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Blueshifting, a poetry chapbook by Heather Kamins

David Barker — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:46:03 +0000

Blueshifting is a physics phenomenon – the Doppler effect applied to light: if the source of the light is approaching, the light waves get scrunched together so they have a shorter wavelength (higher frequency) which shifts them to the blue end of the colour spectrum. Redshifting is the opposite; it happens when the source of the light is receding. Please do not assume that I know what I’m talking about. I merely mention these phenomena because they frame a poetry chapbook by Heather Kamins.

While I’m leery of making too much of the all-powerful governing metaphor, there is a correspondence between the idea of blueshifting and the feel of these poems. Blueshifting (the phenomenon) involves a passivity – it assumes an observer who sits and does nothing while stars approach or drift away. Blueshifting (the poetry chapbook) also involves a kind of passivity: “The world / wheels toward the inevitable.” The sun rises and sets. Time advances. Meanwhile we sit and watch it happen.

With poem titles like Making Time, Devolution, Entropy, Relativity, Dark Matter, and with an epigraph from Carl Sagan, and references to Mastodons, petroglyphs and quantum states, one might expect to find a collection of science-nerd poems. But science itself has changed (and maybe rescued poetry in the process). We don’t live in a deterministic universe of Newtonian mechanics. Yes, “The world / wheels toward the inevitable”. But we live in a universe of unobservable observations and strange attractions. The path to the inevitable is not fixed.

One twist in the path, which maybe defies scientific analysis even more than love, is humour. Kamins keeps the all-powerful governing metaphor at bay with a gentle sense of humour and genuine wit. Eggcorns, for example, is a funny poem of malapropisms. And Devolution inverts our expectations by sentimentalizing garbage and smog and expressing indignation at the threat of an encroaching nature. And my favourite of the collection – Headspace – lulls us into a saccharine state of mind, sitting next to grandmother, perhaps on a farm, learning how to make jams or preserves the old-fashioned way, until we discover that this is a case of “borrowed nostalgia” and our narrator is, in fact, in a classroom making it all up.

Could this be a comment on the way poetry gets made? In the sometimes vitriolic debate about the merit of MFA programs, maybe one side of the debate rests on a case of “borrowed nostalgia”, projecting the good old days when poetry was a rustic pleasure passed on to us by our grandparents. Maybe this is Kamins poking gentle fun at the whole debate. And with beautifully crafted poems in a tight, cohesive collection like this, we’ll grant her that indulgence.

Heather Kamins’ web site

Upper Rubber Boot Books

Did Julian Barnes Invent Google?

David Barker — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:02:58 +0000

Futurist is not the first word that comes to mind when describing Julian Barnes. However, after reading Staring at the Sun, published in 1987, one wonders if he might not have enjoyed a fertile alternate career as a science fiction writer. The novel starts as a straight-up realistic account of a woman named Jean Serjeant born in the 1920′s, conventional parents, an eccentric Uncle Leslie of whom she is very fond, a flyer named Tommy Prosser who is grounded and billeted at the Serjeant house during the war, a stale marriage to a policeman named Michael, a timid son named Gregory. As the novel progresses, it promises a poignant reflection on life, mortality and the miracle of the ordinary … until we reach the final section and discover that Jean is now a hundred years old, which means that the novel’s present is sometime after 2020. From a 1987 point of view, the world enjoys as yet undreamt-of developments, including something that sounds a lot like Google.

Here is what Julian Barnes writes about the General Purposes Computer (GPC), a project begun in 1998 and released for public consumption in 2003:

The General Purposes Computer was begun in 1998 after a series of government enquiries. Previously, in the late eighties, there had been various pilot scheme which had sought to put the whole of human knowledge onto an easily accessible record. The Funlearn Project of 1991-92, with officially sponsored prizes and scholarships, had been the best known of these schemes; but its purity of principle had been impugned when it was linked to a government campaign to decrease the child-user percentage in state videogame parlours. Some had even accused Funlearn of didacticism.

Inevitably the early schemes had been book-oriented; they were attempts to create the ultimate, perfect library where “readers” (as they were still archaically known) could obtain access to the world’s accumulation of knowledge.

Although Barnes envisions this knowledge archive as a government initiative instead of a private endeavor, he captures something of Google’s aspirations, including a debate which he frames as a dispute between proponents of “Total Knowledge” and “Correct Knowledge”. It presages a concept that Jeron Lanier identifies in You Are Not a Gadget as “cybernetic totalism”, an ideological stance adopted by Google and many technologists: machine intelligence will arise as a natural consequence of an accumulation of knowledge.

In Staring at the Sun, Gregory pays frequent visits to the GPC and consults it almost in the same way Athenians used to consult the Oracle of Delphi. But the process proves frustrating:

Gregory didn’t want examples. That was one of the troubles with GPC: it was so full of information it always tried to give you as much of it as possible; like some party bore, it wanted to drag you away from your own interests and boast of its knowledge instead.

That sounds like Amazon with its useless book recommendations, or the 200,000 different links returned by a Google search. And Google promises to become an even bigger “party bore” now that it will be incorporating “information” from Google+ in its Search Plus Your World. What I find most curious about reading these passages is that Barnes reflects upon these developments with a note of irony while we, who now live it, have, for the most part, lost our ironic detachment. It is what it is and we accept it in all its absurdity.

10 Reasons to Like Li’l Bastard by David McGimpsey

David Barker — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:15:11 +0000

and by “Like” I mean “Like” as in feel great affection or affinity for, as opposed to “Like” as in click an up-turned thumb on a Facebook page.

1. The titles. Many of McGimpsey’s “chubby sonnets” should not be read without first pausing to savour the title. For example: “Song for Cardigans and Assholes.” Or “Death be not proud but, really, who could blame you? I mean, c’mon, you’re Death!” Or “Jesus loves you, but doesn’t love-love you; I mean He thinks you’re okay but He’s going through some things now and is not interested in something more meaningful.”

2. Canadians with gluten allergies (who have mourned their inability to drink beer during hockey games) can find solace in McGimpsey’s tender verse:

Certain despairs, like gluten allergies,
Should only (suspiciously) affect white
Middle class women or Canadians.

3. McGimpsey understands the cultural importance of Barnaby Jones like few poets speaking for our generation.

4. Novel titles. McGimpsey could have written a novel called “The English Patient Vs. Predator.” Sadly, he didn’t, but it would have made a great movie.

5. Cellphones and Facebook figure importantly in McGimpsey’s poems (although not as importantly as Barnaby Jones). “I paw my cellphone like a rosary” and “Before the iPhone arrived, we lived like pigs” or the confessional: “All those times I was ‘Maybe Attending,’ / I admit I wasn’t going to attend.” After I read those lines, I was seized by a fit of guilt and had to stop reading until I poured myself a drink.

6. His poems can be mined for writing advice. And why not? After all, David McGimpsey has a Ph.D. in English Literature and teaches at Concordia University. So, for example, in “Putting the ‘ah’ in ‘adjunct.’”, he offers us some shtick from Wayne C. Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction:

I wasn’t a full-time professor
But I still worked for the university.
I was a departmental mascot —
‘Skewy’ the Creative Writing Bee!

In that warm, itchy outfit for Skewy
I buzzed about the halls at big events.
I’d wave my arms and say, ‘Show, don’t tell,’
And, ‘Your craft will set the world abuzzzzzzzzzz!’

7. His poems can also be mined for aphorisms, although not the sort of aphorisms Zarathustra would cite from his cave on the mountain, more the sort of aphorisms that qualify as ‘gas-station wisdom’. “Like all fine cuisine, airport celery soup / achieves balance.” “Hell is other people’s taste in music.” “Those who think you can’t run / away from your problems just haven’t tried.” “You can’t buy Wrangler jeans at Versailles.”

8. McGimpsey shows you what it’s like to be a middle-aged man on the run from the things middle-aged men are usually on the run from. Except that running has become acutely disappointing since every place looks like the place before. They all have box stores and cheap motels and tacos and Pepsi.

9. The cover, designed by Evan Munday, features what appears to be the rare and exotic Jackalope.

10. If you are ever wondering what McGimpsey is up to in this book, a hint is only a click away. See, for example, this interview from Maisonneuve which includes the following statement:

My affection for American pop culture is, I think, unambiguous and, I assume, has been enjoyable for my best readers. A few times I’ve seen how this accounts for a misreading of my poetry which I’m sure will trail me to the grave: that is, when a critic takes contemptuous displeasure in an American culture reference and imagines I must hate what they have been conditioned to hate and therefore assume my goal is satire (I couldn’t possibly be saying I watch Family Matters, could I? I couldn’t really prefer Celine Dion to The Tragically Hip, could I?) and then wonder why my satires don’t seem to go far enough. I have no interest in apologizing for that or defending that as governing poetic conceit in the face of the myriad weepy grievances Canadian intellectuals have against the United States. After all, I do not write about American popular culture: I write about my life and American popular culture is the metaphoric vehicle through which the tenor of my life is moderated.

I admit, sometimes I get a burr stuck up my ass and rant about how the American elephant is going to roll over and smush my cultural mouse. Reading Li’l Bastard is like taking a laxative, unsticking my burr, reminding me to loosen up a little bit. Have some fun.

Follow @DaveMcGimpsey on twitter.

Buy the book from @coachhousebooks.

Murder in the Cathedral

David Barker — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:46:00 +0000

No, this post is not about the T.S. Eliot play, but about an episode I’m writing as my excuse to participate in NaNoWriMo – the discovery of a body in a church and subsequent revelation that the priest had been having sex with the victim (when she was still alive). My aim is to take this news story and embed a fictional adaptation of it into a larger novel I’m working on. The curious thing is that when I revisit the news reports, I discover that my brain’s faulty memory has already done the adapting for me. For example, I could have sworn that the victim was a prostitute. I could have sworn that the priest had reached out to her as part of some kind of pastoral program. I could have sworn that the murderer, the custodian, had been motivated either by a desire to protect the priest from the corrupting influence of a prostitute, or by jealousy springing from some homoerotic rage, or both. It turns out there is no way to come up with any of this from the facts. It turns out it all comes from my own sick brain.

That’s not entirely true. Stories seem to fall into patterns all their own. Like sentences, they have a native syntax that determines outcomes quite apart from facts and logic. In a sense, all stories write themselves. I think that’s why we can detect patterns in our own writing that belong to things that have gone before. In my “murder in the cathedral” I see a storied heritage. I don’t trace my plot back to T.S. Eliot’s fictionalized account of the very real assassination of Thomas Becket. Instead, I trace it to Yukio Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion which itself was inspired by the very real 1950 arson of a Kyoto reliquary called Kinkaku-ji. Mishima told the story from the point of view of the arsonist, Mizoguchi, a Buddhist acolyte, and he provides a careful exposition of the young man’s deteriorating mental health.

I find surprising similarities between Mishima’s story and the adaptation I have made of my particular facts. The similarities suggest to me that I have been unconsciously influenced by Mishima. First, there is the priest, Dosen, whom Mizoguchi has seen with a geisha. Second, there is the friendship with Kashiwagi. This friendship follows a type that appears throughout literature (and life for that matter) – the co-dependent relationship between a dominant personality and a passive subordinate narrator. This may appear so often in literature because writers tend to assume the role of passive observer to other people’s actions. Mishima himself uses this type elsewhere. For example, in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the son, Noboru, plays subordinate to The Chief who leads a gang of boys and goads them to acts of violence. Implicit in the type, and perhaps more obvious in Mishima’s works, is a homoerotic connection between the dominant and the subordinate. The completion of violence produces a sexual release.

In my account, the custodian kills the prostitute, not because it produces a sexual release in relation to the woman he is killing, but because he perceives her as an obstacle in his relationship with the priest. The act of killing her removes the obstacle and any sexual release is then transferred to the priest.

Time for me to stop yakking about it and get back to writing.

No related posts.

Hogtown – my gift to the Occupy Movement

David Barker — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 22:20:05 +0000

Toronto had a dry run for the Occupy Movement. It was called the G20 Summit. There’s the same feel to things now as last year. Frustration. Disbelief. Anger. Overwhelm. A confrontational rhetoric that threatens to explode. A painfully disengaged middle class more inclined to sidle up to power than trouble itself with issues or long-term consequences. For me, there is the same taste of disgust I swallowed last time around – disgust at the sheer pig-headedness of capital and the readiness of paramilitary types to fall into lockstep. More than anything, I am struck by what might best be described as a collective failure of historical imagination. We wouldn’t be engaging one another in this way if we remembered.

When the crisis had blown over, I did what I always do when I’m trying to understand something that puzzles me deeply. I holed myself up with a pen and pad of paper and started to write. The result (which you may have encountered in previous posts on this blog) is a serialized novel called Hogtown. Since completing the final chapter, I’ve polished things up a bit. I thought it would be fitting to release the shiny new issue just as the Occupy Movement starts up on the site of last year’s G20 protests. I thought it would be fitting, too, to offer it for free.

I get tired of the capitalist hustle that turns everything into a resource for sale to some distant market, a machine greased by advertising and credit. Fuck it. My mind does not produce intellectual capital. And, at least in the modest space of my blog, YOU are not a consumer of that capital. And so, while I dedicate this latest novel to the protesters of the Occupy Movement, it is for everyone. It is a gift. It is an act of protest. Download and enjoy it as an ebook in a variety of formats from Smashwords.

Here’s the extended description I’ve posted there:

Hogtown is the story of a nameless girl from a small southwestern Ontario farm community. Now she works as an articling student at a respectably conservative law firm in downtown Toronto. Be nice. Don’t ask awkward questions. Look your best. Work hard. These are the rules she tries to live by. But the rules don’t help when her boss asks her to do research for clients – two police officers – charged with raping a sex trade worker. On the eve of the G20 Summit, news breaks of the victim’s suicide, but no one notices. All eyes are on the world leaders as they breeze into town. No one has time to bother with the local tragedy of a non-person. Enraged and confused, the articling student takes to the streets with other protesters. There, her detachment evaporates as she witnesses first-hand the abuses that power can inflict on the vulnerable. Even then, she believes she can walk away with a neat collection of intellectual nuggets while avoiding the messiness of taking a stand, getting arrested, detained, beaten up. And then, thanks to the police, her turn comes.

The title of the book comes from a nickname for Toronto which arose more than a century ago when Sir Joseph Flavelle, one of the city’s preeminent capitalists, began importing hogs, slaughtering them in Toronto, and exporting the produce throughout the Commonwealth. Conveniently, the name also reminds us of the thousands of police and paramilitary personnel who locked down Toronto’s downtown core at the end of June, 2010, and committed the largest mass arrest in Canadian history.

Thanksgiving: a turkey of a holiday

David Barker — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:54:27 +0000

I took this photo at the petting zoo in Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park. This is one ugly creature. Personally, I don’t see the appeal of slaughtering, plucking and skinning one them, letting it simmer in its own juices for five hours, then serving it up on a platter of bread crumbs and whatnot that have cooked inside its own body cavity, worrying all the time that you’ve cooked it long enough to kill all the bacteria that would otherwise give you food poisoning. In popular usage, we use the word “turkey” to imply losers and failures. Yet we still delight in eating them. Is the ritual of devouring these ugly beasts a symbolic re-enactment of our colonial past? The way we respond to losers and failures? I’m a descendant of the Puritan settlers who invented this ritual; it’s kind of important to me that I think this one through. It eats at me.

No related posts.

Graffiti in Victoria

David Barker — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 01:59:30 +0000

When people go on holidays, they like to see the sights, or shop, or lie on a beach, or dine in nice restaurants. Me? I like to hunt for graffiti. While I was in Victoria, I did a lot of walking and found graffiti everywhere. Tags. Bombs. Walls. Stencils. Even dust on bus shelters. Some of it was commercial graffiti–commissioned by the owners of the walls. Some of it wasn’t. It’s usually easy to tell the difference. See my flickr account for a large selection of things I found, mostly in Victoria, except for the auto racks which I found in a marshaling yard in New Westminster. The HYPE piece featured here (click the image to download a larger version) is a composite of four photos I took in a parking lot off Fisgard Street in downtown Victoria. You can see a tag for the KWOTA crew which I also saw this morning on a wall in downtown Toronto. I guess they get around.One morning, while I was photographing along Esquimalt Road, a man said to me: “They should bring back the lash for graffiti artists.” I have difficulty understanding the hostility many people bear for people who decorate walls. The lash? For spray paint? There doesn’t seem to be any proportionality between the punishment and the crime. In Toronto, Rob Ford appealed to this general hostility during his mayoralty campaign by promising to clean up the streets. Now, months after Ford launched his war on graffiti, citizens and community organizations are scrabbling after a dwindling pot of city funding. The arts in Toronto are acutely vulnerable. I see a connection between Rob Ford’s hostility towards graffiti and what is quickly revealing itself as his rabid philistinism. He just doesn’t like art of any sort. And that’s the curious thing about the man who would bring back the lash for graffiti artists. He still called them artists.

Vancouver Is A Strange Place

David Barker — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:49:26 +0000

After a month of driving to from in and around western Canada, I’m wondering what to do next. While on the road, I did as I intended, writing poems as I went. Maybe not as many poems as I would have liked, but enough that I have the raw material for a chapbook. Maybe that’s what I’ll do next. I’ll sift through my nearly 6,000 photos and blend them with my words. But what should I use for a theme? What organizing principle? I don’t want to collate a bunch of unrelated poems and throw them at the reader with another bunch of pretty pictures. Themes like “travel as metaphor for life’s journey” or a “celebration of a romantic wanderlust” are too obvious and hackneyed. I don’t want to impose something on my month’s output. Something will emerge if I sit patiently with it for a while.

I’m thinking this aloud as I open the stack of mail waiting for me on the kitchen table. I tear open an oversized envelope and find the 4^th issue of Poetry Is Dead, a Vancouver-based poetry journal, an anomaly in today’s precarious world of letters—a startup poetry journal that deals in the physical world instead of delivering itself through Ethernet cables and wireless networks.

I read the letter from the editor and discover that Issue #4 has a theme. (If it has a theme, then I should have a theme too.) The editor (Daniel Zomparelli) opens with “Vancouver is a strange place”. Coincidentally, Vancouver is one of the places we visited. We weren’t there long. We crashed on the living room floor at my wife’s cousin’s place for a couple nights. He played the perfect host, giving us tourists a flavour of the city, taking us through Hastings and Main to see all the junkies and prostitutes, taking us for breakfast at Sophie’s Cosmic Café near Kitsilano Beach. There was a walk on the beach and on into Stanley Park, shopping on Robson Street, topped off by a visit to the Olympic torch that famously failed, then a drive home through Gastown.

A quick survey of my poems shows a jump from Kaslo to Victoria. Not a single mention of Vancouver in between. The gap, I think, has to do with Zomparelli’s observation: Vancouver is indeed a strange place. It’s not that I had no impression of Vancouver. And I’ve been there before so I have an impression of it over time. It’s more that I’m overwhelmed by it. The place seems irreducible to poetry.

Part of what makes Vancouver a strange place (according to Zomparelli) is that no one actually comes from Vancouver. What is true of ordinary citizens is doubly true of poets. And so it becomes problematic to speak of “Vancouver poets” or of a “Vancouver poetics” since these don’t have anything to do with being born in a place. Zomparelli resolves this by speaking of “influence” and this becomes the theme for Issue #4.

I’m not exactly sure what he means by influence. Is he talking about the influence that poets writing and speaking in Vancouver have on one another and the world beyond the city limits? Call it political influence if you like. Or is he talking about the influence of place? Call it geographic influence. I don’t think the poet exists who isn’t influenced by place and the particular details of local geography. It infects the imagination and oozes onto the page. Or maybe it’s influence in the other direction—kind of a dialogue with the place—where the poet responds to the place they inhabit and it listens and speaks in turn.

Throwing Issue #4 in dialogue with Vancouver and with all the other places I passed through during the month of September, it dislodges the sliver of a theme. I think of belonging. What does it mean to belong? Do we belong to a place? What happens inside us that makes us feel sufficiently at ease that we can say: I belong here? Where is here? In this place? In this body? In this relationship? In this legal status? In this coffin?

Place is like body. We who are schooled on a diet Western thought tend to treat both place and body as accidental features to an essential thinking consciousness. Our identity is nowhere. It is a numinous product of our rootless minds. Place is irrelevant to matters of identity. Labour is infinitely mobile. The ground is plastic and can be reformed to any shape we please. Our plants don’t need soil anymore. If Google had its way, we’d deposit our lives in server farms and live as electronic pulses.

Being Canadian affects how I think about belonging. In a former colony federalist state of mostly immigrant citizens, belonging requires constant negotiation. I belong in Canada, but on a boat ride on Mud Lake in central British Columbia, I felt as foreign as the Dutch and German tourists we shared our boat with. The Dutch couple seemed surprised to learn that our home is 4,500 km away. Even so, in their eyes, we still “belong” here. But in our eyes, belonging as citizenship is an abstraction that is meaningless without the continual interplay of the local.

This is a sampling of the concerns I hope to tease out as I pass my road trip poems through the thematic filter of belonging. I hope to have some kind of artsy-looking chapbook with glossy photos ready in the new year. Maybe I’ll charge money for it. And then, when you pay me money, it will belong to you.

Vancouver McDonald’s Olympics 2010

The Canada Poetry Challenge

David Barker — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:48:54 +0000

When I was nine, my brother and I climbed into the back seat of our parents’ Ford LTD station Wagon, the model with the fake wood paneling on the doors, and we spent the summer driving across Canada and back. We planned to camp and my dad built a wooden clap-trap roof rack to hold all our camping gear. Anyone who knows my mom will understand how hopelessly optimistic it was to suppose that we’d get her to sleep in a tent. Most of the holiday involved conversations that began with “There’s a nice looking campground” and ended with “Wait here while I go get us a room”.

For me, it was a voyage of discovery. At the Calgary Stampede, I discovered that I needed glasses. There was supposed to be a man dancing on top of a hundred foot pole but I couldn’t see the pole never mind the man. And I discovered that I had food allergies. I ate something I shouldn’t have and was seized by an uncontrollable urge to empty my bowels. This happened at a camp site during a thunderstorm and I did my deed squatting in a field while my dad held an umbrella over my head.

Almost forty years later, I intend to retrace my path, this time without any kids and without any tents (and hopefully without any squatting in fields during thunderstorms). Instead of a Kodak Instamatic, I’ll be shooting with an Olympus DSLR. Instead of calls home from roadside pay phones, I’ll be using an iPhone. And instead of driving in a Ford LTD with V8 engine and 8 mpg, we’ll be driving a Prius with a 3^rd generation hybrid engine which gets 70+ mpg.

To give our undertaking some perspective (for the benefit of readers from Europe), leaving from Toronto and driving through Ontario to the Manitoba border is like driving from Penzance in the southwest corner of England to Wick in the northeast corner of Scotland and halfway back again. And that’s just to get to the next province!

Lady Tweedsmuir

Seventy years ago, Lady Tweedsmuir wrote about our country in a slender volume which bears the highly inventive title Canada. Reading it today feels a bit like an exercise in anthropology – observing the attitudes of colonizers to their subject lands. She opens by observing that “It is necessary for anyone who wishes to understand a country first to study her history…” I’m inclined to think this is especially true of people who use that history to congratulate themselves: what fine people we British are for having spawned such a civilized colony!

Here are some of Lady Tweedsmuir’s observations about our country:

Ontario

“There are great forests in Northern Ontario. In the winter the train passes through unending aisles of what appear to be Christmas trees, their roots deep in snow. In summer you see the vivid green of the treacherous muskegs, an occasional wooden shack, with a flutter of washing on a line, varying the monotony.”

She goes on to describe it as a “curiously savage country”.

The Prairies

“The prairie people rarely want to leave for other places in Canada. Everywhere else seems to them rather confined and cramping after the huge expanses to which they are accustomed. … [T]hey are a virile people who get a great deal of pleasure out of life even in hard times, and some of the ablest Canadian minds have come from the prairies.”

Vancouver

“Grave Sikhs with black turbans are to be seen walking in the streets, and stolid-faced Chinamen stand under cabalistic signs in front of their shops.”

Victoria

“The architecture of Victoria is pleasantly Victorian, with solid villas set in flowers and grass, and the only alien note is the Chinese gardener gravely watering precious seedlings.”

If this is the understanding of Canada that history yields, maybe I’ll take a pass.

Jen Hadfield

Another Scot who has written a slender volume on Canada is the poet, Jen Hadfield. Nigh-No-Place isn’t really about Canada; some of its poems were inspired by travels through Canada. Inspired by instead of about makes all the difference. Inspired by means the land talks to you. About means you do the talking. Lady Tweedsmuir sat in her train car and looked out through the window at the countryside whizzing past, then applied her Romantic imagination to the puzzle of characterizing the people who inhabited it. I’m not sure how Jen Hadfield traveled through Canada, but I suspect it didn’t involve wearing white gloves …

Canis Minor

He lies in wait like a little headstone
as dry as dry as all Alberta.
I stop to pat his scrubby mohican.
His tongue spools out his head like magma.

Over the Jamieson place
the stars are rising through a peacock dusk
nice and steady in the arid air.

He scours his butt and licks my elbow.
He falls back on his haunches like a telescope,
winking and blinking his sunstung eyes.

Last light. Mosquito bite.
I scrounge a log from the Jamieson woodpile,
an armful of pinecones for kindling.

I put the fire in.
I begin to write this nice poem about your dog.

It strikes me that a poet might be better equipped to capture something of a place that eludes the rhyme and reason of historical facts and figures. Call it a mood, a feel for a place, a numinous sense of its spirit.

The Canada Poetry Challenge

To write a poem each day for 28 days while driving through central and western Canada. It will be impressionistic. It will be whatever’s in my gut. It will be unpolished. And then, when I’m home and have the luxury of time to think in a more editorial way, I’ll polish them up, tie them to images, and produce an ebook – kind of a road-trip poetry scrapbook chapbook. Nerts to Lady Tweedsmuir.

Review: We Make Mud, by Peter Markus

David Barker — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:37:36 +0000

There is a book I read at the beginning of the summer that I can’t remember having read. I must have read it because it says so in the notes I’m in the habit of scribbling to myself. It mustn’t have been a bad book. I remember when I have read a bad book because, invariably, a bad book makes me angry for having misrepresented itself as a good book. At the same time, the book in question mustn’t have been a good book because I can’t remember it. I won’t name the book here. Thanks to the miracle of google, the author could well discover my comment and it might embarrass us both.

Maybe I can’t remember having read the book because my mental powers are waning. About ten years ago, they hit their zenith or nadir or apogee or whatever you call it, and my brains have been turning to mush ever since. Then again, it could have something to do with the writing (although, as I already noted, the writing was perfectly passable). Or, and this has been weighing on me for some time now, it could have something to do with the more general condition of contemporary fiction. In a piece called “Reader’s Block”, Geoff Dyer writes:

Some books, obviously, are a waste of one’s eyes. To feel this about airport blockbusters is perfectly normal, but I feel it is beneath me to read Jeanette Winterson, for example, or Hanif Kureishi. In fact, most so-called quality fiction that is story-driven seems a waste of time.

In the same paragraph, Dyer uses a surprising (for Dyer) economic term—”opportunity cost” to describe why he resents much of what he reads, or why he avoids reading altogether. If he has to read a perfectly passable work of fiction, it keeps him from reading something good.

James Wood has a term to describe the “quality fiction” that Dyer decries. He calls it “commercial realism”. It’s the stuff you find vying for shelf space at the entrance to your local big box book retailer. It’s good. It’s solid. It’s safe. It’s utterly forgettable.

What else is there to read? It can be difficult to imagine what an alternative fiction could be or could become without having examples of it ready-made and thrust into our faces. To produce alternatives to commercial realism, or whatever you care to call it, writers need space to experiment. Or maybe what they need is space to play. Play incorporates experimentation, but experimentation doesn’t necessarily incorporate play, and both seem important to the growth of fictional forms. In the context of experimentation and play, the notion of creating space has mostly to do with an allowance for failure. If something doesn’t work, do we subject the writer to a critical crucifixion, as often happens in the world of commercial realism, or do we treat it as part of a larger process? And if something does work, how do we know?

We like to use the metaphor of the sandbox to describe the play of writers who have strayed from the big box conventions. But some of those writers use mud puddles. Take Peter Markus, for example. His book, We Make Mud, is one big mud puddle. Released today by Dzanc Books, We Make Mud is a collection of short pieces about “us brothers” who live beside a dirty muddy river where they fish. They cut off the heads of the fishes they catch and they nail the fish heads to a telephone pole. There is an idle steel mill on the other side of the river and that is where their father used to work. “Us brothers” create Girl from the mud. There is also Boy and a mother lurking somewhere in the background. There is the threat that the parents will sell the house, but “us brothers” are death against moving because their lives are wrapped up in the dirty muddy river. Sometimes, to keep from moving, they nail each other’s hands to the telephone pole where the fish heads are nailed.

The stories are told in a language that has a recursive quality to it. Certain phrases crop up repeatedly until they acquire an almost liturgical tone. For example, whenever the boys look at one another, we have some variation of this: “There was this look that us brothers, we sometimes liked to give each other this look. It was the kind of a look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look.” We Make Mud is sublimely non-linear. If it were music, maybe it would be a theme and variations—recurring bits that undergo subtle changes from one section to the next.

The writing has a distinctive linguistic quirk, maybe to convey the fact that the telling of this mud comes from children. It’s what I call the “I know thee who thou art” syndrome (from Luke 4:34), an acute piece of bad translation in the King James version of the Bible where the translators used the object of one phrase even though it was implied by the relative pronoun that introduced the next phrase. Children do this kind of thing all the time but lose the habit as they grow up. Markus uses that linguistic habit to evoke the childlike out-of-time way of telling things that “us brothers” carry almost to the end of the book.

I say “almost” to the end of the book, because just as the book is ending, we catch a glimpse of “us brothers” as men, come back to sit by the river and argue about which of them Girl liked best. The scenario has an almost mythic quality to it – a place of idyllic harmony is shattered by a discord sown, not by the parents who always had the power to shatter things by selling the house, not by the river which once dried up, but by the brothers themselves and, more to the point, by something they created from their own imagining. Girl goes one further by suggesting that the brothers are deluded if they think they created Girl; it’s Girl who created the brothers from the mud. It’s your basic Frankenstein story, only told through the eyes of twelve-year-olds.

Like Frankenstein, We Make Mud can be read as a reflection on creativity. The mud is sometimes used to hide things, sometimes to protect things, sometimes to create things afresh. Writing is like that too.

So is We Make Mud any good? To be truthful, I don’t know. It’s different, which means the usual rules don’t apply. Ask me again in three months. If I remember having read it (as I expect I will), and if I still have a distinct impression of it (as I expect I will), then I’ll give it the nod. For now, let me say that it’s muddy. It makes good mud.

Prufrock’s Trousers

David Barker — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:19:04 +0000

In my grade 12 English class, I had to read T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‘. I took nothing from the class except the line: “Do I dare to eat a peach?” which I repeated over and over when we went down to the cafeteria. Sitting in my jeans, I paid no attention to the preceding lines: “I grow old … I grow old … / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” I had no idea what it meant and didn’t care. Now that I’m halfway to cutting a Prufrockish figure in my own right, maybe it’s time to revisit that line. I discovered an explanation of Prufrock’s trousers in a book called Good Taste, written by my brother’s neighbours, Peter Trifonas and Effie Balomenos:

Historically … and for some time after the introduction of trousers as we now know them, men would commonly roll up the bottoms by hand to keep them out of mud and water. The advantage of the knee breeches worn in the 18^th century was the fact that the hem was so high off the ground that they were not likely to be soiled. The stockings worn with knee breeches were much easier to launder than trousers. Good taste was thus created out of the very practical initiative of saving on the energy needed to wash a pair of trousers. Today, in the concrete urban metropolis, we aren’t concerned with trekking across muddy, unpaved city trails. Turn-ups are a matter of stylistic preference – not a practical way to keep trousers cleaner. In the early 1890s, the sporting country look with turn-ups was first tailored onto trousers, but even at the time, when the fashion was introduced, the response was far from positive. There was an uproar in the Houses of Parliament when in 1893 a certain Viscount Lewisham broke with the tradition of never turning up trousers and shocked the oldest and best-respected of statesmen by wearing turn-ups. However, by the early years of the 20^th century turn-ups had become an accepted variation on regular trouser bottoms, most significantly for the younger generation of well-to-do entrepreneurs and professionals. The older male population, however, did not adapt well to the new tastes of a younger generation. T.S. Eliot immortalized the dilemma in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, in which the aging, anti-heroic protagonist wonders: ‘I grow old, I grow old. Should I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled?’

A 21^st century Eliot might write something like: “I grow old … I grow old … / I shall ditch my cell for an iPhone.”

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The Tyranny of Love, by Nik Beat

David Barker — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:20:48 +0000

Nik Beat’s collection of poetry, The Tyranny of Love (Seraphim Editions), is the first of a stash I’ll be sampling over the next few weeks. As mentioned in my previous post, I found this book at The Book Band booth at the Mill Race Folk Festival.

Nik Beat is a Toronto area poet who, among other things, hosts Howl, a radio show on CIUT FM featuring spoken word and music performers. Listen to his current show here and previous shows here.

There is a lot you can infer just from the cover of his book. First, the name: Nik Beat. It’s an inversion of beatnik. It throws the word on its head. He does this a lot. Take his poem, “the hand that cradled the rock”, playing with a familiar expression, (but grafting to it a religious allusion – Peter, the rock).

Nik Beat (both the name & the poet) is funny, too. In “girl with a cigarette”, we imagine a horny guy desperate for the girl in bed beside him. But she goes on and on about environmental issues and causes and whatnot, all the while, filling the room with cigarette smoke – a toxic smog that chokes the guy and makes his eyes water. When she gets up to go to the bathroom, he’s relieved. Or there’s “My Car” which imagines a typical twenty-something car worshiper who, maybe, uses his car to compensate for other shortcomings … auto-eroticism? The poem unfolds like liturgy: “I’m going to drive my car / I’m going to fill up my car / I’m going to wash my car” and so on to the inevitable brainless disaster that forces him to write off his car.

As his moniker suggests (and also his radio show, Howl), Nik Beat has an affinity for the Beat Poets. Some of his poems capture this affinity in their rhythm and the way they play associative games with the words, better suited to performance than paper. See, for example, “Ally on the line” with its tip of the hat to Timothy Leary:

Ally on the line
The phone’s my fix
Sit back relax
Pick up the receiver
Let her voice in
To play its tricks

Injecting her voice slowly
Languidly into my brain
Letting it flow sweetly
Through me yet again

I’m tuning in
Turning on
I’m going to listen
I’ve Ally to right my wrongs
Ally to conjure me a vision

A ghostly voice
Without form or shape
That tells me tales
Of sci-fi horror
And psycho-sexual lore

Her mind alights on mine
She’s a Sorry Teller
Ally on the line
With a sensual tenor

The book’s title, The Tyranny of Love, comes from a letter which Byron wrote in 1819 to the countess Teresa Guiccioli. It fits neatly with Nik Beat’s habit of turning things on their head or undermining expectations by inverting an idea. Love is supposed to free us, not enslave us. Instead of the soul leaving the body at death, “the body gets up in disgust and leaves the soul”. “[S]ometimes talk is cheap but actions are cheaper”.

But the phrase, the tyranny of love, points maybe ironically to an underlying formalism in the poems. It’s not just that they allude to Lord Byron and Timothy Leary and the Beat Poets. It’s that they are lit with a persistent concern for religious and spiritual questions, and not in some offhand way, either; these are the questions of an “insider” filled with doubt. Take the first poem, “God without the price”:

i want to love a god without the price
to be ruled by a thin king who casts
a shadow so slender so small
whose universal rain
gently falls

Just five lines into the book we have allusions to both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Matt. 5:45. In “a struggle with sadism at sunrise”, he imagines Jesus “writhing on wood” and suggests that crucifixion was necessary because “only when it hurts / does one draw a breath of belief / the air is no longer rank and foul with doubt” and concludes by imploring Jesus (?) to “please be silent / for danger / lies in words”. In other poems, we encounter the mind/body problem and the persistence of the soul, beauty, suffering and redemption, the place of women in the old Jehovah-dominated scheme of things (“women argue with Jehovah over property rights”), and ethics, though he doesn’t call it by that name (“god did not fashion you to be a soldier but a soul”).

The result is a provocative mix of pop and pathos.

Watch Nik Beat perform “God without the price”.

Indie Publishers at the Mill Race Folk Festival

David Barker — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:22:15 +0000

On Saturday, my wife and I went to the Mill Race Folk Festival in Cambridge, Ontario. I’ve never been to Cambridge before. It’s a horrid town. If you’re getting there via Hwy 401, you exit at Hwy 24 and drive south through a wasteland of big box stores. Every brand conceivable. I’d rather tie a plastic bag around my head and jump in the river than spend time there.

But then you arrive in Galt, which is the former name for the old downtown area. Enough of the old buildings remain to preserve the town’s charm. Bridges span the river. A breeze from the water offers a cool respite from the hot asphalt out in the land of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. Clearly, the small businesses are suffering, as they do in all small towns where Wal-Mart puts down stakes. There are vacant shops and the rest are offering their wares at deep discounts.

When we arrived at around noon, the local farmer’s market was packing up, and the festival was getting ready to launch. We had heard about the festival from a friend, Jack Cooper, who was sharing a booth with his partner, Deb. Jack has a small music publishing business called BerLen Music, and Deb does woven wheat. I picked up a copy of Jack’s CD, Land of Plenty, which you can buy or download via CDBaby. Followers of my blog will know Jack as the musician who set one of my poems to music. Jack is a gentle soul who cares deeply about people, and this comes out in his music. See especially his track, Jeremy, about an autistic child (who loves music). The festival features workshops, performances & sing-alongs by (mostly) local talent. And, of course, you can buy their music. Imagine! Tables of indie music! You can find the music online, too. For example, there’s Ouzo Power (I love the name).

Behind Jack’s booth, I discovered The Book Band, promoters for independent authors and presses in the Golden Horseshoe area (between Toronto & Hamilton). They had a table display of poetry from Seraphim Editions, sixteen titles in all, and each for two dollars! I took one of everything and will present some of them here in the next few weeks. I also picked up some fiction titles. All of these are available through The Book Band’s online store.

Sometimes I get caught up in the furor over tectonic changes in the publishing industry. It takes a Folk Festival like the Mill Race to remind me that much of this furor is driven by six and only six major international publishers. Just like the furor in the music industry has been driven by a handful of major labels. They remind me of Wal-Mart. They swallow up great swaths of cultural real estate, and they suck up a lot of attention from other worthy creatives. Think Harry Potter. Think Dan Brown. Stephanie Meyer.

Once you drive past all the big box writers and publishers, you find a rich local scene. Sometimes, you have to ignore all the noisy jump-up-and-down, notice me, notice me screaming and simply pay attention to what’s right in front of your eyes. It reminds me of grade school. In every class, there were always a couple kids who took up all the teacher’s time and energy while the other kids, the interesting kids, got neglected.

So, weighed down by bags of books and CD’s, my wife and I drove down to the river and along Water St., north again through the waste land to the Highway. As we took the on ramp to Hwy 401, we veered past the Wal-Mart and headed home to Toronto. There are ten Wal-Marts in metro Toronto.

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Review: Sub Rosa, by Amber Dawn

David Barker — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:38:35 +0000

I don’t know what to make of the novel, Sub Rosa, by Amber Dawn. I suspect my difficulty with this novel has as much to do with my personal expectations as with the novel itself. Those expectations come from a couple sources. First, there’s the author profile on the Arsenal Pulp Press web site which lists such accomplishments as the production of an “award-winning, genderfuck docu-porn, ‘Girl on Girl,’” and “director of programming for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival”. Even more pointed is her self-description in a shameless interview: “For clarity’s sake, when I say “myself” I mean a queer, kinky, femme, survivor, Canadian small-town born, poor, sex-worker, feminist with a strong passion for experimental artwork and transgressive identity-based art making.” With those two profiles in mind when I bought the book, I was expecting something a little more experimental, a little more transgressive. However, the book I read didn’t feel like a book written by a genderfuck docu-porn producer. It felt more like a book written by an MFA grad. Oh wait. The Arsenal Pulp profile mentions that Amber Dawn has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.

To be fair, Sub Rosa uses a wonderful conceit: it’s like Harry Potter for sex trade workers. Sub Rosa is the sex trade’s answer to Diagon Alley. It’s a magical place hidden from the rest of the city where a select group of pimps take their workers (Glories) to live as happy families while working the “live ones” who arrive each night like horny muggles. Little is a runaway teen “rescued” by a pimp named Arsen. She can enjoy the safety and perks of living in Sub Rosa with Arsen’s family of girls on condition that she work the Darkness until she earns her dowry. There, she is raped and beaten like all the other girls before her. But once she has $500 in hand, she takes her place in her new home and all the pain and suffering magically disappears. As Little settles into her new life, a pall comes over the secret community—a police car has parked at the entrance of their alley and they have to stage a “blackout” to protect their secret status. Driven to enhance her own position in the community, Little returns to the Darkness and, thanks to her magical abilities, restores Sub Rosa to its former life. In effect, Amber Dawn’s Sub Rosa is a happy-go-lucky, tongue-in-cheek paean to the countless girls who become invisible when they fall into the sex trade.

But why that tone? My immediate response is to assume that a transgressive conceit has been undone by a conventional execution. I had been expecting the language to be wild and unruly. Instead, what I read was controlled and measured.

The day I bought Sub Rosa, I was also sifting through the shelves of a used bookstore in Dundas, Ontario and stumbled on a volume of poetry, Echoes From Dusty Rivers, by Dannabang Kuwabong. As with Sub Rosa, I was drawn to Echoes because of the expectations it raised. As with Amber Dawn, the photo of Dannabang Kuwabong creates an impression. The bio tells me that Mr. Kuwabong was born in Ghana. A conventional person like myself, the victim of a liberal arts education, is always on the prowl for alternative voices and fresh expressions. “Ah,” I said to myself as I looked at Mr. Kuwabong’s traditional garb, “some authentic Ghanaian poetry.” (The only Ghanians I know wear suits.) Then I read more closely. The blurbs on the dust jacket were from a professor at McMaster University and a Hamilton resident. In other words, as I stood in a bookstore on the outskirts of Hamilton, I was holding the work of a local poet. What’s more, it was a generic work; reading further, I discovered that Mr. Kuwabong was an honourary fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program. I don’t doubt that the poetry is suffused with the poet’s formative experiences in Ghana. But I do doubt that the poetry is executed in a style that has anything to do with the culture of Ghana, whatever that might mean.

I wonder if Sub Rosa doesn’t succumb to a similar difficulty. It offers a good idea—a conceit as I called it. But the style of its execution is at odds with the world it reveals.

There is, of course, another possibility. Maybe Amber Dawn is using the clean middle-class MFA style to play up the kind of collective dissociative disorder that is necessary to maintain the illusion of pristine cities free of social challenges. Many of today’s modern cities (Toronto, for example) depend on magical thinking that treats great swaths of its streets with a cloak of invisibility. A bright, airy prose seems almost to satirize the point-of-view assumed by many municipal politicians. For the time being, I’m not prepared to say whether this is a deliberate strategy on the part of Amber Dawn. Let’s wait and see what else she can write.

10 Things I Love About Canada (and 10 that I don’t)

David Barker — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:57:25 +0000

Time to kick off some Pride-themed posts, and for two reasons: 1) this is the middle of Pride Week which will culminate in Toronto’s annual Pride parade on Sunday; 2) today is Canada Day which is cause for pride of a different sort.

Today marks the 144^th anniversary of Canada’s confederation, a time to celebrate national pride. I would describe myself as fiercely Canadian (the word fierce is cognate with the French word for proud), but I’m also fiercely ambivalent about being a Canadian. Here are some things about Canada that make me fiercely proud:

1. Multiculturalisme – the idea that difference is important and a reason to celebrate.

2. Québec – Once a month throughout my childhood, we would make the drive from Toronto to Montreal to visit my grandparents; for me, Canada is unimaginable without Québec.

3. Sense of scale – I’ve driven from one end of the country to the other. If you’ve never been here, you have no idea. It makes a person humble.

4. Granite – The Canadian Shield is enormous – all that bedrock right at the surface, which is why there are so many lakes here.

5. I’m sorry – in Canada, I’m sorry isn’t always an apology. Sometimes it’s a knife in the back.

6. Street hockey – National Hockey League? Whose nation? Whose hockey? The real hockey happens only after they shut off the cameras.

7. Moosonee – I love that there are still places on this planet you can’t get to by car.

8. 140 languages – That’s how many different languages you can hear in Toronto.

9. Civility – That thing about politeness is still true. But more importantly, it translates into an institutional civility. If, for example, I’m in an accident, I know I’ll be cared for.

10. Same-Sex Marriage – As you’d expect in a large country, there’s more space here to be who you are.

But Canada has a dark side too, which is why my pride is not unreserved. I came to understand this dark side at an early age. It was October, 1970 on one of our Montreal runs to visit my grandparents. We had to stop at the Québec border and pass a checkpoint. I remember the soldiers with their guns. I remember how they leaned in to the open window and questioned my father. The next day, a terrified parishioner came to my grandfather’s manse. She needed a place to stay. She was convinced there was an FLQ cell in her apartment building. I sat wide-eyed as the RCMP officers arrived and questioned the woman, then spoke to my grandparents. Trudeau had declared martial law. Long before Bush’s War on Terror, Canadians discovered how the fear of a terrorist threat can be used to dismantle civil liberties. Since then, the darkness has spread:

1. Afghanistan – The official line is that our soldiers fight to protect our freedom. At least that’s what Don Cherry tells us. If it weren’t for all his crazy-coloured clothes, I’d call him a brownshirt.

2. Athabasca – As global oil reserves dwindle, the pressure to develop this dirty dirty resource will only increase.

3. Mining – 60% of the world’s mining & exploration companies are based in Canada (Corpwatch). Some, like Barrick, have been implicated in gang rape as a strategy to clear land of local inhabitants in developing countries. That’s just the beginning of a long list of exploitative practices.

4. Asbestos – The Conservative Party refuses to recognize it as a hazardous substance (so we can keep exporting our carcinogens to developing countries).

5. NAFTA – local farmers can’t sell their strawberries because California and Mexico produce gets dumped here.

6. Clear-cutting (see NAFTA) – before the big logging companies started hacking down the Amazon rainforest, they cut their teeth on Canadian trees. I guess that’s why the beaver is our national symbol.

7. Residential schools. No one ever thought multiculturalisme might also apply to indigenous peoples.

8. Stolen Sisters – Think we’re a nice bunch of peace-loving people? Think again. We have our fair share of crazy serial killers — Robert Pickton, Clifford Olson, Marc Lépine, Paul Bernardo. But more disturbing is the fact that there are 520 native women listed as missing and presumed murdered. Almost no resources have been committed to locating these women. If you’re a woman and native, nobody cares. See Amnesty International’s Stolen Sisters campaign.

9. Conrad Black – There is a name for monied conservatives who preach a gospel of neoliberal deregulation. We call them criminals. Do ordinary Canadians make the connection between conservative political philosophy and men like Black? Hell no. Instead, we elect them to public office then act surprised when vast sums of money get skimmed from the public purse.

10. Celine Dion – I’m sorry.

This second list of 10 may seem like a downer for a post about national pride. Then again, in the word’s of Howard Zinn: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Enjoy a patriotic Canada Day.