My chief complaint about much of the (Canadian) poetry published in the last couple of years is that it assumes I’m a qualified psychotherapist. I’ve grown wistful for the days when the cliché du jour had poets smoking joints in garrets, starving but fashionably appointed in their berets. Today, poets sit in clinical offices, leafing through back issues of Reader’s Digest, waiting their turn to lie back on a couch and go on about childhood traumas, the challenges of personal identity, grief for the loss of mother and how that loss has left them without the anchor of unconditional acceptance they so desperately need while facing the challenges of personal identity except, of course, to the extent that the same anchor may have inflicted the previously mentioned childhood traumas. As a reader forced to assume the role of white-coated clinician, I’m tempted to write letters to their publishers recommending mindfulness meditation (everybody’s doing it, these days, even Amazon) and, in the alternative, SSRI’s since there’s nothing quite like poetry by glassy-eyed people who wear vapid smiles.
Maybe I’ve grown cynical, but I’m inclined to think most contemporary poetry reflects an effort to monetize therapist-assigned journaling projects. The only flaw in my theory is that nobody ever made money publishing poetry. Even so, it may offer reputational benefits that poets can leverage in other areas of their literary careers. The current trend of poetry-as-monetized-journaling-project plays to a post-post-Romantic trope about what poetry is supposed to do. Drawing on the M. H. Abrams mirror/lamp distinction, most of the stuff we read today is emphatically of the lamp variety, shining forth the inmost feelings of the poet, only nowadays the inmost feelings of a poet get shoved through the psychoanalytic/identity politics blender before the poet can even begin to articulate what they feel. Without validation from therapists or personal cultural heroes, most poets couldn’t tell you how they feel about their breakfast. It reminds me of a story I heard about the man who had no idea how he felt when he woke up until he’d taken his morning dump and examined the result for firmness and texture before he flushed.
I’m too much of a coward to name names so, instead, I offer an example of poetry that sails against the prevailing winds. See what I did there? I used a maritime metaphor to introduce the work of a maritime poet. St. John’s based Michael Crummey has just released a new collection of poems called Passengers. Unlike most other collections published this year, this one doesn’t trouble us with the poet’s personal wallowing and, my god, it arrives like a breath of fresh air! Crummey turns to a number of strategies that take him far wide of the usual confessional let’s-treat-the-reader-as-surrogate-therapist mode.
For one thing, Crummey enjoys a playful imagination. In the first section of Passengers titled “You Are Here: A Circumnavigation”, Crummey plays with the conceit that the late Swedish Nobel laureate, Tomas Tranströmer, visited Newfoundland and Labrador. Tranströmer responded to his experience by writing a series of poems, and Crummey stepped in as translator. While the conceit is funny, the resulting poems have some heft, presenting local history and geography from the perspective of an outsider or (since we’ve all seen the musical) of someone who’s come from away.
This strategy warrants a couple comments. First, the translation conceit, although humorous, is not so far-fetched. Consider George Steiner’s observation that virtually all language engages us in acts of translation, even in the case of conversation between two native speakers of the same language. It is a paradox of the medium that even as it allows us to communicate with one another, it simultaneously underscores the fact that each of us lives in a condition of alienation. You long to communicate the “thisness” of your experience, and I long for the communion that a perfect apprehension of such “thisness” would afford, but inevitably your communication and my apprehension fall short. Even as I write these words, meaning leaks away, and I feel I have failed you in some way because my words represent something less than the full import of my intentions.
Your house and its belongings, your mother tongue,
the accumulated effects of a life
sit at anchor overhead,
listening for a word winging from beyond
the ocean you crossed to be here.
The imagined Tranströmer is, after all, a tourist, and the very act of tourism brings feelings of alienation to the foreground. There is the disconnect between the idealized travel brochure descriptions of a destination, and the sense of disappointment on arrival where we encounter “the bowl of St. John’s harbour/rank with four hundred years of sewage.”
Second, the “translated” poems concern themselves principally with sense of place and the accumulated stories of that place. Using the M. H. Abrams tool, these poems are more mirror than lamp. They don’t engage us with the internal experience of the poet. Instead, Crummey presents the external experience of physical space. He opens by imagining Tranströmer‘s plane trying to land in a crosswind. Immediately following the poem is a map of Newfoundland. Then the poet visits Signal Hill, the Southside Hills, Water Street, George Street, Cape Spear, the Bell Island Ferry, and so on. Curiously, a sense of personal relationship to the place one occupies is no less important to a sense of identity than the usual psychotherapeutic concerns. We are of the land. We are literally of the land. And we will return to the land. Or the water. We’re talking about Newfoundland, so we can’t forget about the water.
People find themselves in the landscape. In some small measure, Crummey translates the experience of that landscape. His poems take their own shape, like maps, like cliffs overlooking the Atlantic. We visit his poems as tourists and, for the short time of our visit, we ask the question that all tourists ask: what would it be like to live here? We try to take that leap into the poem and then, when our time is done, we make our way home.
In the second section, “The Dark Woods”, Crummey travels in the opposite direction. Instead of imagining a visitor to his native ground, he becomes the tourist, visiting various European cities, especially Eastern European cities that have been the sites of historic turmoil. Now it is his turn to make that empathic leap into another place and ask: what would it be like to live here? As before, the collection begins with an airport, this time, Heathrow. Then moves on to Belfast, Warsaw, Innsbruck, Stockholm, Gdansk, and so on. Now, he translates for us the experience of being an outsider, emblematically figured in the fact that when he orders a Scotch in a Belfast bar, the barmaid serves him a pint of Guinness. The moral, I suppose, is that even if you’re not local, you at least have to make an effort.
Finally, we have the third section, “Devilskin”, when the devil walks among us. This doesn’t take us as far from the first two sections as we might at first suppose. After all, the Devil is a tourist, too. As the stranger among us, the Devil regards the local scene with a detached and paternalistic eye. So, in “The Devil’s Cure,” the itinerant doctors aboard the charity vessel that visits remote ports once a season deliver a kind of healing that is indistinguishable from sadism.
They preached hellfire between surgeries or drank with the locals, trying to scalpel their way into the skirts of some young thing.
Everyone dreaded their diabolical visits.
And again, in “Devil’s Footprint”:
He was the only stranger on the floor and he monopolized the youngest and prettiest all night. Ruining those innocents with his otherworldly grace, his black licorice breath.
In a way, the “Devilskin” section can be read as the limit case for tourism. Taken to its extreme, the impulse that drives tourism is the same impulse that drives colonialism. That takes us into the territory of rank evil and the last handful of Crummey’s poems. The most striking of these, at least for me, is “Lucifer at Sobeys Square”. The devil goes grocery shopping and there, between the aisles of produce delivered fresh year round, he hears the cries of orphans. The store sits on the site of a Catholic orphanage where children lived and died in misery:
He reconstructs the hellish layout as he pushes an empty cart along the aisles, walking those hallways in his mind. The mewl of weeping innocents follows after him like the stench of boiled cabbage.
No, Michael Crummey doesn’t dig deep inside his personal emotional life and then hurl it onto the page like the poetic equivalent of a Jackson Pollack painting. Instead, he leaves it to us to dig deep inside ourselves for emotional responses to his writing. Abused children crying from beneath the floor of a grocery store? Who wouldn’t feel something in response to that?
More reviews of books by Michael Crummey: