Tag Archives: poetry

Of the 90s, but not in the 90s

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I’m teaching English 111, Introduction to Literature and Composition Part I, degree requirement basics. It’s not at my usual university, bleeding funding and scholars. I’m at a small school overlooking Wayne Gretzky Drive, built out of brick by tall Lutheran men, furnished with wooden lecterns too tall for me to see over. It’s a secular university now, but in a little-used courtyard there’s a granite memorial bench engraved with a Bible verse about perfection in weakness where I set my bag while I slip into a mask every day. 

True enough, and even from beneath the lectern, I am qualified as anything to do the job, not at all an imposter. I have everything I need, though some of it is dusty, a bit beige, like the opening unit on English poetry, with its technicalities of rhythm, meter, rhyme, form. 

Quick, how many beats in an anapest, and which of them is the one that is stressed?

My books on these are from the 90s, and they are thick as bricks, marked with the name I got from my father rather than the one I took from my husband. The edges of their covers are reinforced with sello tape, holding up well. The world is different now, and rereading them is opening a familiar window to find the view has changed, and the way the light refracts now makes the place where you stand to open the window look different too. 

I will not call this rhyme feminine. I will not fail to mention that norms of academic English diction are colonial gatekeeping. And I will say, “Don’t necessarily think of Shakespeare as the OP, but as the first big account to repost that trope or saying.”

None of this is to say that the 90s, the old books’ decade of origin, are now lost on me. I started the decade a high schooler and left it a mother. Ten years is half of everything when you’re in your twenties. Big Shiny Years.

Books and music were the only art I could afford in the 90s, and so I’m listening to Blur as I reread for English 111. Past the holiday sarcasm and the Woohoo, it’s more like flawless, earnest harmony not properly appreciated in the – well, in the blur of coming of and out of age in the 90s. 

Still can’t believe Dolores went and drowned.

There will always be Nirvana, I suppose, on the car radio just this week. I’ll usually pass it over. Our songs weren’t radio tunes. (I’ll wear a shield, I’ll go out of my way to prove) to my son, next to me in the car, that I kept the words to “All Apologies.” Try not to cackle when you sing to your kid, “EVeryTHING is my FAULT.” Oh, that last anapest, it might be a joke.

Still in the poetry unit, I found the stack of unworn jeans my last son had outgrown before he could wear them. Tags still on, maybe I could keep them, wear them 90s-ly (or is it 2020s-ly), high and loose everywhere. Scuffing around the house all day, legs dark and stiff, the waistband floating around my ribcage, tripping me on the stairs. Couldn’t make it work then, can’t do it now.

And on the night when my disease flared and I couldn’t eat at dinnertime, my husband brought a tub of chocolate ice cream to bed, and we chipped at it with one big spoon as it softened around the edges of the container, as if we were the only people here to feed off it.

“I haven’t done this in ages,” I said, as he clicked the next episode. “This is how I treated myself in the 90s. I’m telling you, it’s all about the 90s right now.”

He’s not used to thinking about it anymore and asks, “Were we really in it?”

If we hadn’t been there, there’d be no tape on the books, no names, no fault. We were there, thereabouts, in it enough to see selves of ours in the poetry, in the archeology of someone else’s twenties, in English 111.

Eulogy for LC and the USA

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cohenmonkThe morning the results of the 2016 United States election were confirmed, I cried. I am not an American but, like all of us, I am affected by its foreign and domestic policies. And I do ache with empathy for people whose vilification by trumpism has now been wrongly—evilly—legitimated. I reject that legitimization. It is sickening and terrifying.

Later the same week, when Canadian poet Leonard Cohen’s death was confirmed, I cried again. I didn’t know him personally but, like many of us, I am affected by his work. I posted an American magazine’s eulogy of Cohen on my Facebook feed along with half of a stanza of a poem, a song, I’ve known from memory since I was sixteen when my dad would play it in the car on our way home from late night shifts at the doomed sandwich shop we owned at the time.

The rain falls down on last year’s man,

an hour has gone by and he has not moved his hand.

But everything will happen if he only gives the word.

The lovers will rise up and the mountains touch the ground…

Cohen’s “Last Year’s Man” is one of his prophetic works. I’ve always felt it was, even when I was a young girl. I’d listen to verses like

I met a lady, she was playing

With her soldiers in the dark.

One by one she had to tell them

that her name was Joan of Arc…

and I’d feel like they were important. I didn’t foresee an election where no amount of reasons to prefer a flawed but qualified woman over a car wreck of a man could convince people to follow her. Cohen wouldn’t have foreseen it either, but he could still write poetry about it way back in 1971.

In the same song he could write about a declining world power, the end of its moral authority, with poignancy and pathos, with just

And the corners of the blueprint are ruined since they rolled

far past the stems of thumbtacks

that still throw shadows on the wood.

I took Cohen’s death hard not because as a white person from outside the country I was exercising my luxury of being able to flip the channel on my grief machine as the mood hits me. I do have that unfair luxury but it wasn’t operating for me in this instance—not in the way it may seem. I publicly mourn Leonard Cohen because enfolded within my feelings for his death are my feelings about the 2016 US election. Cohen’s work—especially the stanza I posted in public—speaks to my grief and frustration as someone caught powerless in this moment of history.

Cohen was a spiritual person. He called out hypocrisy in people who claimed to be the same—who mouthed piety while indulging in hate, prejudice, greed, and violence. He pointed out the true character of religion is not about cupcakes and work ethics but about loving the world in spite of suffering and sacrifice—about reading “from pleasant Bibles that are bound in blood and skin.” Paradoxes are inevitable and vital. Hypocrisy is not. Consider this verse from “Suzanne.”

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him

He said, “All men will be sailors then, until the sea shall free them.”

This is the theme I saw in the verse I posted from “Last Year’s Man.” No one compares to god. Even when he appears to be still, or impotent, just watching–none of us compares. And this world is to be transcended and overcome. We were made to rise out of it, to be free of it even though to do so is a miracle. We have two faculties for transcendence: suffering and love. Combined together, these faculties become hope. In revisiting Cohen’s work the week he died, I have connected with my grief for American society, and also with the beginnings of my hope for it–for all of us.

And so, we sail on.

 

Facing Up to Poetry

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What the poets are doin’ – 2013 Poetry Prowl in Red Deer, Alberta. Photo by Grant Ursuliak

There’s an old Jerry Seinfeld joke rooted in a dubious claim that more people fear public speaking than fear death.  Seinfeld’s punch-line (in case anyone out there missed the 1990s) is “to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

It’s probably a better joke than it is a reliable piece of social science but there is a glimmer of truth in it.  Speaking in front of a crowd can be scary.  However, we all know a lot of scary things are also fun.  And while I don’t enjoy thrill-rides like sky-diving or giving high-strung driving lessons to my kids, I do enjoy public speaking.  I might even be good at it.

So I was surprised at myself when I realized late in my 30s that since I’ve started writing professionally, I have never stood up and read my work out loud and in public.  I’ve done some radio work but those productions were easy and chatty — not much like careful, literary writing where even tiny prepositions are weighed against something vague and dynamic called “art.”

Art is another one of those things that’s frightening and beloved at the same time.  It needs to be worked out with reverence and caution and that can make handling it in front an audience an intimidating prospect.  But I don’t think the gravity of art is what kept me from finding venues for reading my work to strangers.

The first obstacle was simply time.  With a larger than average sized family, my mommie gig is a larger than average sized time commitment.  That’s the easy excuse.

The more complicated excuse is full of traumatic memories from junior high school – some adolescent persecution over the fact that the perfectly fine face I inherited from my grandfather didn’t play so well on a young girl.  I’ll spare all of us a recital of the harrowing details.  It’s enough to say that the long-term effects aren’t simple and superficial.  They’re not the kinds of things that can be undone by Dove soap commercials.  And it means that I mistrust my face – the one that has stayed happily hidden on the radio and in print.  My face has sabotaged me before and, even though junior high was long ago, I still look like my grandfather and it makes me wonder if his lady-fied face might distract and disturb my presentation of my art.

Of course, all of that’s nonsense and it’s time for it to end.  And it did, a few weeks ago.  To celebrate poetry month every April, a group of poets from Calgary (the big city two hours south of my neighbourhood) travels through what is invariably terrible weather to spend an afternoon in the small city of Red Deer meeting those of us toiling in obscurity.  The event is known as The Poetry Prowl.

It’s fabulous – far better than I expected it to be.

The other poets at the event were high quality artists.  They were editors and writing instructors as well as artists – educated, experienced, and highly polished.  The chief organizer, Emily Ursuliak, even managed to bring along the city of Calgary’s current poet laureate.  The local contributors — all men except for me — were delightful too.  Performance after performance, I was pleased and surprised and honoured to be included.

What was nearly as impressive as the poetry was the personable warmth of the poets themselves.  Despite the haughty ring to his official title, Calgary’s Poet Laureate, Kris Demeanor, backed up some of his work by playing the pink acoustic guitar strapped around his back with a lace from a hockey skate.

The more educated and decorated the poets were the more humble and decent they seemed to be.  The man who’d written articles on “the philosophy of death” for academic anthologies gave me his program when he saw I didn’t have one and apologized that his bio in it sounded so much like a CV.  I pointed out that mine sounded like one too only it wasn’t nearly as impressive.  And my bio wasn’t just a CV it was also a plug for my upcoming novel.  So, yeah – there’s nothing to apologize for here.

Since re-entering arty society, I have no proof that the cold-hearted, self-involved, hipster jerk stereotype actually exists in real life.  So far, everyone I’ve met is lovely and collegial.

And by the time I was introduced and called to the microphone to read my work – the small collection of short poems I’d written during the Dark Ages of my artistic career when “creativity” was more literal than literary and meant blood and amniotic fluid and breastmilk – I wasn’t afraid to match my work to my face anymore.  I owned my physical appearance.  I joked about it, referred to myself with all irony as a “trophy wife” and let everyone laugh with me.

It had to happen.  I’m glad it did.  I can now say I’ve put all of myself into my work – even my face.