winter water blue melt backlit
life suddenly in thin chemise
steadfast
in questions and old silences
in the puzzle of proper nouns
and barking city: February
slow eyelashes that beckon to love
and spinning tops
foliage of word for word
gentleness that evades meaning
plunge into the dark
with metronome
Notes on the Poem
The 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize judges noted that Nicole Brossard "has always shone an investigative light on every word that comes to her." The judges go on in the citation for Notebook of Roses and Civilization to note that those essaying to translate Brossard's work have high standards to reach, but they conclude that Robert Majzels and Erin Moure have done so very admirably. This piquant portion of "Apparition of Objects" illustrates their achievement well, and is well worth visiting again.
Individual lines and phrases taken on their own, with no assumed relation to the lines preceding or following, are pleasurable and evocative fragments unto themselves. This one is refreshing:
"winter water blue melt backlit"
... and this one is startling:
"life suddenly in thin chemise"
... and this one is alluring:
"slow eyelashes that beckon to love"
The poem's brief, uncluttered lines, virtually devoid of punctuation, allows each word to seem to breathe expansively on its own. Perhaps Brossard/Majzel/Moure's intended effect is best captured in the line:
"foliage of word for word"
Perhaps words linked together in a certain order force a certain dense or tangled meaning, and it's only by "plung[ing] into the dark" unknown and setting a new rhythm or approach (whatever the metronome might signify) can those words be invested with new meaning.
I’d have liked to go to the corner
café, to watch the cold file by while I’m
in the warm, or even to make love …
but bombs are raining down on Baghdad
this evening, my friends, I’m going to bed
early because the dark is too thick. I’ll try,
contrary to what’s usual in dreams, not to let
myself be carried by waves, nor hunt
for my key. I’m going to try to sleep,
I believe, as children do
there’s a time in autumn when the
trees change their nature, and
wake up beyond
matter; then one sees them come back to
their ordinary selves
Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week choice comes again from the seven works on the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. This week, we have the pleasure of pondering a selection from Time, wherein Sarah Riggs translates poetry originally written in French by Etel Adnan.
Many past Poem of the Week selections have explored dreams or have unfolded in haunting and dream-like fashion, including "Dream in Which I Am Separated From Myself" by Kate Hall, "Carpets" by Anne Simpson and "OUR LITTLE CIVIC IS TOTALLED LOVE" by Phil Hall, among others.
The narrator of "I'd have liked" is conjecturing about what they would have liked to do if they weren't in the midst of a catastrophe. As "bombs are raining down on Baghdad", this could mean they are present in the midst of an invasion, or they could be distressed from afar that the invasion and its devastation are occurring. That they would like to be at the café
"to watch the cold file by while I'm
in the warm, or even to make love"
adds a disconcerting note, suggesting they are both physically and emotionally at a remove from whatever horrible thing is occurring.
What, indeed, is "usual in dreams"? Whatever is upsetting the narrator, going to bed to recover from or avoid it might be justifiable, but what of this notion of controlling whatever dreams might ensue once they hit the pillow? Lucid dreaming is dreaming in which the dreamer is aware they're in a dream, and might even feel they can exert some control over elements and outcomes of the dream. (We'll let you google "lucid dreaming" yourself, and judge what is useful information about this supposed phenomenon.) Is this what the narrator is trying to do?
The narrator does not want a dream where they are "carried by waves" or are "hunt[ing] for my key", no matter how palliative those dream subjects might be to the dreamer's concerns or pain. Instead, the poem's ensuing lines offer a clue as to what the narrator yearns for, concluding with ...
"then one sees them come back to
their ordinary selves"
When beleaguered, it feels as if one is coping with waking dreams that are nightmares. It makes sense, then, to try to sleep, to then wake from that frustrating or depressing state. It equally makes sense, in the sense of dream logic or lucid dreaming, to try to exert control over what can't be controlled. In its way, it's a type of optimism, however slight - isn't it? In just a few spare lines, Riggs and Adnan capture a rich panoply of states and emotions, ones we might be feeling at this very moment.
the truth?
is the white cursive issued from a brick chimney
is a skeleton in brown gabardine
wandering the underground city, an accent
adrift in its second language
over a b-side version of empire
i speak french. i am a sovereign state drifter
winter hinterlander with a mortgage
and expired aeroplan points, a vacation blazing
on the credit line
unnecessary to my history, my culture extracurricular
creole vernacular stutterer, i ride the metro
underground with my fur
collar tickling my chatter, metro shuttle station to station,
but i don’t matter, carapace of white earbuds contains my rude –
redemption, i go to work in the heart of a conquered
devotion, a thin mist descends over me
a blown surrender,
snow falls through me. it is always snowing inside me.
my hand is a blue fleur-de-lys torched by autumn
my sap is slow, it hardens glistening in its circuit,
the sharpness of pine and spruce tingles
on the yellow edge of my breath
i find refuge from winter in the hudson’s bay
boxing day sale. born in a corporation, i can’t pretend,
i was not born on the equator,
i died in the upholstered ease of a sedan, and here is my after, city blistered
gray by salt and winter, work in a tower, a payment plan carrying anonymous
class aspirations, and this
is my squalor, an abstract longing to cruise the foothills in a lincoln continental
hearse, bleached teeth chattering nonsense as the zero of winter ascends
Notes on the Poem
Again, our Poem of the Week choices this week come from the seven works on the recently announced 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. As we did the past two weeks, we are doubling your poetry pleasure by showcasing two selections. This departs from our usual weekly schedule to ensure that you get to enjoy selections from the entire shortlist before the accelerated 2020 winners announcement on May 19th. The first of two selections this week comes from Magnetic Equator by Kaie Kellough.
Earlier this year, Kellough offered CBC Arts a personalized tour of the neighbourhoods and areas of Montreal that shaped his poetry and life. Enjoy an intriguing, kinetic video version of the tour here:
This walk through Kellough's Montreal is not only fascinating unto itself, but it provides insights into aspects of this selected poem from Magnetic Equator. Just as Kellough hastens to do in his tour, the narrator of the poem almost immediately begins "wandering the underground city", as if irresistibly (magnetically?) drawn. Kellough reveals that the subway / metro was key to learning about his new home and, as part of that process, re-establishing a new sense of self: "When you move to a new place ... you have to disappear into it before you kind of re-emerge, forged in that new identity."
The poem suggests that part of gaining that new identity first involves fully losing oneself:
"i ride the metro
underground with my fur
collar tickling my chatter, metro shuttle station to station,
but i don't matter, carapace of white earbuds contains my rude -
redemption, i go to work in the heart of a conquered
devotion, a thin mist descends over me
a blown surrender"
but in that surrender, there is redemption.
In his tour, Kellough also points out a sculpted poem on a wall near the Mont-Royal metro station. "Tango de Montréal" by Gérald Godin, written in 1983, celebrates in down-to-earth fashion the early rising immigrant workers who keep the city's heart beating. Kellough's poem seems to connect with the protagonists of Godin's poem, with a harsh resolve that acknowledges "i go to work in the heart of a conquered / devotion" and
"i can't pretend,
i was not born on the equator,
i died in the upholstered ease of a sedan, and here is my after"
but also with determination to survive even as "the zero of winter ascends."
A sheet cake soaked in milk & left suspended. She had no decorations, so she placed a sugar bowl on top. She placed her man at the head of the cake & told him to close his eyes & relax: Lean back, mi rey, you deserve comfort at the head of my cake. She wanted to capture the cake before it was consumed, so she called her brother-in-law & asked him to stand behind the cake for good balance. She jumped on top of the cake, folded her legs like Minnie Mouse & told everyone to be cool, this cake was going to be in a movie. She was going to call it À la Mode & this was to be the opening scene. But there’s no ice cream, her man said. No, my body is the ice cream, she said & pursed her lips for the camera until her mouth became a dark wound. Her man, who adored her again for a minute, said: You’re so dumb, clean up this kitchen already, da asco. She waited for the hot water to run & poured a cap full of bleach in the sink. She cried: All my movies are no movies. All my movies are not mine.
Notes on the Poem
Again, our Poem of the Week choices this week come from the seven works on the recently announced 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. As we did the past two weeks, we are doubling your poetry pleasure by showcasing two selections. This departs from our usual weekly schedule to ensure that you get to enjoy selections from the entire shortlist before the accelerated 2020 winners announcement on May 19th. The second of two selections this week comes from Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico.
What revelations and connections unspool from the discovery that the striking characters on the cover of Scenters-Zapico's collection are the subjects of a 1976 photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr entitled "À La Mode". You can start to learn more about it here..
Photographer Gamboa (who appears in the photograph in question) and some of his artistic partners in crime, including Gronk and Patssi Valdez, who round out the trio in the photograph, were part of a conceptual art group called Asco. One of their ongoing projects was something called "No Movie", in which they created film stills for non-existent films. News outlets to whom the images were circulated apparently often fell for the deception, presenting the images and other materials as excerpts from real films.
Asco's artistic mischief, which also manifested itself in graffiti, murals, performances and more, was a protest against mainstream culture, media and events of the 1970s and 80s, including the Vietnam War. Asco's projects and how they were executed were also an assertion of counter-cultural movements, particularly of the Chicano Movement in East Los Angeles.
How interesting, then, that "She" of "She is à la Mode" is making a cake that is going to be in a movie - or is it? But while she is envisioning this cake and how she was going to be part of it ...
"She jumped on top of the cake, folded her legs like Minnie Mouse & told everyone to be cool"
as being "à la mode" in the sense of being fashionable and stylish, her man has apparently misunderstood what this production is all about, and he wants his cake served "à la mode", with ice cream. And when that is not forthcoming, he dismisses what she is trying to create with
"You're so dumb, clean up this kitchen already, da asco."
"Da asco" in Spanish in this context could mean either "it disgusts me" or "you disgust me" - breathtakingly connecting the poem again to the photograph. Why did the collaborating artists also called themselves "Asco", meaning disgust, nausea or revulsion? What they have created is not disgusting, nor is what she of the poem was trying to create with her cake and cake-related performance ... but her cry of
"All my movies are no movies. All my movies are not mine."
suggest despair and abhorrence that what she is trying to create is not being recognized and respected.
beyond reason to one mass grave, one mass
silence. still, one silence his overcoat
pocket would not keep: eighteen months
passed before his wife unpacked that pocket
of earth – rifled through corpses, clothing – found
what remained. it was love. love rifled through
miklós’s silences – love gave his damp
last pages back to sunlight’s keep. oh yes
yes, it was love announcing in him, i will find my way to you, i will come back.
Notes on the Poem
We continue this week with Poem of the Week choices that come from the seven works on the recently announced 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. As we did last week, we are showcasing two selections again this week. This is a bit of a departure from our usual weekly schedule to ensure that you get to enjoy selections from the entire shortlist before the accelerated 2020 winners announcement on May 19th. The first of two selections this week comes from heft by Doyali Islam.
In a brief CBC interview, poet Doyali Islam packs in a plethora of rich insights into heft and her creative process, as well as potent advice for aspiring poets:
She reveals that as she was crafting the work that became part of this collection, she was asking herself a lot of questions, including "Where is tenderness in our world?" and "Where are resilience and resourcefulness in daily life?" The poem "poem for your pocket" answers those questions to both startling and heartening effect. In it, the poem contrasts the mundane contents of the narrator's pocket to the lengths to which Hungarian Miklós Radnóti went to hide messages of courage and love in his pocket, messages that gave powerful solace even as they outlived him.
In the interview, Islam also discusses her efforts innovating form in heft. She created the parallel poem form that she uses throughout the collection, with each poem displayed sideways on each page to accommodate two columns of poetry separated by a slim middle column. As readers will discover as they make their way through the collection, the relationship of each set of two columns varies from poem to poem.
In addition, Islam has worked with different variations of the sonnet, a timeless and surprisingly versatile poetry structure. Over the years we've been presenting the Poem of the Week, we've regularly marveled at the unique ways the sonnet form has been explored and wielded by Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets such as Rachael Boast, Paul Muldoon, Don Paterson, Hoa Nguyen and Mira Rosenthal (translating from the Polish written by Tomasz Rózycki). Islam is assuredly in fine company as she takes the form in directions that bolster her contentions about the power of poetry that's personal, so well illustrated in "poem for your pocket".
When you were first visible to me,
you were upside down, not sound asleep but
before sleep, blue-gray,
tethered to the other world
which followed you out from inside me. Then you
opened your silent mouth, and the first
sound, a crackling of oxygen snapping
threads of mucus, broke the quiet,
and with that gasp you pulled your first
earth
air
in, to your lungs which had been
waiting entirely compressed, the lining
touching itself all over, all inner – now each
lung became a working hollow, blown
partway full, then wholly full, the
birth day of your delicate bellows.
And then – first your face, small tragic
mask, then your slender body, flushed
a just-before-sunrise rose, and your folded,
crowded, apricot arms and legs
spring out,
in slow blossom.
And they washed you – her, you, her –
leaving the spring cheese vernix, and they wrapped her in a
clean, not new, blanket, a child of
New York City,
and the next morning, the milk came in,
it drove the fire yarn of its food through
passageways which had passed nothing
before, now lax, slack, gushing
when she sucked, or mewled. In a month’s time,
she was plump with butterfat, her wrists
invisible down somewhere inside
the richness of her flesh. My life as I had known it
had ended, my life was hers, now,
and I did not yet know her. And that was my new
life, to learn her, as much as I could,
each day, and slowly I have come to know her,
and thus myself, and all of us, and I will
not be done with my learning when I return to where she
came from.
Notes on the Poem
We continue this week with Poem of the Week choices that come from the seven works on the recently announced 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. As we did last week, we are showcasing two selections again this week. We know this is a bit of a departure from our usual weekly schedule, but we want to ensure that you get to enjoy selections from the entire shortlist before the accelerated 2020 winners announcement on May 19th. The second of two selections this week comes from Arias by Sharon Olds.
"Olds is a jubilantly physical poet, renowned (or notorious, depending on your point of view) for rejoicing in the body and its functions ..." This observation from a September 2016 piece in The New Yorker on Sharon Olds' then current poetry collection, Odes, sums up perfectly what she continues with characteristic gusto and spirit in Arias, abundantly celebrated in "When You Were First Visible".
Olds combines dizzying elements in this poem to plumb the depths of meaning of the ultimate intimate connection. There is the dramatic effect of the poem's line breaks, as almost every one teeters breathtakingly into the next image or feeling. There are startling and vivid characterizations of every sense, from:
"the first
sound, a crackling of oxygen snapping
threads of mucus"
to
"the milk came in,
it drove the fire yarn of its food through
passageways which had passed nothing
before"
In their citation for Arias, the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize judges described the effect powerfully:
"there is the heft of heavy lifting, of difficult emotional material moving like magma under enormous pressure to issue volcanically, irrupting into the moment of the poem. It is not just that the personal is political, the intimate here is revolutionary."
Beyond the sensory, Olds executes an intriguing shift partway through the poem, moving from addressing her child in the second to the third person ...
"her, you, her"
... and somehow, a shift that in another context might seem distancing is in fact, perhaps counterintuitively, intensifying. And from that intensity comes the volcanic eruption of Olds the mother's "new life", so beautifully tying together the lives of mother and child.
Find a place you feel comfortable and do it.
Purse your lips together teeth parted tongue
holding the weight of the roof
of your mouth. Inhale
release.
Find a place you feel comfortable with ghosts.
Rumor has it you might wake spirits
this way this talking
how the dead talk not in word
but sound.
Notes on the Poem
Over the next four weeks, our Poem of the Week choices will come from the seven works on the newly announced 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. We will be showcasing two selections per week, with one work in the fourth week. This is a bit of a departure from our usual weekly schedule to ensure that you get to enjoy selections from the entire shortlist before the accelerated 2020 winners announcement on May 19th. (And really, don't we all need double portions of poetry right now?) The first of two selections this week comes from How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy.
The citations offered each year by the Griffin Poetry Prize judges provide, in addition to resonating and unalloyed praise for the works before them, guideposts into those works. This part of the citation for How to Dress a Fish intimates intent and influences that seem to inform this particular selection, "Find a place":
"Bringing languagelessness into language, Abigail Chabitnoy’s How to Dress a Fish is an act of remythologizing and personal re-collection, a text of redress to the violence of US colonialism. Like the contronym cleave, like swallowed fish that appear whole, her poems assemble a narrative of displacement and emergence, of that which is half-revived and half-buried, to address instability and unify across divides."
There is subtle drama in the way the words are laid out on the page, accompanied in the book by the faint image of a mysteriously glowing photograph. There is vertical and horizontal space around the text, seemingly to accommodate the breathing that the poem gently requests. Those breaths are the languagelessness that Chabitnoy has succinctly and deftly turned into language.
Attempting to get comfortable with and then commune with ghosts is just the start of a narrative of dealing with displacement and emergence. That blurry, haunting photograph - do you know the people hovering in it? - is a compelling fragment of "that which is ... half-buried" but calling out to be revived. Yes
"you might wake spirits
this way"
and once revived, does learning how they uniquely communicate ultimately "unify across divides"? We are encouraged to listen - "not in word/but sound" and find out.
wide mouth masons, shard glass, steamed
cabbage, boiling water n beets, some days
her countertops wept and the white tile floor
was a blistering purple sea
let us remember the curved lines bracketing her
parenthetical smile
sometimes she missed the 401 exit to _____ Street
and followed the broken line to Guysborough bi-
secting her fists, not long before the beetles came
and the old pines laid down their weary branches
she surrendered to Science: a needle-punctured
landscape, pretending Prince George had a coast-
line, she traded the shit stank of pulp for the scent
of Atlantic sea salt
she was a card reader, a fortune teller, a knocked-
over stop sign that said, No one promised you a life without corners
she taught her daughter how to make a fist, to un-
tuck the thumb, expose it just enough to take the
impact of a punch without breaking
she giggled when he called it croshit, after she took
to crocheting afghans and doilies, nothing prepared
him for a widower’s life of small cups of soup & half
sandwiches
she leaves behind a question mark, a flickering
light, and a northern village of bones, a peaceful scene
staged on a lake in the quiet corner of morning, as if
she has every intention
of coming back
Notes on the Poem
Over the next four weeks, our Poem of the Week choices will come from the seven works on the newly announced 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. We will be showcasing two selections per week, with one work in the fourth week. This is a bit of a departure from our usual weekly schedule to ensure that you get to enjoy selections from the entire shortlist before the accelerated 2020 winners announcement on May 19th. (Don't we all need double portions of poetry right now?) The second of two selections this week comes from How She Read by Chantal Gibson.
They may be functional and necessary, they may even evoke surprising emotion, but we don't typically associate obituaries with artistry or beauty. Gibson's poem turns that standardized notification of someone's passing - so standardized you can even google a template for it - resoundingly on its ear.
There is no room in the obituary template for the sensory bonanza that vigorously launches and animates this poem. The colours, the smells, the vivid sensations ...
"her countertops wept and the white tile floor
was a blistering purple sea"
are of a life lived energetically, prodigiously, enthusiastically. That previous fragment is the vibrant rendition of, say, "loved to cook" for the obituary template's request for an answer to "accomplished at {skill/talent}".
Gibson's poem reads between the dull lines and canned words and phrases of the traditional obituary and brings other tamped down aspects of a life lived back to life. A journey summed up blandly as "moved across Canada" becomes, with unconventional gorgeousness:
"pretending Prince George had a coast-
line, she traded the shit stank of pulp for the scent
of Atlantic sea salt"
A mundane "enjoyed needlecrafts" becomes not only a sly chuckle
"she giggled when he called it croshit, after she took
to crocheting afghans and doilies"
but a snapshot of a relationship, one that segues into the pathos of what is left in the wake of that obituary:
"nothing prepared
him for a widower's life of small cups of soup & half
sandwiches"
This obituary acknowledges that the signs along the way of this life (getting off the highway, coming to a stop) were not always heeded. This obituary also includes references you would normally never see, like the imparted skill of making a fist that was perhaps even more important than cooking or needlecrafts. This obituary also offers a bracingly ambiguous ending that argues against a conventional obituary's finality, with a lack of concluding punctuation and an abundance of spirit.
TORONTO – April 7, 2020 – Scott Griffin, on behalf of the trustees of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry, is pleased to announce the International and Canadian shortlist for this year’s prize. Judges Paula Meehan (Ireland), Kei Miller (Jamaica/UK), and Hoa Nguyen (Canada) each read 572 books of poetry, from 14 countries, including 37 translations.
MY MOTHER WAS A WHITE SHEET DRYING ON THE LINE. Wooden clothespins held her tight as she lifted and snapped and filled like a sail. At night, when she covered me, I inhaled lily of the valley, burning leaves, the starched collar of a nurse’s uniform and the stillness of a recently abandoned room. She taught me how to iron the creases out of a man’s shirt after all the men had disappeared. My mother played piano by ear in the basement. A long line of hungry people gathered outside to hear her play. They wanted news from home. Overhead, handkerchiefs fluttered in the breeze. Little telegrams sent but never delivered.
Notes on the Poem
While we await the announcement of the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist on April 7, 2020, let's explore again the intriguing emotional effects of another of the softly surreal prose poems from the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize winning poetry collection Quarrels by Eve Joseph.
Personification is a literary device that imbues a inanimate or non-human entities - objects, creatures, ideas or concepts - with human qualities. As this author's resource explains, using the device "connects readers with the object that is personified. Personification can make descriptions of non-human entities more vivid, or can help readers understand, sympathize with, or react emotionally to non-human characters."
That's not the literary device Joseph is using in this poem, where the narrator's mother is depicted initially as a white bedsheet. Chremamorphism gives the attributes of an inanimate object to a person (and zoomorphism attributes animal qualities to a person). As Joseph's narrator's mother is "chremamorphed", what effect is the poet creating?
If personification deepens sympathy or human connection, does chremamorphism achieve the opposite? In this case, is the mother being held at arm's length, made impersonal, unsympathetic? On the contrary, the bedsheet seems to be a formidable and enveloping force. When the mother becomes a person again midway through the poem, she continues to be a source of instruction, wonderment and solace.
The narrator's mother is clearly extraordinary. The emotional effect of seeing her take different forms is both comforting and powerful.
