Link Wray Is Dead

There were not many Wrays as famous as Link - though the one in King Kong's clutches must count as a distant second.

The death of Link Wray is the end of an era of sublime trash-noise simplicity whose cultural value will only rise with time. He was a musical genius, and more interestingly, a man with a fascinating personal story.

The fortunes of Quentin Tarantino, and his masterpiece, Pulp Fiction, would have been very different, if Wray had not supplied some of the major musical moments, which, along with Miserlou, are the leitmotifs of the film. It is no puffery to say that Wray had the opportunity to create signature sounds that were iconic in at least two key decades, one of them being the 90s. His influence on garage-punk-surf, both originally and during its revivals, is comparable to that of Ezra Pound on Imagism - which is to say, he almost single-handedly (as it were) strummed the power chords of his genre into existence.

I have long felt that, should the thin walls between high and low culture ever truly crash down, in a thundering surf, it will be recognized that a legimate B-poetry movement has been rumbling along, beneath the surface, all the time, since the Beats. This trashy, indie, alt-poetry, if it is ever noted, will come to be called The Age of Wray, in honour of this often wordless troubadour of something wild, raw and utterly itself.

The link below (no pun) takes you to his obituary.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1647696,00.html

French Letters

A site with world poetry features a poem of mine translated into French by the fine writer Robert Paquin.

Thought you might enjoy reading it.

http://www.poesiedumonde.com/temp/article.php3?id_article=58&id_rubrique=112

Review: The Consequences of Love

The Consequences of Love, the Italian film released in 2004 and now out from Artificial Eye as a DVD, receives Four Quartets from The T.S. Review.

It is one of the most poised, stylish, suspenseful, and under-stated European films of the last five years, with an extraordinary series of final images that reminds one of Pasolini's Christ, if not for the reasons one might expect.

The central roles are cast perfectly, with Olivia Magnani and Toni Servillo, as the Beatrice-waitress-figure and the Dante-middle-aged-business- traveller, respectively.

I welcome haunting films about isolation, desire, the gaze, despair and transgression set in hotels, Death In Venice perhaps being second only to The Night Porter. Now, add a third classic to this genre.

Revillo invests his face, manner, body and stylish dress with an exhaustive but invigorating melancholia; and Magani is utterly astonishing in her long, languid silence, and speech.

Moving, elegantly but with feline-immediacy, from the most sublimely measured asthetic shots of glowing interiors to hyper-cool chrome-bright, Mecededes-black violence, this is a study in the hot and cold both of the image, and the interior self, and how imagination moderates, or does not, our movements between worlds of love and death.

http://www.artificial-eye.com/consequencesoflove/main.html

Switch or Fight?: Ever More New Canadian Poetry

It seems 2005 is shaping up to be the "Year of New Canadian Poetry" and canon-revising anthologies - first my own section for New American Writing this spring, then Sina Queyras' Open Field from NYC, and soon, The New Canon from Carmine Starnino, and, altogether less-expected, Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. As a long-time enthusiast of the anthology, I am particularly pleased to see this series of alternate publications unfolding.

The introduction, by the editors, contains the following by Jason Christie:

"Most introductions include all manner of caveats to anticipate or deflect criticism, to comfort egos that may have been bruised during the selection process, etc. Editors often apologize for what isn't included in the anthology and why it wasn't included. In introductions to anthologies where the editors presume to a project of capturing distinct, new voices, of encapsulating a new generation of writers, or ensconcing an elderly, threatened generation in a monumental marble edifice to weather the wreck of centuries, such editors must address the connotations of their pomposity with caveats. We offer no apologies because we are not attempting to suggest our anthology establishes boundaries, exhausts possibilities, or captures an entire future literature in the gestational state of its potential. Shift & Switch is not a complete catalogue of New Canadian Poetry."

My comment here is that S&S is most certainly not a complete catalogue, and its ruptures, aporias, holes, absences, vacancies, discrepancies, revaluations, shiftings, etc., may be invaluable, but the collection has done itself a disservice - it seems to me - by failing to include a number of Canadian writers, like Meredith Quartermain, Sina Queyras, Ray Hsu, Alessandro Porco, and many others, who indeed are practitioners of work which is not within the lyric Canadian sublime.

The editor also writes:

"Writing is alive, mutational, impermanent, flexible, and explosive rather than reductive, static, rigid, and entombed; writing is a dynamic system rather than an hierarchical tree. We would sever the thin lines that connect our anthology to a current tendency in Canadian letters toward community instead of toward sects, a movement toward inclusiveness and encouragement instead of exclusivity and elitism by pretending to such an impossible and false endeavour as Canon-building. With this anthology, we partially demonstrate the variety of talented writers currently underrepresented in Canada. We are not responsible for 'discovering' or 'uncovering' any of the writers in this anthology: we were fortunate to have had the chance to come into contact with their work and are eager to share their work with you. I believe that with this anthology we have a chance to sidestep lineage-bound and fraught notions of patriarchal literary inheritance with which we've been nurtured, to find a warmer intelligence than the cold austerity of reason."

This sounds to me like an attempt to reach Bernsteinian post-modernity without working through the modernity of Early T.S. Eliot - which is indeed a fraught project. Writing is both static and dynamic (it is in fact a dialectic) at times, and there is a tradition, albeit one which shifts continuously. It isn't clear to me whether they are celebrating elitism or inclusivity, community or sects - I read it as saying they wanted sects and elitism - presumably arguing that a quietism lies the other way. As one of the fathers of several inclusive, eclectic, broad church anthologies, I actively disagree with the total abandonement of community for sects - although we should all mate on the high crags with our own kinds, as poets, following Stevens, arguably. On which note, I should add, this anthology is curiously confrontational of the idea of "Canada" - in favour of a strongly American form of "innovative practice". Such a shift was essayed before, notably in the 60s (see the essay on Bowering in the latest issue of Jacket by Canada's own rob mclennan).

My own feeling is, Canadian nationalism, in terms of poetics and publishing, should be certainly interrogated by international sympathies (as I have) but not so far as to dispense with a grasp of the socio-political and literary-economic realities, pressures and burdens of history, writing, and "Canada" as these ideas intersect - in short, there is a Canada, and it has poetries of its own, whose strong point is also its weakness: it always tends to resist the best of international writing, while seemingly investing its efforts in aping what is weakest in foreign models.

Rather than abandoning all interest in the lyric, the tradition, form and so on (we might as well abandon the poem while we're at it) a blessed recovery is in order. The poem, as written in the UK, and Ireland, for instance, is alive and well, and sometimes rather lovely for its interest in voice, metre, and music. Much of what is best in the human being (if such a thing still exists for these editors) nourishes, and is nourished by, the lyric imgination, which, if extended in an Ashberyian fashion, can contain flow, wit, experiment, and delight, without recourse to "math".

I look forward to reading this...

Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry
Edited by derek beaulieu, Jason Christie & Angela Rawlings
Cover art by Brendan Fernandes
The Mercury Press
$19.95 / $16.95 US, ISBN 1-55128-116-3

A Perfect Night To Go To China

The T.S. Review is pleased to announce that David Gilmour has just won the 2005 (Canadian) Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction for his novel A Perfect Night To Go To China. Gilmour has long been a fixture on Canadian television. He lives in Toronto.

I recently reviewed this novel for Books in Canada, where I said: "This seems one of the most refreshing, moving and supple works of fiction written since the 21st century began; it is lovely to see it achieve so much that is uniquely Canadian by handsomely converting great American and European works, without missing a beat. " I stand by my words. This is a Canadian masterpiece. Bravo to Mr. Gilmour.

Future Welcome Is Coming

The Future isn't what it used to be. No more Buck Rogers. Now it is all nanotechnology and innovative poetry...

Do consider the link below, which leads to information about the new anthology, Future Welcome, which I recently edited for DC Books.

www.dcbooks.ca/futurewelcome.html

Poem by Bernard Lamb

Eyewear is pleased to present a limerick from Dr. Bernard Lamb, Reader in Genetics, Imperial College London (as pictured here).

I met Lamb at a dinner, as part of a literary festival where I was "Poet-at-large" and we sat next to each other, where we struck up a lively conversation, about poetry, and genetics.

Dr. Lamb is a prolific writer of limericks, which combine his interests in science, word-play and edgy humour.


Defective DNA

The mutation ‘hyperkinetic’
Makes fruit flies really phrenetic;
Their legs kick and beat
As if they’re on heat -
The problem’s deeply genetic.

poem by Bernard Lamb