John MacKenzie ponders rationalism, art making, and The Reinvention of the Human Hand

Poet John MacKenzie takes a little time to consider the implications of a rationalist mindset on the creative process as he analyzes aspects of my book The Reinvention of the Human Hand. Here's a sample:

Vermeersch makes poetry out of anything and everything: the cave paintings of Lascaux, a Bosch landscape, anesthesia, a boy of an early, unspecified hominin species, and even Warner Brothers’ cartoons. This willingness to experience, examine, and synthesize the whole of life and culture is to me the essence of artmaking.

Read the whole piece here. 

Peer Pressure: The Next Big Thing

I have been asked to particpate in The Next Big Thing, a blogging meme concerning forthcoming books, first by Catherine Jenkins and then again by George Murray, and despite the almost certain fatal hubris of the meme's title, I suppose it's time for me to get with it and just do the damn thing, so here goes:  

What is the working title of the book?

The working title of my book is Don't Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something.

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

While completing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Guelph, my thesis was a collection of poems on apocalyptic themes using a variety of forms that generate new poetry from existing texts (centos, erasures, glosas, ekphrasis, etc). For example, the working title (actually the apocryphal last words of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa) appears in a cento (a kind of collage poem) composed entirely of the dying words of notable people. The gist of it was that I was creating apocalyptic poetry using fragments of past literary works in the same way that survivors of a calamity might build new structures from the rubble of a ruined city. The finished book will be a continuation, greatly revised and expanded, of the work I began in my thesis.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.  

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

This question is clearly biased toward fiction writers, but I'd be happy if the cast of the 1963 film version of Lord of the Flies could be gathered together for a reading of the poems.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? 

If the world is going to end, you'll need the right book of poetry for the occasion.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Over three years and counting. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

One of the themes of my previous book was the origin of human culture, so imagining the end of it seemed a natural starting point for my next book.

What other books would you compare to yours within your genre? 

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn uses some of the same para-textual techniques I'm using, although my book won't adhere as strictly to those constraints as Flynn's does. I see the formal challenges as more of a launch pad than a finish line. Perhaps Apocalyptic Narrative and Other Poems by Rodney Jones is similar in its thematic concerns. I draw inspiration from many sources; I wouldn't be able to name them all here.   

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The book is, I believe, somewhat of a stylistic and formal departure for me. It's an adventurous undertaking, but if we aren't trying something new, then we're only repeating ourselves. I think people who have enjoyed my previous work will enjoy it, but perhaps I will win over some new readers, as well. 

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

This question doesn't make any sense to me. Having an agent isn't the opposite of self-publishing. This book will not be self-published, nor do I have an agent. Because work on the book is still in progress, I haven't signed a contract for this book yet, so it is too early to say who the publisher will be.

Make up a question you think is pressing in way of poetry today.

Why are people always checking its pulse?

*

TAGS: I was supposed to line up five more participants for this in advance, but I hate to be pushy about these chain-letter memes, so I haven't done that. I don't know whether or not they will want to participate, or if they have already been tagged, but I would like to hear about what Stuart Ross, Lauren Kirshner, Chris Banks, Grace O'Connell, and Natalie Zina Walschots are working on. And hey, if they don't want to play, they won't get any guff from me, but you should still visit their websites, buy their books, and read their stuff.

Tracking Down Alice in Bluebeardland

An appreciation of the poet Gwladys Downes and a poem I've been hunting for 25 years

I loved the anthology we used in high school English class. At least I think I did. I remember reading things in it that weren't even assigned for homework, especially the poetry. Like many of my peers, I was hungry for culture, and here was a book with a variety of voices and experiences from the English Romantics to the American Modernists to Canadians doing their own renditions of Romanticism and Modernism. It was a book well suited to its purpose, and for anyone who bothered to open it, it offered an escape from the harsh pecking orders of secondary education and from the increasingly dismal environs of Sarnia, Ontario. 

Sarnia in the late 1980s seemed a cultural wasteland. It had a shopping mall, and it had a beach, so at least the possibility of pretending to live out to the shallowest "valley girl" lifestyle was there four months of the year--even if the perfunctory Californian subculture was already passé, it was still exotic in Canada's "chemical valley." Not that pop culture was a reliable distraction; there was a fluctuating number of movie screens in town, and Sarnia was not a frequent stop for a lot of concert tours. Even if you wanted to get lost in your work, you had your work cut out for you. Often literally. Jobs were being cut, and many industrial positions that meant pensions for baby boomers were already being converted to contract and temp work for the next generation. Getting a summer job cutting grass at a petrochemical refinery had become a coveted privilege for anyone aged 16 to 25. The downtown core was already showing signs of demise. But there was this book...

I can't remember the title of this book, or who the editor or publisher might have been. It has been almost 25 years, after all. I believe it was green, but that is a common enough colour for anthologies of English literature. I do remember that this book was instrumental in my discovery of poetry, and I first read many of my early favourites in its pages. There was E. E. Cummings' poem "Buffalo Bill's" and William Carlos Williams' poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" which I thought was hilarious at first until I realized how sad it really is.

It was in this book where I first read William Butler Yeats and Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane along with so many other famous writers. And it was in this book where I first read a poem by Gwladys Downes.

Gwladys Downes was a Canadian poet and translator who had a long and distinguished career as a professor of French at the University of Victoria. She was not prolific in her output as a poet, publishing only four volumes over a career that spanned half a century. The sparseness of her output has likely meant that she is not as well known as some of her contemporaries like P. K. Page and Phyllis Webb, but she was a fine poet in her own right and did much to advance the art form beyond the writing of her own poems. In addition to her role as an educator, she was a passionate and active translator of Quebecois poetry into English.

For many years I knew nothing of Gwladys Downes' work as an academic or translator, and, to be quite honest, I knew nothing of her work as a poet beyond a single poem of hers that was included in my high school English literature anthology. The poem was called "Alice in Bluebeardland," and I remembered only that I loved it.  

As much as I tried, I could not remember the exact words of the poem, but I knew that it relayed the story of a girl who, having experienced some kind of metaphysical or existential horror, was forever altered in her ability to navigate the "real" world. I know that I likened it to the near-universal trauma of adolescence, and I appreciated the unsentimental appraisal of the damage done therein. It was a good poem to give to high school students, but this wasn't assigned reading. It just one of the many poems I discovered in this book, and its effects have stayed with me over the years.

I would sometimes look for books by Gwladys Downes in libraries and second-hand shops, but to little avail. I would occasionally happen upon House of Cedars, her last book of poems published in 1999, but never anything earlier than that, and so the poem "Alice in Bluebeardland" continued to elude me.

A few years ago, I began to search online in used booksellers' catalogues for Lost Diver, Downes' first collection published in 1955 by Fiddlehead Books, and for When We Lie Together, published in 1973 by Klanak Press, but these titles seemed to be lost to the digital age. Repeated searches of ABEbooks yielded only scattered postings for House of Cedars, which I had already acquired.

Recently, I asked several old classmates from high school if they could remember anything about our English anthology that might help me track it down, but none of them could remember any more than I could. Several weeks later, though, I tried ABEbooks again, and this time I was surprised by what I saw. There were a few listings for a Gwladys Downes book that I had not seen before: Out of the Violent Dark published by Sono Nis Press in 1978. I ordered it immediately, hopeful that "Alice" would be found inside.

The book arrived the other day, and I was instantly pleased with it. Other than some fading to the cover, and a strong, musty aroma of basement storage, the book was square and tight and in near fine condition. The volume itself was a de facto "new and selected" though not advertised as such. It contained poems taken from Downes' earlier collections as well as many of her translations of Quebecois poems that had appeared in various periodicals and anthologies over the years. And to my absolute glee, there it was on page 70, the very poem that I had been hunting for so long: "Alice in Bluebeardland."  

It was everything I remembered it to be: stark, vulnerable, vivid, and riddled with suspense. Here was a poem that I had fallen in love with almost 25 years ago, a poem that made the tedium of "chemical valley" more livable for a curious teenager, and that helped me (though I might not have known it at the time) find the path to a creative pursuit that would occupy the rest of my life.   

See for yourself.

I have a new poem in Taddle Creek Magazine

Taddle Creek Magazine has been good to me over the years, and I'm happy they wanted to publish one of my poems in their latest issue. They've got the poem up on their website now, so you can have a look without evening buying the magazine, which you should do anyway, because they have lots of great stuff.


Anyway, here's the poem:

Sugar Transformed By the Sun

“Whatever can / be destroyed is going to be destroyed. Patience, patience. / Hate what needs to be hated. All is finished. All’s completed.” —A. F. Moritz.

Skin. An eye. An ulcer. Whatever
can bleed will be torn by the nail
or the knife. Matter that ripens, that
rots, will be cuisine for the grubs.
If it can burn, be it paper,
or muscle, or coal, it will be ash
when the sun swells and reddens,
taking the inner planets into its bloom
when the apparatus falters.
Whatever can be destroyed

with a look, with a glance, will stand
before the basilisk, the gorgon,
or the cockatrice, and will petrify
as when the heat escapes, all at once,
from a face, from a forest,
and is swapped with layers of
many-coloured silica...

Read the whole poem here.

I have a new poem on The Week Shall Inherit the Verse

Just in time for the end of the world: my poem "What the Prophecy Could Not Foretell" appears today on Stuart Ross's weekly poem site The Week Shall Inherit the Verse.

This is how it starts:

WHAT THE PROPHECY COULD NOT FORETELL

The new sports set up again in Gaul,
After victory in the Insubrian campaign:
Mountains of Hesperia, the great ones tied and trussed up:
Romania and Spain to tremble with fear.
— Nostradamus  

That the layoff notice would come
on a Friday. That the palpitations
would be caused by coffee. The inventor
of a childhood protected by monsters
would die of an acute case of ghosts.
There was no warning at all, no signs
in the flight of birds, no dreams
to caution us: the eggs would all be broken,
the Internet slow. ESPN has announced
the new sports set up again in Gaul...

To read the rest of the poem, visit The Week Shall Inherit the Verse! 

Please come to The Al Purdy Show on February 6, a benefit for the Al Purdy A-Frame Association

My poetry course at the University of Guelph runs from January to March

My eight-week intensive poetry writing course at the University of Guelph's Centre for Open Learning and Educational Support starts in January. There's plenty of time to register. 

Click here for details.

I have a new poem on the website Canadian Poetries

Please visit the website Canadian Poetries to read my new poem "The Unseen World".

Here's the first stanza:

The Unseen World

There was the Hudson—more like the flash

of a sword-blade than a noble river.

The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel

in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face,

             and the solar system circled about my head!

                     —Helen Keller describing “the view” from the Empire State Building

If you are born to it, there will be no oblivion,
born from one tight womb into another,
as through a door that opens on a different
unmarked door, and then onto a room
with no walls. As though slipping from a basin
filled with ink into a Martian silence, to a depth
where you assume invisibility beneath an ocean
of no light. But look, there’s no oblivion here,
no brusque deletion, only the panic of being found,
of being touched by the limb of something
swimming near you. Don’t you see? Nothing
has been removed from your experience,
only added. First, there was the word for water.
There was the Hudson—more like the flash

Click here to read the whole poem.