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Marrow Reviews: A Manifesto of Sorts 🙂

Tent Caterpillars

I will never get too old to crouch down and gaze long at the inhuman beings of this world and find them beautiful. 

 

The Eternal Quest [it may seem] & in mysterious correspondence, the poem Washing.

Tags

Canadian poetry, catherine owen, poem, privacy, triptych, washing, woman in shower

Photos by Warren Dean Fulton

Photoshop recreations & unwitting modeling by Catherine Owen

Which recalls to me this prose poem I wrote some years ago, now in my manuscript Yclept:

 Washing

2 inches. All the water we were allowed in the tub. My father’s orders.

Four of us, aged 3-10, bleached sugar peas in our porcelain pod, shoulders

& thighs stuck together, small buttocks dipped with water like the tips of Dairy Queen cones,

the kind we were bought once a year as a bribe following the family photo session

 at Brown’s on Kingsway. We could never luxuriate. He wouldn’t permit such wastefulness.

The water wasn’t even hot, but a pissy-warm puddle we crouched in, slathering cloths

swiped with thin ridges of soap over our limbs, slapping the cotton squares against spines & knees,

damp flags of cleanliness. Our mother officiated at the bath, here squidging a comma of Johnson’s No

More Tears shampoo onto a plastered down scalp, there slopping a plastic cup of water over a frothy head in her skint

benediction. Though at the end of bath time she would drape a towel over her lap

 and the younger ones would leap into that soft pocket, a plush & highly coveted moment, this

was meager consolation. Even our rubber duck was grim, its yellow promise never allowed

to bob, jammed as it was among our collective feet, moored. When, years later, I traveled to Turkey

 it was to learn how to yield to water. On my first day in Cappadocia, I sought out a hammam where, for 25 Euros, a woman

wearing a white kerchief and pure apron washed me. Languishing on a heated stone in the Sicaklik as she squeezed a

cheesecloth of minty suds over my prone body, I became a child again, at least that fantasized child I had never been, who

could eat as much as she desired without a careful doling out, wear the clothes she longed for, indifferent to budget, sink

into the endless depths of hot water without guilt. Just for awhile anyway. “Cok guezel,” the woman murmured, her olive gaze

drenching me where I lay. Yes indeed. So beautiful. As the water dripped down upon me, unskimpingly, into the light.

Qualicum Beach, 2014, after Tomas Transtromer

 

 

 

Every morning, I walk to the sea’s recurrent embroidery.

 

Salt enters me like a soft & hungry animal.

 

Always in the body, some pain; in the mind, something I cannot say.

 

The stones beneath me changing underwater into their accents,

 

Becoming colours I am never able to take with me.

The Nth Chambers of the Heart: A Body Paint Performance from Skins (of grief)

Marrow Review: Two from Biblioasis: Oliver & Neilson

Randomly, I decided to pick two books to review from Biblioasis and it is these, one from 2013, the other from 2009, both obsessed by rhythm with differing considerations of context and with forms that seek to be a vehicle for their content. 

1/Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway – Alexandra Oliver

I must say, it surprised me to see Oliver listed as a “new voice” on the front of her bee-spackled book, and a “new formalist sensation” on the back, seeing as how she has been publishing and reciting poems in one form or another since around the time I initially met her, when we were mere infants, reciting for the Burnaby Writers’ Society’s Poets Under 25 event in about 1994, and her first book came out, albeit in the UK, in 2007. But such are blurbs, those desperate for attention beasts. Oliver’s poems, crisp, at times sing-songy, Philip Larkinesque, rhyming, mannered, smart, continental and often quite droll, are usually hits in performance, the main place I’d been exposed to them prior. On the page, they are both bop and oops, something that could be noted for any collection perhaps, but because Oliver uses rhyme schemes so regularly, the oopsies are more due to the fact that every kind of subject matter isn’t suited, in my opinion, to a similar scansion & stress (do dee do dee do dee do dee do dee do), than to any lack in Oliver’s ear, which is, mostly, bang-on.

It’s a slim little text, but the poems are so compressed, it’s a perfect length and I counted 11 poems I would return to of about 45, not a low figure really. Among these: “A Child’s Christmas in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” with its well-crafted revelations about the Partizan Santa, Deda Mraz, the list of misdemeanors in “Curriculum Vitae” (O these lines are meaningful to me: “This is how you last,/they tell me, cut the sparking fuse;/a woman doesn’t get too many chances/I wonder if respectable means right:/I’m waiting to be rescued by my doubt,” the villanelle on the death of parents, “Taking Care,” the sweetly ingenious, “The Toy Catalogue of the Afterlife,” “Modern Camera’s” biting Brit-style humour (“This is the setting for blood & ablution/And this button here is the one that you press/when shooting yourself is the only solution”), the rare oft-iambic poignancy of “A Serbian Man in a Bar Said” (“This is the beast you see when you are sleeping: / a stag….the red cloud clears,/then you wake up weeping”) and the super funny death wish of “Final Request” (“Please put me in the muumuu that I bought…the one you hate…I’ve often thought/I’d leave you in a good, embarrassed state…so nothing would be strange.”) Though the pieces are described as “cinematic visions,” they didn’t seem especially marked as suburban movie clips to me, apart from their regular dips into film noir tonalities, but more like slightly sour (but not unpleasantly so) rotund bonbons, accurately shaped, but sometimes a tad too sproingy going down.

2/Meniscus – Shane Neilson

Even though Neilson’s first book is from 2009 and thus not a new release (and so what), I wanted to review it anyway (as I may in the future Elise Partridge’s Fielder’s Choice or Jeramy Dodd’s Crabwise to the Hounds or other gems requiring refreshing in our tiny public’s memory). Meniscus is striking with its textured cover of messy intestine cassette tape feed, the innards chopped into four sections of elegy, insanity, injury and adoration, the 1st and 4th sequences being the most stirring and stick in the gut.

Neilson’s rhythms are usually quite sophisticate and slant; witness the opening lyric, “Recovery” where visits rings with shrinks, went with absent and the piece concludes with the ache of slow epiphany, “I surveyed three barren years/and saw a poem, flaring there.” And the flare of these cuttingly delineated poems is fierce, snared in the deep need to translate a father’s brutality as he snaps his wife’s wrists during a fight (No Ring), thrashes his son in Beaten-Down Elegy (“I cough red /and grab time. The breath again and he’s there, throwing bales/the thump of wet hay on wet hay”) and then, at the end, weakens, along with the paternal lineage of farmers into “one collective sigh” (This is not a Rural Poem). The loveliest lines in the book might be in this segment: “Is there sorrow? If I look it may be/creation” (For my Father). 

But the punchiest kapows of sound are in the last part on love – “Love like piss on a hot stove,/like Jumpin’ Jehosephat and Snorting Nicodemus” (Love Life), “The hings of or/, the sulk of not…Your back does not balk;/it has no non” (Just Saying), “the syllable – /a lollygag terror, a long slow gurgle…for all the rictus cheer, there is the velvet taint of roses” (Love Poem), and “Love was forgotten/ and bastardized and/flecked and fucked, we/woke and fell and fell/again” (Rebound). And again a moving moment: “I pray that I won’t instruct you in pain” (Prayer). The parts on bipolar states and brain seizures are less communicable I think, possibly too fraught with equivalent media scenarios the mind unwittingly replays. Still, strong utterances here like Bird Men (“Drained/ wallets strain against seat seams….men stretch arms/into albatross wing spans”), There is No Cure, MRI with the body in the machine “a harvest/of grains and tubers/in the long, magnetic season” and Bedside Delirium: Family Visit. An echoing of Pete Trower, Alden Nowlan and Al Pittman while being relentlessly itself, Meniscus sings bleeps & grinds & mellifluous witnessings to loss. 

 

 

Visualelegies: Four Women Artists Speak to Grief

http://www.vancourier.com/news/creating-art-helps-in-the-mourning-1.1267813

 

Marrow Review: Two from Coach House Books: Hancock & O’Meara

I wrote both of these reviews in draft form while running the air conditioning unit on the set of Arrow, the TV show, occasioning many interesting comments from the cast & crew, including one man who shuddered, “My ex-wife was a poet. Turned me off poetry for life.” Well damn her/him. These books are truly worth the read.

1/ Brecken Hancock’s Broom Broom:

Amid the welter of first releases, glutting, unrecollectable, Hancock’s Broom Broom (with its vertiginous cover of palimsestuous female faces) sticks in the blood like Roethke’s abject greenhouse spells or Sexton’s wicked glittering seances. And grief begot those too.

Initially, while I relished the energy of Hancock’s language, from the playfully grim scenarios of fetal sharks that “scarf/each other to abortion/Yum yum/in Mom’s womb. It’s on YouTube” (Husha) to her quirky familiarity with forms like the villanelle (Sandy) and glosa(The Near Site), and the compelling emotional scholarship found in “Notes to Historia Thermae”, I couldn’t engage with the deeper agony of familial narration fracturing inside these pieces. By “Incubus, Malleus, Stapes” feeling leaks in during an erotically rupturing canoe trip: “Dock, years after these whales/ came to die, to drone of insects./No one knows what becomes of sound/ when all the world’s coquilles/hit shoal,” a delicious ominousness further elaborated in “The crime for which he’s serving life” which concludes with the stark philosophical queries: “I don’t believe in any god, so why am I nodding towards something like a soul? What does one live for?…Is the goal here to eke out another clutch of years?”

And then the Mother enters with the next poem,

a brilliant dark sashaying between numbered accidents experienced in childhood and seemingly more banal, quotidian moments that carry their own sour baggage: “bluebottle fly bunt bunts against glass…Mom’s broom, the vroom vroom of her vacuum…Dad rips up the carpet; goodbye stains.” The brutal maternal momentum is then sustained to the book’s end, with the ponderous wonder of lines like “Grief is a door, strange how feral” (Lag), “Grief isn’t an epoch, it’s a milieu” from the startling The Art of Plumbing, and “Evil Brecken'”s repellent chutzpah punching through in stanzas such as “Fused sex to sex, pixel to pixel/we sit together, shit together/brandish our teats/like handkerchiefs, oink, oink,/muddle in the bristly/bacon of us: wrecking-/ball vulva, this bathetic smile.”

But Hancock saves the most affecting poem for nearly the book’s fierce finale. “Once More,” which prosily alternates between the personal history of Brecken’s mother’s early and tortuous decline, italicized descents into her damaged psyche and the author’s own strivings to acknowledge this long term loss through the support of grief-theorists like Barthes (a fave of mine) and Didion, is powerfully articulated. Hancock’s awareness of her mother’s disconnection from a “decayed language” serves as impetus for her own offering of poems in response to what, even after death, keeps, achingly, echoing.

2/David O’Meara’s A Pretty Sight

While Hancock’s poems rake into sanguinary memory, instantaneously fixed, O’Meara’s perhaps deceptively quieter cerebration rhythms itself gradually into the spinal column and haunts. Kind of like the book’s subtle hunt of cover, the dog chasing the hare gradually pressing through its night. “Inside my mind, there’s another mind,” O’Meara writes in the sardonic “So far so stupid,” which begins with the wholly contemporary line: “All those selfies I posted/look really great,” an observation (the mind one that is) that may account for the densely laden allusiveness of these poems.

They aren’t just a randomized what’s what of O ‘Meara’s rolladeck of reading though; A Pretty Sight is hinged with its references to philosopher and raconteurs from Ancient Greece: Socrates, Aesop, Virgil, among others, including a lyric on Socrates at Delium and a hilarious dialogue between old Soc and Sid Vicious on the nature of martyrdom: Soc: “And the scabs on the back of your hands/ were they not left by spear tips?” Sid: “That was just a laugh with a cigarette, some game/ we’d play in the Hampsted bedsit.”

O’Meara’s poems resonate with the sophisticated intellectual poise of a Steve Noyes, a James Pollock, or a Richard Greene, though they can take the piss out too, mashing things up with lush bits of description and raw pronouncements that jag the textual flow in a mostly satisfying way. A prime example of this mode is his long rhapsody, “Circa Now”, which veers from Klimt, Freud, and Juno to “khao soi and mango” to “Fuck silence or permanence/Fuck elegy.Fuck time and pain,” before ending with the ennuiesque directive, “Virgil, don’t be our guide; you wouldn’t know the way around now,” amid cellphones and contrails that “rib the sky.”

My favorite poems however (of course attesting to my rather elegiac predilections) are the bittersweet and noble “Terms,” about a teacher dying of cancer who wants his students to remember his beloved novel’s motifs: “the white horse and the pillar of smoke,” “Dance”, whose description of teen sex pops the nostalgia button so acutely: “In back seats, sweat squeaky on vinyl, trying to syringe pleasure into each other’s skin,” the endlessly deferred poem of “The Tennis Courts in Winter,” and the gutting loveliness of “End Times,” its remnant ghosts and in the urn, “tiny, like seashells in the sand…his hipbones.”

As with the previously listed poets O’ Meara resides among, I don’t think he ever writes a “bad” poem, just pieces one is more or less engaged with in relation to how his use of language vivifies his occasionally hermetic subject matter. And o he’s ballsy in his joustings with Rilke: “You must change your life, but first, wait a few minutes” (How I wrote). If you insist. Ok.

 

 

A Marrow Review: Elegy for M X T by Sina Queyras (Coach House Books, 2014)

Tags

Canadian poetry, catherine owen, Coach House Books, elegy, Lemon Hound, M X T, Marrow Review, Sina Queyras

Obsessed as I am with elegy I felt I couldn’t compose a typical review of M X T, thus (respectfully) this.

Dear One,

MXT is so pink-existing, a shock of lurid hurting rendered bearable through the architectonics of an arrayed machinery of feeling. Initially, a resistance to the equipment and then, a yielding as diagrams set grief outside the self-mire, arrow & circumscribe

directionalities of chaos. Do we believe in this? Mostly, Dear One, I cling to the emotion caught in the lettered texts, the Dear Ones addressed, those pieces where when she says, “I don’t want a grid, I want arms” we nod assent, absolutely. Mary Oliver flits in; Diane Arbus; Lee Miller, those

painters “in blood” from the “darkest recesses” of their vaginas. As there is little intimate grip on this mourning, few anchors, faces & idioms vague, lost progenitors are contained in places, the ghost Vancouver of childhood, its Jericho Beach, its Aristocrat’s. The juxtaposition sharpens between the desire

for containable, describable processes and the obvious melange of detrital this n that: hashtags, Oil of Olay, Mike Harcourt, The Grateful Dead, cherry Kool-Aid. Any conclusion ineffable,

Dear One, is it

does one need to grieve and is it manifested by this whirl-world slammed by doors & doors of laws & circuit breakers or do such blueprints of utopian withholding give us rituals (of a colder sort) to enable our continuance?

“This endless loop of feeling what does it reveal?” Well at least, Dear One, an alternative to the drop-box stages of supposed grieving, the symbols and frame dimensions and magnetic fields but stone-attempts in a stream-reality of Coleridgean “water, water everywhere, my dead.”

On occasion,

the mourner shrinks a bit. Is it from protection, fear (if “thinking in public terrifies us” how about feeling?” ) or just because “Grief is too bright. Too head-on.” And thus subterfuge is crucial for survival, endurance. Of which tactics I count not only the machinery of elegiac dismantlements but also the arms lengths of certain end-frames for Plath or Pollock or the letter Q (the cento though is essential harvest….)

,strategies that can drain grieving of its salt, or else proffer a balance, a ballast to the keening of “Dear Regret….I am lost…I am hungry to keep you alive.” So very true. And perhaps the only line,

Dear One, any of us needs to write about grief.

Fragments from Improbable Conversations

Gotcha, the young man keeps replying, like a rubber band pinging into my

brain, Gotcha, and so I know I am alone in the world where only the homeless

people are majestically polite, one denizen of a shopping cart calling out to me

“Excuse moi Ma’am, but do you have the time?” as he wheeled his precious

refuse mobile past my lockup on Mars. Everything’s named by what’s not there,

I mumble to myself and you yelp out – put it in a poem! – by which you mean

consign it to a dark corner of the billabong where it will eat its own reptilian

wisdom for eternity. Sorry I didn’t understand your directive to bury myself

in sand and garbage juices while strutting proudly as representative of Lucid

Communication, Inc. And on the train back home there are six German

Hula hoopers and one is excited by a lemonade stand, dude, and maybe even

fried eggs, while the chick drawls at her mate, “You feel me man? It’s just

one of those things. If I wake up, I’ll go. And if I don’t wake up, I won’t be awake.”