Thursday, January 31, 2008
Monday, January 21, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
some Chaudiere Books author activity
not only do we have the Vancouver and Edmonton John Newlove screenings/launches, but decalogue: ten Ottawa poets author Michelle Desbarats is reading at the Dusty Owl Reading Series in Ottawa on January 20th, and various others are involved in the ottawater fourth issue launch at the Ottawa Art Gallery on January 24th; will we see you at one of these?
a review of John Newlove's A Long Continual Argument
A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove. Ed. Robert McTavish, afterword Jeff Derksen. Chaudiere Books, 2007. 251pp, pbk. ISBN 978-0-9781601-9-7.
Kane X. Faucher
Chaudiere Books has released a new selection of poems by John Newlove which includes all of the poems appearing in the 1993 Porcupine’s Quill edition (Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992) with 37 additional poems to better give the reader a more compelling and intimate portrait of a frank observer and modest poetic innovator. What is particularly striking about this collection is the nearly palpable trajectory of development, closely indexed to the fragmented events of his life. Beyond following the same chronology as the 1993 collection, the Chaudiere Books edition appends a handful of other poems during that period as well as Newlove’s post-1993 work.
He presents a raw, uncooked version of the Canadian landscape by way of particular instances that demonstrate his aversion to the stereotypical poetic fare, staging a quiet rebellion. The candour and honesty comes to the fore in such moments as when he admits the revolution’s failure in how the energy to prevail was confused with hypocritical self-aggrandizement and brazen disregard: “It was too late. My eyes/were closed. Freedom, summer,/never seemed to be what we wanted.” (The Cities We Longed For) – In this way, there is a connotative cut between dissatisfaction with the buoyancy of the ideal and the grim outcome of the real. But to label Newlove a poetic realist is to commit a treasonous blunder – rather, he could more appropriately called a clever lyricist with strong realist tendencies.
Despite his occasional lapses into incendiary and anguished subjects that border upon polemic, Newlove’s remarkable gift is in the scrupulous generousity he brings to bear in his playfully punning lines, stripped of the overbearing sentimentality and rigid structures of poetic form. Behind his playfully mendacious cynic’s sneer there is the burbling undertow of a fleeting litany (pronounced in “Notes From and Among the Wars”) that runs through his more vitriolic asides, but his primary target for attack does not spare the poet himself, and it is the involved rather than the high voice that does not posture as the objective outsider looking in. The modesty in his approach would decline any claim to his poems standing as generational anthems, but are instead carefully elusive in not being fixed as being the rallying cry of any group or ideologically myopic plan.
Newlove’s work is an implied testament against vertiginous utopian strategies and the overbearing largesse of poetry manifestoism. It is not so much that he is averse to theory or disinclined to take an ideological stance, but that it can too easily interfere with and impede upon allowing the work to speak itself, such a practice being the domain proper of the documentation- and process-obsessed conceptualists. In place of nesting such conceptual prejudices within the works themselves, Newlove presents us with a kind of desordre d’etabli replete with teasing margins, loose ends, vignettes, and cul de sacs. There is an uncanny kinship here with bpNichol’s epistolary fragments insofar as Newlove illuminates all the personal effects of candour into verse-form, veering from the 60s poetic predilection of couching concrete vision in impenetrable obscurity. Perhaps Newlove would even shy away from such a lofty term like “vision” since that would suggest a unified project, limited in its particulars by the demands of an inflexible form from which all is to be derived.
Newlove has but traces of a poetic inheritance, and what makes the work still so relevant and fresh today is that there seems to be no firm historical precedent installed that would otherwise lead to the etiolation and reduction of his work to crude literary canonization. These traces may betray his reading influences, but never do they actually come to dominate his work and make him culpable as an emulator by any stretch. However, neither do his poetic innovations have the flashy, visceral pizzazz of his contemporaries that tried to reflect the social turbulence of their times through shocking phonetic or overtly concrete visual matrices. Instead, Newlove opted for a marked subtlety in his inventions, making modest appeals to how the poem can be re-envisioned and disseminated. He handles the ageless Canadian leitmotifs with a deft, playful, and unique manner, not relying on the stale tropes of his poetic forbearers. There are moments of lubricious potency in his imagery, but this trades blows with an earthy realism with all the blemishes.
Just a step behind the imagery resides the paradox of Newlove and his “doubles”. There is crouching behind each poem the high-stakes interplay between product-persona and person-producer, but this carries off well in a kind of self-deprecatory way that nuances the poems with a jesting similitude, giving them the characteristic raw beat with a snap to its tempo readers of Newlove have come to recognize and admire. The collection is quite aptly named “A Long Continual Argument”, for although an informative editor’s preface by Robert McTavish and an afterword by Jeff Derksen bracket the works, even then the fisticuffs of Newlove’s solo argument breaks out of these confines to be renewed again in their sanguineous strife. With a sort of Borgesian flourish, he makes even of his own life an inset fiction, blurring the line between work and life, highlighting the absurdity of uniting the bios and the graphein with complicity: “I can remember very little of my life. What I do remember I am suspicious of. I may have invented it” (Being Caught, Author’s Preface to Apology for Absence). Newlove shared the keen insight through his many capsule “autobiographies” that a life is always double or more, eternally irreducible with an infinite remainder. Although we may all be a “sack of wet shit” (Death of the Hired Man), in the end we “make the world” (The Cat). It is these stark contradictions of misery and joy, lies and half-truths, that populate the terrain of the poet and the person, and these are the contentious issues of Newlove’s continual argument with himself.
For those discovering Newlove’s poetry for the first time, readers will delight in his trademark parting shot nested in the pithy last line and the unapologetic poetic reportage, as in “The Fat Man”, that does not hide behind a wall of whimsy or false sympathies. Stylistically, Newlove’s poetry has always remained approachable and never prohibitive or exclusive.
originally appeared in ottawater #4, January 2008; see in the same issue, interviews with Chaudiere authors Nicholas Lea + Anne Le Dressay...
Kane X. Faucher
Chaudiere Books has released a new selection of poems by John Newlove which includes all of the poems appearing in the 1993 Porcupine’s Quill edition (Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992) with 37 additional poems to better give the reader a more compelling and intimate portrait of a frank observer and modest poetic innovator. What is particularly striking about this collection is the nearly palpable trajectory of development, closely indexed to the fragmented events of his life. Beyond following the same chronology as the 1993 collection, the Chaudiere Books edition appends a handful of other poems during that period as well as Newlove’s post-1993 work.
He presents a raw, uncooked version of the Canadian landscape by way of particular instances that demonstrate his aversion to the stereotypical poetic fare, staging a quiet rebellion. The candour and honesty comes to the fore in such moments as when he admits the revolution’s failure in how the energy to prevail was confused with hypocritical self-aggrandizement and brazen disregard: “It was too late. My eyes/were closed. Freedom, summer,/never seemed to be what we wanted.” (The Cities We Longed For) – In this way, there is a connotative cut between dissatisfaction with the buoyancy of the ideal and the grim outcome of the real. But to label Newlove a poetic realist is to commit a treasonous blunder – rather, he could more appropriately called a clever lyricist with strong realist tendencies.
Despite his occasional lapses into incendiary and anguished subjects that border upon polemic, Newlove’s remarkable gift is in the scrupulous generousity he brings to bear in his playfully punning lines, stripped of the overbearing sentimentality and rigid structures of poetic form. Behind his playfully mendacious cynic’s sneer there is the burbling undertow of a fleeting litany (pronounced in “Notes From and Among the Wars”) that runs through his more vitriolic asides, but his primary target for attack does not spare the poet himself, and it is the involved rather than the high voice that does not posture as the objective outsider looking in. The modesty in his approach would decline any claim to his poems standing as generational anthems, but are instead carefully elusive in not being fixed as being the rallying cry of any group or ideologically myopic plan.
Newlove’s work is an implied testament against vertiginous utopian strategies and the overbearing largesse of poetry manifestoism. It is not so much that he is averse to theory or disinclined to take an ideological stance, but that it can too easily interfere with and impede upon allowing the work to speak itself, such a practice being the domain proper of the documentation- and process-obsessed conceptualists. In place of nesting such conceptual prejudices within the works themselves, Newlove presents us with a kind of desordre d’etabli replete with teasing margins, loose ends, vignettes, and cul de sacs. There is an uncanny kinship here with bpNichol’s epistolary fragments insofar as Newlove illuminates all the personal effects of candour into verse-form, veering from the 60s poetic predilection of couching concrete vision in impenetrable obscurity. Perhaps Newlove would even shy away from such a lofty term like “vision” since that would suggest a unified project, limited in its particulars by the demands of an inflexible form from which all is to be derived.
Newlove has but traces of a poetic inheritance, and what makes the work still so relevant and fresh today is that there seems to be no firm historical precedent installed that would otherwise lead to the etiolation and reduction of his work to crude literary canonization. These traces may betray his reading influences, but never do they actually come to dominate his work and make him culpable as an emulator by any stretch. However, neither do his poetic innovations have the flashy, visceral pizzazz of his contemporaries that tried to reflect the social turbulence of their times through shocking phonetic or overtly concrete visual matrices. Instead, Newlove opted for a marked subtlety in his inventions, making modest appeals to how the poem can be re-envisioned and disseminated. He handles the ageless Canadian leitmotifs with a deft, playful, and unique manner, not relying on the stale tropes of his poetic forbearers. There are moments of lubricious potency in his imagery, but this trades blows with an earthy realism with all the blemishes.
Just a step behind the imagery resides the paradox of Newlove and his “doubles”. There is crouching behind each poem the high-stakes interplay between product-persona and person-producer, but this carries off well in a kind of self-deprecatory way that nuances the poems with a jesting similitude, giving them the characteristic raw beat with a snap to its tempo readers of Newlove have come to recognize and admire. The collection is quite aptly named “A Long Continual Argument”, for although an informative editor’s preface by Robert McTavish and an afterword by Jeff Derksen bracket the works, even then the fisticuffs of Newlove’s solo argument breaks out of these confines to be renewed again in their sanguineous strife. With a sort of Borgesian flourish, he makes even of his own life an inset fiction, blurring the line between work and life, highlighting the absurdity of uniting the bios and the graphein with complicity: “I can remember very little of my life. What I do remember I am suspicious of. I may have invented it” (Being Caught, Author’s Preface to Apology for Absence). Newlove shared the keen insight through his many capsule “autobiographies” that a life is always double or more, eternally irreducible with an infinite remainder. Although we may all be a “sack of wet shit” (Death of the Hired Man), in the end we “make the world” (The Cat). It is these stark contradictions of misery and joy, lies and half-truths, that populate the terrain of the poet and the person, and these are the contentious issues of Newlove’s continual argument with himself.
For those discovering Newlove’s poetry for the first time, readers will delight in his trademark parting shot nested in the pithy last line and the unapologetic poetic reportage, as in “The Fat Man”, that does not hide behind a wall of whimsy or false sympathies. Stylistically, Newlove’s poetry has always remained approachable and never prohibitive or exclusive.
originally appeared in ottawater #4, January 2008; see in the same issue, interviews with Chaudiere authors Nicholas Lea + Anne Le Dressay...
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Monday, January 07, 2008
John Newlove documentary screening & book launch, Vancouver
John Newlove Documentary Screening / Book Launch
Hosted by Jamie Reid, with readings/talk by Jamie Reid and Jeff Derksen [read Derksen's afterword to the book here].
Filmmaker/editor Robert McTavish in attendance.
8pm, Friday, February 8th
The Western Front (303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia)
$5 admission, $3 students and unemployed. cash bar.
Come celebrate the life and work of poet John Newlove with a screening of the documentary What to make of it all? The life and poetry of John Newlove, and the Vancouver launch of Chaudiere Books' A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, edited by Robert McTavish.
About A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove:
For information on the book, or anything else, contact the publisher, rob mclennan, at az421@freenet.carleton.ca
Ordering information on the book here; information on the Edmonton launch here;
Hosted by Jamie Reid, with readings/talk by Jamie Reid and Jeff Derksen [read Derksen's afterword to the book here].
Filmmaker/editor Robert McTavish in attendance.
8pm, Friday, February 8th
The Western Front (303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia)
$5 admission, $3 students and unemployed. cash bar.
Come celebrate the life and work of poet John Newlove with a screening of the documentary What to make of it all? The life and poetry of John Newlove, and the Vancouver launch of Chaudiere Books' A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, edited by Robert McTavish.
About A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove:
A Long Continual Argument is the comprehensive statement of an acknowledged poetic master craftsman. It includes all the poems John Newlove chose for his previous selected poems with substantial additions from all his major collections. All of his later poetry has been included, as well as integral, critically-acclaimed works such as the long poem "Notes From And Among the Wars," and many of the cynically lyric poems that established his early reputation. From his first chapbook in 1961 to his final epigrammatic poems of the late 1990s, Newlove has been a quiet poetry dealing with unquiet themes. A poetry that, in the words of Phyllis Webb, "doesn't struggle for meaning. It emerges out of his thinking."John Newlove (1938-2003) was born and raised in Saskatchewan. He began publishing while working various jobs in Vancouver in the 1960s. His many honours included the 1972 Governor General's Award for his book Lies, and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Founders Award. His works have been internationally published and translated.
"Newlove was the best of us, the great line, the hidden agenda, tough as nails and yet somehow with his heart on his sleeve. There was always a double-take involved when reading his work. His lyrics, such as "The Weather" were faultless. I devoured and loved his work. --Michael OndaatjeFor information on the event, contact Jamie Reid at dadababy@shaw.ca
To call him "the voice of prairie poetry" misses the target by as broad a margin as if you called John Milton "the voice of Cromwell's London." This was the voice of a man who knew what it was like to almost drown, to gasp for air, to almost drown again. His poetry delivered a blow to the head then, and it does now. It will be seen again for what it was, and is: major in its time and place. --Margaret Atwood (from John Newlove: Essays on His Works, forthcoming)
For information on the book, or anything else, contact the publisher, rob mclennan, at az421@freenet.carleton.ca
Ordering information on the book here; information on the Edmonton launch here;
Saturday, January 05, 2008
John Newlove and Max Middle
I wouldn't have necessarily put them in the same phrase, but Chaudiere authors John Newlove and Max Middle (as well as a few other Canadian poets) were recently referenced on the British reviews blog Intercapillary Space.
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