The Dominion - Linda Besner

November Books

hillarybain — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:05:56 +0000

New works by Stifter and Endicott

Rock Crystal
Adalbert Stifter
Translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore
New York Review of Books Classics, 2008.

Rock Crystal, a 19th-century Austrian story now available in an attractive little edition from NYRB Classics, is written in pure, evocative language, never too virtuosic but not at all plain, and the narrative is relayed with majestically broad omniscience and a bountiful sense of history. It is a story that starts off calm and easy but gradually becomes a tale of excruciating suspense. It is about Christmas, but it is not insipid or Christmassy.

A boy, Conrad, and his little sister Sanna embark on a hike to their grandparents' village on the other side of an alpine mountain range. Their grandmother, whose hunger to lay eyes upon the pair "amounts to a morbid craving" (a perfect characterization of grandparental longing), receives them, feeds them until they are full, loads them with snacks and gifts for their parents, and sends them trundling home. On the way back, the children run into trouble: it begins to snow and they take shelter in a mountainside cave. Their grandmother's bundle keeps them warm for the night, a canister of coffee staves off sleep and cold, and in the morning they are found by a search party, to the supreme relief of their mother, whose fears have brought the village to the family's aid. These themes of communal living and of the constancy of rural communities emerge near the beginning of the story, as the narrator surveys the region and its customs:

"The village people thus constitute a separate world, they know one another by name and are familiar with all the grandfathers' and great-grandfathers' tales. All mourn when anyone dies; all know the name of the new-born; they speak a language which is different from that used in the plain; they have their quarrels and settle them; they help one another, and if anything unusual happens, come flocking together."

The author, master stylist Adalbert Stifter, lived from 1805 until 1868, but did not do so with the assistance of any such flocking. When his father died young, Stifter was sent to boarding school. He was barred from speaking to the love of his life, and, when he did marry, one of his adopted children ran away and another was killed. Suicidal, he bled to death from a self-inflicted wound.

How painful it must have been to know tranquility and to have lived its opposite, and how rare to have retained the gift to describe it so acutely. There can never be too many lucid evocations of the past in literature, partly because of the memory-distorting effects of nostalgia, which, as Austria would find out less than a century after Stifter, can usher in problems for the present by erasing those of the past. Stifter is worth reading because he evokes nostalgia without succumbing to it. It should come as no surprise, then, that the late, great W. G. Sebald, possessor of the most clear-sighted vision of the past in recent literature, admired Stifter's powers of expression. So should we all.

– Robert Kotyk

Good to a Fault
Marina Endicott
Freehand Books, 2008.

It is unusual to come across a contemporary novel that takes up moral themes as modestly as Endicott does in her latest work, Good to a Fault. Goodness, in this meditation, is a functional thing, a hospital corridor where reluctant visitors brush past each other on their way to confront realities larger than themselves. Clara Purdy, a middle-aged insurance clerk, is driving to the bank one July day, “thinking about herself and the state of her soul,” when she plows into a beat-up Dart conveying (and housing, as it turns out) the Gage family: hardscrabble parents Lorraine and Clayton, a mulish mother-in-law, and three children; Dolly, Trevor and baby Pearce. Clara’s life is transformed; with Lorraine in the hospital for an extended period, Clayton deserts the family and Clara ends up taking over the care of the three children.

There is immense subtlety in the way Endicott handles her characters and themes; when Clara looks at sleeping Lorraine, Endicott observes, “her mouth had fallen slightly open, relaxed, and her hand lying nearest to Clara had opened too. Long fingers, nicely shaped. She was worth helping.” While the Gages’ lower-class status fundamentally shapes their interaction with Clara, her childlessness acts as an equivalently handicapping ‘status’ marker. At the grocery store, “They got the special grocery cart with the red baby seat. Secretly, Clara supposed, she must always have longed to use this cart. And now she had every right to pop Pearce into the vinyl seat and wrestle with the knotted straps and bent buckles.” Good to a Fault is a work of nuanced social portraiture, and the slow romance between Clara and her (Anglican) priest draws out the problem of childlessness and societal worth in a surprisingly modern way.

– Linda Besner

September Books

Moira Peters — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:27:32 +0000

New works by Venart and Stiles

Woodshedding
S.E. Venart
Brick: London, 2007.

If her work is any indication, S.E. Venart’s poems are made up of dispatches from a writing life that is underway with admirable vigilance. Woodshedding, her first collection, ferrets out space for its intellectual labours around the contemplation of the ordinary, but time moves neither too fast, nor too slow; the poems emerge from life’s infrequent furrows of solitude with refreshing tranquility.

The poet shares this pursuit with bird-watchers, monks and joggers: inhabitants of what Venart calls “privileged openings,” pockets of inspiration that open up with circumstance (“There are sudden canopies/of silence between the low tones/of speedboats”), but which become worthy of safeguarding when the moment lingers (“Touch, I think, is mostly overrated.//It makes for only the luckiest/misunderstandings. I prefer the syllables of birds.”).

The full end-stop between the line about touch and the next reflects the exalted status that Venart affords to this sense of aloneness and sequestration, but the poems encourage a certain level of interior play even amid the hustle and bustle of one’s daily commute. This dual mode, mingling worldly tumult with the concerns of the self, can be heard in a line from “Sightings”: “I’m back in the city, stopped for a red light, reading the off-ramp’s/sprayed messages,” which echoes an earlier poem, “Lanes,” ending with “The sun overcoming me. . . /throwing light down on me as I bring/flesh and soul together, and fall/again into the moving traffic of myself.”

When a musician friend of mine makes a trip “out to the woodshed,” he means to remain there; anywhere, that is, so long as he cannot be reached by phone, e-mail, Facebook message, or any of the other brazenly intrusive gizmos of this early 21st century; for as long as it takes to learn a part on his tuba.

References to musicianship pervade Venart’s work-—her own epigraph invokes the improvisatory play of a jazz musician—-but as another definition of the collection’s title included in the epigraph attests, “woodshedding” also refers to the administration of a “sound parental thrashing.” Venart perhaps means that her work reveals itself only with the avoidance of easy pleasures and through an embrace of an ascetic self-discipline. If so, her collection reflects this principle with uncommon beauty and maturity.

– Robert Kotyk

Taking the Stairs
John Stiles
Nightwood: Gibson's Landing, BC, 2008.

Stiles' protagonist, Jarod, is a struggling writer whose phone is simply ringing off the hook with job offers. His friend Elliot wants to pay him exorbitant amounts of money to write a screenplay, and it's all Jarod can do to evade his would-be benefactor so he's free to endlessly re-read his abortive short story attempts and fret about his unfinished novel. High doses of implausibility and inaction can kill just about any novel and Stiles' choice of subject matter only furthers these problems.

The “writing about writing” genre is an extremely tricky one to make engaging and Jarod spends a tedious amount of time bellyaching about what a chore it is to stuff his work into envelopes and mail it off to literary magazines.

Although Taking the Stairs is written in the first person, Jarod's personality remains curiously opaque. He fights with his girlfriend; he works odd jobs; he holds circuitous telephone conversations with people he's trying to avoid. Stiles has included in Taking the Stairs several excerpts from Jarod's oeuvres, which are bad without being atrocious enough for comic effect and it's unclear just how much we are meant to sympathize with Jarod.

Stylistically, there's not much here to save this book from itself. “He says that when people jump off bridges, they land on their feet and their legs get jammed up inside their bodies and have to be pulled back out with a huge set of tongs,” is as interesting as it gets, unless you count the anatomical curiosity of the phrase, “She looks fine with her round spanish ass in a tight, tasteful blouse.” Must be quite the figure.

– Linda Besner

May Books

Moira Peters — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:00:36 +0000

New works by Wickers, Vuong-Riddick, Boyko and Bryan

Stations of the Lost
Brian Wickers
Mansfield Press: Toronto, 2006.

This book offers readers something remarkable: the chance to engage with a captivating voice and enlist the experience and lifetime observations of an extremely erudite and affable poet. Here we have a complicated and finely textured emotional landscape of ex-wives and teenage daughters, elderly fathers and the children who look after them. There is a solid quality to the voice in these poems, a sense that the speaker has withstood life’s inclement weather and will live to withstand more. In addition to carefully wrought images and phrases, Wickers is adept with sound; in the lyric “A Seashell From the Seychelles,” the ‘s’ sounds mimic the sea, and the resulting miasma of sound and meaning is beautiful. Wickers shines when he’s being ostentatiously humorous, as in “Marginal Questions, Winter, English 101, Frost.” The poem riffs off questions a teacher might ask students – mentally and verbally – while teaching Frost’s famous poem: “Who owns the woods – in which of several senses?/ do you own property have you ever tended to animals.” These poems span the pains and joys of life while reflecting on what it is to be human.

--Matthew J. Trafford

The Evergreen Country: A Memoir of Vietnam
Thuong Vuong-Riddick
Hagios: Regina, 2007.

As a child in Hanoi and later a student in Saigon, Vuong-Riddick witnessed Vietnam's turbulent changes in the second half of the 20th century. Historically under French colonial rule, Vietnam was occupied by Japan during World War II, then reoccupied by France, only to be split in two after Communist rebels led by Ho Chi Minh captured Hanoi. The Evergreen Country is Vuong-Riddick's vivid memoir of these times, brimming with historical, cultural and personal insights. The tone is straightforward: events are presented chronologically, with occasional welcome asides to describe relevant cultural details or social practices, including feet binding, teeth dyeing, betel chewing, and the use of the "shame pole" to punish immodesty. Vuong-Riddick casts both sides of the political conflict in a suspicious and violent light, and only hints at where her biases may lie. Vuong-Riddick is a likeable narrator, and we become interested in her personal growth and family, even as we're drawn into the larger historical narrative. Despite the ever-present tension of war, what emerges from the book is a colourful picture of a vibrant and dynamic country.

--Sam Fraser

Blackouts
Craig Boyko
McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 2008.

First short story collections often possess a restless quality, as the developing writer casts out his or her net as widely as possible to determine just what sits within reach. In Blackouts, individual sentences often show signs of overextension, falling into the kind of exploratory wordiness that signals a young writer straining to broaden or discover the range of his abilities. Occasionally this effect works: “It sounded like a word she’d borrowed from her husband, the psychiatrist, the psychologist, whatever.” As this sentence from “Black Ink” presses outward, each word becomes essential to one character’s conception of another: first a tossed off statement of designation, then a frustrated amendment, and finally exasperation. At other moments, the unchecked forward momentum weakens the impact of some of the poetic passages. Subtle differences between the modifiers notwithstanding, sentences like “Science pursues truth impersonally, dispassionately, disinterestedly,” from “In the Dark,” would benefit from greater concision. The stories in Blackouts are extraordinarily varied in style and subject matter. Given the ambition of this collection, it may only be a matter of more time spent in the workshop for Boyko’s trials to yield major results.

--Bob Kotyk

Gerbil Mother
D.M. Bryan
NeWest Press: Edmonton, 2008.

D.M. Bryan’s first novel is a marvel. From the first few sentences—“Take it on trust—the moment's a bad one. Not Greek tragedy, but ordinary doctor's office despair, regular as a diagrammed digestive system”-- the narrative voice jerks us awake. Bryan has taken a classic character—the harassed mother of small children overwhelmed with noise, sleeplessness and loneliness—and, with the use of a judiciously chosen device, both heightened and deflated its pathos. Gerbil Mother is narrated from the point of view of a foetus, which is unusual in itself, but Bryan has gone one better and made this foetus a bully. The foetus tells us from the beginning “I see at once what a bad mother we have,” and it takes us several chapters to realize how unreliable this narrator is. This judgement mimics the actual voice a selfish toddler might use were it capable of eloquent expression, and the effect is startling. Bryan's language is sophisticated and vigorous, and every paragraph pops with images like this one: “Ref in a dirty diaper, shaking the ropes of the ring. The crib.” A tough and imaginative debut.

--Linda Besner

March Books

hillarybain — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:25:30 +0000

New works by Trussler, Adamson, Snider, and Friedman

Accidental Animals
Michael Trussler
Hagios: Regina, 2007.

There's an openness to Trussler's stanzas that's oddly relaxing—his speakers seem willing to accept whatever comes, even defeat. The unabashed autobiographical bent of these poems provides continuity and context, which allow some of the most difficult moments to resonate. A recently divorced parent writes to his daughter about the mistakes made by “your Mom and Dad, and the other/big people around you—all of who/ will never touch who you really are.” Though this kind of pronouncement occasionally verges on preciousness, it's not all sentiment; there are also some great lines like, “My face sweats so much sometimes it's/ like snails are copulating on the lenses.” The engaging authenticity of the content allows the reader to look past some awkwardness in the form. Trussler uses devices that other poets have employed to great effect, but here the slashes and numbered stanza breaks that don't actually divide the poem feel like exercises. Trussler's meditations, however, feel fruitful, and the collection gives a refreshingly honest sense of reflection rooted in experience.

--Linda Besner

The Outlander
Gil Adamson
Anansi: Toronto, 2007.

The Outlander, set in the early 1900s, chronicles the adventures of “the widow,” a 19-year-old woman who has killed her husband and is now fleeing his vengeful twin brothers across Western Canada. Adamson has done a fine job of endowing the widow with a complicated character, giving her so many faults it's a wonder the reader manages to like her—but we do. The niggling technical question in Adamson's execution is a distracting inconsistency in point of view. The narrative voice stays, for the most part, fairly close to the protagonist, but occasionally bolts into startling omniscience, remarking, as the widow fails to recognize the edible plants surrounding her in the forest, “Abundance lay about her, but she starved.” This, paired with phrases like, “August dandelion seeds floated across their path, as if nature itself hoped to bewitch them from their purpose and dream them into the trees,” lends The Outlander a kind of Hardyesque grandiosity, at the heart of which is a ballad's tall tale of a love story. Gather around the campfire and listen to Adamson spin this one out.

--Linda Besner

On Performing
Bob Snider
Gaspereau: Kentville, 2007.

This is intended as a self-help book: Bob Snider, the Canadian folk musician, gives a series of tips for whoever, in his words, wants to learn to be “a ham.” Here's a sample of his prose style:

Timing is the art of saying or doing the right thing at the right time. Let's say you're standing one the street with a friend and you decide to tell a joke.'I always wanted to be a tree surgeon,' you say, 'but I faint at the sight of sap.' This is a good joke and will probably get a laugh or a smile. But if your friend happens to mention that he had some tree surgery done in his yard and you then tell him your joke it will benefit from the addition of good timing.

This earnest explication doesn't seem to match what most people mean by the word “timing” in comedy. There is a vagueness here that plagues the book from the outset, as Snider gives would-be performers generic, flatly phrased advice like, “Anecdotes are interesting and illustrative.” Snider may be an entertaining performer, but he's not much of a writer.

--Linda Besner

Long Story Short
Elyse Friedman
Anansi: Toronto, 2008.

The situations depicted in Elyse Friedman’s new collection of funny and often unsettling stories are mounted with droll, crisp dialogue. Particularly likable is the Journey Prize-nominated “Truth,” which imagines a dating world in which the commitment to spoken veracity (Him: “My self-esteem will be temporarily boosted if I get you into bed tonight, and that waitress is making me horny.” Her: “I have masochistic inclinations and I’m feeling self-destructive.”) exposes the everydayness of game playing and self-deception. While amusingly told, the collection’s novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing,” about a young man who befriends a washed-up sitcom actor for the inside joke-generating potential afforded by their taped phone conversations, is overlong and, in the end, verges on preachiness. Cruelty aside, doesn’t the occasional lending of a disingenuously sympathetic ear to a bad-tempered friend constitute a necessary, even quasi-noble component of lasting companionship? Friedman privileges empathy in the story, upbraiding a youthful culture of detachment, but her targets feel too easy here, straw men (boys, really) who never quite evolve out of a caricature of their videogaming demographic.

--Robert Kotyk

February Books

hillarybain — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:52:09 +0000

New works by MacArthur, Armstrong, McPherson and Glenn

Take Us Quietly
Tammy Armstrong
Goose Lane Editions,
Fredericton, 2006.

The poems in this book meander: geographically they cover Canada from coast to coast, as well as foreign locales like Spain, Guatemala, and Indonesia. While the range of content may be admirable, there’s a sense of something missing in this collection, and in the individual poems themselves—a lack of common purpose and cohesion. Take these two stanzas from “Mathematics:” “A cigarette mark/ burnt through a twenty-dollar bill/ into your forearm/ is my logarithmic reminder./ I’ve memorized them all./ When my sight is faulty tungsten,/ my fingers will read polysyllabic.// This rock and scald of absence blisters/ into Saturday morning:/ coffee, samosas, Globe and Mail,/ my feet tucked beneath the angles of your leg.” While the thread connecting mathematics, the number twenty, and logarithms is clear, the movement to chemistry (tungsten) and literature (polysyllabic) feels strange, not to mention the tangle of other images and allusions which are in no way accessible to the reader. Throughout the collection the poems seem to skim the surface of something beautiful, but never take the plunge into real depth or meaning. Take Us Quietly leaves the reader wanting more matter and more art.

--Matthew J. Trafford

Six Ways to Sunday
Christian McPherson
Nightwood, Gibsons, BC, 2007.

In his debut collection, McPherson conjures a gritty and colourful Ottawa, populated by addicts and losers, obsessives and gawky teens. In “The Plastic Garden,” the first and best story of the collection, a retired model-maker named Rumford feuds with skateboarders menacing a little girl’s garden. Rumford’s rage after the first failed confrontation is touching in its excess, and McPherson's other hapless characters are equally sympathetic: jazz-playing Two Seconds and Elvis-haired Squid seem to scrape by mostly on luck and pure gall. Occasionally, the plots beggar belief, or coast along the edge of an easy pathos. The intentionally silly “Chilidog Love” is playful enough to escape standards of believability, but it feels out of place among the darker stories. Where the collection falters is in the saggy dialogue, and also where the writing dips into weak similes, like Johnny’s father in “Autograph,” “scribbling away with the intensity of an accountant.” But McPherson’s endings, like the pool hustles, drug deals and long afternoon shags of these stories, have a nice way of leaving things open to the unexpected.

--Saleema Nawaz

Combustion
Lorri Neilsen Glenn
Brick Books: Toronto, 2007.

Glenn's second poetry collection considers the big abstractions of connection, cyclicity, and death. Glenn's background is in ethnography, and her removed evenness of tone, which could have seemed clinical, here reassures the reader with its empathic solidity. Her first and second person narration feel both intimate and cautious, considering some of her explosive subject matter, like the true story of FBI investigators severing the hands of murdered M'ikm'aq woman Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. Glenn shifts lightly and cleanly from physical and emotional detail to broader images and ideas. Addressing the title object in "Smooth Rock on Laurencetown Beach," she muses "memory / like you, is shucked from mystery, / rests snug in my hand." The changing moon is one of Glenn's recurrent images, her nod to a vaster perspective of time. Glenn's own perspective occasionally takes a wry turn into gallows humour, as in "Birthday in Middle Age," where she harrumphs, "So, each lacy card a shovel." Combustion is a surprising title for so steady and compassionate an exploration of what it means to watch and be watched. "The heart is a hymnal," writes Glenn, and indeed her collection is also something brave, to be read and sung.

--Jane Henderson

Isolated: Two Plays
Greg MacArthur
Coach House: Toronto, 2007.

Get Away and Recovery, the two plays contained in this collection, have a lot in common. Both storylines feature a nebulous epidemic—in Get Away, it's apathy and discontentment, in Recovery it's a vague, nameless drug— that engulfs society and leaves MacArthur's characters huddled on the outskirts, in outposts they like to imagine they've chosen themselves. Macarthur's characters, despite their slightly surreal surroundings, feel real, as do their interactions with each other. Garbo and Henry are a pair of teenage vagabonds; Leroy is a snotty Dutch teenager; David is a hopeful middle-aged man whose loneliness leads him to desperate acts. “What do they say?” is a recurrent line in both plays, an appeal to old adages and folk wisdom, neither of which can be marshaled to offer the characters much more than temporary comfort. Both stories play with the idea of numbness, and while both storylines unspool towards events that should provoke an emotional reaction, these stories occur in a kind of frozenness that makes them difficult to connect to. It's hard for readers to feel invested in characters who don't seem invested in themselves.

--Linda Besner

Inhabiting the Historical Houdini

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 16:10:49 +0000

Anatomy of Keys: Poems
Steven Price
Brick Books: Toronto, 2006.

Towards the end of Price's poetic interpretation of the life of the escape-artist Houdini, the speaker says, "the dead do not return, not as you desire them:/ in keys, perhaps, in keys pretending to be keys." The task of an author who attempts to recreate a historical character is to be a key pretending to be a key. The reader expects the qualities and concerns of the character to be unlocked for them. We want to feel ourselves closer to the person, closer to knowing how they thought, what they did, how it felt. To some extent, Price is forced to colonize Houdini, and the Houdini we get is both real and imaginary, both Houdini and Price.

Price has made several choices that highlight the artifice of what he's undertaking. The most immediately striking is his choice of diction. Price has chosen a mannered, archaic sounding syntax:

I learned my name belonged to the grasp of forefinger and fist, to a slanted shaft, to the brace and heft of grip: not of mine, not to me. Solemnly he'd rustle and blot, scratch a line, each page knarred, ink-rubbed: in that candle's pitch and toss he held loose the word that in holding held all else aloft.

This choice effectively yanks Houdini out of his historical context—early twentieth century America—and positions him instead in a more distant time and place. The obtrusive, insistent use of Anglo-Saxon sounding words like "knarred" can be seen as a reminder that Houdini, born Ehrich Weiss to Jewish immigrant parents from Hungary, would have heard Yiddish or German at home. However, it's a choice that obliterates much of what must have been Houdini's own way of speaking, since he came to the U.S. as a child.

The use of this tenor of language is also problematic in that it emphasizes the poet in poems that purport to be in Houdini's voice. Price has constructed a narrative voice which switches back and forth between third and first person, and at various times we assume the speaker to be Houdini, an unnamed observer, an unnamed scholar/historian, Ehrich Weiss, or Price himself. I think the success of this tactic is mixed; because it's sometimes hard to tell who's speaking, the import of what's being said is lost, and the gap between Houdini and the reader, rather than shrinking, grows.

There are a few occasion when it seems that this distance between the reader and the intended meaning of a line or phrase has been allowed to drop off the writer's list of concerns. Price is undoubtedly magnificently skilled. There's a poem in which a bird gets trapped in the Weiss' kitchen at night: "all flack and wing/ and furied battering of sink, dishrag,/ kettle, sink, and off, up, a fierce thing hurtling/ high in that kitchen its harsh batlike stagger". Price's command of rhythm makes this poem breathtakingly dramatic, makes you want to memorize it for the sheer swelling music of the lines. Sometimes, however, Price's metered lines don't add up to much. The villanelle that appears late in the collection uses, as its repeated lines, "The bound no more believed in blood or chains," and "the thin insane ropes no longer kept men sane." Neither of these phrases really seems to mean much, and since they can pretty much be dropped in anywhere and perform the same function, they don't pose a proper challenge for a villanelle,

They're indicative, though, of the kind of image that peppers this book. The world that Price has created feels a little bit like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; there's a tossing-and-turning feel to the poems, a nightmarish quality heightened by the dense syntax crowding out the light. Time loops back and forth so that the there's no strong line between the living and the dead, the bound and the free: as one poem says, "When he is bound, the crowd is. When he is free, the crowd is not." Price even manages to do something seldom tried: he invents words with, not a humorous, but a serious intention. "Hoofkicked bloodily back, her left elbow/ still fanked up in cartspokes like a braid of grass," he writes, and we allow the imaginary word 'fanked' to elaborate the image for us.

Anatomy of Keys is a book about binding and escape, considered in terms of family, in terms of the self, and in terms of language. Price's interpretation of Houdini takes a lot of liberties, but at the same time leaves the important boundaries intact; it's the friction between words that creates poetic energy, it's the dialogue between lock and key that makes meaning out of escape.

Lindsa Besner reads Steven Price's new book of poems, Anatomy of Keys.

Description and Excess

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 05:15:41 +0000

An interview with Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino. Photo: Terence Byrnes, Véhicule Press

Carmine Starnino's third poetry collection, With English Subtitles, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2004, winning the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers' Federation in November. Starnino, resident of Montreal, is an associate editor of Magazine Maisonneuve. His new book on criticism of Canadian poetry, Lover's Quarrel, will be released this year. Here, Dominion Review Editor Linda Besner discusses love, descriptions, and the nature of Canadian poetry from With English Subtitles.

Linda Besner: I'm going to start by talking about Yukon Postcards; there's a quote in there that says,

if description is an act of love
I record for you fern-roofed orchestras
of white mountain heather with their tiny
woodwind flowers."

So, where does this idea of description come from?

Carmine Starnino: It's an old idea in love poetry, the idea of investing the intensity of emotion in a poem through the accuracy of the description. It's not as old as you would think, but certainly since the 19th century it's been very important for poets to see things clearly.
In writing that particular poem I was feeling that there's been an awful lot of editorializing when it comes to love poetry and that maybe the best way I could show feelings for the woman the poem was meant for, and maybe to show the shock-- the visual shock--of being in the Yukon, was to communicate what I was seeing as succinctly as possible and hope that the emotion would seep in. It was a little zen in the sense that I thought if I could see something clearly and try to express that as clearly as possible then the language would take care of what I wasn't exactly saying, which was I miss you I love you I wish you were here.

LB: I was wondering where descriptive language comes from-- whether it's something that stems from the object or whether it's something coming from you, that's imposed onto that object.

CS: There've been studies done of how descriptive language is actually sort of recent in terms of the tradition; certainly when you look at Shakespeare-- and he's often celebrated and justly so for the genius of his wordplay--he wasn't very interested in actually seeing things clearly. There are lots of new words being coined and there's lots of very bold metaphorical play, but he's not interested in making sure that what he was seeing could be communicated clearly like a photograph.

That photographic accuracy is more recent-- since Ruskin certainly-- and it's a tradition I've never completely understood. The French tradition, for example, is much more abstract than the English tradition, one that lives in the head. The English tradition especially since the 19th century, late 18th, is one that lives in its senses. It tries to create drama in the theater of the senses.

So the idea for me in "Yukon Postcards," and the book as a whole, is finding the ways in which the world gives you the words it needs to utter itself. My greatest fear was misappellation-- not finding the right word. The mot juste for me was often a very descriptive word which often forced me to turn to a part of the language that was a bit high octane. I had to be a bit careful not to overdo it and I think I may have overdone it in some places but you know, as Beckett says, "fail again, fail better."

LB: When you talk about using too many words, in the search for the right word, one thing I wonder about in the collection is that it seems very adjective heavy, very alliterative. I'm wondering how you walked the line between using words judiciously and veering over into what could be considered ornamental.

CS: Well, I think that's the risk in writing this kind of poetry, that ornament is always a danger. I just felt that, previous to the collection, I had been writing poems I didn't enjoy reading. For this book I wanted to go back to the pleasures that drove me to poetry in the first place--language, wordplay, melody. Music. I do find that in a tradition like ours in terms of Canadian poetry that we are used to less, and so when someone comes along who tries to do a bit more our ears hear it as messy. I think the fear of offending that neatness sensibility is one that keeps people from taking the kind of risks that might be interesting.

There's a critic, James Wood, who says that a writer's dream is to touch every word in the language once. That's not a particularly Canadian dream; the Canadian dream is to touch as few of them as possible. I thought it would be interesting if you took Wood's idea seriously--what if you did touch every word in the language once? I think we forget that a need for excess drove poets to write. It wasn't a need to pare down, it was a need to add to.

Review Editor Linda Besner talks to Montreal poet and critic Carmine Starnino about description and the fear of misappellation.

The Art of Second Language Conversation

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 23:15:04 +0000

When I talk to my new friend Tom, we're not just talking-- we're metatalking. When I ask him how he's enjoying the weather, he tells me he is not enjoying it at all because it has too many future tenses. "Will it rain?" he asks me. Then answers himself, "In the afternoon it may begin to rain." "It will soon be raining."

Tom and I meet once a week to practice the most self-reflexive art on earth-- the art of second language conversation. It is simultaneously speech and the dissection of speech, a use of form which constantly queries the form. It's as though an actor, in the middle of a soliloquy, were to stop and earnestly ask the audience, "If I said 'jealous,' would you understand me more like a person whose girlfriend is cheating on him, or as someone who is careful about their possessions?" And the audience were to answer, "I don't know, what's the rest of the sentence?" And then the actor and the audience would go on to toss around ideas about whether the actor has jealousy in his/her nature or sometimes behaves in a jealous way, and whether this quality is good or bad.

It makes for a unique kind of performance. It combines elements of logical flow with questions of semantics, word association, and indeed outright mistake. Set free of its particular contextual meaning, every word expands, and becomes important in its own right.

My favourite aspect of the second language conversation, however, is the way it forces the listener into that position so dearly beloved of poetry teachers everywhere-- the active interpretative stance. Because of the sometimes agonizingly slow pace of the conversation, as well as the listener's awareness that the speaker may actually lack the words to say what he/she means, expectation and anticipation are heightened, and there is a greater sense of surprise and discovery when a sentence is completed in an unanticipated fashion. The listener rarely sits passively and allows the speaker to flounder, casting about for a word he/she may not even know. Instead, the listener is constantly making suggestions, chasing various trains of thought, trying to divine which linguistic alleyway the speaker is wandering in. My most creative audience experience, in talking to Tom, was when he was telling me something about a flower, and was getting frustrated that I didn't seem to be following him properly.

"A flower," I repeated.

"No," he insisted, "the best part of the flower."

"The petals?" I asked stupidly. "The stamen?" What's the best part of a flower?

Eventually, it turned out that in Czech, kvetina is a word that refers to a cut flower, but with the stem and the leaves as part of the package. Giving someone "flowers" is giving them kvetina. But the word for the actual blossom is kvet, so Tom was looking for something like flow, or maybe flo, that would relate to "flower" in the same way. Easily sorted out; but the confusion provided me with an interesting opportunity. For a tantalizing moment I was considering our conversation from the unexpected vantage point of a bee. My attitude towards flowers as a human was not generating any information by which I could determine what Tom meant by "the best part" of a flower. Maybe, I thought, the assumptions that I'm using for this conversation are wrong. Because there is generally less context in second language talk, I am quicker to jump in an array of directions to try to fill in the missing pieces. If Tom's first language was English, I would expect him to fill in the information for me. My position as listener or audience member would be lazier.

Finally, in conversation with Tom, we both end up questioning how important the form really needs to be. Is it enough if I understand what he means? Or does his grammar and word choice have to be worthy of an Oxford don? In other words, is the function of conversation to communicate ideas? Or is part of it a display of linguistic virtuosity for its own sake? As a conversationalist, Tom is able to be innovative in a way that might take me considerable thought. It wouldn't have occurred to me that Labrador dogs "have rich emotions," or to say that "the rain is falling in ropes." In some ways, learning "correct" English is a plot to turn Tom's conversation conventional, to strip it of the poetic effects that unusual words or sentences structures can have. Paradoxically, once his English is more consciously artful, it may lose its current gaps and spaces that allow the listener to interact with it as art.