Poem by Tammy Armstrong

Tammy Armstrong is one of the 20 poets I selected for New American Writing, "The New Canadian Poetry" section, 2005. She's one of the younger poets in Canada most worth following.

So, as we move towards Canada Day, Eyewear is very happy to present a most apt poem of hers, below.

I recall Canadian Tire and its Monopoly-style money with great fondness.


Amaryllis Canadian Tire

Near the return and exchange desk
the sink drain blare of Cash 11, Manager to Cash 11,
bulb-split amaryllises,
petals halogen rusted, garden bulimic
stand sturdy in clay cups
while the mats at the automatic door grow streamy
with boot tracked snow, slush.

Ski coats shift sibilation
each down-plump body
maneuvering the card table
careful not to catch a leaf
above sparkle-glue bijouteries
outsized flanges and piano hinges.

Amaryllis -
dismissed amid vulcanized rubber
boxing day sale perfume -
an ostentatious widow
price shopping the discount aisle.


poem by Tammy Armstrong

Nixon In China

Eyewear attended Nixon In China last night at the ENO.

Let me say this about that: NIC rivals Kane or Godot as a signal 20th-century work that is both paradigm shift and summit of its type - so, as Kane is both best film and most innovative film, and Godot is most influential absurdist play and also central play since 1950 - so too is John Adam's NIC both the most popular postmodern opera of its period (roughly 1977 to 2001) and the pre-eminent one, inaugurating a new kind of reference to contemporaneity in art. It is also, like the work of Welles, viscerally thrilling for its exuberance of design.

Music For Canadians

On the cusp of Canada Day, July 1, Eyewear is pleased to note a new review of Leonard Cohen's latest collection, Book of Longing, in the TLS (June 30 2006).

It's written by Pico Iyer (see link below), no stranger to Cohen's Northern Comforts.

I am currently completing my own review, for NPR, so won't say more here.

One aspect worthy of mention - the Iyer article on Cohen is under the heading "Music" - not "Poetry".

Canadians may find it irritating to realise that, outside his own country, LC is not considered so much a writer-turned-singer as vice versa - as if his towering intellect had been muffled by his tower of song.

http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/iyer.html

Summertime

The Summertime issue of Poetry Review, the UK's leading journal of poetry, founded in 1909, is now out, and it includes poems by (among others, as the saying goes) John Burnside, W.S. Merwin, Andrew Motion, Don Paterson, George Szirtes, Sarah Wardle, C.K. Williams, Tamar Yoseloff, and, indeed, myself.

It can be ordered from www.poetrysociety.org.uk - a single issue is £7.95.

Echo Friendly

Anyone who sees Derrida, the fairly recent documentary "biography" of Jacques Derrida, is in for an essay on the difference (with or without an a) between voyeurism and homage, the clear and the opaque, and the pretentious and the sublime. Layered and edited to take full advantage of how film can mirror, copy, track, trace and inscribe, the image, the voice, the eyes, the gaze, this particular film shows the nearly-impossible: a person thinking. Or appearing to think.

Derrida, as the self who is playing his Other, his image onscreen, is strikingly photogenic - a handsome, tanned, white-haired older man who is like a combination of Einstein and Sartre - sartorial yet slightly eccentric. This is a coincidence the film enjoys - he could have been ugly, and his thought might be the same - but the fact the camera "loves" him allows him to question what love, and cameras, are for.

The film constantly implies division, and doubling - sometimes "Jacqui" is a doddering old man puttering about his dowdy kitchen in Paris, other times he is in California, speaking perfect English, quipping like Wilde, and dressed in startlingly fashionable suits, charming the pants off (it would seem) brilliant young philosophers. Sometimes, too, he speaks movingly of fidelity and love - then refuses to speak about how he first met, or thought of, his wife (a moving, strange moment) - and then again, admits that, should he be able to see a film about Heidegger or Hegel, he would want to know more about their sex life - because they spoke as asexuals. Because Derrida has not been asexual in his writing, he does not feel required to answer such questions for this film.

Knowing that Derrida is, now, sadly, dead "in reality", the film bears some melancholy weight - the weight of a vessel bearing a load for which it was not built; or rather, the exuberant hero-worship that clearly informs the makers, and lifts the film up into play while also lessening its critical functions, seems deflated by this loss. It also redoubles our fascination with the secrets, and the public iconography, it attempts to inscribe - so, a sequence where Derrida handsomely walks a Paris street, smoking a pipe, is deeply impressive, and shallow, all at once.

Derrida is invited to make several impromptu (improvised) essays - on the eyes, on hands, on identity, on biography, on love - that are both simple, and profound. Anyone who has avoided reading Derrida, assuming him to be a nihilist, over-difficult, or irrelevant, will find a different man, one engaged with moral and socio-political issues (such as anti-Semitism, forgiveness in South Africa) and able to use lyrically intense, but often very clear, language. When he confesses he cannot tell a story well, we are unsure - his hesitant, yet-firm, soliloquies are at least fables - fables of consciousness at play.

Watching Derrida allows several intriguing thoughts to emerge: the difference between poetry and philosophy (where there is one) is based on the tension between the life of the philosopher, as revealed and the thinking "itself". How much of the language in a poem - for example - is about thinking about the how and what of words - and how much is about the poet herself?

Derrida contrasts the relationship between Narcissus and Echo. He relates how Echo, even only by using the repeated words (or ends of words) of Narcissus, was able to poignantly inflect the echoed language with traces of desire. Writing poetry needs to be the place between Narcissus and Echo.

On Novellas

The novella is the ideal form of the novel, just as the short lyric poem is the best sort of poetry - for a reason that is self-evident: brevity. Or rather, brevity by way of compression. And not just pounds-per-square-inch. The balance between the demands of the author, and the needs of the reader, seem to find equipoise in the novella - which can be read in one sitting, in one moment and place, just as much as a poem can, or a piece of music may be listened to.

While longer works of writing have their different values and charms, one of them, surely, is the function of being able to be "picked up" later. There is no later in a novella - there is the enveloping sense of a dying movement, a now turning into a then, as one flows with the work itself. The novella is the glance at the painting that turns into the look that's held by wanting to see more, but also knows the gallery will be closed in an hour. Its dance with the finite is responsible and sweet at once - the novella is the last glass of wine before the bottle is done, the kiss at the doorstep, the short walk home. It finds its place among all the pleasures of life that are neither here, nor there - but gently in-between.

My three favourite novellas were two, until yesterday. And now a third has joined them. It is not lonely company, but a third is welcome. I love very few books, and the ones I love transport me. I make no apologies for this. I am much moved by a sense, in the author, that a time is both passing and held, in the written word; I prefer the elegiac. My previous favourite novellas are Daisy Miller and Death In Venice. If one wishes to suggest that Miss Lonelyhearts is a novella, then so be it. So, four, then. For a full handful, my fifth would be Heart Of Darkness. In all novellas of greatness, the themes are death and love, and how they meet and undress each other.

I read A Month In The Country (1980) by J.L. Carr yesterday, on a train, from Scotland, and a remote farmhouse on a firth, where I spent a golden week-end with brilliant, beatiful poets in their youth - hurtling back to London. The weather darkened as the distance forshortened.

I am not sure how this book escaped me until now - that is one of the pleasures of reading - one never need read a book until it finds one. The time being in joint, I read it in one (motionful) sitting, and was moved. I won't summarize here - the "short novel" is less than 90 pages in my Penguin Classics edition. I simply hope you read this book some day. It opens irresistibly, for me - a young shell-shocked veteran-artisan stepping off a train in 1920s England in terrible rain on to a platform where he is to be greeted with kindness, friendship, love and discovery, even as his grotesque facial tic sets him apart as a man who has seen irremediable horrors. I am so touched by this meeting of opposites, of violence and gentleness. Then, it unfolds that the novel is a looking-back, to a lost time, and that always gets me.

It has something of A Separate Peace in it - also informed by a classical knowledge that life is passing. This book, too, is based on the carpe diem perspective. It is also a fine meditation on art, and work, friendship, desire, and faith. Carr loved Conrad, Hardy and the poems of Housman, and he manages to bring their various ways of writing, and seeing, into his own story. Like The Good Soldier, but more simply, each line is pitch-perfect, and leads to an ending of great sadness. The last line is one of the most quietly beautiful in the modern English language.

That being said, I am not entirely convinced by the figure of Mrs. Keach. As such, this is a great work, and it is Carr's masterpiece, but it is a slightly flawed one. Only slightly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Carr

Nothing To Fearing

June 26, 45 years ago today, the great American poet Kenneth Fearing (pictured) died in New York City.

See a previous post for more on Fearing.