Nox <\/em>(2010), which combines translations, poetic fragments, letters, photographs and visual art. The book\u2014if we can properly call it a \u201cbook\u201d\u2014conforms to many of the generic conventions of the pastoral elegy (searching, rehearsal, attempts to fashion a daedal substitute for the deceased), but does so very much in Carson\u2019s signature a-generic manner. Thus, what Brick Books calls Carson\u2019s \u201cfirst collection of poems\u201d seems less an inaugural compilation of her poetic endeavors as an inkling into the increasingly diverse opus of a funny, creative, and rigorously intellectual verbal artist.<\/p>\nShort Talks <\/em>begins with an odd but formal \u201cIntroduction\u201d: \u201cEarly one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else.\u201d These first four sentences key readers in to some of Short Talks<\/em>\u2019 central themes: Carson\u2019s subjects, though diverse, are inseparable\u2014intrinsically, if tenuously, connected. Each \u201cpushes,\u201d or prompts, another of the Talks. They are, moreover, words that describe the \u201cfacts\u201d and \u201cfaces,\u201d that fix phenomena in language, preserving theirs accounts for posterity and offering, for the writer, a mode of investigation. This minor apologia <\/em>is significant, since Carson\u2019s subjects are so diverse. I imagine one of the major challenges in constructing this book was making its myriad pieces cohere, a feat Carson accomplishes with ostensible ease. More importantly, however, it allows her to highlight the emphasis on inquiry and intellectual pursuit evident in nearly all of her writing, from the searching effort crucial to the process of translation; the seeking and eventual rehabituation necessary to mourning; and, most essential, an elemental and unadulterated desire for knowledge. Indeed, Carson notes in the introduction, \u201cI will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough [\u2026] you can never work enough.\u201d<\/p>\nPerhaps Short Talks<\/em>\u2019 most endearing quality\u2014and what allows this collection specifically to endure, despite her myriad subsequent publications\u2014is Carson\u2019s sense of humor. In fact, humor is the very characteristic that allows readers to dismiss the non-poetic generic indicators\u2014the titles and the essayistic language\u2014as tongue-in-cheek gestures aimed at undermining the self-seriousness of her academic subject matter. (The Talks <\/em>consider Kafka, Van Gogh, and Friedrich H\u00f6lderlin, for example.) Carson\u2019s humor is tempered with sentiment, which is what renders it so affective. Take, for instance, \u201cShort Talk on Reading\u201d:<\/p>\nSome fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madame Bovary [\u2026] Since those days I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The association at the passage\u2019s end is strange, but true. It\u2019s oddity makes it funny, but there\u2019s a relatability to the passage as well. Who hasn\u2019t conceived some eccentric, apparently useless associative connection between two things? It\u2019s how mnemonics work. But those factors are emotively underscored by the situation at hand, and by the subsequent truth readers glean from examining it closely. The speaker\u2014the \u201cchild\u201d of the poem\u2014does not want to be in the car; she loves to read. The father hates what she loves (i.e., \u201creading\u201d), but loves what she hates (long car rides). There\u2019s an estrangement there that we can all relate to on some level, but that this speaker in particular conveys with powerful clarity, despite the ironic detachment produced by the passage\u2019s comedic final turn. Moments like this one are the most powerful in Short Talks<\/em>. It\u2019s what I love about Carson still.
\n
\nI admire Dennis Lee for entirely different reasons. Like Carson, Lee has worked in a wide variety of fields. To date, he has composed sixteen children\u2019s books, edited five anthologies, and written music for various children\u2019s television programs, including the theme song of the 1980s show, Fraggle Rock<\/em>. Of note, he also co-wrote the story for Labyrinth<\/em>, the 1986 film directed by Jim Henson and starring David Bowie. Riffs <\/em>is his seventh poetry collection for adults, of thirteen. Being a midcareer work, and an evolutionary one in Lee\u2019s poetic trajectory, it plays a different role in the Brick Books series than Carson\u2019s Short Talks<\/em>. His work couldn\u2019t be described as a-generic or hybridized in the way that Carson\u2019s can, but that\u2019s very much to Lee\u2019s strength: the poems in Riffs<\/em> are exuberant, slippery, erotic and celebratory in a way that only verse proper could accommodate. They are funny, too, though they don\u2019t contain the same wry, self-ironic sensibility that characterizes Short Talks<\/em>. There\u2019s an honesty and fluidity to them that remains rare in contemporary poetry today. They seem to spring, if not from the heart, from an artless, emotive impulsivity. I imagine they were scribbled down, at least originally, without much hesitation or editing. That\u2019s not at all to suggest that Riffs<\/em> feels unfinished or even rough around the edges\u2014quite the contrary. Lee\u2019s Riffs<\/em> contains a genuine spontaneity that I admire and even envy.<\/p>\nLee\u2019s penchant for spontaneity is evident even in the opening passages, where the tone is especially celebratory: \u201cYup, this is how it happens: \/ you do your half-smile, serious and bantering both, \/ and right on cue my insides \/ cave in\u201d (Riff #5). Though the tone grows sullen later in the text, the same spontaneity remains, altered by Lee\u2019s pained emotional tenor. It\u2019s as if readers themselves experience the ups and downs of the speaker\u2019s romantic relationship. That spontaneity is enhanced by Lee\u2019s typography, which ranges from largely standardized free verse to highly enjambed and radically indented lines that, as they unfold on the page, mime not only the fluctuations in the speaker\u2019s voice but those of romantic relationships, and life, more generally:<\/p>\n
Fact: it was
\nwrong from the start.
\nOur treks through plenary
\nskin and vistas, the
\nblastoff to lovers\u2019 clear\u2014
\nthose were
\nsnotty renditions of soulful.
\nFurtive. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Self-serving. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0A lie.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Riffs<\/em>\u2019 spontaneity is something of a break from Lee\u2019s earlier poems. As Paul Vermeersch notes in his introduction, 1968\u2019s Civil Elegies<\/em> features much more rigidly structured and tonally congruent poems, pieces that match the gravitas of the collection\u2019s title. Consider the stanzaic structure of Elegy #5, which Vermeersch somewhat paradoxically\u2014though I think correctly\u2014describes as both \u201cfluid\u201d and \u201cstentorian\u201d:<\/p>\nIt would be better maybe if we could stop loving the children
\nand their delicate brawls, pelting the square in tandem, deking
\nfrom cover to cover in raucous celebration and they are never
\nwinded, bemusing us with the rites of our own
\ngone childhood; if they only stopped
\nmattering, the children, it might be possible, now
\nwhile the square lies stunned by noon.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The poem\u2019s long lines and stressed, syllabic clusters place it in immediate contrast with Riffs<\/em>, but we see some of the same stylistic moves: Lee\u2019s taste for polysyllabic abstractions (\u201craucous celebration,\u201d \u201cbemusing us with the rites of our own\u201d) paired only lines later with palpable monosyllables (\u201cthe square lies stunned by noon\u201d) remains constant. Tone and structure similarly complement each other in Riffs<\/em>, though they function in largely different ways. As Lee permits increasing amounts of white space, the poems themselves open into a playful, erotic mode simply inaccessible to the speaker of Civil Elegies\u00ad<\/em>\u2014perhaps why this particular collection has aged so well. Ultimately, Riffs <\/em>veers from celebration to frustration to, if not contentment, optimism, as the speaker begins to accept loss, acknowledging the transience of love and of life itself:<\/p>\nThe dolphins of need be-
\nlie their shining traces.
\nArcs in the air.<\/p>\n
They do not mean to last. One
\nupward furrow, bright & the long disappearance<\/p>\n
as though by silver fiat of the sea.<\/p>\n
(Riff #88)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Despite their aesthetic differences, Carson and Lee embody a distinct period in North American poetry, one that finds itself in the wake of postmodernity wherein poets must push the boundaries even further in order to renovate the genre. In Riffs <\/em>and Short Talks<\/em>, we observe the poets challenging what a poem can do and say, how it can act on the page, and how readers in turn relate to it. In a cultural moment when critics decried the genre\u2019s irrelevance, the period\u2019s aestheticians\u2014of which Carson and Lee remain exemplars\u2014began to experiment not in the mere categorization but in the very ontology of the poem. Poetry broadly, and these poets specifically, answered this charge by innovating subject matter, the line, tone, and even by defying the genre\u2019s conventions altogether\u2014at points by writing, not poems exactly, but poem-like verbal assortments that licensed the poet with a greater window of invention. Such could perhaps be said of other periods\u2014we think of Eliot, Pound, and the Modernists in this way\u2014but never had a poetics migrated so radically from its point of origin and still, for the most part, been called a poem, even if sometimes it was called so by imposition. In fact, the innovations readers note in Short Talks <\/em>and Riffs<\/em> foreground many current poetic movements, from the n<\/em>-th generation New York School to the subgenre known as ecopoetics. Yes, Brick Books\u2019 release prompts us to (re)investigate these collections\u2019 historical moment, but that moment was already all around us. It\u2019s simply up to us to recognize it and observe.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
[1] It\u2019s worth noting that The Autobiography of Red <\/em>is classified on the book jacket as \u201cpoetry\/fiction\u201d; Red Doc><\/em>, on the other hand, is classified only as \u201cpoetry.\u201d Both are published by Vintage. To what extent has her work\u2019s reception shaped its categorization?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Poetry Reviews Short Talks by Anne Carson London, ON: Brick Books, 2015 75 pp, $20 Riffs by Dennis Lee London, ON: Brick Books, 2015 105 pp, $20 It would be difficult to imagine two poets whose lives and work share similar origins but whose careers have experienced such divergent trajectories as Anne Carson and Dennis Lee. Both hail from Ontario,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":776,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":719,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}