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Stumped Sky (Questions of Missing Weather and Birds)

4

Everything fades to …

Whiteout. Hypnotic and nose-close to hypothermia.
Blizzard-blinding (snow like something out of Fargo).
Winter a mile-high silver screen

tarnished to monotone. Unrelenting;
an eight-months’ sustained
sub-zero note.

—

Look down,
look down,
look waaay down …

It’s as if you were never here (you start to believe this).
Walk the same footprints every day
and every day they disappear — drowning
in the whiteness of it all, hyper-invisibly visible;
white trudging white.

Notes on the Poem
Poetry can be evocative in many ways. Sometimes poetry's power is wielded in ways not entirely - or at all - pleasurable or satisfying. Have you ever been left feeling unsettled or uncomfortable at the end of a poem ... but still appreciative that the poet can orchestrate words in such a way that they've achieved that effect?

The judges commented in the citation to Sylvia Legris' 2006 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Nerve Squall that her "high-octane poems are powered by 'atmospheric overload'." Overload, be it meteorological or sensory, can spawn arresting and rapturous states. If the overload continues to build, it can rapidly tip into any number of forms of physical or mental distress, for an environment or an individual. In this poem, Legris maintains a razor thin line between euphoria and senses of discomfort and dread, and the effect is enthralling.

Note the ominous hints of something not quite right: fading, tarnishing, monotone, trudging. Note the outright unnerving, unpleasant, painful sensations and states: whiteout, hypothermia, blinding, drowning. But wait a moment. There are also notes of whimsy, such as the reference to Fargo, a movie noteworthy for its dark humour played against a blazing white, snowy backdrop. The suggestion to "look waaay down" suggests - at least for Canadians of a certain age - a wacky reversal of the friendly exhortation of a childhood pal, the Friendly Giant. The whimsy is perhaps perversely juxtaposed with the vaguely threatening. 

But wait just another moment. When you look waaay down, is it possible you'll attempt that bungee jump into the unknown, rather than "walk[ing] the same footprints every day"? Conversely, is Legris just despairing that she is treading that same path every day and is disappearing into an irreversible invisibility? In just a few stark stanzas, she manages to unsettle in the most exhilarating fashion.

Notes on the Poem
Is contemplation of the four elements a classic poetic conceit, or does it verge on cliche as poetic inspiration and subject matter? With a light but not insubstantial touch, Elaine Equi takes a fresh approach to the mystique of fire, air, earth and water.

Is poetry too casual or not refined enough when it's couched in a conversational tone and contemporary idiom? Equi doesn't eschew the cerebral or dumb down the discussion just because her language is simple and plainspoken and her format is ubiquitous, the Q&A used in everything nowadays from corporate overviews to Hollywood interviews where you know the interviewer and the star never actually meet.

Does the concept of the poet interviewing herself draw the reader closer, hold the reader at arm's length, or is it just too cute by half? Although it perhaps smacks a bit of too smooth stand-up comedy, Equi uses the technique to disarming, even endearing effect.

Did you, the reader, notice that these notes are Q's in a Q&A about a poem in a Q&A format? Will you provide your answers in the comments below?

Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.

Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still centre.
It is never lighting cigars with ten-dollar notes:
that’s idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.
Nor can it be bought with the ash of million-dollar deeds.

Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.
Sprawl almost never says Why not? with palms comically raised
nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn
with mink and a nose ring. THat is Society. That’s Style.
Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
or anyway the fourteenth.

Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
bisecting an obstructive official’s desk with a chainsaw.
Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal
though it’s often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know his own.
Knowing the man’s name this was said to might be sprawl.

Sprawl occurs in art. THe fifteenth to twenty-first
lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings;
I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.
Turner’s glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl –
except, he didn’t fire them.

Sprawl gets up the nose of many kinds of people
(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don’t include it.
Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.

Sprawl is really classless, though. It’s John Christopher Frederick Murray
asleep in his neighbours’ best bed in spurs and oilskins
but not having thrown up;
sprawl is never Calum who, drunk, along the hallways of our house,
reinvented the Festoon. Rather
it’s Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
No Lewd Advances, No Hitting Animals, No Speeding,
on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
An image of my country. And would that it were more so.

No, sprawl is full-gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
and thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.

Notes on the Poem
Those objects, landscapes and behaviours that Les Murray suggests exemplify the quality of sprawl might seem disarmingly expansive and deceptively languid at first, such as:

"... doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home."

While sprawl seems synonymous with "easygoing" and "generous", Murray lets us know in good order that it can be inspired to act at the first hint of bureaucratic indifference or injustice, as the unharmed but likely nervous official with the desk halved by a chainsaw learned quickly enough. Murray reassures us (and we can hear it expressed with a sly drawl):

"Sprawl is never brutal
though it's often intransigent."

Murray vividly incorporates the figure of Beatrice Miles - described in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as a "Bohemian rebel ... notable for her outrageous, disruptive conduct in public places, and her outspoken criticism of political and social authorities" - to embody sprawl's colourful spirit.

Is there an air of menace to "The Quality of Sprawl"? The last line would suggest that the threat is more to those who insouciantly wield sprawl than to those who dismiss, disregard or actively oppose it. More likely, while sprawl "may have to leave the Earth", one suspects it will still be looking on with "one boot up on the rail of possibility", quietly but unflinchingly gazing at the arbitrary, the hypocritical and the cruel.

I don’t want to see the city through
myself anymore. I imagine an open body
stuck with pins and flags ready
for labelling. The city is a city of constant
sidewalk repairs and household renovations.
If I could lay my hands on the interior walls
I would know enough to miss myself.
The city is a city of streets named
after saints and explorers. On the dock
I am cold. I imagine myself
at an art gallery looking at installations
and not pretending there can be
any sort of understanding.
But somewhere the water
may meet the unseen shore
and someone like you believes
it happens. There
is a line where they touch.
I would like to speak
to that line and have it speak
to me in return.

Notes on the Poem
The poems of The Certainty Dream by Kate Hall all have that clear-eyed, precise and utterly wacky conviction about what is right according to the opaque, hilarious and sometimes terrifying logic of dreams. This conviction, which could be the certainty of the collection's title, permeates almost every poem in this collection, and "Dream in Which I Am Separated from Myself" is no exception.

"I don't want to see the city through
myself anymore."

You could interpret the opening line of this poem in a pretty straightforward fashion: the speaker doesn't want to experience the city through her own senses and perceptions, but maybe through someone else's. But wait. Maybe the speaker's body had become transparent, and the city was literally visible through it - and somehow, this is making perfect sense in the context of a dream, which often juxtaposes the mundane with the bizarre, but treats the bizarre as the mundane. Then this follows:

"I imagine an open body
stuck with pins and flags ready
for labelling."

That line between the water and the "unseen shore" can mean the separation, or the bringing together, of many things. Sometimes, it's only in a dream that the connection is made, and you get to speak to and understand that line. Kate Hall captures here and throughout The Certainty Dream the truths that are driven home to us through the whimsy and sudden clarity of the dream state.