NOVEMBER POETRY

POETRY LAUNCH

You are invited to a 

Launch / Reception 

for two new books by Phil Hall 

My Banjo & Tiny Drawings

(Flat Singles Press) 

Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, A Selected Collage
 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press) 

Le pluvier kildir, translated by Rose Després

(Pris de Parole)

Massey College     4 Devonshire Place 

November 25, 2015 

5:00 - 6:30 pm Cash Bar / Words / Music

REVIEW: Pearl Pirie (BookThug, 2015)

“The Hem in Vehement”: a review, the title poem,

& Pearl Pirie’s the pet radish, shrunken

Jospeh LaBine

     If you glanced at BookThug’s Spring list for 2015, you may not have noticed Pearl Pirie’s exciting, new collection of poems, the pet radish, shrunken.  Here’s some basic information about it:

Cost—$18.00; paperback, also available as an e-book; edition—800; length—96 pgs

It’s been described as, “the world in words in miniature,” an “incidental collation of plays on a Scrabble board,” and a foray into words inside words; but Emblazoned on the back of the book, Dapne Marlatt offers the following blurb:

In Pearl Pirie’s poems, language ferments, foments a ‘vinegar vigour.’ Flipping the labels off contemporary mores, cooking with sound, she offers quick food for thought. Keep up with her if you can.

These descriptions are not wholly satisfying though, because they do not interrogate Pirie’s lusty, zesty use of language, nor do they explore word play in the individual poems.

     One of the best poems in the pet radish is the title poem, which represents, in miniature, the humour of the collection at its best. The speaker’s quirky observations are framed in an arms-length perspective rather than the traditional, close lyric addressing a lover. Here it is in toto:

            the pet radish, shrunken

            it’s kept as the head of operations

            for the methadone gaffe. no one question.

            magical thinking bile is required

            to med the agate ditz of comfy.

            look at that dory, minus the hunky

            it’s as seaworthy on the tines of gale.

            pr is the inevitable start of any time

            of prayer. the blitz howls its own oaths.

            such putz work avoids the snip snap of soars

            of the tachyon pulses of the fatal laws of later.

            sidestep the rule of: fresh is best.

            much is tucked inside the virulent must.

            recall: even the most buxom blues thin, thin out

            by dawn. to pray is to flick a spraying fez of gold.

            chin up, birth enzymes of a slug’s swagger

            to shrink the antlers of their onwards despites.   (tprs 76)

One might speculatie that the radish at the “head of operations,” is a scrotum, not a vegetable; the “methadone gaffe” is likely the euphoric blundering resulting after coitus; the multi-coloured, “ditz” – airheadedness “of comfy,” is orgasm.

     Before this explanation gets too deep, or intense, errr…another poem, “how to root out the normal,” brilliantly explores the codification of sexuality in language and offers some context for further discussion. It examines the “fruit machine,” what Pirie defines in her note as:

a device for a homophobic program run by the federal government in the 1950s and 1960s. Subjects were made to view pornography, and the device measured the diameter of the pupils of the eyes, perspiration, and pulse for a supposed erotic response. (tprs 10; 92). 

In “…root out the normals,” Pirie employs an n+7 method (rough translation, a form of Oulipo, ‘Ouvroir de littérature potentielle’)—a method of selecting different nouns from the dictionary (or another source text) just ahead of the initial poetic impulse: i.e. “the impulses of the test homosexuals” becomes “the impulses of the text hyenas” (10, my italics); but later, also, “turning hyacinths” (10). Hyacinths also denote beauty, and with it, a beautiful sexual connotation (See The Waste Land & Eliot’s “hyacinth girl”); but combined with the tension of homophobia in the verb turning, as in converting. Wonderful words emerge from this type of noun play: “hyacinth” (also “hyenas”) revises the negative resonance of the word “homosexuals” within the original fruit machine text. Pirie shows through Oulipo that homosexuals, like hyacinths, are beautiful.    

     This method of masking words is used to greater effect in title poem. The line, “look at that dory, minus the hunky,” tantalizes a look in the dictionary for a different d-word.  While “minus the hunky” reveals a disembodiment with “seaworthy” qualities that do not go unnoticed, nor do the “birth enzymes of a slug’s swagger / to shrink…” because what is true of the slug is also true of the post-coital penis, the slimy trail, its semen. The sex act: “the blitz howls its own oath,” and the sexual connotation of this poem, the performance being expressed (like the lack of sexual imagery in the “making children from scratch ’n sniff” poem), is only one meaning within a vibrant language filled—brimming over with potential: “to pray is to flick a spraying fez of gold,”—the line is as elusive as it is orgasmic. Put that “fez” atop your head and cry out: “much is tucked inside the virulent must!”  

     In 2011, Pirie won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative poetry. The three main sequences offered in the pet radish show that this award is well-well-well deserved. But it would be foolish to think that this means much, beyond small recognition for good work. However, it does raise a question about that word innovative, a lyrical quality Pirie arrives at by challenging language to break apart into component words and meanings. Try the word generator page at www.pearlpirie.com/wellthatputs, and have fun with more matryoshka words like hem in vehement.

     If anyone is “vehement” about anything, it is readers who have snapped their pens (or laptops) in half, made furious by the thought that they did not [, could never] write the pet radish, shrunken. Pirie entices readers with cartoonish, sing-song lyrics, the words ring out their music, this is poetry sung to an air:

            scholars

             pulp fiction & meadows & gun

            a dagger

            a digger

            a 2 o’clock trigger

            how a summer comes undone

           

a cord of wood & an axe have begun.

to begin

you begin

the lifted swing

under long slanting afternoon sun.      (tprs 91)

The jolly atmosphere of “Scholars” (the final poem of the closing sequence) is rivaled in the earlier sections by clever attempts to undermine negativity and twenty first century cyncism: “shall we turn this can’t / into a canto?” (tprs 44). In “from the annals 1,” the phrase, “wild dust bunnies (hereafter w.d.b.)” recalls the over-used American abbreviation for “weapons of mass destruction”: w.m.d., and offers an ironic political gloss at depth of the speaker’s joyful levity (tprs 31). The comic turns are thematic to the playfulness of the collection: Pirie’s word play tests the cultural constraints of language (i.e. the fruit machine and constructing gender identity). She tests the sexual and political intentions of ordinary turns of phrase.

  

     Earlier versions of poems in the pet radish originally appeared in several magazines: the Ottawater, Touch Donkey, Peter F Yacht Club, and The Best Canadian Poetry 2014. However, Pirie and BookThug poetry editor and award winning author, Phil Hall, finalized the collection together, working towards what reads as sustained thought/argument. An editor in her own right, Pirie publishes little miniature folded chapbooks under the phafours press imprint. Hall supplied the drawing for the cover illustration and title image. Copies are available through your local bookstore and online at http://bookthug.ca/

REVIEW: Lillian Nećakov (Apt. 9 Press)

Nećakov’s “Giant Cockroach…Agility Sentences”

In The Lake Contains an Emergency Room

Christopher McCarthy

     Lillian Nećakov lives in Toronto where she has been writing and publishing poetry for the past 30 years. In her most recent book, The Lake Contains an Emergency Room (2015), a beautiful hand-sewn chapbook produced by the Apt. 9 Press, in Ottawa, Nećakov revisits memory, fathers, the absurd, death, abuse, birds, agility sentences and surrealism.

     The move to subvert reality in the new poems is an imaginative step in line with earlier work. Nećakov was one of the featured poets in Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, (Mercury Press, 2004) and is currently editor of the Surrealist Poets Gardening Association. She is also the author of the Sickbed of Dogs, Polaroids, Hat Trick, The Bone Broker, and Hooligans. Her work is published in numerous anthologies and magazines in Canada and the U.S.A., in China and throughout Europe. This new book boasts a breezy form that resonates, even after multiple readings, all while veiling the dark depth of these poems with humour.

     The Lake Contains an Emergency Room contains only the suggestion of surrealism balanced with memory, and at times, anecdote. There is a surrealist timbre to the eighteen poems featured in the new sequence; however, this effect is well balanced, emotional, and immediate. There is a sense of reality through animation:
                                                                     Story Cycles

                                                                     My cloud rots around the alcoholic
                                                                     mothers delouse their children
                                                                     there is a function to the orchestra
                                                                     we plant rubber seeds

                                                                     occasionally whalebone and ivory sprout.

This is a small example of the kind of fragmented lines, what we might call, “Agility Sentences.” The name derives from title of a Nećakov poem but it also informs the poetics; each line drags closer towards a line break, and finally pulls down, down; while every poem culminates in a single period which is often the only form of punctuation used.

     Nećakov has been writing agility sentences for some years now.[1] It is fortunate that, with this recent work, readers can put a name to the form. And it is an engaging form, and a jarring one, as each break engenders new signification: “my bicycle wheel / spins / inconsolable shadows.” It starts out expected, wheels do spin, but with the following break, the image bursts out—as light casts its shadow through the spokes—the focus shifts to what the object is doing. This creates an emotional distance between the speaker and language.

     The winding down of each line, stanza to stanza, down to the inevitable full stop, affects the scan and often necessitates re-reading the previous line. This method achieves an absurd brilliance in “Collecting Twigs,” and “Small Brains,” the latter is fabulous and is possibly the best sustained balance between surreal description and narrative in the book.

     The only shortcoming of The Lake Contains an Emergency Room is failure of the effect of some of its italics. It is often unclear why italics are used. Do italics mark the use of a quotation? Are they meant to achieve a thin irony by evoking another, separate lyric voice? Their effect may become more obvious in a larger collection but the heavily italicised sections of “Burn It,” “Poser,” and “Sedna from Northern Baffin Island” smother the poems. They could be dropped for the sake of the clean clutter-free style Nećakov employs elsewhere.

     The poems in this sequence form a fine thematic unity. Family figures, like fathers (see the anti-hero in the wonderful, “You Are Not My Hero”), are a recurring topic throughout. The combination of gentle humour, absurd reality, and nostalgia has a sinister counterpart in the darker poems of The Lake Contains an Emergency Room. The lyric voice of the observer is always shifting age and perspective.

     The author’s interview with Rob McLennan published six years ago is fair indicator of her thoughts on where memory and surrealism intersect:

                                     8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
                                     Today, I love pears. My dad has a pear tree in his garden; I grew up with them                                      falling all around me.[2]

Nećakov grasps that what is absurd is also real. Projectiles, funerals, cycles, the “Small Years” (oh christ this is it / …this is it) menstruation, “the hurt gone now / a deep moon coming up,” render simple everyday occurrences in language that make the events seem fantastic or terrifying.

[1] See “Two Poems,” from 2014, “In the Woods” and “Tragic Dressmaker”; published by MadHat Lit. http://madhatlit.com/two-poems-by-lillian-necakov/

[2] rob mclennan, see the “12 or 20 questions”(2009) interview with Nećakov for the above/ground press blog.

JUNE POEMS

Pearl Pirie

romantic painster, louder, I can’t even hear you bleed

bungee

jumping school drop-

out, spine rhymes with itself

muscles too taut to spit cusses

ground-kissed

*

tourniquet, turn a quaint what? tune a kit, tuna kid, done

orchids, (lie alkaline), dumb as orchards (Palestine)

doom NASCAR, gloomier child, Rumi eyeshot

(there is a field) roomie’s eyesore, hot om, ye sorrel

homesick oral, (there must be a prayer for this) om

throne a sorrow (meet you there), thorned a Zorro.

*

-can you wake up this word?

- look up or wake up? 

I usually wake up a word by tickling its left serifs

*

the hottest part of me is the tangent of our combined heat

— the point of your shoulder against my temple

the temple, that part of my head, my idiolect’s headwaters

that icebox robot of bone that runs on its tin feet towards 

the odg, a god, a dog, or sense of odd, and winds me back to our

shared ticks.  if it’s an idiolect we share, is it a dialect? a bialect? 

  

*

a bi-election this separation into the unnaturalness of having—wait,

eight limbs? does that mean we are

an octopus finally? ou une autobus? we idle and sidle and sit.

*

the coldest part of me is the C of your ear as it rests on my scalp.

soft sounds of hair is ocean is ohh. 

where are you warmest? can I riffle deep under your shirt?

is it here? may I ask? will you answer me that?

or will I have to find out for myself?

we are countries apart in the politesse of public.

the land under the land has no lines that match anything

we devise.  Palestine or lines of  pants or panty lines.

tan lines, police lines. threat and thread and red and unread

and always one more means

to an and and an and.

*

there are real things to do, if

we are insistent on peace. if we

act instead of throw money, patience

and petittions at. there are people

to feed, talk to, carry heavies for.

if are well-healed before well-heeled

we must each horn and powder 

one’s own arrow of anemone

(out beyond ideas of wrongdoing)

break bread and eat, share.

sense is ours for the remaking.

present, accounted for, is everyone

with family who die more reliably

than rain that lifts itself in petticoats

diagonals of dandelions in dialogue

the whole width of The Possible

(when the soul lies down in that grass)

turn a cat loose on the birds

and two kills a week, half for sport

half left in indifference. the grief

of heart family of loss of gloss of

eyes turned etiquette away, quiet

the midnight mental paintings.

tête-à-tête quite suppressed.

insert bird, birds and sloppy generals

(out beyond the ideas rightdoing)

no, don’t invoke Hitchcock again.

unfinger your eyes and see. not

hand-me-down movie clichés

to replace observations. are you

at the end of your trope yet? yet?

*

to beehive to behave to behove,

(there is a field) stone unturned,

left unpaved, a corn row owns 

and forms itself  from what it has

sown in sequence in sun sequins. 

what was allowed, farm-sown?

let us dye. aloo palak arm-thrown.

one world of surface, depths of

convoluted believing anything.

(the world is too full to talk about.)

*

silk curls tumble over suit man. 

the light polishes his bald spot.

I want a pen to write hearts on it 

(as if that will fix everything).

*

strum feathers by the fountains, so foreign for the brahman

the sparrow myna, shady. what’s fated for ermine or tending to debris.

you’re the hallways and the tables that I stream to, folding light

that I bliss for, swell and well, goodnight, oil-barrel myna, tangled nude.

strumming hairs of my guitar on a nippy slippery weekday

a schlock with ardour. I see dense bones lift for my chains.

conscious and adhered as those sheened eyes of sparrow myna

she's berating me with the ladle from a dove

of the lonely strawman, her plucked down.

sparrow myna, squawking radio, barrelled myna, can't you see

you’re the hallways and the tables, are the rooms and walls and light

the space I miss, hood your eyes, sparrow myna, that’s my news.

sparrow myna, I love you.

*

Pearl Pirie's lastest collection is the pet radish, shrunken (BookThug, 2015). She is a host of Literary Landscape on ckcufm.com and president of KaDo, a group for eastern varieties of writing including haiku and tanka.www.pearlpirie.com

JUNE POEMS

Brittni Carey (Windsor, ON)

JUNE POEMS

Chronology

Plunder, Early Canadian Glass (1961)

the present        grows out of all that went before

it is increasing                in the future, as in the past

it is difficult to picture                without many forms

Cameron Anstee lives and writes in Ottawa ON where he runs Apt. 9 Press.