By Judith Fitzgerald Feb 22, 2008, 16:37 GMT
Above all else, a successful poem demands balance between perceptual ability and conceptual agility. Readers hanker for an irrevocable alteration of the literary mindscape on the transformational shift. Sometimes it flies, sometimes it falls diddly splat. As Aristotle noted, the "aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance." Damned straight.
Beneath the surface, in other words, it's all about the InterNetWorking at the axis where interior meets exterior: There's the "in" or the "out." The ins and outs. And, of course, the ol' in-and-out. Getting them right is a mean challenge few master. That's why poetry attracts more than its fair share of pikers and poseurs, those incapable of articulating the "inward significance" of worlds-in-waiting beneath the skin of broke-down days.
Nevertheless, recent books by Newfoundlander Mary Dalton and bilingual poet (one of Canada's few) Nathalie Stephens take up the challenge.
Dalton's Red Ledger opens with a teaser from Selima Hill: "My nipples tick / like little bombs of blood." This speaker raucously woos the piano man: "What sort of a woman would you fancy, Nelson?" Possessing the rhythm of a sea ditty and the charm of a love-call from a woman to a prospect, it appears to head towards bodice-ripper territory.
Quickly, the tone of the book turns serious. The second poem concerns itself with shorthand, Golden Bough, blood-ritual images, while a subsequent entry dekes into car-wash territory and features one cranky spit-and-polish man. Does he occupy the sacred or profane spheres, this misery monger with a power hose and an attitude snarling at passing cars?
Next, a narrator ruminates upon "engorged breasts" — the salt mounds in St. John's harbour encased in plastic bras awaiting winter. The light side of Red Ledger remains consistently playful. Local lore? Tick. Local colour? Tick. A dialectics of talk? Tick. In fact, associational insets, temporal vignettes, and narrative riffs often as not amuse and entertain.
The dark side? There's a good deal of staunch sentiment surrounding history, language, politics, and culture under siege in Newfoundland, alongside the lousy rap dealt Newfoundlanders in recent decades. Preaching, propaganda, or poetry? Readers define themselves in the act of deciding which applies, a nifty grift, if nothing else.
A poem titled "The Great Big Sea and Lost Speech" laments the fisherman diminished. A once-vibrant human being is now unceremoniously reduced to an abstract entry in a red ledger (thanks largely to market forces, corporate factors, the great divide, and the bottom-line mentality of the balance sheet). Not surprisingly, media come in for a drubbing; here, even The Globe and Mail gets fingered:
. . . It was the radio, the stock reports,the shipping news, leaders, glib,with dollar signs burningwhere eyes should be.It was the TV, Globe and Mail,deficit, profit and loss . . .
Surely this is a fate all must confront as psychological space, cultural niche, and human mercy threaten to collapse under the staggering weight of globalisation. Brief, effective, and keenly personal, the poem is a scathing documentary of the slaughter of a way of life. As such, it speaks to anyone who once had a way of life to lose.
Along similar lines, pieces such as "Lies for the Tourists," "Lies for the Newfoundlanders," "The Labradorians," and "A Litany to be Said by Newfoundlanders" address vanished cod stocks, poisoned seabirds, Newfie jokes, Hibernia money, the McMurray tar sands, and Confederation in one fell tumble, illuminating the kind of blackness of mood permeating dread made manifest.
Talk dread. Talk dreary. Talk darker than dark. Then imagine: Darker than even this darkness, in an entirely different and disturbingly solipsistic fashion, is Nathalie Stephens's Touch to Affliction, an allusion, one hopes, to Left-Coaster Daphne Marlatt's Touch to My Tongue. (Nope.)
In form, it belongs to the po-mo pop, snap, and crack genre of poetry, one deserving of its own subgenre: Osteo-poetics. (Almost.) Obsessed with splinter, shatter, and bone (but no way near as splendorous as Montréal's Nicole Brossard working the same material), Stephens is also enamoured of cities, dust, and death, especially by drowning.
Add a dash of willful chaos combined with a kick of purposeful disjunction, and a reader might begin to feel the stirrings of a tiny tempest brewing in some terminally tarnished teapot, a sense of new afflictions rearing their uglies or, perhaps, an inevitable free fall into meta-nothingness.
In one sequence, "My Thigh Grew a City," Stephens's various fixations collide:
I was to be a hermaphrodite. Caught in my own sex or inbetween. My thigh grew a city. My hands held a river.Someone walked through me. We all drowned.
Stranded helplessly on the page, telegraphically touching upon landscape, passion, gold, granite, books, body parts, and sleep, the fragment bespeaks a narrator desiring fracture of some nebulous and unspecified sort. Somehow, the city penetrates bone and the resulting wound yields to sound echoing into a small body. This small body, with "cringing" hands, sits on a stone step, says nothing until she says the word "nothing." Finally, somebody — it never is made clear who — weeps.
Sad, right? Not really, since the work entire possesses no emotional valence whatsoever. Beyond nothingness, if you will. It's hard to care less when desperately sparse poems offer no artful construction, no hope, no colour, no direction, and no narrative. All this word ploy obviously means something to its author. That's one and counting.
By the time readers happen upon "Our Languages are Infinite and Murderous," they may well feel they are going to choke if forced to digest the word "text" one more time. Without the linkages and sinew of meaning, coherence, and continuity, the bones (or words) are bound to scrape and grind in annoying fashion. And, guess what? They abso-deffo do.
Canadian poet and literary critic Judith Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed Adagios Quartet's BOOK III: Electra's Benison has just been named one of The Globe and Mail's TOP 100 BOOKS (2007). The Almaguin Highlands resident is currently completing Leonard Cohen, Master of Song (Dundurn Press, Fall 2008).
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