I have volumes of poetry that once belonged to my grandfather and which had belonged to his aunt before him. Some are more than 100 years old, mostly falling apart, with fake gilt lettering on the spines – Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow. Back then, the rules for poetry went like this. The poetry wasn’t any good unless:
1) the poet was dead (a perverse kind of proof that the poetry had the power to stand the test of time)
2) it was leather bound (as proof of the publisher’s commitment to the dead poet)
3) it appealed to universal themes that would somehow improve us.
Yech.
Let’s bow our heads in remembrance of the good old days when poetry was universally anal, served as a mouthpiece for white cultural superiority, and was unafraid to admit that the appeal to universal themes was just a way to avoid acknowledging difference.
I’d like to think that after 5,000 years, we have at last lost our poetry virginity. Now, we aren’t so fucking uptight, and when we finally get in the motel room with Athena, we don’t pretend that what we’re about to do is somehow shrouded in mystery or holiness. After all, it’s not like we’re salmon. Once we”re done, we’ll get another chance to screw around with our poetry.
We should never go into the motel unprepared; there are props and lubricants that can make the experience a lot of fun, even if it never takes us to the mountaintop or lets us commune with the ground of all being. Here are some things we can bring:
1) An eye for particularity. We came from somewhere, right? So let’s be honest. Let’s share some of the gritty details. That’ll impress her.
2) A sense of humour. I’m not talking about the cheap one-liner, but something that rumbles deeper down, like the Buddha’s belly. Life’s absurdity shouldn’t lead us to an ignominious death in a car accident; it should unroll like laughter in a storm.
3) A childlike perspective. No, I don’t mean to invoke the idea of innocence. Hopefully, the idea of innocence is as dead as the idea of poetry. n childhood, there is a chilling obverse to innocence that is a kind of savagery. Let’s leave aside the innocence and savagery of childhood and look to something like play instead. It is a suspension of fear, an embrace of foolishness, a critically uncritical eye.
Here’s a volume of poetry that breaks my grandfather’s sacred rules: Tiny, Frantic, Stronger. The person who wrote the poems is Jeff Latosik. He is not dead. The volume came out only this year, so it has not stood the test of time. The publisher, Insomniac Press, did not offer the poems in a leather bound volume with fake gilt lettering down the spine. And if reading this has somehow improved me, none of my friends has bothered to mention it. In fact, I’m in the middle of the worst head cold of my life. My immune system has been compromised. I blame the poetry. Nevertheless, none of these is a good reason not to read Latosik’s first collection of poetry.
What do you do when you”re a Toronto native and read a poem that opens:
A streetcar stalled on Howard Park
and Roncesvalles Ave. Passengers cleared,they fume in sunlight, waiting for a newer version
of the part that held their afternoon together.
Do you call the mayor and beg him not to scrap the streetcars in order to preserve the integrity of place in a poem? I seriously considered it. And what about the references to Queen Street West, College Street, the Darwin Exhibit, the field behind Mississauga Valley Public School? Or Freddy Krueger, or Tylenol-3, or an epigraph that quotes a search return from Yahoo! Answers? Or a Sonnet to Fake Puke?
Whatever happened to Xanadu? Or Tintern Abbey? Or the Light Brigade? Or Hell, for that matter? (Note to self: If Tennyson were alive today, he’d write: “Charge of the Lite Brigade” and hire Valerie Bertinelli to do a reading for his YouTube video.)
Even from the first poem, we can see where this is headed. How the Tiktaalik Came onto Land begins with an amphibian crawling from a primordial ocean and ends with a girlfriend walking out and leaving behind her keys to the apartment. Isn’t that how it always goes? The major events of our lives strike us as pivotal developments in our emotional evolutions – until somebody describes them for us; a well-intentioned friend says: “Don’t worry, there’s plenty of tiktaaliks in the sea.” If we’d rather no one saw us cry, then our only choice is to laugh.
In An Unauthorized Account of the Downtime of the lovely Couple we have this exchange:
I imagined my life differently, she said.
No matter, he said, when I drink
I’m the tallest man in Toronto.
…
You have too many tiny apartments, she said.
It’s an epic for ants. But never turn your back on small creatures. Attila the Hun was reputed to be a dwarf and look what he did to the Romans. Napoleon’s penis was 4 cm long and he overcompensated his way through most of Europe. In Latosik’s Cockroach Elegy he writes of those persistent insects “whose lineage took the long train from the Cretaceous, / who continue scurrying away from us, tiny, frantic, stronger.” It’s a paradox he rephrases in Centipede Elegy: “they’ll go on precisely / because they don’t matter.” The oppressors don’t die in revolutions; they collapse beneath the weight of their significance and leave the oppressed to continue. The colonized conquer by teaching their masters simpler ways to see the world. The global becomes so general it’s pointless, and cries out to the local for the kind of meaning that’s only possible in particular details. James Wood has noted this phenomenon in the context of fiction but I think it applies to poetry too: in today’s writing, nothing is real unless it is couched in seemingly irrelevant detail. And so we have:
A little rain, a sudden gust.
That plastic watch we found ticking
away to its imperfect end.
Someone we knew walks into our thoughts
while a car drives off, a dog barks,
a woman feeds the smashed pigeons.
A succession of detail feels like a flag on the moon, staking a place to make it real.
On Basketball captures the tension between local and global, first imagining the early years when James Naismith used peach baskets for hoops and players climbed a ladder each time they scored: “Maybe retrieval was the silent mantra / that peeled back the days of boredom like a callous.” Things changed, of course. They cut holes in the bottom of the baskets. They standardized the game by writing a book of rules. A professional league evolved. It became an Olympic sport. Basketball went global: “Until the storm of limbs and taunts that sweated / upcourt was claimed by a new geography – “
It’s like the tiktaalik, only instead of dragging itself onto dry land with a flukish proto-limb, it throws up a basketball.