FEATURING:

The SCIENCE POETRY DOSSIER:
ed. Gillian Savigny
Christian Bök
Jim E. Johnstone
Kate Eichborn
Sylvia Legris
Ken Babstock
Mari-Lou Rowley
Julia Williams
derek beaulieu
Jay Millar
Kathleen Miller
Karen Solie
a.rawlings

COLUMNS:
Alienated by Darren Wershler-Henry
Mean Old Man in Training by Joe Ollmann
Nernies by Claire Gibson and Marian Churchland
Movie Mythos by Taien Ng-Chan
The Graveyard by Scott W. Gray
The Self-Esteem Workout by David McGimpsey

REVIEWS:
Between by Laurie Petrou
Everything is Movies by Nicholas Lea
Yesno by Dennis Lee
The Hero Book by Scott Waters
Types of Canadian Women, Volume II by K.I. Press
E.C. Segar’s Popeye &
Moomin, The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip.

Read by Kris Rothstein

Many of the twelve stories in Between are snapshots — glimpses that provide a static picture but don’t really develop. They are precise and accurate but somehow empty. The other pieces in this collection, however, contain genuine moments of insight and revelation, documenting the instant when something changes, comes into focus or suddenly makes sense. These moments of disclosure are always subtle and occur without the traumas and manufactured difficulties which so often provide the momentum for short fiction. Almost all of the stories are told in the first person, which allows for a gentle passage into another mind — the narrative is always patient and never tries too hard to explain or illustrate this personality or that life.

“In the Home” presents an old man who offers a few thoughts about his life — past and present. He reflects on the value of knots, considers another life he might have lived while holding a miniature figurine. In “With Love From,” a son waits to tell his father that he’s sold his stationary business and, despite the dreadful anticipation, the moment becomes one of joy and possibility. In the startling “Butterfly Net,” a son spends the summer following his father around town (stealthily, he thinks), protective and curious. It’s an impulse that’s stirred by affection and the yawning gap that exists even between people who are close.

The best-realized characters are older people, perhaps because they know the value in a pause, in a nostalgic thought, in a moment of waiting. Much of the action is in anticipation: waiting for a husband’s return from work, for a friend’s visit, for a new life to begin or a season to end, or for that elusive flash of comprehension. The stories are full of routines that seem insignificant, but Petrou teases out the small precious secret that makes each life wonderful and strange.

Read by Darren Bifford

Dennis Lee’s new book is, I suspect, untranslatable. Even competency in what goes these days as Standard Poetic English may not be sufficient for comprehension of the maneuvers and stylistic risks Lee takes with enviable gusto. For almost random instance:

Terragon tilth, or
heartwork in kinderpolis.
To couch in the knit of the sinew, to
ponder refolient scrub.
To gawp at what thrives without us

Hence the initially peculiar sense that, whatever the risks, many of these poems require an English translation in order to understand their meaning. But “meaning” is not always a useful notion in poetry; especially in works that seem either uninterested, or critical of, standard semantic conventions.

Forget, then, that I couldn’t get through one of these short poems (averaging about 6-10 lines) without a dictionary — a medical and geological dictionary at that. I trust Dennis Lee. A poet with his mind is not interested in obscurity for its own sake. These poems are trying to hit a very particular, very disturbing and exacting reference. One gets the sense that they abandon conventional semantics because the conventional is the commodifiable, and the commodifed is ubiquitous in our time; it includes the earth, our lives and the language we most ordinarily and sometimes poetically speak. But it is precisely against hackneyed meanings, as well as the evident despair such a condition engenders, that this book offers its dissonance as partial cure:

Combing the geo-pre
frontal, scritch-
scratching for relicts of yes

It is interesting to compare this work with Civil Elegies and Gods. Both are works I’ve loved. But if there is a fault in them, it is probably that the weight of the themes and Lee’s judgments can occasionally collapse of the wild cadences of the poems into didacticism. But here the concept of “yesno” that this collection assumes as its title recalls the reconciliation of opposites we see in the austere ethical stand-points of Dogen or Heraclitus.

With a yes, with a no, with a
yesno:
sonics in simuljam.
To habitate crossbeing.
To ride both reals at once

I think Lee is working in the spirit of such company. Lee continues to take seriously his own poetics of cadence, and has escaped any serious trace of the didactic. Yet these poems are, in the best sense, instructive in the way I always hope poems to be: they show something of crisis and hope.

Read by Jesse Ferguson

Everything is Movies is a rollicking and elastic first collection, and it announces Lea as a voice to listen for. These poems evince a magpie curiosity, building linguistic nests from all things shiny, be they junk in the gutter or the jewels of literature and philosophy. Lea gathers and loves these fragments of nature, thought and emotion because, as A.M. Klein wrote, “until it has been praised, that part / has not been.” Implicit in many of Lea’s poems is that all things are connected, though not in the sense that they are the same and equivalent (which would render cataloguing needless), and not in the sense of any specific religious view, though Lea borrows at will from various mythologies. He, like Whitman, seeks to tease out the connections between things, to celebrate synchronicity and the unexpected harmony that arises if we will only listen “when the car alarm medley’d” (in the poem “Song Writhing”).

These poems are by turns reverent and irreverent; they delve into the arcana of metaphysics, and then they disarm with confessional passages, self-deprecation and hammy comedy. In “Unnatural Speeds,” for instance, the speaker speculates:

during all this the ice is melting.
A gradual melting that must relate
to time — so — time is melting, or,
melting is time. The inflection is
unclear. Hoped you could clarify, get back
to me. First, there’s no brainy sobriquet for it.
Nothing so cute.

There is a double-gesture in many of the most memorable of Lea’s poems both toward and away from any totalizing philosophy. We must ask with the speaker of “Crowded Out” whether “the world is more than dishes and / miscarriages, you know . . . don’t // believe Nietzsche. What’s he ever / done for the garden?”

Lea achieves most when he develops fewer images with greater detail, taking the time to connect each to the next by means of a rough sense of setting, or adherence to theme. Through greater coherence, poems such as “Aquifer” and “Unnatural Speeds” become more memorable. His poems ramble incorrigibly; they ask you if you want a beer; they ask you if you want a pillow fight; they ask you your thoughts on the ontological significance of couch springs. Above all, they are funny and smart, yet they let you in on all the in-jokes.

Read by Lateef Martin

Take your everyday Canadian white dude in his twenties. Mix in a BFA in arts out of Kelowna, BC, a taste of design training at Ontario’s Sheridan College and a splash of York University’s MFA program. Throw in a little resentment at the design world. Marinate it in a Why-in-the-Hell-did-I-do-that? stint in the Canadian Forces and a need to barf it all out and you’ve got The Hero Book. Short, sweet and witty, Scott Waters drops you in the bong water of dejected Canadians training for a war they never join (Operation Desert Storm to be exact). Becoming more inventive and violent as time wears on, Waters and the various colourful characters in his platoon pull pranks, get drunk, beat each other up and handle an array of weaponry. This is all chronicled with licks of text, raw photography and stunning paintwork. What makes Waters’ work so charming is its honesty and brevity, allowing the reader to fill in the blanks, which are as wide and generous as the snow-covered prairies of Alberta. The Hero Book is also a portrait of innocence and boredom; Waters’ misadventures play on the edge of a potentially soul-shattering existence in a faraway land, held at arm’s length by chance. The artwork and photography are spread out between the text in a fashion that keeps things moving, from black and white to color, spiced with graphics of shovels, guns, outlines of people and even underwear. Quotes, lists and stats pepper the text, giving The Hero Book itself a fresh and varied appearance. At under seventy pages, Waters has created a page-turner that can be knocked off over a beer or on the can, or both.

Read by T. K. Murphy

In Types of Canadian Women, Volume II, K.I. Press presents us with a poetic continuation of Henry J. Morgan’s biographical dictionary, Types of Canadian Women, Volume I (originally published in 1903). Reading Press’s work, one wonders about Morgan, what kind of person he was, and why he wrote a catalogue of Canadian women.

Modern readers, I suspect, would see Morgan as a puffed-up, prudish Edwardian. The act of categorizing the female population of a country into “types” symbolizes a misogyny particular to the late nineteenth century, and many people would recognize it as such. The condescension of such acts is obvious — so obvious, in fact, that one wonders whether Press’s efforts were misspent by satirizing it.

If the satire were sharper, perhaps, or if the portraits of Canadian women less florid, the effort might seem more meritorious; however, Volume II is undermined by its limited diction. Though Press successfully suggests there was an invisible morbidity to 19th Century feminine life, the result is less like Wuthering Heights and more like an abridged screenplay to Northanger Abbey. Press’s vocabulary is spotted with words that the average Canadian might associate, in the vaguest possible way, with what is British and dated. Volume II otherwise relies on macabre understatement, grim conflations, and clichéd juxtapositions — all of which repeatedly suggest that a woman’s life circa 1903 was one of outward doilies and secret dildos, of placid social appearances and gruesome sexual realities. (“Social graces,” Press writes in “Uplifted the Home Life of the Whole Country,” include “fainting, flirting, archery, abortion… and sitting on chairs.”) All of her portraits share predictable rhetorical structures, and reflect a casual understanding of second-wave feminism better than they do any kind of human experience.

In her introduction, Press declares Typesto be “a window not merely onto the lives of… legendary women, but into their very souls.” Here Press stakes her claim: she acknowledges that a catalogue intended for public consumption will be partial, restricted by what is publicly acceptable. Press wants Volume II to complete the picture, and yet the larger problems of biographical portrait-taking remain. Without its companion volume, Types of Canadian Women II is as great a misrepresentation as the first. I suspect that some of the women whose photos appear in this volume would resent Press’s grim, sexually unorthodox descriptions as much as a contemporary woman might resent the original entries from 1903.

There are watersheds touted by critics in every genre: in old movies, in great literature, in classic television series. Some of these actually live up to their hype. The car chase in the movie Bullitt with Steve McQueen, for instance, deserves the hype it is always afforded. But some much-lauded films are products of their time, embedded in amber, and do not survive well under modern scrutiny. Watching the film Mask recently, which was much-praised and won Oscars in the 80s that spawned it, was a truly painful experience. It did not age well. It was naive and dated and bore no kinship to the viewer in the present time.

I feel the same about many old comic strips: they are anchored forever in the spirit of the mores and the times in which they were created, and I feel little affinity with them. So a lot of the deluxe reissues of old comic strips of late, I approach with caution. For instance, I never really understood the celebration over the inane and the mundane in Bushmiller’s Nancy, which has long been touted as some kind of post-ironic genius. For me, work of this sort is merely inane and mundane. (Please, let’s be clear, I’m not referring to the Complete Peanuts reissues. I’ve stated before in these pages that Schulz is nearly the fourth member of the holy trinity in my book, and that stands).

Recently, however, two new reissues, Moomin, The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, from Drawn & Quarterly, and E.C. Segar’s Popeye, from Fantagraphics, have surpassed all the hype.

First, Popeye. I grew up with the Max Fleischer animated Popeye and as I grew older, I kept hearing about the “kitchen sink” drama, socialist gritty realism of Segar’s original Popeye strips. Reading the first volume of Popeye, I found all of this delivered in spades. Popeye is a strange hybrid of an adventure strip and a funny cartoon strip. And it actually manages to be funny to modern sensibilities without the need to laugh in context with the times.

The good-hearted, brutish Popeye prevails, in spite of his ignorance and ugliness, to come out on top morally in most instances. He may not hold the power or the money, but he has decency and physical power on his side. I can’t help but think how this kind of hero must have resonated with readers in the 30s. Popeye is incredibly violent. Really, just insane levels of physical violence on most pages. All of this in a beautiful, oversized diecut hardcover volume. Nice!

And speaking of hardcover volumes — since comic publishers have discovered the source of cheap hard-cover printers overseas, we are now being inundated with a wave of hard- cover comics collections that seem to be in hardcover format for no other reason than it is economically possible. But some books actually merit the fancy window dressing and Moomin, The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, is one of these books.

Tove Janssen writes like the smartest nine-year-old in the world, all honesty and absurdity and contempt for arbitrary conventions of society. Stylistically, Janssen is a master of the simple, clean line drawing. With perfectly balanced areas of blacks and whites, these drawings appear more like quality book illustrations than the newspaper strips they actually were.

Moomin tells the story of Moomin, the hippo-like inhabitant of Moominland, along with his parents and others. The strips are naive and sophisticated at the same time, bitter-sweet and sexy and also genuinely funny at times. Moomin falls in love with Snork Maiden, they love, they are jealous, they squander what they should save on whiskey and jewels, they seek adventure, they embrace life, they speak openly and honestly to one another. After reading Moomin, I felt like I should be living my life by asking, “What would Moomin do?”