branta

I thought of the word “boil”, of how it suggests agitation, of how the very word intimates lack of control, and I thought of the word “abscess,” derived from the Latin abscedere, “ab” for “away” and “cedere” for “to go” which suggests the humours leaving the body through the portal of the abscess, and how boil is the better name, how poetry is an assertion of mastery on unruly elements, and how this abscess, this boil, will take weeks to heal.

The poem state is manic: written as if it talks fast, talks much, talks an ear off; it grasps what it can, perhaps stays too long, but it is glitteringly present, evanescent, has the amiability of a high. But the real danger of the poem is the change it makes in its poet: convinced that the poem is transcribed from the muse, pure dictation, the poet is gulled into thinking that the writing will be lasting, will be a contribution, and the poet, heady, not yet coming down, has the manic state of his art:
-from Maisonneuve

Fifty readings. Forty-five poets. Two days. I could offer a run-down of the events, conversations had, arguments put forth, social interactions gone wrong, but the truth of it is that I loved being back home and that’s all I’ll tell out of school. I loved the river, the trees mid-turn. The ride back and forth to the University, where I did my undergraduate degree.

It is common to think that only one solution is required. The avant-garde thinks that language is enough; no matter that the poem might be a polysyllabic soup. I have read poets of real talent with undeniable panache, but when I weight their collection in the middle of the night, for I carry all poets with me there, I wonder: but what are they saying? Are they summarizing anything of use? Is there an honest emotion to be had?

It’s not that I think of them as inadequate as poems; it’s that I fear the inadequacy of their maker. But I thought about the teacher’s objective, to get these kids thinking about writing as something they could do, and I looked through my book, the first section of which is all about my daughter, and I marked off ten poems that would be appropriate for reading to the class, poems essentially about joy and mystery. Thus there was an additional hook: the poems were written not only by someone the children knew, their classmate’s father, the poems were about someone they knew.

The only difficulty with Kafka’s letter that I see in terms of using it in my practise is that it is written at a very high level; the translation I have (Schocken Books of New York, 1954) is a soaring, ebullient document, its devices are high, and so could only be prescribed to the literary patient. But if I ever found an intelligent patient who thought that “dredging up the past” to “blame Mommy and Daddy” was useless, I could recommend Kafka’s letter, and I think no one can read this document and not be changed if they have suffered some kind of abuse, be it emotional or physical or both;

As Tom Waits sings on his album Alice, “You haven’t looked at me that way in years/
You dreamed me up and left me here” and I was a physician in Erin, a little place where Tim Inkster published books by the wood engraver George Walker; Walker was the illustrator for the first Canadian edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Tim gave me a few books and immediately I was back, regarding Alice.

Poetry is necessarily a self-interested discipline, and I think the writer is looking for his poems to do too much for him. They will not work out at the gym for him and give him a better body; they will not make savvy investments. There is the matter of time spent, and poets believe –have to believe- that even the half-born have half a life. And there is honour in writing poetry, in living a life conducive to it.