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radfrac_archive_full) wrote2006-06-08 10:50 pm
radfrac_archive_full) wrote2006-06-08 10:50 pm
A Fractional Survey of Contemporary Canadian Poetry I: Documentary and Memoir
Saturday I was going to go to a barbecue, and then I got a wickett sunburn at the Moss St. Market, and decided to discuss poetry instead. Here is the result.
While I was away in Prince George, I had a moment of crisis. I became convinced that my poetry was Not Sufficiently Contemporary. The Ode we discussed here, for example. It owes much to Anne Carson's translations of Sappho. But what does it add to the zeitgeist?
I had a sense that, since postmodernism invalidated formal innovation, (a good thing, since most innovation in western poetry of the 20th century consisted of nicking a poetic form from other cultures and then pretending you'd just thought of it), the excitement is all with spoken word right now. Who speaks, where they do it, how they do it, the meaning of performance.
Or possibly this is all done, and everyone but me is talking about the next thing.
There didn't happen to be a spoken word show for me to go to, that night of crisis in Prince George (pop. 75,000 people, 40,000 trucks, one rapidly diminishing collection of pine trees), so I bought a selection of literary magazines instead. That was not as difficult as it sounds, because Books and Company exists. It's a large bookshop/coffeehouse on the edge of downtown, and it's what makes life worth living if you happen to be doing it in Prince George, and you happen to be me.
Here then, begins my entirely unfair and biased survey of contemporary Canadian poetry and the relationship of my work to it.
ABSTRACT
Contemporary Literary Canadian Poetry appears to be: not that good.
SAMPLE
I purchased:
SubTerrain: Strong Words for a Polite Nation (Issue 43)
Speakeasy: A Literary Look at Life (Spring 2006)
Vancouver Review (Number 9, Spring 2006)
Literary Review of Canada (Vol. 14, No. 4, May 2006
This selection was neither random nor orderly. They just seemed like the best bets. I'll discuss the specific poems I read in these magazine at a later date, such as after I get some sleep.
PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
The documentary voice is almost universal. True or not, specific incidents are recounted like anecdotes. Often the form is prose poem, though sometimes there are line breaks, but the voice is generally distanced and neither emotional nor imagistic. Often it relates an incident or observation we might typify as "gritty". By which I mean: potentially disturbing, but feeling oddly derivative.
[Note to self: Blame Al Purdy?]
Many of these seem to be written by men.
The poems that are not documentary-style are memoir-style. They are imagistic. They contain ambiguous eroticism that would make us uneasy if we hadn't already seen a movie about it. They are often about mothers. Many of these seem to be written by women.
My sample is far too small for me to knock together a theory about this apparent gendering. I may in fact be making it up.
Is it a bias in publishing? You only get in if you use what we think of as a Woman's Voice, a Man's Story?
Is it a difference in the sort of things men and women are taught to be pretentious about?
Is it Just Me?
Please feel free to speculate in the comments. Again, seeing the eventual poems may help somewhat.
A thesis: these approaches, documentary and memoir, reflect the current popularity in prose writing of memoir and creative nonfiction.
They also reflect some kind of concern with truth, or at least that 19th-Century monster, Realism.
(And I mean specifically memoir, not autobiography; the focus is emotional and phenomenological, not historical.)
I think they are also a reaction against elitism, an attempt to make poetry Relevant. This kind of thing is almost uniformly awkward, because it confuses subject matter with relevance.
I'm torn. I like the idea of documentary poems. I'm glad that the age of epiphany is over (circa 1990-2000). I'm glad people don't feel they have to end every story and poem with a two-line revelation, or, failing that, a suggestive line break:
in the hopes that the reader can supply the meaningful insight which has eluded the poet.
Yet I'm not really satisfied with these poems as they stand. They lack a reason for existing. They recount specific incidents, but since they all seem to signify the same thing, they accumulate without deepening experience. They have focus, but not attention? That is, they can tell you something very precisely, but all they seem to mean to say is "I am the sort of poet who would tell you this sort of story."
I can't say what a poet's reason for writing was, no matter how good my psychic critic skills are. I can only say why I would have written something, and I think if I had written:
I would be wanting you to see how clever I was for finding a person I clearly saw as a grotesque, for presenting him so precisely, for elevating him, yes, by making him the poem's protagonist, and for always remaining detached from him, since to identify would be to become contemptible myself. And this kind of contempt/fetishization of the "outside" is the great sin, I think, of the Alternative.
That said, it's not a bad poem. It's a quite good thing of its kind. It just doesn't teach me anything that I want to know as a poet.
I will tell you the secret thing I hope for. The first thing I read for.
I want to be wounded by a poem. I want it to tell me the truth I didn't want to hear, that I have been desperate to hear though I did not know it.
I read poetry in the hopes that someone will state for me a small true piece of the agony and beauty of existence, absolutely devoid of sentimentality. And that they will do something with language I had not thought of, that makes this happen, that makes the poem a thing you can't dismantle.
If not that (since my poems don't do that), for something wry, clever, or startling in ideas or in language. The quieter version of the apocalypse.
I would settle for something that didn't feel like I'd already read it several times.
Maybe that's my fetish of the New, which could be getting Old.
I want to learn from a poem how to write honestly, so honestly that it humiliates me, because the poem is so much stronger than I am.
This contemporary documentary voice could be useful to me. It could help sharpen and focus what I write. It isn't the thing I'm really looking for, though. I want to find poets who can hurt me with their truth.
{rf}
While I was away in Prince George, I had a moment of crisis. I became convinced that my poetry was Not Sufficiently Contemporary. The Ode we discussed here, for example. It owes much to Anne Carson's translations of Sappho. But what does it add to the zeitgeist?
I had a sense that, since postmodernism invalidated formal innovation, (a good thing, since most innovation in western poetry of the 20th century consisted of nicking a poetic form from other cultures and then pretending you'd just thought of it), the excitement is all with spoken word right now. Who speaks, where they do it, how they do it, the meaning of performance.
Or possibly this is all done, and everyone but me is talking about the next thing.
There didn't happen to be a spoken word show for me to go to, that night of crisis in Prince George (pop. 75,000 people, 40,000 trucks, one rapidly diminishing collection of pine trees), so I bought a selection of literary magazines instead. That was not as difficult as it sounds, because Books and Company exists. It's a large bookshop/coffeehouse on the edge of downtown, and it's what makes life worth living if you happen to be doing it in Prince George, and you happen to be me.
Here then, begins my entirely unfair and biased survey of contemporary Canadian poetry and the relationship of my work to it.
ABSTRACT
Contemporary Literary Canadian Poetry appears to be: not that good.
SAMPLE
I purchased:
SubTerrain: Strong Words for a Polite Nation (Issue 43)
Speakeasy: A Literary Look at Life (Spring 2006)
Vancouver Review (Number 9, Spring 2006)
Literary Review of Canada (Vol. 14, No. 4, May 2006
This selection was neither random nor orderly. They just seemed like the best bets. I'll discuss the specific poems I read in these magazine at a later date, such as after I get some sleep.
PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
The documentary voice is almost universal. True or not, specific incidents are recounted like anecdotes. Often the form is prose poem, though sometimes there are line breaks, but the voice is generally distanced and neither emotional nor imagistic. Often it relates an incident or observation we might typify as "gritty". By which I mean: potentially disturbing, but feeling oddly derivative.
[Note to self: Blame Al Purdy?]
Many of these seem to be written by men.
The poems that are not documentary-style are memoir-style. They are imagistic. They contain ambiguous eroticism that would make us uneasy if we hadn't already seen a movie about it. They are often about mothers. Many of these seem to be written by women.
My sample is far too small for me to knock together a theory about this apparent gendering. I may in fact be making it up.
Is it a bias in publishing? You only get in if you use what we think of as a Woman's Voice, a Man's Story?
Is it a difference in the sort of things men and women are taught to be pretentious about?
Is it Just Me?
Please feel free to speculate in the comments. Again, seeing the eventual poems may help somewhat.
A thesis: these approaches, documentary and memoir, reflect the current popularity in prose writing of memoir and creative nonfiction.
They also reflect some kind of concern with truth, or at least that 19th-Century monster, Realism.
(And I mean specifically memoir, not autobiography; the focus is emotional and phenomenological, not historical.)
I think they are also a reaction against elitism, an attempt to make poetry Relevant. This kind of thing is almost uniformly awkward, because it confuses subject matter with relevance.
I'm torn. I like the idea of documentary poems. I'm glad that the age of epiphany is over (circa 1990-2000). I'm glad people don't feel they have to end every story and poem with a two-line revelation, or, failing that, a suggestive line break:
And if I did love
then I guess I loved
him.
in the hopes that the reader can supply the meaningful insight which has eluded the poet.
Yet I'm not really satisfied with these poems as they stand. They lack a reason for existing. They recount specific incidents, but since they all seem to signify the same thing, they accumulate without deepening experience. They have focus, but not attention? That is, they can tell you something very precisely, but all they seem to mean to say is "I am the sort of poet who would tell you this sort of story."
I can't say what a poet's reason for writing was, no matter how good my psychic critic skills are. I can only say why I would have written something, and I think if I had written:
cuz shorty was the punchline in every other joke
being four feet tall toothless & bald & old man stinky
he had to lie atop the quarterpanels of those cars
arms & feet horizontal w/the ground
just to change a spark plug
--"poem for shorty", Patrick McKinnon
I would be wanting you to see how clever I was for finding a person I clearly saw as a grotesque, for presenting him so precisely, for elevating him, yes, by making him the poem's protagonist, and for always remaining detached from him, since to identify would be to become contemptible myself. And this kind of contempt/fetishization of the "outside" is the great sin, I think, of the Alternative.
That said, it's not a bad poem. It's a quite good thing of its kind. It just doesn't teach me anything that I want to know as a poet.
I will tell you the secret thing I hope for. The first thing I read for.
I want to be wounded by a poem. I want it to tell me the truth I didn't want to hear, that I have been desperate to hear though I did not know it.
I read poetry in the hopes that someone will state for me a small true piece of the agony and beauty of existence, absolutely devoid of sentimentality. And that they will do something with language I had not thought of, that makes this happen, that makes the poem a thing you can't dismantle.
If not that (since my poems don't do that), for something wry, clever, or startling in ideas or in language. The quieter version of the apocalypse.
I would settle for something that didn't feel like I'd already read it several times.
Maybe that's my fetish of the New, which could be getting Old.
I want to learn from a poem how to write honestly, so honestly that it humiliates me, because the poem is so much stronger than I am.
This contemporary documentary voice could be useful to me. It could help sharpen and focus what I write. It isn't the thing I'm really looking for, though. I want to find poets who can hurt me with their truth.
{rf}