PARTIAL FOG LESSENING
by
Ben Griffin
Master of Arts, Keele University, England, 2004 Bachelor of Arts, Keele University, England, 2003
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in the Graduate Academic Unit of English
Supervisor: Ross Leckie, PhD, English
Examining Board: Stephen Schryer, PhD, English
Gary Waite, PhD, History
This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK
May, 2010
© Ben Griffin 2010 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada
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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission.
In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these.
While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. Canada Abstract
Partial Fog Lessening is a collection of poetry concerned with making the unfamiliar familiar. The poetry creatively maps my negotiation of place and articulates my creative investigations into my role as an immigrant to New Brunswick and Canada.
The collection uses a series of lenses — love, nature, commerce, contemporary culture, family, loss — through which to sharpen my perception of cultural difference and accurately express an authentic sense of my experience and personal identity.
New Brunswick becomes the locus of meaning for each of these independent fragments of my existence, establishing a sense of tonal continuity that unifies the sometimes disparate and conflicting voices that echo through the work.
ii Acknowledgement
Thanks must go to the University of New Brunswick, and John Ball in particular, for providing the financial support that made this move to Canada possible. Without
John's diligence and enduring support during the application process, our transition to New Brunswick and a new life in Canada would have been difficult, if not impossible. Thanks also to my supervisor Ross Leckie, whose perceptive and engaging readings of these poems helped to improve much of this collection, and to
Demetres Tryphonopoulos for enabling me to clarify a central notion of how this collection operates. Likewise, attention should be drawn to the influence of my friend and colleague, April Ripley, whose skill, sensitivity and intelligence when analysing poetry is bettered only by her own beautiful work. The professionalism, hard work and good humour of Theresa Keenan and Janet Noiles in the English
Office has been a great help throughout the course of this degree. Thanks to my friends within the English department: I wish you all good luck and success for the future. Thanks finally to my wonderful partner, Helen: your love, kindness and good nature make me a better person, and better able to write with the integrity I hope this collection articulates.
iii Table of Contents
Abstract it
Acknowledgements Hi
Table of Contents iv
The winter did it 1 Uses for a hard-copy dictionary in the age of the internet 2 Alden 3 McAdam ice rink in winter, 1930 4 Old man at the hockey game 5 1 6 Preparation for a wood chopping contest 7 Grapefruit 8 Moose 9 Route 3 10 Fall in New Brunswick, 2009 11 New Brunswick Evocation 12 As we read Neruda 13 Your return from work 15 A lady in her nineties plays piano 16 Ode to the firefly 17 If we go camping 20 When did smoke learn to fly? 21 Cat wading through snow 23 Farm 24 II 25 What I hear at 3am on Christmas eve 26 Let the windows be 28 Winter postcards 29 Mince pies 31 A clear day in Switzerland 33 Airplane boneyard 34 The age of discernment 35 III 36 Fragment in winter 37 First glimpse of a firefly 38 Fish racing ahead of a freezing river 39 The year they cancelled Halloween on the Miramichi 40 Macheda 42 The problem with an empty court 44 Breathe 45 What do I remember 10 years after the fact? 47 A poet reads, moving from one poem to the next 50
iv To the spider on the window frame, 3rd floor 52 In the eye of the dog 53 Domestic 54 IV 55 V 56 Leaf Collection 57 Flannel sheets 58 Vitaly Kaloyev 60 Warming 65 Our New York 67 Alleyway 68 VI 69 Postcard from the back of the washing machine 70 My Uncle John 71
Afterword 73
Works cited and consulted 93
Curriculum Vitae
v 1
The winter did it
Watch it fall.
Watch snow drift through the seedy orange glow of a street-lamp and dress like white ash on the pimpled ice of a freeze/thaw winter.
It's night-light sophistry,
Christmas guessed into being by the collapse of a pregnant cloud.
Watch me fall. (Didn't you always?) Blood pumped like oil in the rooted purple heart of a bruised knee.
See dog shit curled like marzipan and brushed with white gold at the foot of our steps.
(Did 1 mention the bullet I whittled from wood . . . Oak swollen in the choked barrel of a gun)
Breathe.
Can you taste the metal in the snow on your tongue? Baltic carbon laced in the cradled nebulae of flaked ice.
Feel the weight of the dam up-river, pressing deer into the ground. Sound the word in your mouth: Mac - Ta - Quae.
Listen:
Buy heavy sweaters and anti-slip boots. Gather kindling in the cold, your fingers raw with the splintered ingress of wood.
Did you hear the static shock of for on flannel as the cat ran across the bed? Fervent heart beating amber-like; atom arc of blue in the dark. 2
Uses for a hard-copy dictionary in the age of the internet
Kindling. Burn the words you hate and keep warm.
Lethal weapon. Murder never felt so poetic.
Historical artefact. Be the first to own mankind's newest relic.
Toilet paper. Excrete and be neat, for the paper's replete.
Cat bed. Teach them the meaning of the word "Narcolepsy".
Pillow. Sleep yourself clever.
Home to a very small bomb. Terrorism with a message.
Paper planes. Who's laughing when you're winging poetic darts down Main Street?
Imaginary friend. The best read buddy you'll never introduce.
Lover. If she accuses you of being unable to read her.....
Origami. Not very good? Select and crease the pages to leave helpful clues. 3
Alden
Nova Scotia Moonshine on a Carleton county night, baptist mothers praying under guide of firelight.
And there is Alden on the bridge: drunken parabola of man and bike sliding over asphalt loose with sand, expletives showered from his mouth like a farmer slinging seed from the hip.
Heavy leather boots stained with the wet snow of early winter pound the pedals of his iron bike in broad indiscriminate arcs of lactic, swollen legs. McAdam ice rink in winter, 1930
Groaned from the chimneys of sleepers that heave over the border to the percussive thrum of iron, fine particles of drifting soot settle as a crust on the ice overnight; a crisp stubble of atomised coal that roots the steel kindle of a sharpened blade cruising underfoot. The first skate of the day, gilding a figure eight into the sedimentary membrane of the coal- black breath of night. 5
Old man at the hockey game
I noticed you first during the presentation, the slow haul of a jubilant flag from ice to roof, as you massaged your knee persistently.
You took no notice of the klaxon sounding, or the half-embarrassed cast of players who decorated the ice before the first puck dropped:
Silhouettes of muscle skating through the searchlight as you tapped at your knee and shifted side-to-side on the wooden seat.
You did not clap in adulation as the trophy descended from the rafters, sheathed in celebratory velvet, lush above the hard white of pre-game ice.
Perhaps you've seen it all before, I thought, until the puck allowed the net to shimmer in the light, and you just rubbed your knee in silent supplication to the fire in that joint. 6
I
Blue light and wind amongst the fruit stands; the rustle of wax paper cradling two mangoes.
Nexus of iron silence scaffolding the manifold trill of a hockey klaxon.
Corpulent fear in a suit, pressing through a pin-hole closet of dust.
Balletic, the flesh-thick swoon of impact. A bird waddles under the weight of relics.
Organic shrapnel in the air, atomised by the capsuled heat of collapse. 7
Preparation for a wood chopping contest
The kink of your spine when you wake: back cracking like a walnut in a vice as you rotate your body on the mattress.
Shuffle down to breakfast; instant coffee in a tin-clad flask and pancakes laced with wood smoke from the remnants of the hearth.
Draw your axe from its leather sleeve, soft with heat from the kitchen stove, and brush the chestnut rust with wire wool as copper dust collects upon the floor. Rest the blade upon your lap and slide a calloused thumb around the curve to test its edge. Find the sharpness lacking, blood not creeping from a slit below your nail, and brace the blunted blade against the grey shoulders of a grindstone turning on a rod of blackened oak. Drive the edge of kindled steel hard against the stone; heat honed blade.
Sheathe the axe once more into its leather glove, the newly sharpened blade shredding tiny fibres from the recessed bed of wool. 8
Grapefruit
We would eat grapefruit on the balcony, baroque balustrades filtering the neon glow of a Catalan carnival, swollen in the piazza below.
Two-tone marble dishes cradled halves of caustic flesh and fibrous rind in orbs rondure, until you sugared them and watched molasses crystals seeping, topaz butter on an acid sun. We would eat grapefruit on the balcony, and share the febrile alchemy of an acrimonious fruit turning rich upon the corners of our mouths. Moose
You had smeared berries on your mouth before this day, and felt the acrid tang of forest fruit burst loose around your bulbous nose, juice spread like jam upon your fur as tacky liquid dried a bloody stain against your gums, mouthing a sonority of noise in waves across the clearing to a mate, and so with hooves closed in moss that cushioned your great weight, you had lurched and stumbled on those foolish legs into the road, affront my silver car, and streamed like leathered, heavy light in glass through my windshield on the hinge of dusk. 10
Route 3
Slow in the heat, backs branded by the train-track shadow of an overhead power line, cows rest in the field.
Soporific granite carriages rise and fall to the hot viscous rhythm of a heavy August sun.
Beads of sweat slide like salted whitewash smearing the width of their flanks. Rivulets of clarity riven in the dusty folds of their leathered flesh, where the hieroglyphic imprints of this New Brunswick summer accompany them to pasture. 11
Fall in New Brunswick, 2009
This is the art of declination: fall tugging at the seams of summer, seed spilling from the desiccate hem of the season.
Insidious autumn cold beguiles colour from the trees, photosynthetic glucose swelling in the body of a leaf grown orange in the dark.
Grasshoppers fold their wings to the earth and shiver into capsules of grass, heat draining from the heart of those dark, hard shells.
The last, long click of the year catches in a crease of sound at the edge of the road, and smooth is the rise of my chest, in autumn. 12
New Brunswick Evocation *
Cold land, green land of compound wood-stain depth.
Moose in the forests, ice on the trees.
New land of road salt burnt in our eyes. Houses cracked with wood. A tattoo of mosquitoes eroding the sky.
Men buttressed in their shingled skin and Walmart denim.
Snow on the roads. Deer fat packed in a barrel of ice.
This poem owes some of its shape and elements of its initial phrasing, especially, to Lorca's Evocation. 13
As we read Neruda
His sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies, shredding atoms of colour through the sky in a volley of air. Velvetine wings split as confetti petals in a funnel of wind.
I'll read to you as the fat seeds of a pomegranate detail the white linen of our bed, burst in the thick flesh of your lips on my cheek.
A swollen bloom of juice running through the bristles on my face like sun parting shadows in the auburn grass of late September; dark rivers of light divining the pores of my skin, misting in the folds of cotton at our feet.
The smudge of your toes printing evidence of our sweet heat in forensic detail across the bed. 14
I'll read Neruda as the moon clambers the sky, grafted like a silver amulet on a black onyx plate. 15
Your return from work
Your skin smells of wood smoke in our lamp light.
Wood smoke. An aroma of oak on your cheek.
In lamplight I inhale wood smoke from your hair.
Our porch. Wood smoke clouding in your eyes. 16
A lady in her nineties plays piano
Subito, your eyes gleam white in the ivory-keyed clarity of practice kindled in a twisted knuckle.
There is no vernacular of cliche for this: your fingers cannot dance, or race, or flutter. They are ligament placed in thought; concious decision, a step, a lavender-scented wrist telegrammed in quiet adagio pulses before your muscles clench and stretch a tissued fold of dry reluctant skin, unlacing sound throughout the room. 17
Ode to the firefly
To the night light, to the orchid star, to the stem of light wrapped in wings, primed to flush the yard with your piracy of light and gleam elemental in my eyes:
You are the root of lighting: blue light throbbing at the end of a fork of white heat, the hot crack of electric current riding rain, cruising down tin roofs of churches in the fields of New Brunswick, singing wood with incandescent slithered cores of light and leaving tattoos 18
of smouldered oak upon the weather-beaten beams.
Sun; warm, marble light dressed in the glow of fruit tropical in the coal-fired blush of fish heating on a bed of foiled fruit.
Perhaps you rose from the soil, fertile with protein and the dense helicoid marrow of decomposing life, shed forth in wild lucent fragments, oxygen giddy with light refinished.
One atom of silver spun from coiled 19 metal wool, a bead of solid sterling weight that feeds the sun around its sphered curves to heat and glow as emerald balled in wings upon my deck, alight.
Soon you'll sleep glowing in a nook of bark, wood warm to touch within your bed of verdant summer moss; until the day you lure a mate with neon pleas of strobing, candid gold, to love and die and float, a solo ember shedding light bejewelled until the feathered edge of ash goes dark, descending into night. 20
If we go camping
You will sleep in a field of crushed fruit, the purple snap of blueberries stained like ink in your hair, as night pulls a wedge of black flies from the trees to fuel upon your warm arms and the white nook of your neck. Flesh scooped like clay within the anaesthetic mouthful of an insect's jaws. Refuge is a canvas triangle pitched under the damp shelf of a mossy wall, so forgive me if I leave tonight and furnish spools of opalescent nylon thread to the lazy flick of my carbon rod, and beg the roaring mouths of bass to fold in scaled fury on my iron hook. 21
When did smoke learn to fly?
When it was blown unwilling
from a spiral of grey soot and eased before the night;
undressed by a deft shoulder of wind
and shafted from the flu in a pallid wound of smoke.
Anchored to the sky by the almost carbon streaks
of feathered, blackened wood.
Maple split and bent
untethered from the iron catalyst of fires
exhausting moisture from the once damp lips of autumn. 22
Ash loose on the wind, distal flecks of wood
resurrected in the maple-scented hinge of polystyrene dinner trays, the deep rutted paint of a fire hydrant,
and the black asphalt ingress of a curved roof tile. 23
Cat wading through snow
Your coal black paws puncture wounds in the surface of the snow.
Your chin resting on a rumour of support, stiff white rind.
Sinking cylinder of fur, legs scampering beneath the crust.
Your release; silent movie slapstick as you flop onto the kerb. 24
Farm
A small room, the desk settled into a grooved template on the floor, shards of a broken drawer picked and cast like seeds to yellow in the crevice-riven planks of mottled pine.
Cattle rushing from the rain, a rumble of hooves beating like young thunder in the mud.
Windows opening on the fields, the red painted flank of the barn against the corn, the grasses and the river running. 25
II
Drive nails like light into splitting wood. Plywood swollen in evacuated window frames.
Lie on grey slate floor and dress the grout with the wetness in your eyes and the tart drool of liquor on your lips. Molasses rum mined like viscous coal under drifting snow.
Open corn and hay fields. Flat grace. The elegy of snow shoes drying on a rack.
A wood stove leaks tepid ash into the room. In the shards of freezing rain, bones curve. 26
What I hear at 3 am on Christmas eve
I know this.
The insidious creep of sound muffled in the
moist stretch of my drummed ear.
Grass strained by the velvet paw of a cat; the deft hush of ascent
fluttering in a clutch of bladed green.
The ache of shellfish
swelling in the foam; flesh cleaved like pearls from the base of an oyster, as salt burns nightly in the vacant calcium chassis of a shell.
I hear the creak of bone
as deer skulls shift in the muscled, moose-dark corners of the forest.
The snap of crushed fruit, and the piquant hiss of a pepper 27
heating on the vine gathers in my ear. 28
Let the windows be
Beyond the circle of common purpose, backgammon on the street and a line of tethered mules - gnawing brown grass - sits a slack figure in a shaded corner of the square.
Bleached walls and a mosaic of chipped cobblestones echo with the chatter of feet.
A single lemon tree, acid in desire and spitting colour, hides his face.
Eyes glued half-shut with a tangled liquid alloy of tears and sweat, he scrapes a thread of lank hair from his temple and sinks against the tree, bent under the heaven of heat that curves his spine.
A clatter of wooden shutters against foot-thick-rock augments his air of timorous absence, such is the clarity of sound.
Under the leaves of the lemon tree, iridescent fruit in an afternoon sun, he slips a little lower, the small of his back moist against the dry, grey bark.
Quietly the village folds itself to sleep. The slow rolling sonority of an iron bell calling its patrons to Siesta. 29
Winter postcards
The cold,
ice rooted in the white
bone of deer, marrow - chilled like honeycomb in a tube
of curved frost.
ii
The bronzed bodies of trout tear their desperate gills against the chandeliered undercarriage of the river's frozen crust, yawning toward the light. ill
A black December morning, lobster sold 30 at cost on a Saint John pier.
Plastic coolers repossessed by soon to butter hissing flesh of claw, and shell, and eyes that slick with salt
congealed. 31
Mince pies
Snow braids the icy side walk with a lethal rash of shadowed, ambush white where bones throb implicit and hips flush plum-red on avenues slick with greased ice.
harboured in our kitchen, you bury mincemeat into beds of pastry; the thump of your arms in alloyed flour deep as the collapsing thwock of snow upon our deck. swarthy curls of sullen, fibrous rind, cubed and pressed, dressed with tangled spice, tiny coffins of sugared fruit that hiss and brown in cradled robes of heating pastry: 32 the deft print of your fingers just evident at the loose circumference of their uneven floured crowns, dimples crusting in the hot yellow belly of our galvanic stove. 33
A clear day in Switzerland
I saw from the cable car a mountain shot through with tremendous light.
A glacial sun wrestling with the cold valley of snow and porous rock.
The air creased ice into the corners of my eyes and the inside of my lips.
The sky was so sharp I'm sure in its brilliance the rest of the spectrum collapsed and colours raced through a vortex of noiseless, spinning black to find this blue. 34
Airplane boneyard
These are the Machine Dreams of American metal, plastinated spectres stiffening in the sun.
Ransacked by retirement and left to sit through half- life in an Arizona desert; husks nuzzled to the sand.
Row on row of deus ex machina flushed with freshly rendered paint, museum pieces navigating limbo in the well-protected grace of a consolidated allegory. A lobotomised network of collective serenity, swollen with filler. Helicopter gunships vacuum-packed in plastic, emasculated by the threshold of resin on their airless blades.
These are the winged shadows of an eagle's slow cruise from a mantel of desert rock, steel glowing purple in the night. 35
The age of discernment
Today, someone, somewhere, thinks you're a genius.
Maybe you crease warm paper into the shape of Kim Jong-il, the tips of your fingers shredded at the hands of an origami despot.
Swallow swords in a Minnesota strip joint, the dull tip of the blade pressed on the slick lining of your stomach like an endoscopic rapier tattooing a silent SOS into the canvas of your gut.
Tie polyester ribbons to the necks of dolls on a conveyor belt in a factory in Manila, stroking their plastic legs.
Write copy for internet porn, or play an oboe out of key on You Tube: Albinoni's Radamisto blown like mangled nails through the cheap reeds of 2nd hand woodwind. 36
III
I have no data for you. Nothing proven, or steadfast.
Not a hint of oak on my tongue, nor fresh-hewn granite in my arms.
No salt to burn the fibres of my hair, or the riveting screech of a gull at shore.
Only this.
1 dream for a coffin full of lead. Soundless. Snow pressed like white vinyl in a film across the road.
Bitter, hot erosion of rubber as a truck rolls south. Potatoes. Rifle shot splintering a frozen disc of earth.
Words that swell in the residue of gun smoke and wine. Coyotes loose about the yard: the yellow of their eyes. Fragment in winter
Tombs in a field in the valley, houses brace for the wind.
Sarcophagi of snow. 38
First glimpse of a firefly
A broad
fist of heat pilots a firefly beyond the honeycomb screen
at a window.
Impudent,
a piracy of green
in the luminescent glide of light enriched
from the deep black of
a yard in August. 39
Fish racing ahead of a freezing river
Clamouring fish drive a wedge of aluminium to the bank.
Severed scales flash as bladed flecks of silver debris in the light.
The water, choked in freezing webs of creaking, stiffening ice.
Their eyes in onyx beads expand, concussed into the night. 40
The year they cancelled Halloween on the Miramichi
Porches hum from dawn-to-dusk with a neon, back-lit absence in the Fall of'89.
A collective flank of purring flies, wings chattering in the yellow glow of flight unnatural through the enduring, throbbing light.
Locksmiths logging overtime, fingers stiff on the cold steel of dead-bolts grafted onto unbroken oak, hard, dark wood bitter in the bruised hands of men whose pockets swell unspoken.
Smoke twisting through the fine nylon mesh ofbug-screens: the carbon scent seeded in the shimmering creep of a flame riding the topography of a musty bedspread.
Fireflies dissolve into an overarching tent of light above the town:
Invisible, stupefied beads of sun camouflaged by the shedding glare of a Canadian Tire nebula, unloading incandescent clouds of passive heat discharged into the evening sky.
The leathered skins of pumpkins droop uncarved in a mottled crawl of orange flesh, craft knives rest in drawers, and the contused squash of autumn ferment in their own bitter juices.
Fields sweat with the first light snows, mud running thawed in veins of gritty silt onto the banks of vacant highways, staining the feet of a man; thumb cocked to the wind, eyes hard in the sharp light of headlamps driving shadows to the swollen, bloated grass. 42
Macheda
Leather, stitched with rain and the scent of grass, is fed in a sphered glissade of mathematic precision to the fluid shape of Frederico.
Tendons quick about the taut flex of his feet, light in the bright synthetic sheen of his latex boots.
Impudent transfer of weight from heel to toe, the ball grazing the inside of his ankle and shifting through his legs at the pivot of his hips.
The defender slow and viscous, glue setting in a space once full of red nylon and the presage of indelibility. 43
Then the ball. Only the ball.
Arced as curved white light around the apology of an outstretched dive and a palm primed for grip in the damp white foam of a polyurethane glove. 44
The problem with an empty court
In response to an invitation for tennis, he wrote: "I'm sorry, I can't. My father has just committed suicide. Thanks for the offer though."
I was shocked of course, but somewhat disappointed about the tennis; he was the third person I'd asked. I couldn't help but rally with the image in my mind:
Flooded with the pallid glow of filtered malachite light, slipped from the bonnet of their lime-green Nissan adjacent on the drive, is a slowly heating bedroom
in a large brick house. Copper tins for fountain pens and a tall iron sphinx decorate the window ledge, clusters of dust gathering in its fissures of rough oak.
The smell of rich soap and old linen sweating in a wicker basket, accelerated brain matter ruptured on floral wallpaper in the closet - a single shell casing resting on a silk scarf.
The court played empty that night, the smell of stale sweat and floodlights humming in the quiet. I watched the football instead. "I'm sorry" I wrote,"Let me know if you'd like to talk." 45
Breathe
As I sit reading by the shutters, the smell of new hardwood cutting through the stale, second-hand fibres of our fifty-dollar couch, I picture you in this chair, grasping at the hose of an aluminium oxygen bottle.
Clutching the mask close to your thin blue lips, plastic fogged with the warm moist air of shallow, grating breath; the grey bristles of your chin pressed into the damp, translucent curve of rubber cupped against your face.
Your ribcage shaking as the incoherent moaning of the furnace in the basement echoes the shrill lament of your swollen chest.
Heat twinned and streaming simultaneous from the final protestations of your lungs and the old aluminium piping shaking through the house. I wonder what it must have been for you to to limp and grope this tiny distance down the hall, lean against the wall and smell the dust collecting in the layered, fading paint you smeared once without 46
a second glance beyond the fifteen feet of hall you crawled. 47
What do I remember 10 years after the fact?
You, crushing my hand in yours and grinning goodbye:
Teaching me how to relax my knuckles one over the other, loosening knots of rope, the rugged, ligament beauty of your hand clothed in skin grandfathered by the purloined patina of age, leather worn and spotted by the sun.
Me, crushing the dimpled, kinetic plastic of a golf ball three hundred yards down a Cornish fairway marbled by linear ridges of salt-browned grass in this tapered strip of green. You raise your putter from the green in the absence of a handshake 48 and join me later in the bar to drink too much wine, pore over our scorecards, and weave narratives into the numbers pencilled messily into ink boxes.
You, drained of colour and static in the clean universal white of hospital linen, your head resting like a tablet of stone on the shapeless lump of two thin pillows; The nurses feel your wrist, turn to Nan, and quietly draw the sharp unnatural blue of the cubicle curtain around your dented bed.
Me, later, shooting pool in a friend's basement on a cheap plywood table draining balls to one side. Crouched over the cue ball in fierce concentration, as the insistent leak of the roof bleeds a pearl of rain upon 49 the faded green baize and turns it olive in the light. 50
A poet reads, moving from one poem to the next
This is the silent stanza: wordless rectangles of white noise buttressing two poems on a spoken page, awaiting release.
Formless but expectant, composed in the queer angles of words, humming with an echo of the last elucidated stress, the mouth wrapped around it as the cleaving of lips pressed forth sound and bound the word to air like music fed through the unmistakable hiss of a well-kept record player: revised, reviewed, rehearsed, but always singularly different in the not quite perfect pressure of a needle meandering across worn vinyl, reading the lines of a song as a tongue navigates the scaffold of the written word.
Air that shifts with the loose shuffle of plaid on a firm wooden chair, the common inclination of heads towards the lectern as stubble rustles on a bright woollen scarf, legs cross and uncross, coughs strangle uncomfortably at the back of the throat in the deferential censure of expression.
There might be a haiku on the collective breath of the audience, a brevity of exhaled noise formed like mist on the banks of a river only to enfold back into itself as shadow melts behind the hinge of light at nightfall. 51
Pre-percussive, his mouth shifting around the air, moist lip on moist lip for a fraction of a second, the last fragment of not-knowing before white noise turns to 52
To the spider on the window frame, 3rd floor
Will you scale the tactile furniture of your existence, and rest upon some undetermined architecture of your adventitious art, to lay your eggs before the season ends?
Or will you simply clamber lost amongst the cantilevered angles of your web, before November comes to shape your legs around you in the absence of escape?
A velvet pebble cast in wind beyond the path to fall against a rigid blade of grass turned iron in the evening frost.
The casual silver fall of mercury glassed in dreams within a tube of heated sand. 53
In the eye of the dog runs a feathered iris fleshy as an onion swollen with rain, corpulent pin-hole of reflex catching all he sees: children burning the eyes of bees with the simple torture of a magnifying glass and the July sun, plastic soldiers melted in the sand beside the blackened bee, his yellow stripes turned carbon dark at the hands of a three-foot despot and his sandy-haired sycophant. the slatted wooden walls of a bright red dog shed, a canine voyeur's retreat. palisades of light imprinting whiskey-brown shadows into the thick, rough fur of a long extended paw as the kids abdicate to lunch. 54
Domestic
As it rains I hear water slide by the ruptured flashing of our pitted chimney breast.
A shingled barricade run porous by the wind and the malign pressure of red brick.
In the damp concrete of our basement a scent of wet nuts and deer nuzzled in the grass rises to converge in alloyed air like coins rusting in the belly of a well.
You knit in the rocking chair 1 purchased online:
someone else's cats and roasted coffee bloom in the heat and fibres of the cushion.
Your fingers quick in the blue yarn. Needles clash like plastic swords in the small, slicing hands of children grasping at the edge of fun.
You need to watch they don't draw blood and stain the wool.
I think about wood, about moisture in the wood. About asphalt cracked by a root. About the noise you make when you turn over in the night and shudder. 55
IV
In a glass tower, and me on a strange bed.
Blood drops spread as a star burst cluster of finely rendered eyes replete upon my pillow.
Stained and watching me in rubied concert with the blithe sway of steel shivered in the wind.
I retreat at the fat snap of glass creaking in the frames.
And you break ranks at the mini-bar: lemonade mouthwash as my gut sounds confusion at the concertina onrush of flight outside our east river window. Water chased with the oscillating seizure of police cruisers reflecting in the blue-black water, shrunk like tin toy baubles from our bed on the 36th floor. 56
V
I am a wall of blackened sand, sleep-etched glass grooved by the edge of an artisan's blade. A bloated overflow of paint swells from the corner of a window frame, callow in its latex plumpness.
Membranous and stretched like a sex mask or the animal skin crown of an African drum, hot dark hands in the low beat of shadows. Light swallowed in the gathering layers of plastic syrup congealed like sleep in the well of a drowsy eye, warm and rigid with the night.
There is nothing in the room but the elastic hum of a computer fan, provoking dust into the air.
I pick things out of the air. a firefly. The odour of wood panel. A ruby. 57
Leaf collection
November Sunday, the rag-bag failure of our first collection strewn about the yard.
Disintegrating light that rustles like maracas in the steel toes of my rake.
I fumble with the sack and a chestflil of leaves like a virgin battling with an elusive rubber.
Autumn bagged in see-through orange plastic and hauled away en-masse. Smoking grunts of city staff: Bags slung hard against the rusting bed of a diesel truck.
The wet rush of mouldy air gasping through the sweaty neck of a supple sack fat with strangled leaves.
Neon bags that heave like swollen bronchioles in a cold steel lung, the gaping rear entrance of a rusty yellow truck.
Garish paint denoting the odd anti-language of civic nomenclature in a cluster of emblematic logos enlarged down the side of the vehicle.
In my yard, I almost hear the thankful exhalation of the grass: a slow corkscrew of green unfolding its trampled, incubated blade towards a light that streams past the crisp angle of a leafless branch. 58
Flannel sheets
Cantilever spans
of sallow, bobbled linen
throb
with an agency of magnetic heat:
This muscled flare
of light: a static
flash of current
cracks in blue across the bed.
Lightning forked
in miniature, the fugitive
outline of a cat
dissolving into the slow
white fade of retinal recall. 59
Hairs rise
in a collective
brush of finely rendered
sentries, aroused
in electric strands of swaying blonde. 60
Vitaly Kaloyev*
*Vitaly Kaloyev is a Russian national whose entire immediate family — wife, son and daughter — were killed in the 2002 crash of Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 which collided with another aircraft over Germany on July 1st 2002. Responsibility for the crash eventually rested with Skyguide, a privately operated Swiss air traffic control organisation. The man in charge of the flight in question that night, Peter Nielsen, took much of the blame for the crash, although dubious operating protocols and faulty equipment played more of a role than his personal incompetence. Kaloyev was justifiably shattered by the accident and suffered a complete breakdown, weeping uncontrollably by his family's frankly gothic and ostentatious marble shrine. Holding Skyguide and especially Nielsen responsible, he tried to arrange a meeting with the management of the company but was rebuffed, which in turn led to him hiring a private investigator and locating Nielsen's home address. Kaloyev eventually travelled to Kloten, Switzerland, knocked on Nielsen's door and stabbed him to death. Kaloyev was convicted of the crime and imprisoned in 2005, only to be released back home to Russia on account of his mental condition in 2008. Strangely, perhaps, he has been treated as something of a hero since his return and was appointed Deputy Minister of Construction for North Ossetia-Alania shortly after his release. This poem is an attempt to reconcile this extraordinary and tragic story, and imagine something of the steps which Kaloyev took in trying to process such an event.
1.
"I have been living on the cemetery for almost two years, sitting behind their graves."
Shallow in the brilliant burnish of their marbled shrine falls his face. Grey skin, and eyes like glassed lava shimmer in the dusk.
Embossed in lacquer, sharing a shy smile, they stare back at him. So life-like. Too life-like.
Just words, and the colourless backdrop of Ossetia: Brown grass and a strip of concrete. 61
Their eyes are coy in the bright white glare of scintillating flash bulbs.
The howls - at night. Immaculate grief and the rounded husk of shoulders shadowed onto marble. 62
2.
Behind the veins of a thin green leaf, translucent in the light of Uberlingen, a fine mist hovers over the valley floor.
Arching trees that broke her fall from thirty-six thousand feet, the pearls of her necklace dissipate amongst flecks of bark.
She is his daughter. Diana. Four.
Aluminium is ragged at the edges when exploded under pressure. A tail fin and a fuselage and less than a minute for a man and a bank of screens to shadow with a grim efficiency the coalescing avatars in their pixelated carousel to earth.
Alarms rip sound through an ecru office as Nielsen hovers at the water-cooler, unsure, and the diachronic metronome of an LED pulse quickens in the bevelled glass of his monitor. 63
3.
The efficient click of a tram on tracks, wheels cutting cleanly in the February snow, and a nondescript building in a Zurich suburb.
Trash curls on the snow in the wind, resting on the grate of a drain, damp.
Something like a conversation, doorway murmurs melting into air like flecks of freezing rain on a warm hand.
Enraged eyes dilate, fabulous retinal heat.
"They were my children."
Oily blood misting on the white breast of a shirt.
There is nothing in the grating slash of blade on bone but the limp body of his daughter caught in a tree, intact. 64
4.
Dignitaries stroll as cattle over marbled floors, clicking heels that resonate like castanet hooves in the concave dome of an Ossetian church.
Smoked salmon hooked from freezing rivers and the oiled richness of dense Russian wine bled from vineyards where the grapes swell and burst and stain the earth a violent purple.
Filtered panes of coloured glass modulate spectral light as Vitaly moves among them like fog, nodding in professional acquiescence as they convoke their pleasure.
There is nothing in the cool roll of a pearl in his hand, nestled in the pocket of a fine grey suit, but the lithe body of Diana resting on his chest, intact. 65
Warming
I
The first thaw
of winter.
Even the ice seems to crave
a shot of the sun's liquor.
II
Imprisoned flecks
of loosened ice
agitate in amber-filtered
canes of probing light.
III
A slick of
blade-bruised water
feeds across the pond
in grooved
flutes of blue. 66
IV
A mosaic flank
of sun-pocked ice implodes
chandeliered into the grey
underbelly of the lake's
splintered crust. 67
Our New York
Roller-blading Nuns cruise past the UN as a coterie of diplomats surge in suited unity to the lobby.
Light stretched in neon veins of glass and tattooed in brilliant robes against the white of your cheek.
My sandwich, eaten over three days: the blue-cream strata of ham and cheese clamped by the rigor of bread. (You joked: He's croaked, Monsieur!)
The Rockefeller centre: you, me and prometheus
(bound) like old friends to this image of our youth. 68
Alleyway the almost rape of a woman on the plush leather seats of a deep blue Lincoln, high on meth and shaping curled, incoherent insults with the wet meat of her tongue as he pulls her pants askew like the tortion of drapes in the wind. 69
VI
March: 4am. I watch a banana skin brown in the heart of this poem, bruised yellow flesh.
You sleep, and the cat too. Her head braced on the bony curve of your foot.
Tomorrow, we'll loose sap from the drilled wounds of maple: a lobotomy of sugar.
The maroon flank of our Buick dilated in the swollen, gormless eyes of Moose.
Six feet of bone tangled in a blanket of wool. My arm heavy with blood. Your breath, cinnamon. 70
Postcard from the back of the washing machine
The severed head of a plastic toothbrush, guillotined in green.
Abuts:
Dust cradling the dessicated body of a fly.
Atop:
Underlay cracking into tectonic scabs of black.
Conceals:
The quiet incubation of cells in a concrete soup of damp grey.
Reveals:
Beads of insulation swollen into polystyrene eyes.
Behind:
The calves of wood panels curved in scimitars of atrophied beige. 71
My Uncle John
Was a little nervous,
they said.
Bouncing on the spot like a wound spring.
Hunched against the radiator
eating cold beef
and a handful
of damp carrots
from a cracked ceramic plate
as the family dined
downstairs.
Lying with the greyhound
and listening to her heart
beat a rhythm of blood
against his white cheek.
Her fur smelt of damp grass, and it soothed him.
Bruising the strings of a sitar
in his fervent calloused hands
until they snapped:
lashings of brass and copper
forked in bronze 72
across the shabby council decor
of his shared room. His father laughed
and fought him
on the porch that night,
whiskey cruising in their veins.
And so, the Doctor eased him into a leather chair,
stuck electrodes
to his clammy skin, and ran electricity
like a silver train of heat into the damp, pink candy
of his adolescent brain. 73
Afterword
Partial Fog Lessening is a collection of poetry concerned with making the unfamiliar
familiar. It creatively tracks my negotiation of place and represents my poetic
investigations into my role as an immigrant to New Brunswick. It charts the
development of my perception over the last eighteen months as I wrestled with the
question of how to articulate my subtle, individual sense of cultural difference.
This afterword will analyse my thesis in the following ways: assess the role of academic intellect and formal planning in the creative process; reflect upon my original thesis proposal and how it ultimately impacted my poetry; discuss the poetic voices and creative impulses echoing in my work, and; introduce my own poetry to explicate ideas present in the collection. In doing so I will test the strength of my
poetry as work that strives to resist the simplistic resolution of poetic ideas and constructs, and demonstrates an invigoration of language that punctuates the poems with striking, memorable images.
Tracking the development of this creative thesis raises a number of questions about the role of academic intention and execution in the poetic and creative process.
It is my contention, from my experience during this thesis and my previous exposure to academic work, that the heart of the poetic project unfolds outside of academic artifice. That is, the expressed intentions of my thesis proposal and my subsequent attempt to complete this plan were initially strangled by the artificial imposition - real or perceived - of a constricting intellectual framework. Whilst the sub-conscious intellect is ever present in the organic consideration of the ideas, forms, narratives, images and rhythms of poetry, the writer is working at an essentially experiential and reflexive project that requires a mental disconnect from formal academic theorising. 74
It is, or at least should be, an imaginative, kinetic space where the encumbrance of an intellectual blueprint renders the poet mute, or at the very least bound to a plan rooted in the constraints of an overarching narratives. Peter Jones, writing on T.E.
Hulme in the introduction to Imagist Poetry, asserts that "prose is the vehicle for intellect: poetry for intuition" (30). Likewise, Peter Sanger, in his introduction to
John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations, in reference to the influence of
Rene Char's poetry on Thompson's own work, talks of "abrupt disjunctions that are faithful, nevertheless, to intuitive, inner logic" (26). I will not, therefore, concentrate entirely on analysing my own work from a traditional academic perspective which would contradict my own understanding of the creative impulse. Rather, I will bring my poetry into focus through the selective treatment of key influences and cultural imperatives active in this collection, supplemented by critical material useful in understanding the presence of key ideas.
I would like to explain how my particular experience — and I make no claims to speak universally for other writers or their understanding of the poetic process ~ came to exceed and explode the initial conceptual umbrella under which my thesis was proposed. Likewise, I will also explore the manner in which aspects of this proposal found their way into my poetry in more subtle, accumulative pulses that accentuate and colour the final product.
Initially, the conception of this thesis arose from my experiences as a new immigrant to Canada, and New Brunswick in particular. I was interested in exploring ideas around the immigrant experience of a white, middle-class male from Europe, and to questions as to what extent I operated as a "hidden" immigrant, and the ways in which "otherness" manifest themselves in the immigrant experience. I planned to immerse myself in the province through frequent travel and a survey of the important 75 poetic voices of the literary history of the Atlantic Provinces. I imagined myself visiting interesting towns, cities and communities across New Brunswick in a linear process that would work something like this: travel to place - experience place / take notes - reflect - write poetry. What actually transpired was the following: Travel to place - experience place / take notes - reflect - get stuck! The problem I found was in the restrictive frame of reference I had enforced on my creative process. I felt compelled to write about the places 1 visited in an overly conscious, intellectual, and objective manner. This adherence to tangibility and an attendant yearning for the concrete, the real if you will, strangled my creative process and I began searching for quirkiness and interest where there was none. I was essentially grafting poetry on to the people, animals, buildings of historical interest, golf courses, restaurants, marinas etc. that I was visiting, rather than absorbing their influence naturally and relying on my poetic intuition to blend experience with internal perception. This deflated my initial and perhaps naive certainty that undertaking the research would reveal sufficiently catalytic material to me in the form of history, personality and landscape.
While the value of the trips themselves (to Woodstock, Hartland, Gagetown and others) should not be discounted, and I will refer back to their subtle value later in the essay, the initial effect of their undertaking was disappointing for me personally. I didn't feel like an obvious immigrant at any point during the process - my social and cultural admission to New Brunswick and Canada has been generally swift and painless - and I certainly didn't feel impelled to write scintillating poetry about the experiences 1 was having. Any work 1 first tried to write felt forced and artificial, almost as if I were writing by numbers; collecting and assembling images and ideas and packaging them into a superficially competent display of mediocre poetry to fulfil an inflexible theoretical outline. The natural beauty, human decency 76
(in my experience, at least), and "ease" of living in New Brunswick and developing a new life away from home did not pique me in the way I expected. That is not to say that this period of travel in the summer of 2009 was wasted, and I did produce poetry in this thesis as a direct result of those experiences, though even in the case of
"McAdam Ice Rink" below, it was at an historical remove.
McAdam Ice Rink in Winter, 1930
Groaned from the chimneys of sleepers that heave over the border to the percussive thrum of iron,
fine particles of drifting soot settle as a crust on the ice overnight; a crisp stubble of atomised coal
that roots the steel kindle of a sharpened blade cruising underfoot. The first skate of the day,
gilding a figure eight into the sedimentary membrane of the coal- black breath of night.
While this may not be the best poem of the collection, writing of this nature did enable me to work through some of the accumulated material that was proving difficult either to discard or incorporate during the early stages of the thesis. It represents an attempt to enliven something of the history and specific dynamic of a small New Brunswick town (McAdam was once a bustling railway town and a logistic hub for Canadian Pacific Railway) through a universal signifier of the
Canadian experience: the rink. While the commerce and human interest of an 77 important railway link now exists only in the gradual preservation and development of the station as a tourist attraction, I found myself engaged by the idea of binding the town's industry and its rink as the emblem of the communal history of the townspeople. The night-time accumulation of coal dust on the surface of the rink is an attempt at a poetic historical context in which pleasure is etched out of long hours of labour. For me this is a relatively simple poem that best articulates the manner in which my thesis proposal originally directed me: looking for hooks and "roots" from which I could develop poetry specifically concerned with history, landscape and place.
It is worth noting at this point that I did not visit as many locations as I first intended, which may have had some impact on my ability to experience the cultural differences 1 expected. Further, I had also undertaken a lot of distance research about the province before moving to New Brunswick and was very aware of what to expect of the land to which I was moving. One can only speculate on the experience I would have encountered had I moved here twenty years ago before the internet enabled me to visualise, map and even "walk" the streets I was planning to visit. I would argue that the easy availability of resources and abundant information, detailing everything from broad history to the location of the nearest ATM, de-mystifies the process into a post-modern collecting of bits of data. We now experience place in a less visceral way than any generation before mine: in many ways we have already processed its difference before we finally land physically in the location of our desire. This may have been the disconnect with which 1 struggled during the early stages of this thesis:
I was actively yearning for a vibrant level of stimulation and cultural dislocation that was impossible for me to realise given my superficial familiarity with the places I visited. Lorca, quoted by Manuel Duran in his introduction to Lorca: A Collection of 78
Critical Essays, instructs that:
The poet should carry a map of the places he is going to visit, and he
should be calm when faced with the thousand beauties and the
thousand uglinesses disguised as beauties which must pass before his
eyes. (6)
In my case I had already transcended the map in the question and I was visually acquainted with aspects of the stimuli I was encountering. He continues:
He should blindfold himself like Ulysses before the sirens, and he
should shoot his arrows at the living metaphors and not at the
contrived and false ones which surround him. The poet must never
surrender himself, because if he does it just once, he will never rescue
his work again. (6)
My mind, 1 would argue, was working a step ahead of my intuition, suffocating the creative process and dulling my natural reflexes to stimuli I had already, in part, converted to memory. I had shed the "blindfold" before I even stepped in the car to commence my journeys; I had "surrendered" myself. The newness and difference that I was processing was far more subtle than I first imagined, and it would take a longer period of reflection and absorption before 1 could adequately articulate a finer sense of my position. Developing my work from this position was going to require patience, especially in the event of metaphorical contrivance to which Lorca alludes, a trap into which I found myself falling during the early stages of creating this thesis. 79
Having explained the difficulties I encountered in attempting to implement my original proposal, I will now turn my attention to analysing the ways in which
New Brunswick came to enter this thesis as an organic component of poetic composition. It is an interesting synergy that John Thompson, a fellow English immigrant to North America and, eventually and most importantly, New Brunswick, has had undoubtedly the greatest influence on the development of this thesis. Born in
Timperley, Cheshire (1938), around forty five minutes from Keele University where
1 studied for four years between 2000-2004, Thompson led a relatively short and troubled life. An alcoholic prone to deep, catatonic periods of depression, Thompson joined the English department at Mount Allison University, Sackville, New
Brunswick, in 1966. He spent a tempestuous decade working as a Professor for the department, initially being refused tenure at the end of his four year probationary appointment for allegedly erratic and unprofessional behaviour. A favourite teacher of much of the student body, their help was instrumental in overturning the original decision and facilitating the appointment of Thompson as a fully tenured professor in
1970. Further details of this complicated dispute can be found in Peter Sanger's excellent critical and biographical introduction to John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations, from which I will quote further during this portion of my analysis.
While Thompson's biography is both fascinating and tragic in equal measure, it is the quality of his poetry that proved critical in offering me a counter text from which to distil and compose portions of this thesis. Firstly, his use of the ghazal — a
Persian form dating back to around the 9th Century ~ displays a rich, often dark, and always fascinating imagination at work. Thirty eight ghazals appear in Thompson's collection Stilt Jack. The form is characterised by Thompson as follows: 80
The ghazal proceeds by couplets which (and here, perhaps, is the great
interest in the form for Western writers) have no necessary logical,
progressive, narrative, thematic (or whatever) connection. The ghazal
is immediately distinguishable from the classical, architectural,
rhetorically and logically shaped English sonnet. (105)
In many ways the ghazal is extremely liberating for the poet. The couplets (when well written) withstand scrutiny as independent units of expression, and the overall impact of the poem develops through a series of tonal footsteps and an accumulated sense of "the greatest controlled imaginative progression" (105). Thompson's ghazal
"VT" illustrates this characteristic use of the form:
VI
My daydreams defeat me, and cigarettes; in the cold I'm myself: two follies.
I want to cut myself off. Bone says: I'll dance, and you with me.
Bats flit at close of eve; anger dies with the wind; partridge roost.
The moon, the moon, the moon. A pine box; Herodotus; no tears, a settling:
what lies in its right place, lives. Brothers, sisters, true friends lie down in darkness.
Dreams and the cold: I'm drunk on these. Sisters, brothers, fathers, friends, I don't forget.
In this poem the pervading sense of Thompson's disconnection from and/or inability to communicate with those around him is palpable; but the manner in which the ghazal allows him to express these inferred emotions is a critical aspect of the poet's 81 success. The ghazal frees Thompson from any expectations of lyric unity and justifies his dislocation of time, sense, and metaphorical cohesion. The "pine box" in stanza 4, for example, refers to his own mortality and subsequent death, despite being written two years before his passing. Thompson argues that: "the poem has no palpable intention upon us. It breaks, has to be listened to as song: its order is clandestine" (105). From my own perspective, this is perhaps the strongest attraction of the ghazal: it need not demand or require complete explication or understanding to retain its overall effectiveness as a poetic form. The reader takes what he/she will in terms of meaning, whilst the overall tonal suggestiveness of the poem guides the reader towards a subtle, nuanced appreciation of the poet's intention. My own work, the ghazal "IV", is composed in this manner:
IV
Drive nails like light into splitting wood. Plywood swollen in evacuated window frames.
Lie on grey slate floor and dress the grout with the wetness in your eyes and the tart
drool of liquor on your lips. Molasses rum mined like viscous coal under drifting snow.
Open corn and hay fields. Flat grace. The elegy of snow shoes drying on a rack.
A wood stove leaks tepid ash into the room. In the shards of freezing rain, bones curve.
It may or may not be obvious upon reading this poem that I am exploring notions of
Thompson's own mythology as derived from my understanding of his personal circumstance and poetic legacy. Without this knowledge, however, I am confident that the individual strength of the couplets and overall effect of the poem as a 82
somewhat bleak, visually striking exploration of how place impacts upon the psyche
remains intact. It invokes elements of the New Brunswick landscape with which I
was becoming acquainted at the time - a process that continues to unfold - and uses
Thompson as a presence through which to filter my perception of the landscape: vast,
dangerous, and darkly poetic. Thompson's own argument about the contemporary use
of the ghazal is both eloquent and convincing, and I feel strongly that it has
influenced my own work in a very profound way. He writes:
There is, it seems to me, in the ghazal, something of the essence of
poetry: not the relinquishing of the rational, not the abuse of
order, not the destruction of form, not the praise of private
hallucination. (105)
This manifests in my own work as a movement towards extravagant and challenging
juxtaposition, often within the same line or couplet, where a form of natural, kinetic
order takes shape. The last two stanzas of the ghazal "V" clearly display this idea:
Bitter, hot erosion of rubber as a truck rolls south. Potatoes. Rifle shot splintering a frozen disc of earth.
Words that swell in the residue of gun smoke and wine. Coyotes loose about the yard: the yellow of their eyes.
The disjunctions between subject and image, and the considered placement of
punctuation to separate and isolate independent nodes of thought that spark
connections, is central to the impact of this poem. Thompson's consideration of the ghazal concludes: 83
The ghazal allows the imagination to move by its own nature:
discovering an alien design, illogical and without sense - a
chart of the disorderly, against false reason and the tacking
together of poor narratives. It is the poem of contrasts, dreams,
astonishing leaps. The ghazal has been called "drunken and
amatory" and I think it is. (106)
Given Thomspon's own struggle with the imposition or order and control in his personal life, these words become poignant, almost prophetic in their passion and intelligent critical appraisal. For my own collection and overall assessment of
Thompson as an influence on my work, the ghazal remains a powerful way to simultaneously liberate and harness the poetic impulse. Ghazals allow the poet to operate in a space where a "constant, delicious skating on the edge of nonsense"
(Selected Poems of Pablo Nerada xiv) helps create a unique, febrile energy particular to the form.
A second central trope of Thompson's poetry that directly informed my own work is his response to the New Brunswick landscape and how navigating that sense of spatial difference as an immigrant manifests in his work. Thompson was, according to Sanger, a man who made choices that connected him directly to the land. On choosing between teaching positions at Mount Allison and the University of
Calgary, Thompson "looked at a map and chose the Sackville position because it looked as though most of New Brunswick was wilderness" (26). Whilst my immigration to New Brunswick was not motivated by such stark simplicity, there is definitely a sense of acute juxtaposition between this province and the cramped, 84 urban environment I was used to during my life in England. Fred Cogswell summarises this reflex in his perceptive essay "The Nature and Function of Poetry":
Logistics — the very pressures and paces of urban living and
population growth and the inner-relatedness of modern economic
life — have so circumscribed the individual's freedom of action that he
or she has turned more and more to fantasy . . . (The Vision of Fred
144)
The combination of choosing poetic "fantasy" as a means of expression and physically uprooting oneself to a new location is a form of a powerful agency.
There is, I think, in any individual's voluntary removal from an urban to a broadly rural landscape, a sense of romantic engagement with the mythology of the outdoors.
Thompson, it is said, was "passionately committed to living out the romantic mythologies of landscape and the natural life" (Sanger 18), and I can understand that impulse coming from a man who attended high school in industrial Manchester in the
1950s. That is not to say, however, that his poetic move to nature in any way wallows in the saccharine overtures of the Romantic impulse. Indeed, it is often hard, imagistic, and full of invention and the surprising torque of language that makes his work so memorable. In the poem Cold Wind, he writes: "In this country, / the wind kills / with swift birds / like bronze javelins" (70). Similarly, my own work strives to express landscape with language that stretches the register of the context. See, for example, the second section of my poem Winter Postcards'.
ii 85
The bronzed bodies
of trout tear their
desperate gills against the
chandeliered undercarriage
of the river's frozen crust,
yawning toward the light.
Working to find new ways to think about the landscape of New Brunswick was a
central challenge of this thesis, a challenge this poem approaches by edging towards
the surreal. Indeed, it can be hard to articulate particularly strong emotional reactions to landscape, and the poetic tendency towards the romantic (and massively outdated) elevation of the natural is something that I did, at times, find troublesome to silence.
Thompson, too, it should be acknowledged, expresses his own investment in the
natural world when writing about Rene Char: "The poem is always bound to the creatures and the elements, the flowers and stones because they are the ground of being" (25). What Thompson does beautifully, and what I believe I have been reasonably successful in doing, is taking the "creatures and elements" of New
Brunswick and poetically charging them with a level of difference that renders them simultaneously strange and accessible. Such work challenges the preconceived registers of bucolic expression and draws unfamiliarity out of the landscape in an interesting way.
Contingent on the outdoors and a contributing factor in Thompson's battle 86
with his own sense of personal dislocation from the world around him, the idea of
"roots" appears throughout his work: "roots fatten / in the earth" ("Dung Day" 74);
"way back the woods are wine-dark, / dark, unfolding / roots" ("The Skins of a
Dream" 79); and from the beautiful poem, "Onion": "So we turn from our darkness, /
our brokenness, / share this discovered root" (100). These are three examples
selected from the many poems where roots and "rootedness" is an obvious concern
of the writer. Thompson uses his immersion in the land around him to anchor his
verse to finite, tangible indices that afford him a level of creative control that his own
life did not afford him. Indeed, it is ironic that fire would prove the catalyst for the
final spiral of a man so connected to the elements around him. When his house at
Jolicure, a small remote settlement around ten minutes from Sackville, burnt down
on September 25th 1974 while Thompson was away in Toronto, it had a profound
effect on his already delicate psyche. Sanger writes:
Most of the material which would have been part of his archive was
destroyed ~ manuscripts, typescripts, notes and most of his books.
Lost also were personal things — photographs, letters, mementoes
— which had helped anchor him, an almost anchorless man. (37)
This is admittedly more dramatic and painful than my own search to recognize and
poetically express a new land around me, but it does speak to the task of rooting
oneself in a new place. That Thompson was unable to do so, both through personal
mistakes and unfortunate circumstance, underlines the critical sense of private
engagement with potential referents that his work exudes. In some small way I have tried to invoke a sense of this process, however soft in comparison to Thompson's, 87 within my own poetry. Many of the poems are particular to my experience of New
Brunswick and seek to familiarize and, to some extent, anchor me in the physical framework of the wider landscape. "New Brunswick Evocation" is perhaps the best example of this process:
New Brunswick Evocacion
Cold land, green land of compound wood-stain depth.
Moose in the forests, ice on the trees.
New land of road salt burnt in our eyes. Houses cracked with wood. A tattoo of mosquitoes eroding the sky.
Men buttressed in their shingled skin and Walmart denim.
Snow on the roads. Deer fat packed in a barrel of ice.
This poem works to take relatively mundane aspects of the landscape and torque them through surreal association with less expected images and ideas: "Deer fat packed in a barrel of ice" for example, works against the matter-of-fact "Snow on the roads" to produce a compound effect. The couplet operates both as a component of the overall poem, and as an independent unit of meaning and juxtaposition. Anybody 88 who has read this collection will be familiar with my practice of separating individual sentences and phrases to heighten their autonomous impact, a strategy that hinges on the quality of each unit connecting with the tonal register of the poem.
Peter Jones, writing about Hulme in the introduction to Imagist Poetry, states:
Hulme insisted that if the sentence or phrase were regarded as the unit
of meaning instead of the word, the relation between words
within that sentence or phrase would yield a fresh spark of analogies
revealing a particular, singular, intuition. (30)
This, I think, is exactly what is operating within "New Brunswick EvocationThe
"Snow on the roads" couplet, as an example, plays off the relative banality of the first line and uses heavy lineation to surprise the reader through the difference of the second line.
Contextually, this practice in some way reflects my ongoing process of experiencing the province in both anticipated and extraordinary ways, both of which contribute to the sense of accumulated anchoring which pulses through the collection. Furthermore, the tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary, or the unfamiliar and the familiar, as represented in both my own poetry and the work of Thompson especially, echoes Fred Cogswell's assessment of the post-war poetic landscape in the province: "Internal visions of the landscape were darker, harsher now. It seemed that a new poetry was required to express the narrowness, the limitations, the doubts and frustrations of human lives in New Brunswick" (143),
While I wouldn't necessarily characterise my poetry as ultimately "dark," there are individual poems that admit an uneasy sense of otherness, communicating a more 89 ominous tone of cultural dislocation than much of the collection.
In the final section of this essay I would like to look at the role of the image in my poetry. I will do this through assessing the lmagism of Thompson and the broader critical framework established by Cogswell's essay on the role of poetry.
Peter Jones claims that "Imagist poetry is concise, tight and precise, with no narrative" (41), while Pound's note on the subject (quoted by F.S. Flint) includes three rales:
1. Direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical
phrase not in the sequence of a metronome. (18)
Taken in concert with the instruction to "produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite," and Pound's directive to "Go in fear of abstractions" (131), one can quickly discern the central imperatives of the movement: concrete poetry articulated without bluster, abstraction or any semblance of the Romantic reflex whatsoever. Jones goes so far as to argue that "The truth is that imagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our [contemporary] poetic practice" (14). Thompson, for his part, was a student of Pound and the wider Modernist movement, intending to begin research on the "influence of 19th century French poetry and prose on the poetry and poetics of Ezra Pound" (Sanger 35) during his aborted sabbatical year of 1974.
Sanger goes on to talk about the "precise economical forms and language of his
[Thompson's] best poetry," and we can see this influence in much of his strongest work. Indeed, "The Image" would appear to work as an exemplar of the form: 90
The Image
A dark flash: black wings on white rock;
now the sun has burned off that image the eye cannot hold;
but the darkness of the bird still falls, swift, huge-shadowed
toward eyes holding now the shining of a river, the fatness of an animal. (67)
The first stanza especially displays an acute sense of the imagist imperative towards the inherent solidity and poetic resonance of the image itself, perhaps best evidenced in Pound's legendary (and oft-quoted) "In a Station of a Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
In my own collection, "Fragment in Winter" is a (successful, I think) attempt to distil and refine my emotional experience of the New Brunswick landscape to its poetic root:
Tombs in a field in the valley, houses brace for the wind.
Sarcophagi of snow.
There is, I think, something of the essence of a New Brunswick winter in this poem; 91 at once identifiable to anyone familiar with this province during winter, and at the same time stretching a dissonance of language - you would never usually associate sarcophagi with snow - to express tension and surprise. It is the recurrent compound of the unfamiliar and the familiar that gives agency to much of this work. It offers what Cogswell would term "an alternate universe to that in which they [the readers] normally dwell," and "it coheres sufficiently for them to accept it even though their own innate prejudices might normally have led them to reject it" (150).
Cogswell, although not directly referencing the imagist impulse, argues that to "reduce things to the minimum necessary motion is to improve them" (129). There are, I think, many poems in this collection that adhere to the notion of improvement through reduction and refinement. I tried wherever possible to keep the poems compact, both in terms of their length and efficiency of expression, and also in their appearance on the page. I did not find much success with longer, more prosaic poems that allow a narrative to unfold during extended lines and more voluminous stanza lengths. My eye is certainly drawn to the poems that do their work in the most economical fashion possible. There are, for example, a number of poems that work through a series of four haiku, separated into individual units on the page. "Fish racing ahead of a freezing river" is a good example of this practice:
Clamouring fish drive a wedge of aluminium to the bank.
Severed scales flash as bladed flecks of silver debris in the light.
The water, choked in freezing webs 92
of creaking, stiffening ice.
Their eyes in onyx beads expand, concussed into the night.
This poem strives to organize imaginatively a somewhat surreal picture of the river freezing behind a number of fish swimming to escape its advance. Each haiku contains a concrete image that retains its own energy inside of the larger poem, whilst each unit also operates as a point of transition for the wider scene. I hope, at least, that I have supported Cogswell's idea that "You can write quite good poems using haikus as stanza forms" (122).
Writing this thesis has, at times, been problematic and frustrating. I felt bound by the academic construct of the thesis proposal and was not able to find material for my poetry in the manner that I initially assumed would be most natural. Further, my subtle sense of cultural difference made locating my poetic voice for this project a gradual, incremental process. On reflection, however, my accumulated experience facilitated a far more complex and emotionally accurate collection of poetry than a sudden cultural immersion or superficial revelation could ever have produced.
Grappling with my indistinct sense of the unfamiliar enabled me to work organically through unhelpful material and arrive at a place where I can sensibly claim to have produce worthwhile, refined poetry ~ "something new and unique in the universe that the words have somehow managed to create" (Cogswell 140). 93
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Curriculum Vitae
Candidate's full name:
Benjamin Thomas Griffin
Universities attended:
Keele University, England, 2000-2003, Bachelor of the Arts: English Literature and American Studies.
Keele University, England, 2003-2004, Master of the Arts: American Literature and Contemporary Culture
Publications
The Fiddlehead, Issue No. 241, Autumn 2009.
Owerly, Issue 25, forthcoming in May 2010.