Author: admin

Some days like pulling teeth, rotten roots.
Staring down the barrel of the gun.
Shooting the town clock.
Forty days in the desert.
Fifty days in the desert, no food and water.
The devil sticking out his tongue.
Electric shock. Thunderbolt.
Heroin. Poison in the veins.
Angels beating their wings on your bared skull.
Who will believe you.
Moon in your hands, transparent, luminous.
Cursed by God.
Cursed by mothers, fathers, brothers, the bloody town hall.
Bereft.
Dogs limping on three paws.
The fourth one sawed off by a car wheel, careening.
The devil making faces.
Long red tongue, goats’ horns, trampling the streets of Ptuj,
announcing spring.
Licking licking. Cunt or wound.
Bad gas leaking from stones, earth fissures.
Nettles. Poison ivy. Bee sting.
Rotgut. Fungus on your toes.
Wild strawberries low to the ground, cheating the lawn mower.
A wall waiting for the wrecker’s ball.
Clear vodka. Ice.

Notes on the Poem
With surprising poetic sleight of hand, Di Brandt builds several layers of sardonic wit and irony using outmoded expressions and clichés in "The poets reflect on their craft", a poem from her 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Now You Care. Let's explore to what end she applies them.

Not only does Brandt unleash a torrent of mean, stale expressions in this poem, she seems to dig deep for ugly ones, such as:

"Some days like pulling teeth, rotten roots.
Staring down the barrel of the gun."

The one about the dogs is maybe a little more original, but it and many other references are still truly nasty.

Anton C. Zijderveld, a Dutch sociologist, has pondered the function of cliché in his treatise On Clichés (referenced here):


“A cliché is a traditional form of human expression (in words, thoughts, emotions, gestures, acts) which – due to repetitive use in social life – has lost its original, often ingenious heuristic power. Although it thus fails positively to contribute meaning to social interactions and communication, it does function socially, since it manages to stimulate behavior (cognition, emotion, volition, action), while it avoids reflection on meanings.”


So then, how are we to respond to this cascade of hideous woe? It looks like writer and reviewer Michael Dennis has found the clue:


"There is what Don McKay calls "poetic intention" to the beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, of everything around you."
Di Brandt, You pray for the rare flower to appear


The irony? Take a peek back at the title. Perhaps she's criticizing her peers, but there's probably an equally good chance Brandt is reflecting ruefully and with displeasure on her own work.

The additional irony? Buried amidst all the angry, unpleasant clichés are glimmers of beauty and hope:

"Moon in your hands, transparent, luminous."

"Wild strawberries low to the ground, cheating the lawn mower."

"Clear vodka. Ice."

Yes, even that last line has appeal, if you want to see it as a boost to the spirit or a toast to new possibilities rather than a gesture of despair. The narrator has reflected on her craft and has decided to stick with it.

The scarecrow wears a wire in the top field.
At sundown, the audiophilic farmer
who bugged his pasture unpicks the concealed
mics from his lapels. He’s by the fire

later, listening back to the great day,
though to the untrained ear there’s nothing much
doing: a booming breeze, a wasp or bee
trying its empty button-hole, a stitch

of wrensong now and then. But he listens late
and nods off to the creak of the spinal pole
and the rumble of his tractor pulling beets
in the bottom field, which cuts out. In a while

somebody will approach over ploughed earth
in caked Frankenstein boots. There’ll be a noise
of tearing, and he’ll flap awake by the hearth
grown cold, waking the house with broken cries.

Notes on the Poem
"His work engages with the commonplace and the overlooked ..." is just part of why the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize judges were drawn to Paul Farley's poetry collection Tramp in Flames. What they go on to observe about Farley's work is what made the poem "The Scarecrow Wears a Wire" singular then ... and perhaps even more so now, several years later.

The 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize judges go on to praise Farley's scrutiny in Tramp in Flames of "... the absurd and the catastrophic, the scientific and the mythic, in ways that make us stop and think again about what it is to be living in this particular world, at this particular moment in our history."

The notion of a farmer - "audiophilic", no less - equipping his scarecrow to eavesdrop on the field he is guarding is rather amusing. What the scarecrow hears is, on one hand, pretty small and mundane and on the other, achingly exquisite and extraordinary. Especially lovely is:

"a wasp or bee
trying its empty button-hole, a stitch

of wrensong now and then."

It's both hilarious and wrenching when the farmer's "listening back to the great day" ends so abruptly.

How has the meaning of this poem changed or deepened from when it was peering out at and listening to the world midway through the first decade of this millennium? How is it now pertinent in perhaps new ways now, at the end of the second decade of this millennium? The encouragement to listen closely to the little things still resonates ... but are there more questions about who is listening, using what kinds of tools in what kinds of milieus? Who, in fact, is the scarecrow, who is the farmer, and what will jolt us and make us "flap awake" ...? Farley's poem is still making us stop and think about what it is "to be living in this particular world, at this particular moment in our history", isn't it?

“Forty days of snow are registered in the Paris archives of 1435, the trees died and the birds …

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? (1461 François Villon)

But where is the last yeares snow? (1653)

Tell me, if ye know; What is come of last year’s snow? (1835)

Where is fled the south wind’s snow? (1835)

But where are the snows of yester-year? (1869)

But where is the last year’s snow? (1877)

But what is become of last year’s snow? (1899)

But – where are the last year’s snows? (1900)

But where indeed is last year’s snow? (1900)

Where are the snows of yesteryear? (1900)

Notes on the Poem
Let's marvel at another example of how Donato Mancini creates simple but striking assemblages of words on the page. This excerpt from the poem "Snowline" is from Mancini's 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Same Diff. A previous rendition of the poem stood alone in its own chapbook published in 2015.

In a previous Poem of the Week by Mancini - an excerpt from "Where do you feel?" - we noted the generous line spacing that is perhaps one of his signature modes of presentation, which gives a poem's lines surprising heft, weight and impact. In the notes for that poem excerpt, we commented on how the words are arranged and cascade down the page. As the effect is deployed in "Snowline", the Griffin Poetry Prize judges remarked on how Mancini's "strong design impulse" causes the words to "snow down the pages". How particularly perfect as the poem turns over and over and over again variations on the line “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” from "Ballade des dames du temps jadis" ("Ballade of Ladies of Time Gone By") is a poem by François Villon published in the late 1400s.


To achieve his almost mantra-like contemplation of evolution and change over time, Mancini collected numerous translations of Villon’s line, from 1653 to 2014, and then whittled down that collection to forty. The number in the final poem echoes the "Forty days of snow" in the poem's epigraph, but could also be referencing the magical and significant number associated with legends such as the forty thieves, or with the many biblical references to "forty days and forty nights".

The description of the chapbook version of "Snowline" offers more ideas about the inspiration sparking Mancini's fascinating exercise in subtle repetition and variation. We've added an updated link to these insights:


Taking a cue from Caroline Bergvall’s “Via,” but deviating from it in significant ways, snowline traces how Villon’s line has changed and yet stubbornly stayed the same over six hundred years. It is a meditative and pointedly nostalgiac book: You will grow older as you read it, and the world around you will continue to melt into air.

I’ve never seen a raindrop fall on a frog’s head but you have. You say the frog wiped away the water with his wrist and that’s good enough for me.
   Ever since I first heard it fifteen years ago your poem on the death of your son has been flitting in and out of my mind. And now I see there are two versions, the first having been revised on the later death of your daughter, in 1819, of smallpox. And now I want you to know that I hope you’ve been reunited with your sons and your daughters and your wives and your father, and that I prefer the first version.
   The sun has dropped behind the mountains and the tiny cars on the long winding road way over on the other side of the lake have their lights on. And a sense of amazement springs up, amazement that we live in a world where the sun continually rises and sets.
   The Marasmius oreades (delicious when fried with bacon) have formed a fairy ring in the shape of a giant number 3 in the courtyard lawn, reminding me of the time I saw three motorcycles parked diagonally at the curb in front of 111 Brucedale Avenue.
   In October you can look at the sides of the mountains and see the patterns made by the deciduous trees which have become bright yellow or orange among the coniferous which have remained dark green. Sometimes it seems like a territorial war up there but the conflict between the two types of trees is probably more in my mind than on the slopes.
   This morning the sky is blue but the tops of the mountains cling to thick giant puffs of pink and grey cloud. A small white cloud rises from the surface of the lake and tries to reach the big ones up above but by the time it gets halfway there it has almost completely disappeared.
   It’s pleasant to be so unhurried that you can see even the slowest-moving clouds moving. A part of me says I should be ashamed of myself but you know the more time you waste the more you get. It’s like money.
   On a rainy windy October moring a grey Volkswagen sits at the side of the road. It’s covered with hundreds of small wet yellow leaves plastered on the trunk, on the hood, on the roof – in a strangely satisfying pattern. Was it the rain and the wind or was it a subtle and patient artist with a pot of glue? Of course it was the wind and the rain and of course it’s a hackneyed idea. But for a moment I wonder. As you would have.
   It’s pleasant to have a cup of tea and think of you, Issa, and to think of others in the twentieth century having a cup of tea and thinking of you, Issa.

Notes on the Poem
We will always miss David McFadden's wondering, curious, whimsical voice. We are grateful he left us so much, such as Why Are You So Sad?, the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted work from which we've selected "A Cup of Tea with Issa" for this week's Poem of the Week.

We're pretty sure these are the words of Kobayashi Issa that McFadden's narrator is contemplating:


Dew evaporates
and all our world is dew…
so dear, so fresh, so fleeting


(See more reflections on Issa's poem here.)

The poem's narrator uses his contemplations of Issa as a gentle springboard into all sorts of beautiful observations about the world around him. What he sees and how he sees it is simpatico with an equally beautiful observation poet and editor Stuart Ross made about McFadden as he paid tribute to him in 2018:


"There's something about Dave that's just sort of the quiet, suburban fellow telling this story and then, yeah, somehow you find yourself being drawn into something that's magical or bewildering or surreal."


The narrator in "A Cup of Tea with Issa" does indeed tiptoe along the edges of the magical, from the lights of the cars at dusk, to the mushrooms forming a fairy ring, to the "territorial war" of the colours of the trees in October to how in the world a car came to be covered in hundreds of brilliant little leaves ... 

All of what McFadden notes through his narrator is truly "so dear, so fresh, so fleeting", isn't it?

What pride I feel in America stems from our anthem
being the toughest one to sing. The high segment
with the red burn of the rocket: only a few
can reach. Watching a stranger parallel park, I pray
she abrades her neighbor. Watching football, I need
to see a man die. I need to see the intractable passing

and violence. Of the cruelty ringing the Earth,
I am a portion. I never said he was a bad man, only
a larger portion. He wreaked harm on us for years
and then one day he began to die. I watched as science
shattered his body to wrest the disease out, stopping
just short of his failure. Failure, the word
he favored over death. Me, I favored nothing over
death. I held him like a brother. I knew him as an error
of God, dropped at the doorstep of our age, and what
could we do but save him? I began to suspect so many
of machinations. How my parents had summoned me
into this world, but then when I arrived,

they were not here. My whole being was a set-up.
They called me over to sit alone with the weather
and soot, unfettered. They said I had differences to be
resolved. After attempting the anthem, upwards of fifty
percent remark, I should have started lower or I should
have chosen something else instead. Uneasy lies the head.

Notes on the Poem
Not only have we learned and felt much through Natalie Shapero's direct words in selections (such as this poem and this poem) from her 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Hard Child, but we can also learn and feel through what she withholds in a piece.

As the 2018 judges astuted observed:


"[Shapero] teaches us how to retain the self without disappearing into the object we behold. She holds herself at various distances from the thing considered. She drives us toward a view and back again. This is how to write a lyric poem.”


Griffin Poetry Prize winner Dionne Brand has given considerable thought to the concept of withholding in one's work. (Her Ossuaries won the prize in 2011, and her latest collection The Blue Clerk was shortlisted in 2019.) She reflects on the concept in a recent interview, and offers some perspectives couched relative to the form of The Blue Clerk, where two key figures collaborate and at times conflict to produce work: "the clerk is the part of you that attends to your surroundings, and makes note of it. The author is the one, or the part of you, that makes the decisions of what to do with that." The results for Brand were: "a process of attending very, very carefully, and hopefully with a kind of honesty, to what was left out, to what was withheld, and to the reasons that they were withheld."

In "Passing and Violence", Shapero clearly attends to details, many of them disturbing ...

"Watching football, I need
to see a man die. I need to see the intractable passing
 
and violence."

if at times obscure ...

"They called me over to sit alone with the weather
and soot, unfettered."

She is definitely withholding something in all she has itemized and, at times bluntly and viciously, revealed. Her revelatory process is also framed by ruminations on people attempting to sing the challenging US national anthem. What does that represent? At any rate, what we imagine has been withheld invests what has been presented - troubling and mysterious - with perhaps even more power.

As she considers people tackling the daunting anthem - often spectacularly unsuccessfully - then circling back to the regret attending those attempts, Shapero does "drive us toward a view and back again." It leaves us wondering if that regret refers to other much more devastating things than a song sung poorly. "Uneasy lies the head" ... indeed.

1

Being a dog is an empty car park at noon.
“Nothing but trouble …” and seasickness on land.
Being a dog is that and that, taking instruction from garbage heaps,
A knuckle sandwich for dinner, mud orgasms.
Being a dog is whatever happens next, randomness
The mother of boredom and incomprehension.
Being a dog is being up against a bigger opponent
Time, which does you in with endless chain-links.
So much of too-much in a tiny space …
Being a dog is a ride on the ghost train of language,
Which keeps throwing clever obstructions your way.
Being a dog is having to when you don’t want to, wanting to
When you can’t, and always somebody watching.
Being a dog?
It’s the bad smell attaching to your words.

Notes on the Poem
Michael Hofmann translates and brings alive anew many vivid phrases, images and sensations in this excerpt from German poet Durs Grunbein's poem "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (Not Collie)". Would it be fair to assume that the intense cumulative effect of this poem accurately reflects the sentiments Grunbein strove to convey in the original, which is possibly inspired by his early upbringing in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall? Let's revisit this poem and consider this question again.

Grunbein, with Hofmann translating, uses a confined and probably abused dog as a central metaphor for the narrator's feelings of frustration and powerlessness at being severely constrained. "[A]n empty car park at noon" is a lonely, barren, lifeless place. "[S]easickness on land" suggests disorientation, queasiness and even a sense of betrayal, not feeling stable or secure when you believe you should be able to trust your surroundings. "A knuckle sandwich for dinner" captures both violence and deprivation ... and it gets more bewildering and oppressive with each successive line. The phrase "endless chain-links" is likely both metaphorical and literal, in the world in which Grunbein lived until Germany was reunified when he was 27.

Interestingly, one analogy is leavened with a trace of ambiguity that actually makes it almost hopeful compared to all the others:

"Being a dog is whatever happens next"

Never knowing what happens next, subject to fate's vagaries and the cruelties of an unrelenting oppressor ... yes, but could this also suggest that the dog and/or Grunbein was living in and for the moment? Does this perhaps give a clue to how Grunbein personally survived the tyranny that informed his early upbringing?

Enjoy this collection of pieces about Durs Grunbein and his poetry collection Ashes for Breakfast (from which this poem excerpt is taken). You'll find here some interesting insights into the poet and his translator, whose potent collaboration has made a work powerful in not one, but two languages.

she left for Australia a couple of years ago
with five hundred bucks and a backpack
she picked fruit    drove truck    tended bar
did a stint washing paintbrushes for an artist
eventually posing for him while his wife baked gingersnaps
her gift is that the wife didn’t mind
couldn’t blame her husband for wanting to sketch
the beautiful sister    was a bit in love herself

she called us Christmas Day
I held the phone between ear and shoulder
as I peeled potatoes and checked the turkey
it was Boxing Day in Melbourne
how Star Trek I said
I was laughing until my husband rolled his eyes
and then I stopped
chopped the potatoes with short hard strokes

I thought how fitting it was
to speak to the beautiful sister from the future
I asked her for an inside tip    tomorrow’s lottery numbers
thought maybe I would throw these fucking potatoes
in the garbage or better yet just leave them
on the counter to brown and rot
walk out the door jump on a plane
get the hell out of here

Notes on the Poem
Isn't it interesting when a poem provokes an unrelated thought that ends up being kind of related after all? Follow along with your humble Poem of the Week taker of notes and see how that happened with "sister from the future" from Leslie Greentree's 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection go-go dancing for Elvis.

Greentree's narrator is preparing dinner on December 25th / Christmas Day (in Canada, we assume) when she receives a phone call from her sister, who is in Australia and already enjoying the next day, December 26th / Boxing Day. (Boxing Day is observed in the United Kingdom and in countries historically connected to the UK.) In essence, Greentree's narrator is living in the present, but in her sister's past, but her sister is living in the narrator's future. Star Trek, indeed!

Not only is the sister calling from the future, but it sure sounds like she's been having fun and making adventures out of what would be mundane if she wasn't out there in Australia, in the future. The future sounds perfect, in fact - doesn't it? That's when this Poem of the Week taker of notes starting thinking about verb tenses, as one does. The future perfect, to be precise: a verb tense used for actions that will be completed before some other point in the future.

Neither the present nor the future seem perfect in the narrator's tense (see what we did there?) kitchen ...

"I was laughing until my husband rolled his eyes
and then I stopped
chopped the potatoes with short hard strokes"

followed quite vehemently by ...

"thought maybe I would throw these fucking potatoes
in the garbage"

That "would" gives pause, however. Will she or won't she throw those potatoes - and everything they symbolize - in the garbage? This thorough breakdown of "will" and "would" - not to mention the coupling with "maybe" - suggests that the disgusted disposal of the potatoes might be hypothetical and might not really happen.

But that tentative "would" is followed by further mounting anger, so maybe (maybe!) the potential and blithe optimism of the future in which her sister basks gives this narrator the will (the noun, but also the verb!) to toss away her tense present.

When I fought the dog we almost danced
we loved each other that much and he was strong,
not counting even his teeth and claws, and I had
trouble pushing against him even though his
shoulders were weaker in that position nor was he
intended, as Aristotle might say, for fighting
standing up like that the way maybe a
bear was more intended or certainly an
ape with his gross imitation of a
human, or a human of him, if I can
step into that muck a minute, and he was
taller than me, as I remember, which made him
huge for a dog and made me feel small standing
on two legs with my weak left knee impaired
as it was and smelling his breath and shocked by his giant
head and what had to be a look I never
expected in his eyes, though I had to know
it would be like that for who was I anyhow
to bicker as I did or think that love
as I called it, all I did for him, the food
and water I gave him I could barter, I couldn’t
even find my pocket, I couldn’t take out a dollar.

Notes on the Poem
Who is in for the bigger surprise in Gerald Stern's "All I Did For Him": the poem's narrator or the poem's readers? Let's take a closer look at this selection from Stern's 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection American Sonnets: Poems.

This poem captures an amiable tussle between the narrator and his dog.

"When I fought the dog we almost danced
we loved each other that much"

... or wait, is it a friendly tango/tangle?

When Gerald Stern read at the renowned Kelly Writers House in 2002, Tom Devaney's introduction included this reference to this very poem:


"Listen to the counterbalancing of mind and body in the poem "All I Did for Him," where the poet wrestles with his dog and realizes that he is dangerously outmatched."


The poem's play-by-play of this human/canine dust-up grows more ominous ...

"smelling his breath and shocked by his giant
head"

then ...

"what had to be a look I never
expected in his eyes"

not to mention plaintive ...

"made me feel small standing
on two legs with my weak left knee impaired"

... seguing in the end to the downright meek, cowed, somewhat desperate "all I did for him" that ruefully clarifies the poem's title.

As the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize judges observed:


"When we finish one of these American sonnets, we laugh or cry out loud, incredulous."


With this poem, flavoured with what the judges coined "milk and honey irony", we do both, most assuredly.

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
Let's explore 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.

…
Is that MY black dog-
with telltale compost on his nose?
Blade of grass, squash of persimmon,

some leggy insect on his forehead
next to the growth? Is that MY
red truck speeding up the vineyard’s

central avenue, porta potty
bumping along behind, toilet paper
unfurling behind in celebratory loops?

Notes on the Poem
Jane Mead's beautiful book-length poem World of Made and Unmade graced the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. This week, we learned with sorrow of Jane's death. We gravitated immediately to the comfort of her words in excerpts from this and other of her memorable works.

What a ruefully sweet excerpt this is, with literally earthy images capturing mildly annoying but actually rather amusing snippets of the quotidian. The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize judges (Sue Goyette, Joan Naviyuk Kane and George Szirtes) were clearly charmed by these rather welcome intrusions throughout the poem, as they remark in the book's citation:


"The poem allows for the intrusions of dogs and the laundry room flooding, acknowledging how the force of our days persists in the company of the dying. And how those disruptions are sometimes what can help carry us, sustain us through the experience, realign our spirit, or afford us reprieve."


The poem's humour is an entry point into things more poignant, those lived in the moment and those to come. The repeated phrase "Is that MY ..." is notably both lively and haunting. Not only can it be read as comic disavowal of that which embarrasses, but it could also signify a genuine struggle to remember as beloved everyday presences and activities grow smaller and fade. At the same time, perhaps one can cope as things unfold and unspool, not unlike that jaunty final image.