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ESSENTIAL ANTHOLOGIES SERIES 2

Poems written to poets

and the stories that inspired them

GUERNICA

TORONTO • BUFFALO • BERKELEY• LANCASTER (U.K.)

2012

Edited by

Julie Roorda

and

Elana Wolff

Stephanie Bolster

Rainbow

A photograph fans out the bright

contents of the six-month plover’s gut:

the last hundred things it ate, dead

lighters, crushed glass, cigarettes

until no room. We do wrong

and yet that reek of alley rot,

puke, tunnel-pent air, I love

because New York London Paris.

Five times the fish says yes to the hook,

no to the tug, five times keeps

what’s given, and so the poet lets it

go (into wallpaper, similes,

feathers) into the greasy

rainbow. Can art

cancel ruin? Who am I

to gulp the world and live?

Back Story to “Rainbow”

When discussing Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” with an introductory creative writing class at Concordia University, I was surprised that, rather than praising the poem for its clarity and elegance, several of the students found Bishop’s metaphors (“the coarse white flesh / packed in like feathers”) showy and, more importantly, critiqued the speaker’s sense of having done good in releasing the fish as exaggerated to the point of hypocrisy. What did releasing one fish really mean in the grand scheme of things, especially when it was being released into water rainbowed with oil from the boat from which she fished. More insidious, they felt, was her appropriation of the creature to show off her poetic skill. Having long questioned my own “use” of material (was my having written a book of poems about Charles Dodgson’s transformation of Alice Liddell into Alice in Wonderland any nobler than his own undertaking?), I was shaken by this discussion and, some time later, moved to weave it into a poem about the power and the futility of art, and the problematic role of the artist. A poem like this would have existed without Bishop’s, but her sense of simplicity, frankness, artistry, and play helped it to find its form and focus.

A Poet-to-Poet Preface

Elana Wolff

Former American poet laureate Robert Hass has called poetry “a very private kind of art.” I believe this. Poems come from and get to the deepest, most secret, most intimate interstices of the human predicament. That’s why they continue to be written, that’s why they continue to be read. Poems are other people’s pictures in which we see ourselves — image-to-image, private-mind to private-mind.

Julie Roorda

It’s a paradox that it is in our particular solitudes we most relate to each other, in our unique privacies that we find the most in common. Robert Hass might very well have said poetry is a very lonely art. People continue to write and read poetry because they are lonely. Is it surprising, then, that so much poetry arises from imagined, perhaps longed-for, conversations with other poets?

Elana: Writing is largely a solitary occupation. So yes, the poet is alone, often lonely, and the poem becomes a piece of crafted language in which he or she seeks to frame a face, a memory, a mood, a truth, a moment in time in which another can recognize himself or herself.

Julie: As we can see from the variety of forms one poet’s response to another takes, that personal identification is multifaceted. Often the recognition involves a concern with the creative process. A poet addresses another as teacher — sometimes reflecting an actual relationship, sometimes an imagined one. The lines of the perceived mentor’s poem trigger or provide a foundation for the growth of a new poem. Think of the glosa form, for example, or the thousands of poems prefaced by a poetic epigraph.

Elana: Also the poem written in the manner of the mentor, or the call and response poem.

Julie: Many poets respond to the poem of another simply as peer, as another of that tribe possessed by the peculiar inclination to celebrate, or condemn, the mundane events of daily life in poetic form. Sometimes poetic identification exists on an ideological basis, spawning conversations about history, politics and cultural identity, or voices joined in protest. Then, of course, there are the elegies. It’s a very natural impulse to turn to poetry for comfort or release when confronted with the transformational loss of someone loved or admired. But when a poet elegizes another poet, there’s something happening on another level. It’s as if there’s an assumption that the medium of poetry allows for conversation across the divide of death.

Elana: In addition to expressing lament, paying tribute to an oeuvre, honouring and reflecting on a life lived, the elegy seems to be a writer’s way of attempting to extend time with another writer. Graham Greene is reported to have said he couldn’t imagine how anyone could manage the shocks and confusions of life and death without the clarifying help of a pen. The elegiac poem renders a heartfelt message, represents a reaching for an understanding that couldn’t be achieved otherwise. Of the seventy-four poems chosen for this collection — submitted from all across Canada — at least twelve may be called elegies, and of these, three grapple with death by suicide.

Julie: The fact that these poets address the particular pain and alienation of suicide attests to poetry’s capacity for communication between two souls where they are at their most vulnerable and exposed.

Elana: Yes, most exposed, and probing. The idea for Poet to Poet was sparked in fall of 2010 — at a Guernica launch in Toronto’s Little Italy. A young author had closed her reading with a moving poem about another poet, prefaced by an anecdote on how the piece had come into being. The audience was engaged and the response was particularly enthusiastic. As I stepped up to the stage to close the set, I thought: What a collection that could be — a book of poems written to, for, about, or after other poets, accompanied by short anecdotes, or back stories that would throw light on the provenance of the poems. Everyone who writes poetry has been inspired, influenced, or nurtured by other poets; every poet has dedicated poems to other writers. There’d be a wealth of material. Yet what would make the collection distinctive would be the partnering: poems with their back stories.

Julie: Including back stories alongside the poems injects something of the atmosphere of the poetry reading, workshop or class, in which poets emerge, temporarily, from their solitudes to celebrate and continue the dialogue, and to return to their private art with new insights, skills, and inspiration.

Elana: Right. And poetry is demonstrative. “Show, don’t tell,” goes the dictum. Back story is different. Story is telling. It’s the obverse. You can read a poem without a back story — that’s the way poems are generally read. But a back story has the attractiveness of providing a glimpse into the cauldron or ground on which the poem was founded and crafted. The two are complementary. Read the back story and you have an entry point into the poem. Read the poem and you’re intrigued to find out from whence it came.

Julie: At some point in his or her career, in an interview or at a question and answer session following a reading, every poet is asked that dreaded question: “Where do you get your ideas?” Dreaded, because it’s impossible to answer — as if poets have special access to a magic idea-bank. Every poem has its beginning in the experience or perceptions of the poet, but as the back stories here illustrate, these sources are complex and varied. The stories also give a glimpse of the process which cultivates the seed of an idea to fruition in a poem. It requires work, practice, and attention to what other poets have to teach.

Elana: We were looking for a personal touch in these pieces, and the array of what constitutes “the personal” is textured and rich. The back stories come in different lengths, styles, and voice — reflecting different notions and patterns of process. Yet all the pieces, in one way or another, bring the reader into a fuller, more nuanced relationship with the writer and his or her “subjects”. In reading these pieces, I’m struck over and over by their warmth, humour, poignancy, insight, and variety. I could bring examples from any and all, but here’s one: In her brief back story on “Not a November Love Poem” for Gwendolyn MacEwen, Nanci Lee cites MacEwen’s “rare ability to display passion without hyperbole, humour without self-consciousness and leaps without too much punch ... We trust her.” This last little sentence really reached me. And it resonates, in a wonky way, with a line Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño put into the mouth of one of the characters in his polyphonic novel 2666: “I used to read everything ... Now all I read is poetry. Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated ... Only poetry ... some of it — is good for you, only poetry isn’t shit.” This sounds more than a little hyperbolic — the character is a colourful one. But it gets to the elements of authenticity and truthfulness — the kind of trust that Nanci Lee and others want and are willing to invest in poetry.

Julie: It’s a trust that exists despite poetry’s seeming futility to counter that wave of contamination that is, according to Bolaño, everything else. “Can art cancel ruin?” asks Stephanie Bolster in “Rainbow” — the first poem in this anthology. It is the most agonizing question that poets continue to ask themselves and each other. I don’t know the answer. I only know that the conversation, poet to poet, is ongoing ...

Poet to Poet

From the time I could recognize alphabets, I became a constant reader. I’m also a believer in immersing oneself in one’s country’s culture. The first book I read when we immigrated to Canada in 1972 was Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. I’ve reread the book several times since, and I still feel it’s one of her most powerful books; the raw energy gets under your skin.

The first of her books of poetry to fall into my hands was Power Politics. Published a year before Surfacing, and an inspiration for it, Power Politics also hit me like a hammer. A collection of merciless images — like that of the famous “fish hook” in the “open eye” — were difficult to digest. Since then I’ve read her gentler poems. When I experimented with writing glosas, I read Interlunar. In “Kin” I’m grateful to pay a small tribute to a great Canadian writer.

Lenore Rowntree

This poem is not just about sex

I want to drink too much vodka,

and have unbridled sex

in Montauk, with a man, not my husband,

just like Anne Sexton.

I want to be that good girl,

standing in my black slip, all messy

and wavery on the bottom stair,

waiting to go up, and unleash.

I want to find a fresh beating flower

just above my left wrist, cup

it with affection, then stop myself,

again and again, from slashing it.

I want to write lines that tear down the stars,

that row toward God, turn sun into poison,

and look gorgeous while reading them,

just like Anne Sexton.

I want to be a reflection in a window,

shaped like a book that draws

parallels between orgasm and writing,

and everything else.

I want to bed all comers,

but make every one of them wait,

while I arrange, and rearrange,

my white silk, black mink, and blood rubies.

I need to write a poem that attacks

in the guts, casts a gnawing pestilential

shadow, yet embraces the rat within,

just like Anne Sexton.

But I don’t prefer suicide, I dress only in denim,

and I limp into poetry, so too often I find,

I’m out shopping for tomatoes and melons,

gone soft and on for half-price.

Back Story to “This poem is not just about sex”

I’m in love with Anne Sexton. I didn’t know it when I first wrote This poem is not just about sex. I thought then I was merely infatuated after reading the biography written by Diane Middlebrook. But I should have known better. I’d renewed the book so many times, the library recalled it. Then weeks later as I tried to re-borrow it, I nearly cried when told it had been discarded with no plans for repurchase. Especially since I was the one who had ratted on the book, had shown the librarian how the yellowing, tissue-thin pages were falling out. I was naïve thinking the library would buy a new copy. I’d written down a stack of important quotes from Sexton, and because my life is such a mess of scraps I’d lost them. So I needed that book and thought it was only a consolation prize that I was able to take out her collection of essays No Evil Star (rats spelled backwards). I didn’t know I was in love with Anne Sexton until I was walking back up the hill away from the library, and the slim pink volume opened to a journal entry titled Roses from November 6, 1971. In less than 200 words Sexton had written a love poem, a lament for life, a shield from her abortions, and an anthem for women. It was then I started dying to write a good poem for her.

George Whipple

Proust

He liked to masturbate

while watching savage rats

eviscerate each other.

At the end he lived

on Peach Melba, apples, beer

brought in from the Ritz.

He heard no angels singing when

he died — only gay aristocrats

discussing funeral wear.

Too weak to hold a pan

he left his corklined room

for a marble one

and is remembered for a Madeleine,

a cup of tea — the memories within.

Back Story to “Proust”

This poem is written in the French sonnet style of four tercets with a final couplet. It condenses four pages of a capsule biography into fourteen lines while maintaining the famous facts of Proust’s life, not forgetting his masturbation, which we can all relate to. I’ve always been puzzled as to why Henry James, who knew all the French authors of his day, never mentions Proust — his French counterpart for voluminous, involved, and nectarious prose.

A Poet-to-Poet Preface

Poet to Poet

Contents