather cover
pages with torn and crumpled edges
paper so thin the handwriting beneath shows through
homemade stamps glued in.

One notebook is filled with your son Stefan’s linguistic evolution:
Moma keet for parakeet
dandals for sandals
little birds for nail clippings when they fall to the ground.

There are crossouts
(like Virginia Woolf and Anne Carson)
and Xs
and small, inked crosses + + +
to inventory and make meaning.

There are sketches for essays.
A drawing of a lullaby.
Notes on Kafka arranged in two columns that could pass for a poem:
<<<<<<<<Forgetting Disfiguration
<<<<<<<<Forgetting
<<<<<<<<Swamp world

There is marginalia.
There are ink spots, annotations, rusty echoes of paper clips.
Pages sewn together with thread.
Fragments on Proust, Baudelaire.

There are bibliographic notes written on the back of a receipt.
Circles drawn in blue.
Words within boxes.
A manuscript cut into strips.

There are black and white photos of Paris arcades and interiors.
There is the S page from your 1930′s address book.
There are photos of toys from your collection:
<<<<<<<<Bacchus on a billy goat. Music in the casket.

I go back to the photo of you in the Bibliothèque nationale again and again.
Your long fingers against your papers
your curious mind visible.

One could spend years in these pages
returning again to wander, inspect, absorb.
So much residue.
So many glimpses.

<<<<<<<
Objects look back at you, you once said.

It is true.
I can see you, WB.
You look back through the photos and the notebooks.
You look back through the scraps, the titles, the margins.

I imagine that this gathering together would make you happy.

Knowing that the archives are open
and you are so clearly here.

Susannah M. Smith is the author of the novel How the Blessed Live. She lives, writes and blogs in Vancouver. Visit her online at www.susannahmsmith.ca.

KEN BABSTOCK

Hay

By Paul Muldoon

This much I know. Just as I’m about to make that right turn

off Province Line Road

I meet another beat-up Volvo

carrying a load

of hay. (More accurately, a bale of lucerne

on the roof rack,

a bale of lucerne or fescue or alfalfa.)

My hands are raw. I’m itching to cut the twine, to unpack

that hay-accordion, that hay-concertina.

It must be ten o’clock. There’s still enough light

(not least from the glow

of the bales themselves) for a body to ascertain

that when one bursts, as now, something takes flight

from those hot-and-heavy box pleats. This much, at least, I know.

— From Hay (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).

I had decided to look at a piece by the great American poet of the mid-centry, Elizabeth Bishop — her patient, investigative line always informed by tradition; her reliance on (amounting to a deep affection for) the over-abundant facts of the world — but, on reading her, slid directly to the Irish American Paul Muldoon. Ever since his first collection, written in his mid-20s as a student of Seamus Heaney’s at Queen’s University, Belfast, Muldoon’s work stood as a signpost indicating possible alternative routes poetry might take after the achievements of Bishop, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes et al.

Many poets play fast and loose with language, but few of Muldoon’s generation have had so much deranged fun with so many aspects of verse. From imported quotes to concrete visual games, ventriloquism and the unbelievably expanded moment, Muldoon has acted the prodigy, trickster and troubadour, all sharing a warmth of sensibility that makes his readers want to repay his effort in kind.

Though it may not look like it, this is a sonnet, the title poem of a book containing 10 others, all equally inventive. The sonnet is an 800-year-old form, born in Italy and then, of course, adopted by many languages and literatures with stunning results. The English took to it with such fervour they altered its stanzaic pattern and claimed the new beast for themselves. In the original Italian, as I’ve recently learned, “sonnet” connotes “little song” or “little sound.” Given Muldoon’s penchant for etymology and all things arcane, he may have had this in mind while writing the bent and playful 14-liners in Hay. 

Following standard sonnet analysis, it would certainly be difficult to say just what the argument or problem set out in his octet (the first eight lines) might be; or, more so, what resolution, or response, is being offered in the sestet (the final six). One of poetry’s enduring charms is that it allows, even encourages us to admit, at times, to loving a poem without knowing exactly why. The best poems continue offering up pleasures even as they frustrate attempts at fully decoding them.

I’ve gone back to this sonnet and found myself giggling out loud at the word “load” (such a cumbersome, fat rhyme for “Road”) balanced at the end of the first four lines (the quatrain), just being itself, about to tip over and spill. The sight of “lucerne,” “roof rack,” “fescue” and “alfalfa” all within three lines is a wicked delight. I can’t help thinking “alfalfa” is laughing at the pursed lips of those long U sounds. And those wavering, uneven line lengths barely held together by rhyme — I’ve been in a Volvo as ramshackle as this one.

Personable, humorous and highly intelligent, Muldoon hits this register so often he’s made it his own. We want to go along for the ride, however bumpy, with a voice that admits its own ignorance and invests in the world’s vast network of connections more than in any compressed, singular Truth. It’s amazing to watch him convey this aesthetic by bursting open the bound-up, pressurized bale of the sonnet form.

Ken Babstock’s last collection of poetry, Methodist Hatchet, won the Griffin Prize. This column originally appeared in the Globe and Mail on Saturday, May 5, 2001. Look for more reprints from Babstock’s column in the coming weeks. If you are interested in writing a How Poems Work check out our submission guidelines. You can follow @KBabstock on Twitter.

And poetry can also be sculpture, or at least more like sculpture than it’s like conversation. Lisa Robertson’s Monday , from her collection The Weather, is a poem that defies immediate analysis, although even the most perplexed reader will still be able to state a few givens. The poem repeats words and motifs. The sentences are short and declamatory. There is no apparent narrative structure. These observations do not “unlock” the poem, but they present a case of the poem as a language object. This gives the reader insight, to some degree, into the process.

But examining what is being repeated leads to a collation of ideas. Belief repeats. Two-stage depictions of something repeat (“Fine and grand. Fresh and bright.”) A pastoral landscape is depicted in fragments. Is this an ideation of Paradise? Is this a series of free associations detached from their sources? The reader of the book takes in seven prose poems and seven more traditional poems. Many weathers appear. Many fragments of history, of reading, of emotion, appear.

The poet, having asked us first to experience the poem as a language event without any support from her, then tells us about the process: “The Weather took shape when, wanting to make a site-specific work during my six-month stay at Cambridge, I embarked on an intense yet eccentric research in the rhetorical structure of English meteorological description.” She gives us some sources. Wordsworth. Shipping forecasts. Academic explorations of dew.

Does it “explain” the poem? No, but it brushes dust off the motherlode and the poem bursts open into a phenomenological exploration of something present in the everyday. It’s a collage. It’s a list. It’s a meet-market where ideas intermarry and produce shadowy offspring of association and insight. It may frustrate or bewilder. Or (as it does for me) open up a whole new range of expression, something unique that feels, at the same time, related to the world I’m familiar with. This is poetry, something only our species does, using this project called “language” to help us keep waking up to the new.

–Michael Redhill. This column originally appeared in the Globe & Mail.

BY PETER CULLEY

Between the storms of October

And the storms of March

the deep, wide trench

Of this afternoon, one

of a series making up

This temporal lapse, this

interregnum

In which we are involved.

Ignorant as I am

I hardly dare

to speak of it,

But the fabric of its projection

tears against

All the provisions

I can bring to bear –

The distant groaning metal

of non-being, the self

Afloat in a saucepan

of burning sugar, myriads

Of little salts, shaped like

double wedges

Diffused through water

earth and ether.

A flock of what

resonates through the low thatch.

Retrieve the sample

as a dog would, its noble and

      stolid

Shoulders versus

the booming cataract,

Because it knows nothing else,

because I know nothing else.

— from The Climax Forest (Leech Books, 1995)

‘Today then is the morning when the verb to enter will seem wrong,” writes Toronto poet Steve McCaffery, in The Black Debt . “Plus the problem of what colour for the sky seemed wrong. Sky being wrong and wrong being day.” That the problem of making meaning cohere in language is not theoretical sophistry but common struggle has, this week, become painfully obvious. An extraordinary political silence is stuffed with images crafted by terror. What can a poem mean in such a context? Indeed, what can language say? We simply count — the lost, the wounded, the hours.

German-Jewish critic Theodor Adorno claimed that lyric poetry reached its end with Auschwitz. Paul Celan proved him wrong with poems that voiced the terrible exile of the body, the exile of all compassion from the forms of political life. He believed that it is the poet’s specific work to bring into the world’s language the texture and condition of its own political demise: “Eternity decays.” The lyrical poem makes the temporal breach of that decay audible.

This is the seriousness that Peter Culley brings to his writing. He gives us the utterly anxious pause where meaning can’t yet find its story, where the speaker can only come to language by descending to an irresolute specificity — gouged lawn, saucepan, smell of burnt sugar.

The excerpt here comes from a longer poem, which begins in a resonant mock-bathos: “Between the cannon/ and the father,/ Between the thicket/ and the cave of light,/ A large rectangle/ of lawn, deeply scored.” The poem, too, scores itself into the page, to make a temporal trench through which our own ambivalence pours.

Culley’s poetry is remarkable for its suspension of rhetorical elegance, together with all the stubborn rawness of the refusal to stop seeing. The inconsistencies and ravelled edges resulting from this charged refusal are themselves the troubled condition of “being,” which is but one refraction among many in natural history.

The Provisions is an early sequence in Peter Culley’s long work-in-progress, Hammertown , a serial that borrows its title from French experimental novelist George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual . Buried in Perec’s tangled plot is a semi-fictive Vancouver Island fishing port depicted on a picture puzzle — “a place called Hammertown, all white with snow, with a few low houses and some fishermen in fur-lined jackets hauling a long, pale hull along the shore.” Culley imports the avant-garde fantasy of the wilderness outpost into his own descriptive project: He conflates Hammertown with his hometown, Nanaimo, B.C.

His landscape is equally a product of cultural memory, real estate development, individual perception and geology. The lapsed economy of Culley’s place and its seeming insignificance in contemporary cultural and political movements ironically lend Hammer- town a potent metaphorical power. The moving filaments of Culley’s witnessing attention among the weathers and ephemera of the hinterland begin to expose the speciousness of centrist self-regard.

The lyric poem is now a very minor cultural form. But its integrity can be located in the precise and difficult description of the shape of between. Culley dares to give language to this interregnum, this morning which has used up all the verbs. It is importantly minor, what he can do. –Lisa Robertson

–Lisa Robertson

Originally published in the How Poems Work series in the Globe & Mail. Check back for more of these original pieces from Lisa Robertson and others. Also look for new poems from Peter Culley.

my body was a liquor cabinet
the night you said “when are we going to be boyfriend-and-girlfriend‟.
I said “I don‟t know, when do you want‟ while shrugging my shoulders,
and you said, “now‟ so I said “let‟s make out‟,
which was romantic in a true-to-self sort of way.

from “POEM ABOUT REMOVING SOMEONE AS A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK”

————————————————————————————————————————————-
guillaume morissette is a creative writing major. His work has appeared in Lickety Split and he’s currently working a short story collection. He runs a free outdoor cinema during the summer and writes sad emails during the winter.
Originally posted on Synapse.