Georgia and Alfred
By Keith Garebian
Toronto, ON: Quattro, 2015
80 pp, $18.00
Hastings-Sunrise
by Bren Simmers
Gibson, BC: Nightwood, 2015
96 pp, $19.00
Keith Garebian’s fifth book of verse, Georgia and Alfred, treats the lives of artists—namely, painter Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In contrast, Bren Simmers focuses on the art of living—in apartment, neighbourhood, and city—in her second collection, Hastings-Sunrise.
Garebian pays homage to O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Stieglitz (1864-1946) as pioneering U.S. artists in their different media and as a sensual couple, with O’Keeffe serving as Stieglitz’s model.
The poems suit this ekphrastic era. Many Canadian poets are busy pondering visual art, with Armand Garnet Ruffo’s book about painter Norval Morrisseau (1932-2007), The Thunderbird Poems serving as exhibit A.
Garebian’s free verse format is anchored by footnotes and fleshed out with found poems gleaned from real-life letters or biographies or critics’ second thoughts. The lyrics are as documentary as they are confessional.
O’Keeffe’s “found” lines are sometimes painterly: “charcoal—[is] a miserable medium / for things that seem alive / and sing”; “Stem and leaf … / sheens of shape / have subtle possibilities for my brush / Words would guillotine them.”
Stieglitz’s “found” lines are functional to the point of being perfunctory: “All lived moments are equally true, / equally important.”
The poetry is most vivid when Garebian isn’t documenting, but trying to sketch—or snap—the inner lives of his subjects as lovers and/or artists:
“Camera Work” has us glimpse Stieglitz thinking, “Say platinum, gum bichromate, carbon, etc. / light an economy of mood / shadow its imprint.”
The love affair is neatly pictured: “In high summer her shanty / studio is glutted with apples. // Their shine fills trees all morning, / burdened boughs straining / with the weight of this light / that falls on her nakedness [posed for him] like fever.”
Roughly 2/3 of the poems deal with Stieglitz looking at O’Keeffe and snapping her or other models, to conclude that males are fixated on coitus and/or the eternal feminine. Is this news?
O’Keeffe focuses on Nature: “Shingle dissolves into leaf, / and the shell is a white memory. / Shining praise for the design in things.”
Fine lines are found in this collection, along with some—including the “found poems”—that are just pedestrian.
More grit and sparks might have appeared had Garebian explored the illicit love between O’Keeffe and another artist, the African-American poet Jean Toomer.
Bren Simmers’ book should be required reading for every member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Cabinet, for she plots the angst of thirty-somethings facing low-wages, high debts, zilch pensions, and zero hopes for affordable houses.
Settled in Vancouver, a city where middle-class homes are high-rent apartments, Simmers simmers with discontent: “Frida [Kahlo] had a bridge, / Georgia [O’Keeffe] had Ghost Ranch. / Virginia [Woolf], you understand, / I dream of four walls.”
Trying to decide whether she belongs in her neighbourhood, Hastings-Sunrise (now yuppified as “East Village”), Simmers maps the number and locations of swing sets, Xmas lights, footpaths, autumn tree colours, and open doors.
Trying to decide whether she should be married, Simmers weighs pros, cons, and offers proverbs: “Ask yourself, What is the next necessary thing? Then do that”; “be that crow. / Grow feathers, hollow bones, / scavenge a different wealth / from notes, berries, books.”
Simmers style is to skitter twittering observations, ricocheting from one concern to another: “Five percent down / has spawned sprawl, smog / and bank foreclosures…. / This tenement marks us as / ordinary cosmopolitans.”
The domestic must be navigated like any terrain: “Our routines don’t align without effort. / I crave quiet into afternoons; my love plays / double bass in our one-bedroom. All / the negotiations over headphones, time alone…. / I still covet a fireplace, a hammock / doors we can close.”
Simmers inks literally a pedestrian poetry of how B.A.’s and M.A.’s make lives for themselves in downscale neighbourhoods threatened by gentrification.
She has written the 2015 equivalent of Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies (1972), if crossed with Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue (1968).
Ghosts and Girls of Fiction House
by Various, Maurice Whitman, Matt Baker
USA: IDW, 2015
152 pp, $30.00
Teacher’s Pets
By Crystal Hurdle
Toronto, ON: Tightrope, 2104
150 pp, $22.00
Ghosts and Girls of Fiction House ($30 US, Yoe Books) is a hardcover collection of 1940s Ghost Gallery comic books, reproduced in gorgeous, primary colours, in coffee-table format, reminding us that this form of pop—pulp—culture required a pool of gifted artists, if not quite so gifted writers.
In his foreword, Craig Yoe recalls that, as a teen, he loved Fiction House comic books, featuring “space-vixens, lady pilots, and leopard-clad lasses…”
Yoe registers that, in the 1940s, Fiction House specialized in “aviatrixes, outer space ladies, and … Me-Jane-You-Tarzan characters [in] tight-fitting civilian clothing” and pitted these cartoon feminists against poltergeists and banshees.
These audacious, bodacious, and curvaceous heroines won the enmity of moralists, such as Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, warned Yank adults that letting youths read comic books, with their suggestive situations and titillating illustrations, would lead to deviancy and delinquency.
In his intro, Michael H. Price notes that Ghost Gallery “yarns” mix crime with horror, allowing heroes and heroines to confront “flesh-and-blood miscreants” as well as ectoplasmic foes.
Like Yeo, Price denies that the damsels are “mere decorative ciphers.” No: They are staple allies with male detectives and he-man types, battling phantoms and Frankensteins, demons and Draculas, related to “the early 1940s resurgence of horror movies as a moneymaking staple of the Hollywood studios….”
Both Yeo and Price understand that these classic comics are racist (and exploitative of “sexiness”), but they are products of their time.
How does a typical Ghost Gallery plot unfold?
Check out Jumbo Comics #56 (October 1943): The ghost of Josh Butler haunts “Pa” in “Gunsmoke Hollow,” a backwoods shantytown perfect for an Alice Munro story.
Fearing that a spectre has ambushed her dad, Millie—a blonde in a magenta dress best described as peek-a-boo rags—writes to square-jaw Drew Murdoch to come to her aid.
Drew arrives, but Pa is dead, and Drew soon battles shotgun-toting rednecks. One foe is not a phantom, just a dude—a moonshiner in cahoots with another distiller.
Next, the hicks are dead—and Millie, a sudden kidnap victim, is freed, and Drew leads two women to safety.
The stories are outlandish, the ink-and-paint garish, and that’s their charm.
Crystal Hurdle’s second book of verse is a novel-in-poetry, Teacher’s Pets ($22, Tightrope).
It’s not a comic book, but the tale is easily campy; its free-verse narrative tells of the Venturers, an extra-mural, extracurricular, school camping group, and their adventures in the Great Outdoors—and in the buff.
The stuff of secondary school becomes the media for these dramatic monologues: hallway gossip, diary jottings, report cards, horoscopes, essay bits, lists of essentials.
The poetry is accessible, witty, and “PG-17” in orientation. Thus, “Excursion List” includes, not only DEET, but “prophylactics.”
“Natalie Wong” testifies to hanky-panky amid the sleeping bags: “Mr. Waggoner—no, Cam—at the tent’s entrance, / at the foot of my air mattress, / at….”
Hurdle asks that we use our imaginations to fill in the blanks or to draw the obvious conclusions: The teachers are predators, but the teens are not babes-in-the-woods (pun intended).
“Mary Beth Tansy” witnesses that Cam “sounded almost like God, / and the way he touched my body later was reverent, / as if I were something holy…. / Not grabby like my step-dad or all of the boys before.”
In a later poem, Mary Beth recalls, “there was a rim of pleasure around the pain” and that Cam “put his hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t cry out…. / His hand tasted musky, but his kisses are honey.”
English teacher Letitia Henry marks Candace Hunter’s haiku that reads, “in the starry tent / he kisses constellations / along my backbone”: She thus learns that her sometime lover, Cam, has been intimate with the teen.
This poetry is a mash-up of Vladmir Nabokov’s Lolita and Peggy Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie: Naughty and knotty imagery that makes “roughing it in the bush” a double entendre.
But the central debt is to Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, whose centenary was in 2015.
A creative writing prof at Capilano University, Hurdle knows her stuff. Teacher’s Pets is a Grade-A accomplishment.
